The Nazi invasion of Ukraine was caught on camera by a German soldier. Are these images...

On July 27, 1941, the German army entered Ukraine.

"On 22 June 1941, Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, opening the Eastern Front and kick-starting the Generalplan Ost. By 7 August 1941, German troops in Ukraine had reached Kyiv, and by 1 September, Hitler had established the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, signalling that the territory was now occupied. Initially, some Ukrainians welcomed the German forces, believing they would help liberate the country from the Soviet regime responsible for the Holodomor — the man-made famine that killed an estimated 3-12 million in 1932 and 33. They were soon disabused of such notions.

The Nazis believed that ethnic Slavs were racially inferior, and Generalplan Ost was a blueprint for genocide and ethnic cleansing on a devastating scale. It is estimated that between 900,000 and 1.6 million Jews and between 3 and 4 million Ukrainians were killed during the occupation; other sources estimate that 5.2 million Ukrainians of all ethnic groups — more than 12 per cent of the population at the time — died due to crimes against humanity, war-related disease, and famine. “We are a master race, which must remember that the lowliest German worker is, racially and biologically, a thousand times more valuable than the population here,” stated Reichskommissar Eric Koch in 1943.

It makes for a troubling history behind a chilling new photo book, The Eye of War – Ukraine 1941/42 by Dieter Keller. Keller was serving as a German soldier in Ukraine and Belarus when he took the photographs, despite a military ban on photographing civilians and war victims. Images of both are included in the book, which contains sweet portraits of children but also shocking shots of dead bodies and disembodied limbs. Many of the photographs show destruction, be it ruined townhouses or barns going up in flames; pictures of horses punctuate the series, often emaciated, sometimes dead.

They’re disturbing, and part of the problem is the mystery of Keller’s intention. His image-making is undeniably skilful but it’s hard to know how to read his images of the dead. His images of burning barns also give pause for thought, given that the Nazis sometimes herded people into buildings and torched them. Did Keller take these photographs as trophies or as evidence? Was he, as the book’s PR suggests, using “aesthetic perception as a key to his own reality processing and mental coping”? What does it mean for us to look at this work? And do his intentions matter when we do?

“I feel like it’s such a difficult one to understand,” says Adam Broomberg, an artist who has contributed a text to the book written with Xiaofu Wang. “How someone could be in the middle of what he was in the midst of and be so — it’s difficult not to be presumptuous — but be calm enough to make beautiful, distanced images?”


These questions aren’t new in war photography, or in photojournalism more generally. Susan Sontag famously scrutinised the field in her 2003 publication Regarding the Pain of Others. She pinpoints Roger Fenton as one of the first war photographers for his work in the Crimean War, before working her way forward to the 21st Century (and also taking in Goya). Sontag offers an extremely critical take on producing such work — and also on consuming it.

'Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it… or those who could learn from it,' she writes. 'The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.'”