Album of the damned - Paul Garson

The photographs in this startling collection were taken by German soldiers and civilians during the Third Reich; a few were taken by professionals embedded with the troops. But for the most part, they are the work of amateurs taking snapshots for family and friends.Through these black and white images, we enter the living rooms, the back yards, the boulevards and the killing fields of Nazi Germany. Many of these photos were once in family albums. Some soldiers returned with them after the war and, years later, these photographs were offered for sale by relatives along with their own snapshots of the home front. Other pictures were captured by the Soviets and, after the fall of the USSR, became available on the open market.The author acquired these snapshots from some fifteen countries; he spent more than four years researching, working every day, reviewing more than 100,000 images and selecting nearly 400 for this book. 'Most images,' the author says, 'are accompanied by text that both complements historical research and offers a subjective analysis of each - all in an effort to comprehend, to somehow attempt to understand what is essentially unfathomable.'