These pictures, featured on Jewpop, were taken by Hugo Jaeger, a famous German photographer in the 1930s and an early Nazi party member who took pictures of Hitler and his circle to immortalize the Fuhrer. He traveled to the gheto of Kutno, nearly Lodz, where he took the photographs in late 1939 and early 1940, not long after the Germans invaded Poland. There were about 8,000 Jews in the ghetto, which was created on the site of an old sugar factory and was liquidated in 1942. Most of the inhabitants were sent to Chelmno.
See all the photos here: http://www.jewpop.com/culture/
So, why did Jaeger take these incredible photos of the Kutno Jews? According to the writer at JewPop, which compiles Jewish news in French and got the photos from Time/Life and other sources, Jaeger was sent to Poland in uniform as a war correspondent charged with getting propaganda images. And it's not clear why these photos, unlike others taken by Nazis, show the Jews in an almost empathetic way rather than as sub-humans under the degradation of German soldiers.Knowing nothing else about this guy, I hazard a guess that the photographer in him was stronger than the Nazi in him. What strikes me is the smiles. It shows the power of a photographer asking a subject to smile for the camera. And they do, so discordantly with the background in most of the pictures and with what we know about the setting.
