Atrocities Absent from the Archive: Bauhaus Photographer Fritz Heinze, from Anti-Nazi to Conformist

In 1941, Bauhaus photographer Fritz Heinze, wearing the Wehrmacht uniform of the occupying German forces in Ukraine, took two photographs of Jewish women and children imprisoned in a greenhouse on the eve of their execution. These photographs, which, unlike his earlier work, were not donated to archives, a move which could have linked them publicly to the Bauhaus movement or to Holocaust history, were not seen outside of the family until Heinze’s grandson published them online, seventy-five years later. We can consider Heinze’s photographs—and his participation in the Bauhaus—under archived, difficult to access, and largely missing from the understood relevant corpus. In restoring his work to the historical record, this article traces the path of a communist anti-Nazi artist to a compliant soldier and a photographing bystander to genocide.