Page 120 – LIFE

At the Gates of Hell: The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen, April 1945

August 12, 2021April 12, 2013 by

Compared to the appalling number of men, women and children killed at the Nazi extermination camps places like Sobibor, Chelmno, Treblinka and others where, cumulatively, millions perished the death toll at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northwest Germany was (a horrible thing to say!) relatively small. More than a million people were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau alone; at Belsen, by most estimates, fewer than 100,000 died from starvation and disease (typhus, for example), as well as outright slaughter.

But in the spring of 1945, photographs and eyewitness accounts from the liberation of camps like Bergen-Belsen afforded the disbelieving world outside of Europe its first glimpse into the abyss of Nazi depravity. All these years later, after countless reports, books, oral histories and documentary films have constructed a terrifyingly clear picture of the Third Reich’s vast machinery of murder, it’s difficult to grasp just how shocking these first revelations really were. The most horrific rumors about what was happening to the Jews and millions of other “undesirables” — Catholics, pacifists, homosexuals, and Slavs in Nazi-occupied lands — paled before the reality revealed by the liberation of the camps.

Here, seven decades after the April 1945 liberation of Bergen-Belsen by British troops, LIFE.com presents a series of photographs made at the camp by the great George Rodger (later a founding Magnum member). In an issue of LIFE published a few weeks later, in which several of the pictures in this gallery first appeared, the magazine told its readers of a “barbarism that reaches the low point of human degradation.”

Last week the jubilance of impending victory was sobered by the grim facts of the atrocities which the Allied troops were uncovering all over Germany. For 12 years since the Nazis seized power, American have heard charges of German brutality. Made skeptical by World War I “atrocity propaganda,” many people refused to put much faith in stories about the inhuman Nazi treatment of prisoners.

With the armies in Germany were four LIFE photographers. . . . The things [their photos] show are horrible. They are printed for the reason stated seven years ago when, in publishing early pictures of war’s death and destruction in Spain and China, LIFE stated, “Dead men will have indeed died in vain if live men refuse to look at them.”

In Rodger’s own typed picture captions, meanwhile, dated April 20, 1945, the photographer detailed what he had witnessed when he accompanied the British 11th Armoured Division (the fabled “Black Bull”) into the camp just days earlier. Somehow, the stark, almost telegraphic language of the notes carries more power more immediacy and are thus more terrifying than so many of the passionate, outraged articles and editorials that appeared in newspapers and on the radio in the weeks and months to come. Here are just a few examples:

Ukrainian women cooking a meal on a refuse dump in the camp. For fuel for their fire they used the ragged clothing torn from corpses. They are boiling pine needles and roots to form a sort of soup.

There must be about 5,000 bodies in this grave. The former SS guards both women and men are made to collect them. . . . These girls, all between 20 and 25, were even worse than the men. They were more cruel. Authentic stories are told of how these [women] tied living people to the corpses and burned them alive.

SS girls and men working in the mass grave and unloading the dead from trucks. These girls seem to be completely indifferent to what they are doing . . . [but] the former tough SS men crack up under . . . the strain of continually handling the bodies of those they helped to kill.

This man was talking to me when he fell dead beside me.

Women dying under the trees.

Indelibly scarred by the savagery and suffering he confronted during World War II in England during the Blitz; in war-torn Southeast Asia and Europe; and, especially, in Bergen-Belsen George Rodger did not work as a war photographer again. He did, however, continue to travel and photograph around the world in the decades after the war particularly in Africa, where he made some of his most celebrated pictures.

By the time of his death in 1995, at the age of 87, Rodger was acknowledged as one of the 20th century’s indispensable photojournalists, and one of its greatest witnesses.

Bergen-Belsen 1945

George Rodger The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Vlad the (Insect) Impaler: LIFE With Nabokov and His Butterflies

November 24, 2020April 12, 2013 by

On anyone’s list of the 20th century’s greatest writers never to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov will likely appear at, or very near, the top. Of course, one can point to any number of literary masters Graham Greene, Borges, Ibsen and others who were, inexplicably, passed over for the honor. But the exclusion of Nabokov is especially strange and, for his countless admirers, especially vexing in light of the sustained excellence of the novels (those written in Russian as well as in English), stories, poems and nonfiction that he produced across five full decades.

