Ghetto in German Photographs

You can see real photos from July-August 1944, taken by Rudolf Kessler, a photojournalist of the former German Wehrmacht propaganda company No. 689, in Mogilev, immediately after the capture of the city by the 15th Rifle Division of the Wehrmacht. 

The documentary and staged photographs were intended to illustrate the actions of the occupation authorities in organising Jewish working groups in the city to clean the streets and establish the Mogilev Jewish Ghetto, a death camp for Jews and their families. In total, the photographer shot three small-format films to reconstruct the events in Mogilev in the summer of 1941.

The individual pictures, which had passed military censorship, were then sent to the press and published in fascist newspapers with anti-Semitic notes. From the photographs we see people who have only days to live. Close-ups of the faces of men, old men, in whose eyes there is boundless sadness and hopelessness; columns of people with yellow stars stitched on their backs and chests - a distinctive sign of "inferior quality of human material"; who are leaving their homes, women and children forever; surprise in the huge eyes of a Jewish boy; buildings of their native city of Mogilev, many of which were destroyed during bombing raids or demolished already in the post-war period. We see men, prisoners, children who had to go through the occupation and concentration camps. Most of those photographed by Rudolf Kessler had less than a month to live.