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Cold gaze of a Nazi camera

In 1987 a cache of photographs of the Lodz ghetto in wartime Poland was discovered. The pictures were expertly taken - the photographer thought of himself as an artist. He was also a Nazi, and his subject were the ghetto's Jews. By Nick Fraser 12:00AM BST 14 Aug 1999

'I AM a camera," exclaimed Christopher Isherwood, as he recorded Nazi thuggery on the streets of Berlin. But even he could not have anticipated the uses to which photography would shortly be put.

In 1987 a casual purchaser rummaging through the basement of a Viennese second-hand bookshop came across a dusty portfolio containing 600 colour slides. These were labelled and arranged in a special sequence. They contained what purported to be a full record of the Jewish workers of the Lodz ghetto in Poland, and their German tormentors.

The photographer turned out to be Walter Genewein, chief accountant of the ghetto and a member of Nazi party. He was obviously proud of his efforts, because it was he who catalogued the collection, long after the war.

The discovery of these slides provoked a controversy. Why had Genewin chosen to document the ghetto? He included in the portfolio his correspondence with Agfa. Frequently, he complained about the poor quality of the stock, which was of greater concern to him than the fate of his subjects.

Born in Salzburg, a Catholic and an Austrian, Genewein was an aesthete reluctantly serving his time in Poland. His photographs record an elegant disposition of Bauhaus-style furniture in his quarters. As a member of a privileged elite, he was able to buy antiques that had belonged to Jews.

But Genewein desired to record a notable German success story. Fenced off from the textile town, filled with Jews from the rest of Poland, Lodz was both a staging town on the way to the death camps, and a remarkable experiment in the sort of slave capitalism favoured by the Nazis.

In Lodz the workforce was fed according to the quantity of goods each produced, and not allowed to take food home to their starving families. Workers were crammed seven to a room in unsanitary conditions. They died of typhus or malnutrition, but they contributed to the war effort.

A memo, written in the unparodiable, lumbering style of Nazi bureaucrats, congratulates Lodz on having equipped an entire division of the Wehrmacht. Endless lists record with due pedantry and self-congratulation the great number of suspenders, shirts and hats manufactured, even while they acknowledge the growing mortality rate.

In 1942 children and old people were removed from Lodz, and sent to their deaths. As Genewein's own figures record, this occasioned a further surge in per capita productivity. No camp was more profitable than Lodz - and this explains why so many of its inmates were kept alive.

In 1992 the photographs were exhibited at the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt, coming to the attention of a young Polish film-maker, Darius Jablonski, who says he was shocked by them in a way that he could not at first describe.

Of course there were worse offenders than Genewein. But it was the accountant's aesthetic sense that fascinated the film-maker. It would have been possible for him to photograph the corpses stacked each day in the Lodz streets, but Genewein didn't do this. In the midst of atrocity, he saw only German success.

'You might say that this amateur photographer expressed, in Hannah Arendt's phrase about Adolf Eichmann 'the banality of evil'," Jablonski explains. "Of course Genewein was a very small Eichmann. But he was the sort of man required by the system, and he made it work very well."

In Lodz, Jablonski embarked on a quest to understand the photographs which lasted five years and culminated in a documentary that is remarkable even by the standards of films about the Holocaust such as Shoah.

He found the identification cards issued to workers, of which duplicates were kept. He was helped, too, by the memories of a doctor who survived Lodz, and who appears in the film. It was Arnold Mostowicz's job to record the ghetto deaths each day. Like most camp survivors, the doctor could never forget what he had seen. For him these photographs were worse than memory - because Gene- wein had contrived to record the appearence of Lodz, all the while constructing a lie.

"Those whose existence was recorded died shortly afterwards," he says. "They were betrayed by these photographs. And I feel that this expresses a paradox about art - that it can be made to harm as much as it can heal or console."

Genewein was denounced to the Austrian police by a neighbour in 1947, for having allegedly profited from the death of Jews. He wrote a letter explaining to the judge that the rug he had acquired was damaged, and that the lid of his Chinese vase wasn't the original. After a month in jail he was released, and no charges were brought.

The last entry of his collection shows a group of naked Jewish workers showering themselves in a bath house. They have just completed the task of stripping soiled and blood-stained clothes from the dead. The photograph is beautifully composed, and by now the Agfa colour is excellent. It is entitled, simply, Jew bath.

I asked Jablonski what the photographer might have meant by this title. "I wondered about this," he said. "It could imply some ironic acknowledgement that this is how these men will soon die. Of course, it could also mean nothing at all - except that he still despised Jews."