The scope of his influence, meanwhile, can hardly be overstated. Jhumpa Lahiri, Jeffrey Eugenides, Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, Michael Chabon, Thomas Pynchon the roster of prominent (and even a few genuinely great) writers whose work echoes or pays direct tribute to Nabokov’s genius is as long as it is varied.

But another passion long battled with his love of writing for preeminence in Nabokov’s life: namely, the study and collection of butterflies.

In a November 1964 article titled “The Master of Versatility,” LIFE took pains to remind its readers that Nabokov by that time an internationally celebrated novelist, translator and teacher was “much more than a many-tongued writer: Lepidoptera are butterflies and moths, and Nabokov is one of the world’s authorities on them.”

Here, LIFE.com presents a series of pictures made in and around Ithaca, N.Y., in 1958 by LIFE’s Carl Mydans that illustrate the man’s obsession with the colorful flying insects.

Born in Russia in 1899, Nabokov fled the Revolution at 17, studied at Cambridge, and went on to teach literature in the United States. (He became a naturalized American citizen in 1945.) In 1964, he was living in Montreux, Switzerland “writing,” LIFE noted in the 1964 article, “chasing butterflies and making brilliant conversation.”

Here, in exactly the sort of sharp, amusing and cheerfully acerbic language one might expect from the author of Lolita, Pnin, Pale Fire and Bend Sinister, are just some of the remarks on life, art and, of course, butterflies that Nabokov shared with LIFE’s Jane Howard:

Writing has always been for me a blend of dejection and high spirits, a torture and a pastime but I never expected it to be a source of income. I have often dreamed of a long and exciting career as a curator of Lepidoptera in a great museum.

One of the greatest pieces of charlatanic and satanic nonsense imposed on a gullible public is the Freudian interpretation of dreams…. I can not conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst, but of course if one’s mind is deranged on might try anything: after all, quacks and cranks, shamans and holy men, kings and hypnotists have cured people.

It is odd, and probably my fault, that no people seem to name their daughters Lolita anymore. I have heard of young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but no human beings.

I don’t think I shall ever go back [to Russia]. When I feel like returning to Russia, I go up to the mountains in pursuit of butterflies, and find just before the timberline a region that corresponds to the Russia of my youth.

I am indifferent to sculpture, architecture and music. When I go to a concert all that matters to me is the reflection of the hands of the pianist in the lacquer of the instrument. My mind wanders and fastens on trivia as whether I’ll have something good to read before I go to bed. Knowing you’ll have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.

One final note, this time on the pronunciation of Nabokov’s name. In a 1965 interview, Nabokov himself said: “Frenchmen of course say ‘Na-bo-koff‘ with the accent on the last syllable. Englishmen say ‘Na-bokov,’ accent on the first, and Italians say Na-bo-kov, accent in the middle, as Russians do … [with] a heavy open ‘o’ as in ‘Knickerbocker.’ The awful ‘Na-bah-kov’ is a despicable gutterism…. Incidentally, the first name is pronounced Vladeemer rhyming with ‘redeemer.'”

There. Aren’t you glad we cleared that up?

Liz Ronk, who edited this gallery, is the Photo Editor for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.

Vladimir Nabokov 1958

Carl Mydans Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Vladimir Nabokov and wife Vera

Carl Mydans Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Vladimir Nabokov 1958

Carl Mydans Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Vera Nabokov 1958

Carl Mydans Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Vladimir Nabokov 1958

Carl Mydans Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Butterflies 1958

Carl Mydans Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Lower Manhattan’s Lost Anchors: Remembering the Twin Towers

January 17, 2020April 3, 2013 by

Say you’ve lived in New York for a while. Ten years. Twenty years. Maybe your whole life. You’re coming out of the subway, in pretty much any borough. You’re a little turned around when you get to the street. You’re not sure which way is north, which is south. Without thinking about it, you gaze around for the one landmark (or rather, the two landmarks) that always helped orient you in the past those enormous, companionable markers that silently indicated, at a glance: This is south. This is Lower Manhattan. Get your bearings.

