Heinrich Himmler looks at a young Soviet prisoner during an official visit to a POW camp in the vicinity of Minsk.
Overview
- Caption
- Heinrich Himmler looks at a young Soviet prisoner during an official visit to a POW camp in the vicinity of Minsk.
His Chief of Staff, Karl Wolff, can be seen by Himmler's left shoulder. - Photographer
- Walter Frentz
- Date
-
August 1941
- Locale
- Minsk, [Belarus] USSR
- Photo Credit
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park
Rights & Restrictions
- Photo Source
-
National Archives and Records Administration, College Park
Copyright: Public DomainSource Record ID: 242-HB-47721-306
Keywords & Subjects
Administrative Notes
- Biography
- Walter Frentz (1907-2004), photographer and cameraman of the Third Reich. Frentz was born in Heibronn, Germany. He studied electrical engineering in Munich and Berlin, but showed an early interest in both film and architecture. In 1929 during his student days in Berlin, Frentz met Albert Speer, a fellow student, who would later become Hitler's chief architect. The two shared an interest in sport, especially sailing mountaineering and kayaking (the subject of Frentz' first film in 1931). Through Speer, Frentz was introduced to filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. She had already received the commission from Hitler to direct a film about the Nazi party rally in 1933, and was looking for assistants. Frentz collaborated with her on several Nazi documentaries, including Sieg des Glaubens (Victory of the Faith, 1933), Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will, 1934), Fest der Voelker (Olympis Part One: Festival of the Nations, 1938) and Fest der Schoenheit (Olympia Part Two: Festival of Beauty, 1938). Despite this successful run, Frentz found it difficult to get work and decided to enlist in the Luftwaffe (air force) in 1938. As Luftwaffe photographer he covered Hitler's triumphant visit to Vienna after the Anschluss (March 1938), Ribbentrop's mission to Moscow to negotiate the Hitler-Stalin Pact (August 1939), Hitler's victory parade in Warsaw (October 1939), and the French armistice signing in Compiegne (June 1940). Following the attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, Frentz was sent to Hitler's command center, Wolfschanze (Wolf's Lair) in East Prussia. For the next few years he spent much of his time among Hitler's inner circle. In 1941 he accompanied Reichsfuehrer-SS Heinrich Himmler to the Eastern Front, where he filmed a massacre in Minsk. He retuned shocked and was advised to destroy the film. Among his other assignments was the filming of the V1 and V2 rocket launches, as well as their construction at the Dora-Mittelbau rocket factory. These photos, which were taken in the summer of 1944 lay forgotten in an attic for more than 50 years until they were discovered by his son in a suitcase in February 1998. Near the end of the war, when Hitler retreated to his Berlin bunker, Frentz took the last photos of the Fuehrer published in the Third Reich. These included images of Hitler encouraging boy soldiers of the German Home Guard taken on March 20, 1945. Frentz left Berlin on one of the last planes out of the city on April 25. He reported to his superiors at Hitler's Obersalzberg complex in the Bavarian Alps, where he was arrested by SS officers who had turned against Goering and his subordinates in the Luftwaffe for trying to negotiate a separate peace with the Allies. Part of Frentz' film archive was destroyed at this time. Like his chief, Hermann Goering, Frentz was taken into custody by the Americans and spent a few months at a POW camp in Hammelburg before being sent home in 1946. For several years after the war Frentz had trouble finding work as a photographer, but he began receiving commissions after the establishment of the Federal Republic. In 1949 Frentz married the widow Edeltrude Esser. In addition to her four children, they had a son together, Hanns-Peter Frentz (b. 1953). A documentary film about Frentz, Das Auge des Kameramannes (The Eye of the Third Reich) was produced by Juergen Stumpfhaus in 1992. In it Walter Frentz never expresses guilt for his involvement in the Nazi regime, arguing that he had never joined the Nazi Party and had merely reproduced what he saw.
[Source: Childs, David. "Walter Frentz, Hitler's Photographer." Independent.co.uk, July 27, 2004. http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/story.jsp?story=545056 (29 July 2004).]
Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945), Reichsfuehrer-SS, head of the Gestapo and the Waffen-SS, and Minister of the Interior of Nazi Germany from 1943 to 1945. Himmler, born in Munich, was the son of a pious Catholic schoolteacher. After graduating high school he joined the army in 1917, where he served as an officer cadet in the Eleventh Bavarian Regiment. After World War I Himmler studied agriculture at the Munich School of Technology from 1918 to 1922. He then worked briefly as a fertilizer salesman and a chicken farmer. In the early 1920s he became involved with the fledgling Nazi party and participated in the Munich Beer-Hall putsch of November 1923, serving as standard-bearer at the side of Ernst Roehm. Between 1926 and 1930 Himmler was the acting propaganda leader of the NSDAP. After marrying Margarete (Marga) Boden in 1928, he returned briefly to poultry farming, but was economically unsuccessful. Just over a year after his marriage, his daughter Gudrun was born. Unable to bear him any more children, Margarete adopted a boy, but Himmler showed him little interest, preferring to lavish his daughter with expensive gifts. As his marriage began to deteriorate, Himmler's visits to the family home in Gmund am Tegernsee became so few that Gudrun was often flown to Berlin so her father could spend a few hours with her. Meanwhile, Himmler became romantically involved with his secretary, Hedwig Potthast, who bore him a much-wanted son, Helge. In 1929 Himmler was appointed head of the SS, Hitler's personal guard, and the following year, was elected to the Reichstag as the Nazi deputy from Weser-Ems. Immediately after the Nazi takeover of power in 1933, Himmler became police president in Munich and head of the political police in Bavaria. This gave him the power base to expand the SS and secure its independence from Roehm's SA (Storm Troopers), as well as to organize the SD (Security Service) under Reinhard Heydrich. In September 1933 Himmler was made commander of all political police units outside Prussia, and in April 1934, head of the Prussian police and Gestapo. By June 1936 Himmler had won control of the political and criminal police throughout the Third Reich by virtue of his positions as Reichsfuehrer-SS and head of the Gestapo. In his pursuit of ever more effective means to put down political opposition, he set up the first concentration camp at Dachau in 1933. Himmler was inspired by a combination of fanatic racism and philosophical mysticism. His obsession with racial purity led to the institution of special marriage laws that encouraged the procreation of children by perfect Aryan couples, as well as the establishment of the Lebensborn (Fountain of Life) centers at which girls, selected for their Nordic features, coupled with SS men. In furtherance of his racial goals, Himmler also recruited Aryans of different nationalities into the Waffen-SS. He envisioned the creation of a pan-European order of knighthood owing allegiance to the Fuehrer alone. The outbreak of World War II allowed Himmler to pursue the other side of his program, namely the elimination of Jews and other so-called "sub-humans." In October 1939 he was appointed Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of German Nationhood and given full control over the annexed section of Poland. He immediately set out to displace the Polish and Jewish population of this area with ethnic Germans from the Baltics. By the time of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Himmler controlled all the organs of police and intelligence, the political administration in the occupied territories, and (through the SS) the concentration camp system in Poland. When he was made Minister of the Interior in 1943, he gained jurisdiction over the courts and the civil service as well. Himmler ruthlessly utilized these powers to exploit Jews, Slavs, Roma, and others for slave labor, to shoot and gas millions of Jews, and to subject thousands to forced abortions, sterilization and pseudo medical experimentation. After the failed attempt on Hitler's life in July 1944, Himmler's position was further enhanced when he was appointed chief of the Reserve Army and commander of Army Group Vistula. Near the end of the war, however, Himmler became convinced of Germany's imminent defeat and made several overtures to the Allies. He sanctioned the "Blood for Trucks" negotiations in Budapest, ordered the halt to the mass slaughter of Jews, tried to initiate peace negotiations with the Allies through Count Folke Bernadotte, permitted the transfer of several hundred camp prisoners to Sweden, and proposed the surrender of the German armies in the West while continuing the battle in the East. Hitler was enraged by this betrayal and stripped Himmler of all his offices. Following the German surrender, Himmler tried to escape by assuming a false identity, but was arrested by British troops. Transferred to Lueneberg, Himmler committed suicide by poison capsule on May 23, 1945 before he could be brought to trial.
[Source: Wistrich, Robert. Who's Who in Nazi Germany. New York, Macmillan, 1982, pp.138-42.]
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