From the Visual to the Textual: How Nazi Control of the Visual Record of Kristallnacht Shaped the Postwar Narrative

Abstract:We have a visual record of Kristallnacht, but it is a highly distorted picture that was almost completely controlled by the Nazi regime. Although photographers from the international press, including the Associated Press, were allowed to operate in Nazi Germany, the regime maintained strict prepublication censorship control. Consequently, almost all of the images we have from Kristallnacht focus on damage to property in accordance with the Nazi propaganda effort. This article shows that as a result of this bias, the West German postwar journalistic writing about Kristallnacht continued, for many years, to emphasize the attacks on Jewish property during Kristallnacht, while mentioning the violence against Jewish persons less frequently, and thus perpetuated the image created by the Nazis themselves.