Then you remember: the Twin Towers are gone. So you cast about for some other clue, some other sign that will tell you where to turn, and as you head off in the right direction, the vanished towers hover at the edge of your thoughts a ghost image that, like Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly’s famous black-on-black New Yorker cover, seems to perpetually fade, but never really goes away.

The towers anchored Lower Manhattan for almost three decades. While they stood, no one would have characterized them as “beloved,” or even as terribly well-liked. They were too gargantuan, too lacking in character (it seemed) to elicit the sort of affection offered to structures like the Empire State Building or the Brooklyn Bridge. The Twin Towers were sleek, utilitarian monoliths.

Gradually, though, people did warm to the pair. There were times, for example, when the setting sun burnished the soaring glass sides of those two buildings, that they were genuinely beautiful. And seen from a distance, the Twin Towers added a certain balance to the island’s famous skyline, a counterpoint to the skyscrapers of midtown.

The towers are gone now. A new skyscraper, One World Trade, has risen in the spot where the Twin Towers once stood, and the skyline of the city has again been reshaped, transformed—as it always has been, and always will be.

And who knows? Maybe future generations of commuters and tourists will walk out of subway stations all over town, a little turned around, a little confused, and will automatically gaze about for the one landmark that has always helped orient them an enormous, companionable marker that silently indicates, at a glance: This is south. This is Lower Manhattan. Get your bearings.

Lower Manhattan and the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, photographed from Brooklyn, 1983.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Lovely Bones: The Art of Evolution

August 11, 2021April 2, 2013 by

Design is a funny, marvelous, sometimes unsettling thing especially when evolution itself is the designer.

Take these six-decade-old pictures of skulls and bones. Seen in a certain light, and photographed for LIFE by the great Andreas Feininger, the bones of creatures as varied in size and temperament as fish, bats, elephants, hummingbirds and humans are eloquent totems, raising questions about life, death and what we ultimately leave behind.

In the end, though, perhaps the way that humans and our fellow creatures appear when seen at the most elemental level in other words, how we look when literally stripped to the bone says more about us than we’d like to admit. Even as these pictures summon thoughts that swing between the morbid and the exalted, one thing remains strikingly clear: in the right hands, bones are beautiful.

Many of these Feininger photographs appeared in the Oct. 6, 1952, issue of LIFE.

Andreas Feininger, owl’s skull

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Andreas Feininger, picture of a mole

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Andreas Feininger photograph of a bat

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Andreas Feininger photograph of a fish

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Andreas Feininger, skeletal vertebrae of catfish, 1951

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Andreas Feininger, pygmy armadillo, 1951

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Andreas Feininger, jumping mouse, 1951

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Andreas Feininger, Human and horse skeletons, 1951

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Andreas Feininger, elephant, 1951

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Andreas Feininger, hummingbird and elephant’s femur, 1951

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Andreas Feininger, gorilla rib cage, 1951

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Andreas Feininger, shrew, 1951

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Andreas Feininger, skeletal structure of a bird, 1951

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Andreas Feininger, ostrich femur, 1951

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Andreas Feininger, bear femur, 1951

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Andreas Feininger, sloth, 1951

Andreas Feininger Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The Men Who Would Be 007: LIFE Behind the Scenes at James Bond Auditions

January 17, 2020April 1, 2013 by

In the early 1960s, movie producers adapting Ian Fleming’s novels about a suave British spy named James Bond plucked a relative unknown, Sean Connery, from obscurity and offered him the role of a lifetime. When Connery left the franchise after five movies (although he would briefly be back, in 1971, in Diamonds Are Forever, and again in 1983 for Never Say Never Again) the hunt for another Bond was on.

