Nazis Banned Jewish Photographer — His Son's Camera Put Them on Trial

[00:00:00]April 29th, 1945. The Dachau concentration camp, 12 mi northwest of Munich, Bavaria, liberated by soldiers of the 45th Infantry Division approximately 4 hours ago.

[00:00:11]The The smell here is something that the men who entered the gates this [music] morning will spend the rest of their lives being unable to fully describe to people who were not present.

[00:00:21]Because the human vocabulary for it does not exist in a form that translates accurately from experience into language.

[00:00:28]The camp's surviving prisoners, those physically capable of standing, have gathered near the main gate in the April sunlight, some of them weeping, some of them completely silent.

[00:00:38]Some of them watching the American soldiers with expressions that have not yet resolved into anything the soldiers can read with confidence.

[00:00:46]The SS guards who did not flee before the American arrival are under armed custody near the administration building.

[00:00:52]American officers >> [music] >> are moving through the compound in organized teams, each with a specific assigned task.

[00:00:59]Because General Dwight D. Eisenhower issued an order 3 weeks ago >> [music] >> after his personal visit to the Ohrdruf subcamp on April 12th, that every liberated camp in the Allied advance was to be documented photographically and in writing with the thoroughness of a legal prosecution.

[00:01:15]Because Eisenhower had looked at what was in front of him and understood, with the precision of a man who had spent his [music] career thinking about what future generations would and would not believe, that the evidence needed to be made irrefutable before it could be denied.

[00:01:30]One of the men executing that order is a 26-year-old Army Signal Corps photographer named Private First Class Morris Kessler, who has been inside the camp's administrative building for the past 90 [music] minutes, photographing every document in the filing system in the systematic order that his Signal Corps training requires.

[00:01:48]He has not yet reached the filing drawer marked with the letter K.

[00:01:52]He will reach it in approximately 20 minutes.

[00:01:55]He does not know yet what is in it.

[00:01:57]Private First Class Morris Kessler was 26 years old. He was born in the city of Hamburg in 1919.

[00:02:04]The only child of a man named Heinrich Kessler who had operated a professional portrait photography studio on Mönckebergstraße for 16 years, producing the formal portraits, business photographs, and family records of a broad cross-section of Hamburg's commercial and professional community.

[00:02:21]Heinrich Kessler was a precise and gifted photographer who had built his reputation on the technical quality of his work and the patience he brought to his subjects.

[00:02:30]An ability to wait until a face showed something true before pressing the shutter that his clients described, [music] without quite having the language for it, as the quality that made his portraits look like the person rather than like a photograph.

[00:02:43]He had taught his son to use a camera before the boy could read in the specific way that craftsmen teach children they intend to succeed them.

[00:02:51]Not as a sequence of technical instructions, but as a way of seeing.

[00:02:55]The understanding that the camera did not record the world as it was, but as the photographer had learned to look at it, and that the looking was therefore the art and the mechanics only the vessel.

[00:03:05]Morris had grown up inside his father's studio on Mönckebergstraße, learning to see in the way his father saw, learning to wait for the true moment. [music] Learning that patience was not the absence of urgency, but its most disciplined form.

[00:03:19]In September 1933, the Nazi government established the Reichskulturkammer, the Reich Chamber of Culture, a compulsory professional licensing body that controlled access to every creative and media profession in Germany.

[00:03:33]The decree establishing it included a provision that non-Aryans could not hold membership, which meant that as of November 1933, Heinrich Kessler could no longer legally operate his studio, accept clients, or describe [music] himself as a professional photographer in the country where he had practiced that profession for 16 years.

[00:03:53]His camera equipment, his studio lease, and his professional registration were subject to forced surrender or sale under terms that bore no relationship to their actual value.

[00:04:02]He sold the studio in 1934 at a price that would have insulted him in any previous year of his professional life and spent the following 2 years working out what remained of a life that the law had simply reclassified out of existence.

