Page 113 – LIFE

The Brink of Oblivion: Color Photos From Nazi-Occupied Poland, 1939-1940

January 20, 2023September 20, 2013 by

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, a German photographer and ardent Nazi named Hugo Jaeger enjoyed unprecedented access to the Third Reich’s upper echelon, traveling with Adolf Hitler to massive rallies and photographing him at intimate parties and in quieter, private moments. The photos made such an impression on the Führer that Hitler famously declared, upon first seeing Jaeger’s work: “The future belongs to color photography.”

But beyond merely chronicling Hitler’s ceaseless travels, Jaeger also documented the brute machinery of the Reich, including the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. Here, LIFE.com presents a series of photos from Warsaw and from the town of Kutno, 75 miles west of the Polish capital, in 1939 and 1940. Adding perspective to the images is an essay (below) by Justyna Majewska, discussing just what Jaeger’s haunting images can still tell us about that era, three-quarters of a century after they were made. Ben Cosgrove

Why would Hugo Jaeger, a photographer dedicated to lionizing Adolf Hitler and the “triumphs” of the Third Reich, choose to immortalize conquered Jews in Warsaw and Kutno (in central Poland) in such an uncharacteristic, intimate manner? Most German photographers working in the same era as Jaeger usually focused on the Wehrmacht; on Nazi leaders; and on the military victories the Reich was routinely enjoying in the earliest days of the Second World War. Those pictures frequently document brutal acts of humiliation, even as they glorify German troops.

The photographs that Jaeger made in the German ghettos in occupied Poland, on the other hand, convey almost nothing of the triumphalism seen in so many of his other photographs. Here, in fact, there is virtually no German military presence at all. We see the devastation in the landscape of the German invasion of Poland, but very little of the “master race” itself.

It is, of course, impossible to fully recreate exactly what Jaeger had in mind, but from the reactions of the people portrayed in these images in Warsaw and Kutno, there appears to be surprising little hostility between the photographer and his subjects. Most of the people in these pictures, Poles and Jews, are smiling at the camera. They trust Jaeger, and are as curious about this man with a camera as he is about them. In this curiosity, there is no sense of hatred. The men, women and children on the other side of the lens and Jaeger look upon one another without the aggression and tension characteristic of the relationship between perpetrator and victim.

Strikingly, none of the people in these photos appear to have been forced to pose. In fact, Jaeger probably asked them for permission to take their pictures; maybe he and they had a short chat before he began photographing them. We can even go so far as to suggest that there is no sign of overt brutality here. To Jaeger (unlike for so many of the Reich’s supporters), Jews were not mere “rats,” or “parasites”: He simply perceived them as fascinating subjects. While he probably felt that their subjugation was inevitable in the face of the German Blitzkrieg, he nevertheless captures these already subjugated people sympathetically.

We know, all these decades later, that these thousands of people were, in fact, prisoners, whether or not the ghettos that would follow had already been built. [NOTE: In a city the size of Warsaw the creation of the notorious ghetto was quote complicated, and took a few months to complete; in Kutno, the Jews were forced into their ghetto in one day.]

We know what it means that their homes had been destroyed. We know what the anti-Semitic regulations like the yellow Star of David that Jews were forced to wear at all times in public would ultimately come to symbolize. But Jaeger, photographing in 1939, shows these people as a community trying to rebuild against all odds.

Seeing these photographs today, seven decades later, we know the harsh, unspeakable truth. Within a very short time, the situation for Kutno’s and Warsaw’s native Jews became more and more difficult, and ultimately catastrophic. Poles and Jews were separated from one another. The Nazis created a Jewish council, the Judenrat, responsible for making Jews obey the Germans’ diktats. The food supply dwindled horribly.

In June 1940, all of Kutno’s roughly 8,000 Jews were forced into the ghetto the grounds of an old sugar factory. Typhus and hunger soon began killing hundreds of them. In 1942, the Nazis implemented Operation Reinhardt, which effectively put in motion the Nazi’s planned destruction of all Polish Jewry. In the spring of 1942 the Kutno Ghetto itself was “liquidated.” Jews who were unable to escape and find help among their Polish neighbors were taken to Kulmhof (CheÅ‚mno), the first death camp, located on the River Ner not far from the city of Lodz. There, thousands of Kutno’s Jewish men, women and children were put to death in “gas vans” mobile gas chambers in what were among the first mass murders of the Holocaust.

Operation Reinhardt also sealed the fate of the Jews of Warsaw. Liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto started in July 1942 and took nearly three months to complete. Horrifically overcrowded cattle trains carried 300,000 Jews to Treblinka.