In 1967 LIFE sent photographer Loomis Dean to casting sessions for the James Bond movie, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The magazine published a handful of those photos in an article on the film and on the Bond phenomenon. But some of Dean’s choicest frames Bond wannabes suiting up, brandishing guns, sipping faux martinis, and wooing women never ran in the magazine.

Here, LIFE.com presents photos from those 1967 auditions, featuring the five top candidates including George Lazenby, who would eventually win the coveted role.

[Buy the LIFE book, 50 Years of James Bond.]

Critical reception of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service has hardly been uniform. There was much initial grumbling, for example, about Lazenby’s performance—especially in light of Connery effectively defining the role for a generation of moviegoers. Lazenby was a 28-year-old Australian model living in London, with virtually no acting experience outside TV commercials. But there was something about George Lazenby that placed him a notch above his competitors. Particularly impressive was his physical prowess. (In a subsequent audition to test his fighting skills, Lazenby reportedly broke a stuntman’s nose. That clinched it.)

“I’m really looking forward to being Bond, for the bread and the birds,” he told LIFE after his casting.

Meanwhile, the years have been kind to the 1969 flick. Entertainment Weekly, for example, ranked On Her Majesty’s Secret Service the sixth best of the Bond series, which now includes more than 20 feature films and is one of the highest-grossing movie franchises of all time.

A composite image of the five top candidates (including ultimate choice George Lazenby, bottom right). Published in the October 11, 1968, issue of LIFE.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John Richardson during James Bond auditions, 1967.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service director Peter R. Hunt oversaw a test love scene between John Richardson and an actress, moving her leg just so.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John Richardson during James Bond auditions.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

James Bond audition candidate John Richardson (left), in profile, 1967.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John Richardson reacted as his screen-test costar pulled out a gun.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Director Peter Hunt studied John Richardson during his audition, 1967.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

After he lost out on the Bond role, Richardson appeared in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970) and a string of Italian movies.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

James Bond audition finalist Anthony Rogers, 1967.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Anthony Rogers and an actress during a screen test.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Anthony Rogers smoked a cigarette during his James Bond audition, 1967.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Anthony Rogers during his James Bond audition, 1967.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Robert Campbell during James Bond auditions, 1967.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Director Peter R. Hunt helped Robert Campbell get into a shoulder holster, 1967.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Robert Campbell checked a page of lines during a James Bond audition, 1967.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

James Bond hopeful Robert Campbell adjusted his shirt and jacket, 1967.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Robert Campbell looked in the mirror between scenes for his James Bond audition, 1967.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Robert Campbell during a kissing test, opposite actress France Anglade, 1967.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hans de Vries during his James Bond audition, 1967.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hans De Vries and France Anglade, James Bond audition, 1967.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hans de Vries during his James Bond audition, 1967.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

George Lazenby during James Bond audition, 1967.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

George Lazenby fiddled with a knife while chatting with Bond director Peter R. Hunt, 1967.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

George Lazenby goofed off behind the scenes of his screen test.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

George Lazenby twirled a gun beside potential Bond Girl Marie-France Boyer, 1967.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

George Lazenby during auditions for the role of James Bond, 1967.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

George Lazenby and Bond Girl hopeful Agneta Eckemyr, 1967.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

George Lazenby leaned against a bar during a moment away from James Bond auditions, 1967.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

George Lazenby, 1967.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Brigitte Bardot: Classic Photos of the Original ‘Sex Kitten’

January 17, 2020April 1, 2013 by

Decades after her acting and singing careers came to an end, Brigitte Bardot is more recently known for her animal-rights activism and for her frequent scrapes with the French authorities over her passionate, public denunciations of what she considers the “Islamification” of her native France. (She has been fined multiple times for “inciting racial hatred” in books and speeches, arguing in 2003, for example, that France has “given in to a subterranean, dangerous and uncontrolled infiltration which not only resists adjusting to our laws and customs but which will, as the years pass, attempt to impose its own.”)

All these years later, however, it’s still difficult for anyone who was not alive at the time to grasp the galvanizing effect that Bardot had as an actress and as a sex symbol on moviegoers around the world in the 1950s and early 1960s. Here, LIFE.com celebrates the young Bardot with a series of pictures—most of which never ran in LIFE—made by Loomis Dean in 1958.

