Johannes Hehle

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Johannes Karl Hehle (born February 15, 1906 in Chemnitz , † June 10, 1944 in La Bijude , Normandy ) was a German military photographer during World War II .

Life

Hehle completed an apprenticeship as a businessman and photographer. In 1932 he joined the NSDAP . In January 1940 he was drafted into the Wehrmacht and assigned to the 146 building battalion in the west. In July 1941, Hähle was transferred to the Propaganda Company (PK) 637 on the Eastern Front . As a photo reporter for the 6th Army , he took aerial photos of the war on the Eastern Front. After a long hospital stay in the summer of 1942 due to an injury, Hähle was transferred to a propaganda department in Potsdam in September 1942 . At the end of September 1941, he photographed the traces of the Babyn Yar massacre and another massacre near Lubny ; 29 color photos were taken. Hehle did not deliver this film and a few others to his unit, but kept them to himself.

In the winter of 1942/1943 Hähle was a reporter for Rommel's Africa Corps . A few months later he served in PK 698 in Belgium and northern France, where he took pictures of the Atlantic Wall . On June 10, 1944, Hehle was killed under unexplained circumstances during the invasion fighting in the village of La Bijude near Caen .

estate

At the end of the war, the Americans confiscated several trucks with material from the German propaganda companies. In 1962 they handed over the material to the Koblenz Federal Archives , including 108 films made by Hehle. The three films withheld by Hehle, especially the color material, were sold by his widow in 1954 to the Berlin journalist Hans Georg Schulz. Black and white copies of the recordings served the Frankfurt public prosecutor's office as evidence in 1961 and then disappeared in an archive. The color photos did not reappear until 2000, when Schulz's widow sold them to the Hamburg Institute for Social Research , which was then able to add to the images from its Wehrmacht exhibition .

Web links

Commons : Photographs by Johannes Hähle  - collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Hey, Johannes
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hehle, Johannes Karl (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German military photographer in World War II
DATE OF BIRTH February 15, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Chemnitz
DATE OF DEATH June 10, 1944
Place of death La jewel