All these many years later, Jaeger’s pictures from Warsaw and Kutno are still so hard to look at and hard to turn away from. I presume that the beautiful young girl seen smiling directly, confidently, at the camera (slide #1 in this gallery) is Jewish: on the collar of her coat, we see what is evidently a folded, yellow Star of David. Neither she, nor Jaeger himself, could have truly, fully foreseen her fate: to die of typhus, or to starve to death, or to be forced into a gas chamber at Chelmno, only to emerge again in a haunting photograph long, long after she was dead.

Justyna Majewska works as a curator at the Holocaust Gallery in the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. She is also a Ph.D. candidate in the Polish Academy of Science’s Institute of Philosophy and Sociology. Her dissertation focuses on social change in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Kutno WWII

Hugo Jaeger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Warsaw, World War II

Hugo Jaeger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Kutno, World War II

Hugo Jaeger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Kutno, World War II

Hugo Jaeger / Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Kutno WWII

Hugo Jaeger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Warsaw, World War II

Hugo Jaeger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Kutno WWII

Hugo Jaeger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Warsaw, World War II

Hugo Jaeger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Kutno, World War II

Hugo Jaeger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Warsaw, World War II

Hugo Jaeger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Kutno WWII

Hugo Jaeger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The Unlikely Hipster: Walt Disney on the Beach in Brazil, 1941

September 28, 2022September 19, 2013 by

A youngish, black-clad hipster isn’t the image that usually comes to mind when we think of Walt Disney. A gray-haired, grandfatherly guy in a suit and tie that’s Walt Disney. Right?

And yet here he is, with his little 8mm movie camera on a beach in Brazil, of all places looking for all the world like a lank-haired, goofily grinning film student on spring break. What in the name of the sorcerer’s apprentice is going on here?

As it turns out, the Walt Disney in this photograph was on a break, of sorts; in late 1941, with his studio in the midst of a major labor battle namely, a crippling strike by animators Disney flew to South America under the aegis of the federal government’s newly formed Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. The brainchild of Nelson Rockefeller, the CIAA was created, at least in part, with the aim of countering German influence in countries like Brazil, Argentina and Chile on the eve of the Second World War. The CIAA not only convinced Disney and more than a dozen of his colleagues to fly south on a cultural goodwill tour; taxpayers paid for the entire 12-week trip.

By this point in his career, Disney had already produced Pinocchio, Fantasia, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and other landmark features, as well as scores of short films. He had received a special Academy Award for the creation of Mickey Mouse, and had won eight (eight!) Short Subject Oscars for his cartoons. (He would eventually win or receive more than two dozen Academy Awards, including the Irving Thalberg Award in 1942.) In 1941, his name was better-known in South America and in countless other countries around the globe than that of almost any other person on earth. He was 39 years old.

Once the United States entered World War II, Disney’s studio churned out military training films, as well as some entertaining Allied propaganda including the classic Der Fuehrer’s Face (originally titled Donald Duck in Nutzi Land.) In 1944, Disney released a second feature inspired by the trip to South America, The Three Caballeros.

Today, so long after Walt and his older brother Roy founded what became, arguably, the most powerful pop-culture force on the planet, it’s somehow both jarring and heartening to see this single photograph of Disney in Brazil, and consider the man not as the familiar face of a multinational corporation, or the creator of a soulless marketing juggernaut, but as a filmmaker, an inventor, an artist.

Love him or hate him, Walter Elias Disney changed the face of entertainment forever. Not bad for a lank-haired guy with a movie camera and a goofy grin.

Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com

Walt Disney in Brazil, 1941

Hart Preston/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Suburban Time Capsule: A School Bus Stop, 1971

July 30, 2020September 4, 2013 by

In 1971, LIFE magazine published a special double issue called, simply, “Children.” In the issue, LIFE’s editors sought to peer into what they characterized as “a secret world” the world of childhood. One of the sweetest features was a series of pictures by Ralph Morse chronicling the goings-on at school bus stops near his home in northern New Jersey.

As LIFE put it, introducing Morse’s photographs:

On a certain morning in September, two dozen children stand waiting along a road in Rockaway, N.J., eyeing each other warily and going through their own private first-day-of-school crises, until at last the school bus comes. LIFE photographer Ralph Morse was at the bus stop that day and on many other mornings in the next two months. He watched the stiffness disappear and a bouncy little society emerge. Long before the first snow fell, he knew every member well: the cutups, the bullies, the loners, the flirts.

Here are some of the images that capture the intense, singular, “bouncy little society” of the suburban school bus stop, circa 1971.

School bus stop, New Jersey, 1971

Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Moms wave to their kids at a school bus stop, New Jersey, 1971

Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

When Skateboarding Was Young

January 5, 2020September 3, 2013 by

A teeter-totter on wheels is the new fad and menace. . . .

Thus did LIFE introduce to the magazine’s readers its own unique (if somewhat shrill) take on a toy that would evolve into the emblem of a singular subculture and, eventually, a lifestyle.

