The perception of the “images of the Shoah” has varied considerably since 1945, in step with advances in knowledge and the scansions of memory. It has also been tributary to a profound mutation of ways of seeing, of forms of access to the past, and of the social demands made upon the visible.

  1. In post-war France, confusion reigns between the concentration-camp system and the Destruction of the Jews of Europe. The conditions of the return of the deportees blur the comprehension of these two events with distinct chronologies and aims. The Jewish internees evacuated from Auschwitz toward the camps of the Greater Reich are liberated in the spring of 1945, at the same time as the concentration-camp prisoners with whom they return to France. In their reportages on the “death camps,” the Actualités françaises add to the confusion. The newsreels impose the image of a great generic camp constructed on the Buchenwald model1 and present all deportees, Jews and non-Jews alike, as “patriot-resisters” doomed, in equal measure, to annihilation. The construction of a heroic mythology of France requires silence on the fate of the Jews exterminated in Poland.

In those same years, a strong belief in the powers of the visible expresses itself. Photographs and films alone seem capable of vanquishing the incredulity of public opinions confronted with the first accounts of the deportation. Seeing Is Believing, proclaims the great British exhibition of April 1945 that presents to Londoners the first images of the concentration camps.

These are also intended for the German population, in the framework of the denazification campaign implemented by the Western Allies. The sequences filmed at the opening of the camps thus find themselves invested with a double punitive and redemptive power. They also make their entry into the courtrooms during the trials of Lüneburg and Nuremberg.2 Presenting the film Nazi Concentration Camps before the International Military Tribunal, the American prosecutor Thomas Dodd indicates to the Court that the screening will allow showing “in a brief and unforgettable way what the words ‘concentration camps’ mean.”3 The images are called in as reinforcement of impotent words: they give visibility to an unprecedented event that exceeds the resources of language and imagination.

  1. Ten years later, the release of Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog, 1956) marks a first threshold in the perception of the genocide and in the exhumation of the images. Alain Resnais’s film is a paradoxical work. This short commissioned film on the concentration-camp system — later criticized for its univocal vision of the camps — is nevertheless ahead of its time thanks to the knowledge infused into it by Alain Resnais’s historical adviser. Olga Wormser indeed introduces into the script her first discoveries on the deportation. The historian has just published an article on the labor of deportees in the concentration camps. She brings to light the turning point of March 1942, from which the internees were put to the service of the Third Reich’s war economy. This profound transformation of the concentration-camp system also had major consequences for the fate of Jewish deportees. It led the Nazis to set up the “selection” that separated, upon the arrival of convoys, the “fit for work,” authorized to enter the camp, from the “unfit,” directed toward the gas chambers. To account for these conjoint evolutions, Olga Wormser integrates into the script of Nuit et Brouillard a short development on the “Final Solution” and the deportation of the Jews. But this opening is quickly closed up by the poet Jean Cayrol, former deportee at Mauthausen, who erases from his commentary all allusion to the destruction of the Jews of Europe.4

This thwarted advance nevertheless persists in the state of an imprint in the film’s editing, which includes images of the genocide: the departure for Auschwitz of a convoy of Jews and Gypsies filmed from the Dutch camp of Westerbork; the now-iconic photograph of the little boy with his arms raised in the Warsaw ghetto; the snapshot from the Auschwitz album showing the “selection” of Hungarian Jews on the Birkenau ramp; photographs of executions by the Einsatzgruppen on Soviet territory…

These mute images are gradually awakened by the new ways of seeing brought to bear on Alain Resnais’s work. In 1961, Nuit et Brouillard is presented in the framework of the Eichmann trial: this screening, commented on by the Israeli prosecutor Gideon Hausner, reassigns the fragments of the film to the tragedy of the Jewish people, recounted at the hearing.

Another paradox of the short film lies in the virtuoso assembly of camp images combined with the acknowledgment of their impotence. A talented editor, Resnais constructs the spectators’ gaze upon the photographs and archival shots that he has previously indexed in order to retrace their origin and to attempt to pierce their meaning. At the same time, however, in close symbiosis with Cayrol, Resnais points to the inability of these very images to account for the tragedy. The color tracking shots of Nuit et Brouillard, traced at the rhythm of walking within the enclosure of the camps, inaugurate a new form that calls upon the powers of imagination and acknowledges the failings of memory. The filmmaker and the poet offer the public a work rooted in the present, anxious about the future, conceived as an alert mechanism that announces the coming of the “new executioners.”

  1. Thirty years later, Claude Lanzmann redeploys the figure of surveying the sites of the genocide and ties it to the speech of witnesses. The topographical inscription, the resurrection through the gestures and words of victims placed at the threshold of the unspeakable, construct a new face-to-face with the event. Shoah establishes a memory in action that convokes the facts into an entirely dilated present. Where Resnais offered the dead a sepulcher, Lanzmann, before the open tomb, dialogues endlessly with the ghosts.5

The other originality of Shoah (1985) lies in its tightened definition of the genocide of the Jews. By beginning his narrative at Chelmno, in December 1941, Lanzmann constructs his entire film around the mass crimes perpetrated in the extermination centers of Poland. In doing so, he illuminates the specificity of gassing, which industrialized the killing and made the face-to-face between murderer and victim disappear — the “negation of the crime within the crime itself.”6

Lanzmann finally places at the heart of Shoah the invisibility of the extermination of the Jews instituted by the coding of language, the prohibition of images, the destruction of traces. In this sense, the genocide was indeed, as Shoshana Felman maintains, a “historical attack on the act of vision,” the essence of the “Final Solution” being to render itself — and thereby to render the Jews — totally invisible.7

Taking note of this powerful singularity, Lanzmann integrates neither photograph nor archival shot into Shoah. This radical choice allows him to illuminate the difference of visibility between the killing centers, governed by the Nazi policy of secrecy, and the concentration camps in which the practice of photography was widely developed.

  1. It is in a second moment of the film — that of its long exegesis — that the polemics arise. Lanzmann’s peremptory declarations and the innumerable commentaries on his work contribute simultaneously to illuminating, obscuring, and radicalizing the formal choices of Shoah. As ever more clear-cut positions are taken on both sides, a “quarrel of images” takes shape. It shifts rapidly from the factual observation of the rarity of visual traces of the extermination camps toward the philosophical thesis according to which the “Shoah” would be of the order of the unfigurable, the unrepresentable. Caught in this play of interferences, the question of archival images becomes blurred and exacerbated.

To justify his refusal to use period documents, Lanzmann affirms on several occasions that there would be no “images of the Shoah.” The pertinence of this affirmation depends, of course, on the definition one gives the event.8

A significant number of photographic and filmed images do indeed bear witness to the persecution, deportation, and murder of the Jews of Europe before the implementation of the “Final Solution” or outside the extermination camps: sequences shot in the ghettos of Poland; photographs of the massacres committed on Soviet territory by the Einsatzgruppen; convoys of Jewish deportees boarding at Westerbork or Warsaw bound for Birkenau or Treblinka… This important corpus nevertheless contrasts with the extreme rarity of visual traces of the killing centers. Only two photographic series violate the law of invisibility: “the Auschwitz album,” composed of 197 snapshots taken by two SS men of the identification service, in May 1944, at the arrival of several transports of Hungarian Jews;9 and the four photographs showing the surroundings of Krematorium V, taken clandestinely by members of the Birkenau Sonderkommando. These two corpora, inscribed on the same site,10 come closest to the blind spot of murder in the gas chamber, of which no image is known.

It is precisely on this “blind angle” that one of the ramifications of the French quarrel will recenter itself. It takes shape in 1994 on the occasion of the release of Schindler’s List. Claude Lanzmann then confides to Le Monde that he would have destroyed, if they had existed, images filmed by the SS showing “how 3,000 Jews, men, women, children, died together, asphyxiated in a gas chamber of Crematorium 2 at Auschwitz.”11

This declaration radicalizes, to the point of hypothetical destruction, the condemnation of archival images. One can read in it the double refusal to espouse the point of view of the perpetrators12 and to remain within a logic of proof. Lanzmann’s position is nonetheless inadmissible for historians whose duty is to interrogate without respite the surviving traces of the tragedy, even if they are contaminated by the Nazi gaze.

Four years later, Jean-Luc Godard relaunches and envenoms the debate. Founding himself on the postulate that the Nazis had “the mania of recording everything,” he declares to Les Inrockuptibles:

“I have no proof of what I am advancing, but I think that if I set myself to it with a good investigative journalist, I would find images of the gas chambers at the end of twenty years. One would see the deportees enter and one would see in what state they emerged.”13

This logic of proof,14 which the filmmaker opposes to the negationists, contradicts the best part of his work and of his thinking on the image.15 One may also wonder why Godard, who had so well managed without one up to then, would suddenly need a “good journalist”!

This reasoning leads him, in any case, to decree as missing images that Lanzmann had observed as absent. The first invests them with a dangerous power of attestation; the second sacralizes their non-existence to excess. These clear-cut positions cannot fail to engender new polemics.