[00:04:17]Morris and his mother left Hamburg in June 1936 when Morris was 17, sailing from Bremerhaven to Southampton and then to New York.

[00:04:25]Heinrich stayed behind to complete the final liquidation of what remained of the studio's property and equipment and promised to follow within 3 months.

[00:04:34]He did not follow within a year. His last letter arrived in New York in March 1941.

[00:04:40]After that, there was silence of the specific kind that silence becomes when a person has waited long enough for it to stop being temporary.

[00:04:47]Morris enlisted in the army in February 1942.

[00:04:51]The Signal Corps found him during processing because the intake questionnaire asked about professional skills and Morris wrote in the space provided that he had grown up in a professional photography studio and had been using cameras since the age of six.

[00:05:06]He was assigned to combat photography training and eventually to the unit responsible for documenting the advance of American forces through Germany in the war's final [music] months.

[00:05:15]He carried a Speed Graphic press camera and 312 rolls of Kodak film through the last winter of the war and into [music] the spring and he had not been back to Germany since he was 17 years old.

[00:05:27]And the last letter from his father had arrived 4 years ago.

[00:05:31]And he had learned in the intervening years to keep working [music] with the same focused patience his father had taught him because it was the only inheritance he could still [music] use.

[00:05:41]SS Hauptsturmführer Rudolf Hörmann was 44 years old, the administrative director of the Dachau camp's prisoner records and classification system.

[00:05:50]A career functionary from Nuremberg who had joined the SS administrative apparatus in that 1937 with a background in municipal records management and had risen through demonstrated competence at the organizational work of maintaining large-scale human filing systems to the position that made him responsible for every intake registration, every labor assignment record, every medical experiment authorization form, and every death notification that passed [music] through the camp's administrative structure between 1942 and the morning of April 29th, 1945. He was a thin, organized man with small, careful handwriting and a genuine [music] professional investment in the accuracy and completeness of the records under his authority.

[00:06:33]He had, in 4 years [music] of administrative work at Dachau, overseen the creation and maintenance of of intake cards for more than 200,000 prisoners.

[00:06:42]The cards were organized alphabetically by surname, cross-referenced by prisoner number, and filed in a system of metal cabinets in the administrative building's central records room that he had designed himself >> [music] >> and that was, by any objective assessment of its organizational logic, a well-designed filing system.

[00:07:01]He had been placed under guard in the camp director's office by American [music] unpro soldiers at approximately 11:00 in the morning and had, by the time Morris Kessler reached his records room with a camera and a signal core documentation mandate, been sitting under guard for 4 hours.

[00:07:16]Telling the American officer assigned to his initial processing that he was a civilian records administrator rather than a security officer and that his role had been entirely administrative in nature.

[00:07:28]He was correct [music] that his role had been administrative.

[00:07:31]He had apparently not yet understood that the administration itself was the crime.

[00:07:35]By the spring of 1945, General Eisenhower's directive on camp documentation had given signal core photographers a specific and legally weighted mandate that went beyond ordinary combat photography. They were not recording the war.

[00:07:49]They were manufacturing prosecution evidence.

[00:07:52]The distinction shaped everything about how the work was done.

[00:07:55]The systematic approach to filing systems, the requirement to photograph documents in situ before removing them.

[00:08:02]The careful logging of each frame with its location and context. The instruction to make the documentation comprehensive rather than selective.

[00:08:10]Because a prosecution built on selective evidence could be attacked as selective.

[00:08:15]And Eisenhower had been explicit that he intended the record to be unattackable.

[00:08:19]Morris Kessler had been briefed on this mandate before entering the administrative building.

[00:08:24]And he moved through the records room with the patience systematic discipline of a man who had been trained for this work and who understood the purpose behind the methodology.

[00:08:33]He photographed the filing cabinets from the outside before opening them. He photographed the drawer labels.

[00:08:39]He opened each drawer in sequence and photographed the filed cards from above before removing any of them.

