A Jewish man on the street in the Warsaw ghetto stands bare-headed before the photographer, in accordance with the German order requiring Jews to remove their hats in the presence of German personnel.

Photograph | Digitized | Photograph Number: 20675

Overview

Caption: A Jewish man on the street in the Warsaw ghetto stands bare-headed before the photographer, in accordance with the German order requiring Jews to remove their hats in the presence of German personnel.
Photographer: Willy Georg
Date: June 1941 - August 1941
Locale: Warsaw, Poland
Variant Locale: Warszawa
Varshava
Warschau
Photo Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Rafael Scharf

Photo Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Copyright: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Provenance: Rafael Scharf

Keyword: CLOSE-UPS DOFFING HATS GHETTO/OCCUPATION JEWS (POLISH) PUBLIC HUMILIATION STREET SCENES WARSAW
Photo Designation: GHETTOS (MAJOR) -- WARSAW (Poland) -- Arrests/Searches/Public Humiliation -- Doffing Hats/Other Abuses

Biography: Willy Georg (b. 1911), German soldier and photographer who took pictures in the Warsaw ghetto. Born in Muenster, Germany, Georg served as a radio operator in the German army during World War II. An accomplished photographer, Georg supplemented his income by taking pictures of his fellow soldiers with his Leica camera. In the summer of 1941 when his unit was stationed in Warsaw, Georg was issued a pass by one of his officers and instructed to enter the enclosed ghetto and bring back photos of what he saw. Georg shot four rolls of film and began to shoot a fifth when he was stopped by a detachment of German police. Failing to check his pockets for finished rolls of film, the police confiscated only the film in his camera before escorting him out of the ghetto. Georg developed the four rolls of film himself at a lab in Warsaw and sent them home to his wife in Muenster. He kept the existence of these photographs to himself for the next fifty years. In the late 1980s or early 90s, Georg met Rafael Scharf, a Polish Jew from London working in the field of Polish-Jewish studies, and gave him his Warsaw ghetto photographs. Scharf then published a selection of these photographs in his "In the Warsaw Ghetto: Summer 1941," Aperture, 1993.