Hugo Jaeger was Adolf Hitlers’s court photographer from 1936 till the end of Hitler and the war in 1945. Hugo Jaeger continued to photograph around his muse even after Hitler’s death, going to Austria to the birthplaces of Hitler. Hugo Jaeger took color photographs much ahead of his time (I know little about the technique). In the Life archive there are professional photos that were taken 20 years after the war that don’t come close to Hugo Jaeger’s quality. Jaeger took the photographs of the Kutno Ghetto that I previously published.
I think it is a big internet wrong to publish photos without attribution to a photographer. Somehow people think that art has an authorship but photographs don’t. Even though the process of photography is mechanical, there is always a distinct signature. Another wrong is not breaking photos thematically, not identifying the place and time a photo was taken and lumping together photos from different years and places. Anyway, here is the story of Hugo Jaeger’s archive (via Life):
“In 1945, when the Allies were making their final push toward Munich, Jaeger found himself face to face with six American soldiers in a small town west of the city. During a search of the house where Jaeger was staying, the Americans found a leather suitcase in which Jaeger had hidden thousands of color photo transparencies. He knew he would be arrested (or worse) if the Americans discovered his film and his close connection to Hitler. He could never have imagined what happened next. The American soldiers threw open the suitcase that held the Hitler images. Inside, they found a bottle of cognac that Jaeger had placed atop the transparencies. Elated, the soldiers proceeded to share the bottle with Jaeger and the owner of the house. The suitcase was forgotten. After the Americans left, Jaeger packed the transparencies into 12 glass jars and buried them on the outskirts of town. In the years following the war, Jaeger occasionally returned to his multiple caches, digging them up, repacking, and reburying them. He finally retrieved the collection for good in 1955 — 2,000 transparencies, all of them, amazingly, still in good shape — stored them in a bank vault, and in 1965 sold them to LIFE. To date, only a fraction of the Jaeger collection has been published.”
The database that I have seen contains photos only approximately till 1940. I am pretty sure I remember seeing the later photos on the net, i.e. from Kiev and Babiy Yar. There are at least 2,000 photos in total I belive. Not sure to what extend Life is hiding the complete archive. To my knowledge Life never published the photos in print but only released them in spurts on the web very recently. The photos are also blasphemously sprinkled around the blogosphere. But frankly they all don’t know how to curate photos on the internet. When I curate photos it’s not just the pictures but a story and I intend to tell a story or two under Hugo Jaeger Tag.
Further reading: