Customer Reviews

ALBUM OF THE DAMNED: SNAPSHOTS FROM THE THIRD REICH

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In my opinion, Album of the Damned, is one of those benchmark books. There are thousands of books that deal with the subject of WWII and Nazi Germany. We always see tanks and airplanes and official pictures of the various political and military leaders. But the author of this book gives us a very different and you could say haunting perspective by putting us face to face with individual Third Reich Germans. Faces that looked too much like the ones we see in the mirror.

Very obviously the author, apparently a professional photographer as well as a longtime journalist, has very carefully selected photos both for their historic value and also because they could stand alone as powerful photographs thanks to the composition, lighting, etc.

Album of the Damned is a lesson well-learned, you could say one better learned. I found it's best to ponder the images rather than flip through the pages. Also, read the words. It's way more than a "photo book." Obviously some serious research went into it to add depth to the photos. Buy it for someone who doesn't know much about history. Or someone that does. Buy and it give to your kid's history teacher, your local library, somewhere that other people can see it. Ultimately I see Album of the Damned as a teaching tool. It leaves you with what they call indelible images that bring me back to my copy to look at again and again.

If I didn't know better, I'd swear it was. And I LOVE the Burns Archive books!

The photos are casual and personal, covering a wide range of people, places and time in the Third Reich. The author breifly describes each photo, then gives additional information about the place, time ect.

For instance, pictures of the "Brownshirts" (SA?) are joined with a couple of paragraphs on the SA, it's beginnings and demise. Much more interesting than I make it sound, though!

It's the perfect book for the visually oriented who are interested in the Third Reich without reading volumes of boring detail.

This book is certainly not for those seeking a light "beach read" or for those seeking a book to fall asleep by. Fantastic snapshots taken by WWII era German soldiers and citizens w commentary by the author. As a history teacher I find WWII fascinating. Many of the accounts we get are from scholars studying this era ex post facto. Seeing these photos does spark the imagination and does require the viewer/reader to think about what the photo illustrates. The scope of the Nazi atrocities was horrific: a point Mr. Garson does point out quite vividly. Other facts not so obvious include the 80% attrition rate of unterseeboot crew members & the number of death or concentration camps in Germany. We as a society tend to focus on the major camps whilst forgetting just how many there were. Very interesting concept very well executed. Not for the faint of heart and certainly not light reading. Very thought provoking, although I did not find it a depressing read. It certainly made me rethink my position on the knowledge of the German citizenry in reference to the existence of concentration/death camps.

This is basically a photo book containing many candid photos taken by causal German photographers during the period of the Third Reich and World War II. Accompanied with the photos are comments written by the author regarding the significance of each photo in relation to what is going on. The book is pretty well put together and the causal photos are quite interesting because they are so causal. There are wedding photos here, family photos of their sons, daughters, wife or even their mothers, group photos of soldiers at battle sites or famous landmarks, photos of soldiers having fun or play acting and that sort of thing. Some of the photos almost looks like vacation photography! In fact, many of the causal photos you see in this book may be found in your albums or within your own photo collections. Perhaps, that is the point the author is trying to make here. Many of the people represented in this book in their causal mode, are all members of the Third Reich and many of them took part of the massive Holocaust that killed millions. They took photos of themselves, of their victims or victims to be in a very holiday like atmosphere as they are presented here in this book.

This should be an pretty interesting book to anyone interested in World War II photography. There is really nothing truly brutal here outside of small numbers of photographs that reflects on death in a very causal but realistic matter. Its that casual matter that these photographs revealed, is the true essence of this book.

The concept for Album of the Damned has been the subject of social-psychological studies for some time: nice, normal people do horrible things. Research papers use the words evil, dehumanization, disengagement, altered responsibility to describe and define such behavior. [V. Bernard, et al, (1965) Dehumanization: A Composite Psychological Defense, and others]

In Album of the Damned normal people are shown in casual, candid photos at holidays, various life events, casual fun with family and friends. Meanwhile former neighbors and friends were hauled off to concentration camps or raped, humiliated and tortured for sport - we don't see these pictures. "Normal" Germans let it happen and even participated in the ethnic cleansing that resulted in thousands of clergy and more than 6 million other "normal" people dying in horrible conditions.

This lays a terrific guilt trip on the reader - and surely it is meant to do just that. There is a perhaps unintended irony in that many of the soldiers pictured in happy settings were, by virtue of their collar insignia, regular army (Heer) destined to become cannon fodder fighting the Russians. So we see few of the actual perpetrators of the roundups and medical experiments, or of the death camp guards and commanders - those of the Allgemeine SS with runes as their collar insignia and the totenkopf (skull) on their hats.

The author's commentary, sardonic and accusatory as it is, paints with a very broad brush: the laughing Germans pictured here are bad, all bad.

For sheer emotional impact this book makes you cry and wonder how close to madness "normal" can become during wartime. For clearly delineated guilt in German participation in the madness of the times leading up to, and during, World War II this is not the book. For a rehash of the Nuremberg Trials this is not the book. For a horrific guilt trip this is the book.

But there is a greater question the author seems to ignore: What deterrents can society put in place to stop people from disengaging from reality, from accepting evil as the statue quo?

Wide varierty of very clear b x w photos showing the evil s.o.b.s acting like human beings rather than the monsters they actually wereALBUM OF THE DAMNED: SNAPSHOTS FROM THE THIRD REICH

I, like one of the other reviewers, read this from start to finish as soon as I got it. The pictures were haunting and the captions added explanations that enhanced my understanding.

I was disappointed to find several errors in the book. I am just an amateur historian and by no means an expert on WWII Germany; however, I was able to find several errors, just on my first run through. At least twice, soldiers were identified as officers, when their insignia clearly marked them as enlisted members of the Wehrmacht. Another shows a view of a tired soldier with the "thousand mile stare" and the author is amazed that it was turned into a postcard. Turning photos into postcards were pretty common in WWII Germany...some were developed that way, whether requested or not. Some women in uniform are identified as in the service of the military, when clearly, they are just playing dressup in husbands or boyfriend's uniforms.

But despite these small inconsistencies, it is an interesting book, well worth the price.

When I first saw an ad for "Album of the Damned..." I immediately went to Amazon to order it. I was very excited to receive the book and I must say that I was not able to put it down until I finished it. I must also add that I've actually gone through it several times afterward. As an Historian for self interest, this book is highly recommeded.

The book contains "collections" of photographs mostly from Germany before and during WWII. The author also explains a brief summary of what what was going on at the time and explanations of certain aspects of the War.

5 out of 5 stars! I hope the Author Paul Garson is working on another!

This book is fascinating, if you are interested in history and in particular World War II. I find it very interesting to see how normal these photos are, notwithstanding their sometimes horrible content. Is this the way a nation dies, just a little bit at a time, so that its citizens never realize what's happening, never grasp the true meaning of what is occurring until it's too late? Will people someday look at pictures from Abu Ghraib like this?