Skateboarding, LIFE opined in 1965, is “the most exhilarating and dangerous joyriding device this side of the hot rod. A two-foot piece of wood or plastic mounted on wheels, it yields to the skillful user the excitements of skiing or surfing. To the unskilled it gives the effect of having stepped on a banana peel while dashing down the back stairs. It is also a menace to limb and even to life.” In the previous month, the magazine noted, two children in different parts of the country had been killed when they careened into traffic while skateboarding.

By now it has long since it would develop that grown men and women could make a nice living as skateboarders inking endorsement deals and competing at skateboard contests. Skateboarders such as Tony Hawk and Marisa Dal Santo—not to mention winter offspring like Shaun White and Gretchen Bleiler—emerged as breakout stars of both sport and pop culture. Industries of clothing, gear and skateboard park construction, established themselves, and the appeal of the sport exploded. But back then, LIFE could safely assume that at least some of its millions of readers had absolutely no clue what skateboarding entailed . . . or what a skateboard was.

Here, LIFE.com looks back at the early, thrillingly anarchic days of a quintessentially American sport and pastime that, over the years, has been embraced by millions around the world while still retaining its rebel cred. Skateboarding is no crime—but some of these skateboarding images feel criminally fun.

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.

Skateboarding in New York City, 1965

Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Nineteen-year-old Patti McGee, the 1965 “National Girls’ Champion” became, in 2010, the first female inductee into the International Association of Skateboard Companies (IASC) Skateboard Hall of Fame.

Bill Eppridge/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Life Magazine May 14, 1965

Surf, Sand and Sun: LIFE’s Ode to Beach Bums, 1950

August 11, 2021August 30, 2013 by

In February 1950, LIFE published a feature on what the magazine called “the gold-bricking existence” of ski bums at Sun Valley, Idaho. Eight months later, in its August 28 issue, LIFE published a follow-up piece with the wonderful title, “LIFE Revisits the Ski Bums (and Finds That They Are Now Beach Bums).”

“Photographer Loomis Dean,” LIFE told its readers, “looked up his cold-weather friends and found them still leading a bum’s life.”

Now, however, they are beach bums, spending the summer at San Onofre, Calif., 70 miles south of Los Angeles, where they take as much delight in surfboarding on rolling waves as they did in winter schussing down snowy slopes.

In May, as soon as the snow gets soft at Sun Valley, the bums begin to migrate. They head first for their parents’ homes where they drop off their skis and pick up their brightly colored, 15-foot-long surfboards. Then they make for the beach. . . . On the beach the bums spend every minute they can surfboarding, sunning, guzzling beer, making friends with people who come down to be weekend beach bums. By taking jobs nearby as packers, lifeguards, bartenders, they earn just enough to fill their cups and stomachs and gas tanks of the trucks in which they live and sleep. If war does not catch up with them one way or another, the bums expect to be back at Sun Valley by November.

Here, in tribute to that rare individual self-assured enough to scoff at societal expectations and embrace his or her inner bum, LIFE.com remembers the few, the proud, the charmingly, unrepentantly feckless.

San Onofre, Calif., 1950.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

After tossing his crutches up on the beach, a surfer hobbled over to his surfboard and waited for a receding wave to carry him away from the shore.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Surfers, San Onofre, Calif., 1950.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

San Onofre, Calif., 1950.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

“Hammerhead” Gravage dozed inside of a blanket after surfing all day, San Onofre, Calif., 1950.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

San Onofre, Calif., 1950.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

“Hammerhead” Gravage poured a cold beer for “Burrhead” Grever.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Haircutter to all the beach bums was Myra Roche, mother of three children. She helped friend Warren Miller make ends meet by shearing his hair for free.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

San Onofre, Calif., 1950.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

San Onofre, Calif., 1950.

Loomis Dean Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Udder Bliss: A Cow, Three Cats and Some (Very) Fresh Milk

January 17, 2020August 29, 2013 by

In 1954, LIFE photographer Nat Farbman made a series of pictures of some enterprising (and entertaining) felines on Art Badertscher’s dairy farm near Fresno, Calif. It seems that one of Badertscher’s cats, Squirrley, rose up on her hind legs one day for a squirt of milk right from a cow’s udder and ever since, the farmer had been training all of the farm’s cats to do the same.

In Farbman’s most famous picture of the critters—the shot above that has been reproduced countless times through the years—Brownie (Squirrley’s son) makes a perfect catch while Blackie, a stray that “just wandered in one day and joined the act,” waits his turn.

Brownie drank milk straight from the cow as Blackie waited his turn at a dairy farm in Fresno, Calif., in 1953.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Cats begged for squirts of milk during milking at Arch Badertscher’s dairy farm.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Cats enjoyed squirts of milk at Arch Badertscher’s dairy farm.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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Surf, Sand and Sun: LIFE’s Ode to Beach Bums, 1950

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