French Somua-S-35 and H 38 Hotchkiss tanks are paraded by German tank crews on the Avenue des Champs-Elysees, Paris shortly after the city’s occupation, 1941.
Defendant Julius Streicher, the former editor of pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic newspaper, “Der Stuermer,” on the stand at the International Military Tribunal trial of war criminals at Nuremberg, April 1946.
"Jewish establishments will be combed out. Jews will then get a swimming-pool, a few cinemas and restaurants allocated to them. Otherwise entry forbidden. We’ll remove the character of a Jew-paradise from Berlin."
Joseph Goebbels on his ‘plans’ for Berlin, April 1938.
Adolf Hitler salutes a passing SS formation at the third Nazi Party Congress (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum), Aug 1927.
German troops march through Minsk (Bundesarchiv), Aug 1941.
A group of Jewish women and children walk a street in Minsk during the German occupation of Belarus. The photograph was taken by Ernst Herrman, a traveller and writer, who served as a German soldier on the West and Eastern fronts (Bundesarchiv), 1941.
"It is the ideological struggle of the entire Jewry, freemasonry, Maxism and churches of the world. These forces - of which I presume the Jews to be the driving spirit, the origin of all the negatives - are clear that if Germany and Italy are not annihilated, they will be annihilated."
Heinrich Himmler, Nov 1938.
Płaszów concentration camp, near Krakow, Poland, 1942.
The body of a Soviet prisoner of war who committed suicide on an electrified barbed wire fence in Mauthausen, 1942.
Nazi legacy: The troubled descendants
The names of Himmler, Goering, Goeth and Hoess still have the power to evoke the horrors of Nazi Germany, but what is it like to live with the legacy of those surnames, and is it ever possible to move on from the terrible crimes committed by your ancestors?
Turkey joins the Anti-Comnitern Pact, headed by Germany and Japan, as an observer, June 1941.
A group of naked Soviet POWs, who in the fall of 1944 were sent back to the Mauthausen main camp from the satellite camp of Melk, stand in line during a roll call. This image is one of potentially thousands taken by SS photographers serving as a record of Mauthausen. A small amount were saved from destruction by interned Spanish Republicans.
A chart of markings used to identify types of prisoners in German concentration camps, 1938-42. The vertical categories list markings for the following types of prisoners: political, professional criminal, emigrant, Bible Students (Jehovah’s Witnesses), homosexual, Germans shy of work, and other nationalities shy of work. The horizontal categories begin with the basic colours, and then show those for repeat offenders, prisoners in Strafkompanie (penal work), Jews, Jews who have violated racial laws by having sexual relations with Aryans, and Aryans who violated racial laws by having sexual relations with Jews. In the lower left corner, P is for Poles and T for Czechs. The remaining symbols give examples of marking patterns.
Bales of hair from female prisoners, numbered for shipment to Germany, found at the liberation of Auschwitz, Jan 1945.
A torch the Nazis lit
Seventy-eight years ago this month, two elderly Germans found themselves on a train to Athens. As they watched the scenery chuff past, they discussed arrangements for what would be the biggest sporting festival the world had seen – the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The older man, Theodor Lewald, was president of the organising committee for the Games; his companion was Carl Diem, the committee’s secretary-general, who had captained the German Olympic team at Stockholm in 1912.
While the two men headed south, Diem had a brainwave. Wouldn’t it be a great idea, he suggested, if the Olympic flame were carried by a torch relay from Olympia all the way to Berlin? There could be no more vivid a way of linking the capital of the new German Reich with the original games of classical Greece, whose culture Hitler so admired. Lewald agreed, as did the International Olympic Committee members they were to meet in Athens.