[00:08:45]Establishing the organizational logic of the system in visual form before documenting individual items.

[00:08:51]He worked through the drawers in alphabetical order, the same order the filing system itself used.

[00:08:57]Which meant that when he reached the drawer marked K, he was approximately 90 minutes into the documentation of a system that contained 200,000 entries.

[00:09:07]And had not yet permitted himself to think about what the letter K specifically meant to him personally.

[00:09:12]Because the work required him to be the camera before he was the person.

[00:09:17]The way his father had taught him, he opened the K drawer. He photographed it from above, establishing context.

[00:09:24]He began working through the cards in order, photographing each one, advancing through the filed names.

[00:09:30]He reached the K section. He pressed the shutter on K, the first card. He advanced the film. He pressed the shutter on the second card. He advanced the film. He pressed the shutter on the third card, which his eye had not yet read, because the act of pressing the shutter [music] preceded the act of reading in the working rhythm he had developed.

[00:09:49]The camera recording before the mind processed.

[00:09:52]Then he read the card he had just photographed.

[00:09:55]The card had a prisoner number in the upper right corner and a printed intake date of October 14th, 1942, and a cause of death notation dated March 3, 1943. And in the printed name field at the top, in the small careful administrative handwriting of a man who had processed hundreds of thousands of names through this same system, the name Heinrich Kessler, with a birth date that matched and a profession field that read, in the system's own language, former photography studio operator Hamburg, registration canceled Reichskulturkammer 1933.

[00:10:29]Morris Kessler stood with the Speed Graphic in his hands and looked at the card for a period of time that he was never afterward able to accurately estimate. He did not put the camera down. He advanced the film.

[00:10:41]He pressed the shutter a second time, because the Signal Corps documentation protocol required two exposures of each significant document to ensure against film failure.

[00:10:51]And because his father had taught him that the work was the work, regardless of what it cost to do it.

[00:10:56]And because the only thing he knew how to do with his hands in that moment was the thing his father had taught them to do.

[00:11:02]Then he logged the frame number and the drawer location in his documentation register, in the small careful handwriting he had not realized until this moment was identical to his father's.

[00:11:13]Morris Kessler's photographs from the Dachau documentation were entered into to the official Signal Corps evidence archive in May 1945, and transferred to the prosecution documentation unit at Nuremberg in August of that year.

[00:11:26]47 of his photographs were admitted as prosecution evidence in the main Nuremberg trial and in subsequent proceedings.

[00:11:33]Appearing on screens in the courtroom in front of defendants who had spent the preceding months constructing arguments about their own limited knowledge of what had occurred at the facilities they had administered.

[00:11:44]The intake card in the K drawer was among the documents photographed by Kessler that entered the evidence archive.

[00:11:51]It was not among those individually selected for courtroom presentation.

[00:11:55]Because the prosecution had more documentation than any tribunal could process in its entirety and one intake card among 200,000 was not in the algebra of mass prosecution a sufficient individual unit of evidence to command specific courtroom attention.

[00:12:11]Morris never mentioned this to anyone connected with the prosecution.

[00:12:15]He made his photographs and maintained his documentation register and submitted his materials to the archive chain of custody and did not annotate any frame with personal information.

[00:12:25]Because the Signal Corps documentation protocol did not provide for annotation with personal information.

[00:12:31]And because his father had taught him that the work was not about the photographer.

[00:12:35]Rudolf Hermann was held in Allied custody and processed through the denazification system. His case was referred to the Dachau trials.

[00:12:44]The proceedings conducted by the American Military Tribunal specifically addressing crimes committed at and through the Dachau camp administrative structure.

[00:12:53]He was convicted in 1946 of crimes against humanity in connection with his administration of the prisoner records and classification system and sentenced to life imprisonment.

[00:13:03]The sentence was commuted in 1952 under the same clemency program that reduced or eliminated the sentences of multiple convicted war criminals [music] in the political context of West German rearmament.