In a June 1958 article titled “The Charged Charms of Brigitte,” LIFE waxed lyrical (and, to contemporary ears, a touch patronizing, if not downright sexist) about the 24-year-old actress’ effect on American moviegoers and critics:

Not since the Statue of Liberty has a French girl lit such fires in America, and Brigitte Bardot does not just stand there like a statue. She moves, she wriggles, and her clothes are as often off as on. One of her films, “And God Created Woman,” has played for eight solid months in one New York theater and raked in some $2 million in the U.S. and, with her four other current films, has jammed art theaters until people complain they are clogging up culture. What Bardot has, which is more than sex, still mystifies many who stop to think about it . . . Meanwhile, the Bardot boom balloons. With four new films to open before years’ end, she’s finishing a fifth, “The Lady and the Puppet” [“La Femme et le Pantin,” but often billed simply as “The Female” for the English-speaking world], made in Spain where these pictures were taken.
In gaining her present eminence, Brigitte Bardot has had certain advantages beyond those she was born with. Like the European sports car, she has arrived on the American scene at a time when the American public is ready, even hungry, for something racier and more realistic than the familiar domestic product. Americana actresses, like American four-door sedans, seem to have grown more and more standardized in styling.
No Hollywood girl can play a mechanic’s wife or even an early western rancher’s daughter without being made up as precisely as the Marquise de Pompadour and garbed like a Main Line heiress. By contrast, an actress who lets her hair get in her eyes, who looks as though she could perspire at least lightly and who wriggles greedily as she kisses a man comes as a revelation.
But none of this really explains why Brigitte Bardot has been so successful. Other foreign actresses have had the same opportunity to profit from public receptiveness and the lack of censorship but none of them has been able to match her accomplishments. Brigitte, also known as B.B. and the Sex Kitten, has not lifted a finger to achieve publicity. In fact, she treats all reporters like net men from the city pound. . . . The male viewer, having been frankly invited to admire the lush Bardot charms, is soon forced to an uneasy suspicion that he is a wicked old man.

And on it goes—an endless stream of metaphors that remind us of why, in part, Bardot left acting behind when she was not yet 40 years old. She had helped to create and to define the sex-goddess archetype in the movies, but found herself almost entirely unable to break out of that mold no matter how “serious” her roles became or how nuanced her performances actually were.

In the end, then, if nothing else, the pictures in this gallery help explain why most critics and most audiences were, perhaps, unable to see beyond the sheer sensuality that Brigitte Bardot exuded, both onscreen and off. After all, for a while there in the middle part of the last century, she might just have been the sexiest woman on earth.

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

Brigitte Bardot on set with actor Michel Roux, 1958.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Brigitte Bardot on location in Spain in 1958.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Brigitte Bardot photographed at the time she was making the film “La Femme et le Pantin” in Spain, 1958.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Brigitte Bardot photographed at the time she was making the film, “La Femme et le Pantin” Spain, 1958.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Brigitte Bardot photographed at the time she was making the film “La Femme et le Pantin” in Spain, 1958.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Brigitte Bardot plays the guitar while on the set of the film “La Femme et le Pantin” in Spain, 1958.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Brigitte Bardot on the set of the film “La Femme et le Pantin” in Spain, 1958.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Brigitte Bardot checks her hair and makeup on the set of the film “La Femme et le Pantin” in Spain, 1958.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Brigitte Bardot (holding a copy of LIFE magazine) looks at a photographic slide on the set of the film “La Femme et le Pantin” in Spain, 1958.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Brigitte Bardot on the set of the film “La Femme et le Pantin” in Spain, 1958.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Brigitte Bardot photographed between takes, Spain, 1958.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Brigitte Bardot with co-star Antonio Vilar on the set of the film “La Femme et le Pantin.”

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In Bardot’s films she often ended up lounging on a bed.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Brigitte Bardot during break on location in Spain, 1958.

Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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