Mysteries of a Nazi Photo Album

There are certainly many photo albums of Nazi leaders and many photo albums of the Nazis’ victims. But it’s hard to imagine many albums depicting both, just a few pages apart.

At least one does, however, and it has surfaced in New York City. Its creator was able — apparently within weeks — to photograph Hitler as he warred on Russia and also to photograph some of the earliest victims of that brutal campaign, known as Operation Barbarossa, which began 70 years ago Wednesday.

Two pages in this album, on the Eastern Front in 1941, are devoted to prisoners. Some are dressed in rags, some dressed in uniforms of the Red Army, some wearing jackets with Star of David patches. They stand before what might be freshly dug graves. (Their own? Their landsmen?) In six almost intimate pictures, verging on portraiture, men gaze hollowly or defiantly at the camera.

Four pages later, there is Hitler himself, waiting at a train station for the arrival of Adm. Miklos Horthy, the regent of Hungary, with whom he will shortly be bargaining at the East Prussian war headquarters known as the Wolf’s Lair. The photographer stands just a few feet from Hitler, almost as close to the Führer as he stood to the Führer’s prisoners.

Clearly, this photographer had a lot of access — and not a little talent.

But who was he? His perfectly ordinary, store-bought album carries no identification or inscription. A caption is visible on only one of the 214 three-by-four-inch photographs.

And what was he showing to posterity?

First and foremost, he documented the progress through Eastern Europe of a bus convoy in the service of the Reichs-Autozug Deutschland, a Nazi Party unit whose responsibilities included the logistics needed to stage mass rallies. Judging from graffiti written on the dusty bus windows, the overall itinerary was Berlin-Minsk-Smolensk-Munich. Identifiable landmarks in the album show that the convoy made its way through Gdansk, Poland, which was then Danzig; Kaliningrad, Russia, which was then Königsberg; and Barysaw, Belarus.

Little of the battlefield is seen (the front was, by then, far ahead), but a great deal of destruction is evident. Minsk, the capital of what was then the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic and fell within days of the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, is in ruins. There are many views of the countryside, as well as pictures of peasants that bring the work of the Farm Security Administration photographers to mind.

Your dog can read your mind

Monique, in particular, was interested in finding out how the environment where the "subjects" were raised affects their ability to beg. In the first experiment, the wolves, as well as pet dogs, show successes communicating with an attentive person. This suggests that both domestic and wild animals change their behavior depending on the degree of human sensitivity. At the same time both types showed the results improving each time. It is interesting that American scientists have not figured out all the details of the mechanism of interactions between humans and dogs. Russian scientists have deciphered it long time ago. Back in the 1990s, I was able to talk on this interesting subject with a great zoologist and specialist in animal behavior Konstantin Panyutin. He described the results he obtained that would be summarized in an article. However, unfortunately, he did not have time to write it. This is explained by the fact that the facial muscles attached to the front side of the skull of these animals developed quite poorly. In addition, for a long time scientists simply could not see facial mimicry in dogs and wolfs as their expressions change very rapidly, within milliseconds. The biologists were able to trace these emotions only recently, with the advance of contemporary photo and video equipment. Panyutin, studying pictures of wolves' muzzles and the results of his own visual observations, concluded that the mimicry in these animals is very well developed. He cited an example of a situation where two strange dogs meet and for a while just stand across each other, doing nothing. A layman looking at their noses would not see any of the facial muscles moving and would come to the conclusion that the animals do not communicate with each other. Accordingly, Konstantin suggested that if dogs and wolves "communicate" through the facial muscles, then in their interaction with humans they will also look at the functioning of the facial muscles, trying to figure out what we want to "tell" them. They notice the most delicate and subtle movements of mimic muscles, even those that people are unable to catch. It turns out that all dogs can read human faces even better than humans read each other's. Interestingly, another scientist Jason Badridze who studied the behavior of wolves his entire life and even lived in a wolf pack, irrespective of Panyutin came to the same conclusions.

LIFE

The American Film Institute catalog of motion pictures produced in the United States

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