More pictures and text (German) on the Spiegel site

The NY Times Lens blog and the Spiegel have a set of pictures showing the Eastern Front in World War II (Barbarossa was 70 years ago tomorrow). They are apparently from the personal album of a Propaganda Korps photographer whose identity, despite his self-portrait, remains unknown:

First and foremost, he documented the progress through Eastern Europe of a bus convoy in the service of the Reichs-Autozug Deutschland, a Nazi Party unit whose responsibilities included the logistics needed to stage mass rallies. Judging from graffiti written on the dusty bus windows, the overall itinerary was Berlin-Minsk-Smolensk-Munich. Identifiable landmarks in the album show that the convoy made its way through Gdansk, Poland, which was then Danzig; Kaliningrad, Russia, which was then Königsberg; and Barysaw, Belarus.

Little of the battlefield is seen (the front was, by then, far ahead), but a great deal of destruction is evident. Minsk, the capital of what was then the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic and fell within days of the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, is in ruins. There are many views of the countryside, as well as pictures of peasants that bring the work of the Farm Security Administration photographers to mind.

Update: The photographer has been identified and there’s a sad story behind the album.

See The shot that nearly killed me, a Guardian special report where war photographers talk about their profession (not sure that’s the word). There are some horrific pictures and lots of comments like “I’d just finished a master’s in photojournalism and thought I’d go to Pakistan to cover the elections.” or “This is the last picture I took before I got shot”, but probably the most shocking words were from João Silva who continued taking pictures after stepping on a mine:

I’ve spent enough time out there for my number to come up. I was one of the few who kept going back to Iraq. People think you do this to chase adrenaline. The reality is hard work and a lot of time alone. Firefights can be exciting, I’m not going to lie, but photographing the aftermath of a bomb, when there’s a dead child and the mother wailing over the corpse, isn’t fun. I’m intruding on the most intimate moments, but I force myself to do it because the world has to see those images. Politicians need to know what it looks like when you send young boys to war. If it’s humanly possible, if the prosthetics allow me, I’ll go back to conflict zones. I wish I was in Libya at the moment, without a shadow of a doubt.

Via @Russian_Photos (Jeremy Nicholl)

Also see Inside Sarajevo: A photographer’s tale by Anja Niedringhaus who photographed in Sarajevo (pictures here).