Walter Genewein

Walter Genewein (born May 4, 1901 in Saalfelden am Steinernen Meer , † 1974 there ) was an Austrian photographer and accountant.

Life

Walter Genewein graduated from the Linz Commercial Academy in 1919 and initially worked as a sales representative. He joined the NSDAP in 1933 and acted as administrator of the finances of the Litzmannstadt ghetto in Łódź from June 1940 during the German occupation of Poland . He set up an accounting department in which income from forced labor and the exploitation of the murdered people's belongings were set off. From 1941 to 1944 he shot hundreds of color slides with the new reversal film from Agfa in the model factories of a specially sealed off district .

He documented the birthday of his superior, Hans Biebow , and the arrival of "Reichsführer-SS" Heinrich Himmler or "Reichsleiter" Franz Xaver Schwarz to visit the ghetto. Photos of the Litzmannstadt electric tram were probably made at the request of the director Dr. Bodo Scheidt. In 1943 Genewein became interested in the projection of 8 mm film strips, which he exposed with a spring mechanism camera of the type " Movex 12 " from Agfa.

“Everything that went in and out of this ghetto and related to the finance department went through his desk. But this was also responsible for the killing squads in the Kulmhof extermination camp , where many Jews from Łódź were murdered. That too went through his desk. Walter Genewein was directly responsible for the mass murder of Jews. "( Bertrand Perz , historian)

Genewein returned to Salzburg with his color slides after the Second World War . He emerged from criminal proceedings in 1947 without any major ado. He justified himself that although he had bought some things in Łódź at low prices, he had never unjustifiably enriched himself. He died in Salzburg in 1974 as a respected citizen.

Reception of the photographs

Genewein's pictures were discovered in 1987 by employees of the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt in a Viennese antique shop and exhibited in Frankfurt from March to June 1990.

A few years later another set of slides was found in Bremen . Genewein's work is currently held in the collections of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem .

In 1992 the Łódź TV Center broadcast a short documentary by Jadwiga Wileńska and Wojciech Źródlak entitled Stop, June 1, 1943 . In 1998, in his documentary The Photographer , Dariusz Jabłoński juxtaposed images of Genewein with the comments of Arnold Mostowicz , a doctor and prisoner of the Łódź ghetto.

In 2015, the Kunsthaus Nexus in Saalfelden dealt with this past in the exhibition Das Getto Lódź / Litzmannstadt 1940–1944, On Life in Hell . "Forced to work for the German Reich, around 43,000 residents of the ghetto died of disease and malnutrition by the time it was cleared in 1944, and around 100,000 were sent to be exterminated from there."

Individual evidence

1. ^ Pinzgauer involved in Nazi mass murders. orf.at . April 4, 2015, accessed April 13, 2016.
2. ↑ Hanno Loewy, Gerhard Schoen, Our only way is work. The Łódź ghetto, 1940–1944. Exhibition catalog Vienna, Jewish Museum, Frankfurt am Main 1990 ( Memento of the original from March 25, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF). Retrieved April 13, 2016. 
3. ^ Article from Jewish News of February 12, 2016. Retrieved April 13, 2016.
4. ↑ Gerhard Dorfi: "The Ghetto Lodz 1940-1944": Life in Hell. The standard . April 9, 2015, accessed April 13, 2016.
5. ↑ Vernissage: The Lodz Ghetto / Litzmannstadt 1940 - 1944. Kunsthaus Nexus. April 10, 2015, accessed April 13, 2016.