[00:13:15]He was released in 1953 and returned to Nuremberg where he found work as a municipal records clerk. He died in 1968.

[00:13:23]The filing system he designed and maintained was cited by name in the Dachau trial proceedings as a primary evidentiary resource and remained in active use by researchers investigating individual prisoner fates for decades after his death and his own release.

[00:13:37][music] The system was that complete. Morris Kessler was discharged from the army in December 1945.

[00:13:45]He returned to New York and took a position as a staff photographer for a Jewish-American newspaper in Manhattan.

[00:13:51]Covering the displaced persons crisis and the early years of the post-war Jewish communities effort to locate and document survivors and victims.

[00:14:00]He eventually established his own portrait studio on West 47th Street in Midtown Manhattan.

[00:14:06]A studio he operated for 33 years.

[00:14:09]He was known in the photographic community for the technical quality of his work and for a quality his clients described [music] without quite having the language for it.

[00:14:18]As the ability to wait until a face showed something true before pressing the shutter.

[00:14:22]He never returned to Hamburg. He never returned to Dachau.

[00:14:26]He donated his Signal Corps documentation negatives to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1991 along with his original field documentation register from the Dachau assignment.

[00:14:37]The register contains in the entry for frame 47 of the K drawer sequence, a notation that reads only re-photographed second exposure required.

[00:14:47]His handwriting in the register is small and careful and precise.

[00:14:51]Museum archivist who processed the donation noted that the handwriting throughout the register is entirely consistent in its character and its quality except for the single frame marked re-photographed where the pressure of the pen on the paper is slightly heavier than in every other entry.

[00:15:07]He died in 2001 at the age of 81.

[00:15:10]His daughter, asked in a later interview about her father's relationship to his wartime work, said that he had kept the Speed Graphic camera he used at Dachau on a shelf in his studio for the rest of his life and that he had never used it after 1945, but that he had never put it away either.

[00:15:27]And that when she asked him once why he kept it there specifically, he [music] said it was because it had done its work and deserved to stay where it could be seen.

[00:15:35]Some historians of the Signal Corps photographic documentation program have argued [music] that the systematic use of military photographers to create prosecution evidence represented a significant and under-examined [music] development in the legal history of war crimes prosecution.

[00:15:51]Establishing for the first time a protocol that treated photographic evidence not as supplementary illustration, but as primary legal documentation, requiring the same chain of custody standards as physical exhibits.

[00:16:03]They note that the majority of the Signal Corps photographers assigned to camp documentation in the spring of 1945 were professionals or trained amateurs >> [music] >> who brought to the assignment a technical discipline that made the resulting evidence legally robust.

[00:16:18]And that this robustness was not accidental, but the direct result of Eisenhower's specific directive.

[00:16:24]Others have focused on what the assignment cost the men who performed it.

[00:16:28]Particularly the Jewish-American Signal Corps photographers who entered the camps with personal histories that the documentation protocol did not account for, and that the military culture of the period provided no mechanism to address.

[00:16:42]And who were required to continue photographing regardless of what the viewfinder showed them.

[00:16:46]What is certain is that the camera Heinrich Kessler taught his son to use in a portrait studio on Mönckebergstraße in the years before the law decided what a Jewish photographer was permitted to do with his own hands, became the instrument that made the evidence that placed the administrators of that law in a Nuremberg courtroom.

[00:17:05]And that the man who pressed the shutter was his son, who had learned from his father that the work was the work regardless of what it cost to do it, >> [music] >> and who did the work.

[00:17:14]If you had been Morris Kessler standing in that filing room with the camera in your hands and your father's intake card in front of the lens, would you have pressed the shutter?

[00:17:23]Leave your answer in the comments.

[00:17:25]And if you believe the men who made the [music] evidence that made history possible in the most precise and literal sense of both words, deserve to be remembered by name, subscribe.

[00:17:36]Because most of them are still filed under a category the record has not yet fully [music] opened.