  1. It is in this horizon of expectation that the exhibition “Mémoire des camps” re-exhumes, in 2001, the four clandestine photos of Birkenau.16 The curator Clément Chéroux places these snapshots under the sign of the highly mediatized quarrel:

“[…] these images, for which twenty years of research would be necessary, do exist and are known. These images on which ‘one would see the deportees enter and one would see in what state they emerged’ (Godard), are precisely those that were made during the summer of 1944 by members of the Sonderkommando and the Polish resistance at Auschwitz around — but also from the very inside of — the gas chamber of Crematorium V at Birkenau. These images can be shown; they have been so since the end of the war without any prohibition coming to prevent it.17 They were not made from the point of view of the Nazis, but from that of the deportees. They have not only the value of proof, but also of document. They are far from being useless, and it cannot be a question of destroying them; they must simply be analyzed as historical documents that allow deepening knowledge of the events they represent.”18

The four photographs thus find themselves weighted with a cumbersome symbolic inheritance. For Chéroux, in effect, these would be the images sought by Godard,19 those very images that Lanzmann (who knew them perfectly well) wrongly claimed to be nonexistent. These snapshots, however precious they may be, do not however allow one to revise the fact, stated by the director of Shoah, that we know of no images showing the murder of the Jews inside the gas chamber.20 In fact, the clandestine photographs show a “before” (naked women in the Birkenau woods) and an “after” (corpses lying on the ground before a cremation pyre).

Far from settling the quarrel, this sleight-of-hand operation relaunches it more vigorously. The exhibition has at least the merit of arousing the public’s interest in these images so often decontextualized, of making their history better known, and of admitting them in their full documentary value.

  1. The first two decades of the 21st century see cohabiting, not without paradox, knowledge of the singularities of the genocide, the attraction for archival images, and the desire to “see everything” shaped by our iconophagous society.21

It is on television that this phenomenon is most manifest: programming officials, motivated by the success of a few mainstream documentaries, encourage production companies to conceive of historical films based on archives.

This enthusiasm is accompanied by new forms that take advantage of digital techniques. One finds in them the same immersive aesthetic, a leveling of temporalities, an overlapping of regimes of images.

Documentaries on the genocide of the Jews do not escape this visual culture that one finds even in the most rigorous television programs. Such is the case of the docudrama Auschwitz, les nazis, la Solution finale (2005) directed by Martina Balazova and the historian Laurence Rees. This ambitious production endeavors to date the photos and archival shots and to replace them in their original context. The conditions of their recording are sometimes even illuminated. “This photograph [was] taken by an inmate member of a Sonderkommando at the risk of his life,” the commentary specifies about one of the clandestine Birkenau snapshots. And when the filmmakers are constrained to repurpose an image, they take care to mention it: evoking Mengele’s sinister experiments on the Auschwitz twins over shots of children progressing behind a labyrinth of barbed wire, the narrator signals that these are sequences shot by Soviet operators after the camp’s liberation.

The film is nonetheless porous to an economy of the visible that intends to compensate for the supposed “poverty” of the archive. While Balazova does not colorize the period images, she completes them with fictional reconstruction. In the episode on the “Shoah by bullets” are presented the shots of the Liepāja execution showing Latvian Jews unloaded from a truck and shot before a pit by members of an Einsatzgruppe. This short scene was filmed by Reinhard Wiener, a sergeant of the German navy who was on the spot with his amateur camera. The director chooses to complete this exceptional document with a fictional reverse shot: one sees the actor playing Himmler contemplating the massacre alongside an operator who conscientiously records the scene. This artificial stitching trivializes Wiener’s gesture — he filmed the only shots known to this day of the action of the Einsatzgruppen on Soviet territory. For while Himmler did indeed attend a shooting execution in August 1941, it was in Belarus near Minsk and he was accompanied there by no cameraman. The poor trembling images of Liepāja, miraculously wrested by a witness from the veil of the tragedy, lose their substance under this fictional overload that effaces their singularity.

The docudrama also offers numerous color shots filmed on the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau. These images call upon the heritage of Shoah while at the same time betraying it. For surveying on the sites of the destruction has as its principal function to designate the locations on which the set is to be replanted. The shots of Auschwitz-Birkenau show the emptiness the better to fill it by recreating the buildings and the homicidal installations through computer-generated imagery. The blind angle of the killing finds itself also offered a visibility: the off-screen of the gas chamber becomes a full field, a virtual recreated space into which the spectator-visitor enters and moves about before the door closes upon him. One measures the step taken by television, which no longer poses any limit to the “power to see” and promises the public a “generalized visibility.”22 It moves radically away from a cinema desirous of saving the share of shadow in order to place “the spectator in a real position relative to the illusion of the totality of the Spectacle.”23

  1. This illusion nourishes a growing refusal to admit that certain events are and remain without image. The visual history of the Vél’ d’Hiv’ bears exemplary witness to this.

For several decades, every documentary and television report on the great Parisian roundup of 16 and 17 July 1942 used the same photograph taken inside the Velodrome, showing women seated or lying on the stadium track. But in 1983, Serge Klarsfeld demonstrates that this snapshot, badly captioned, does not represent the Jewish families rounded up in the framework of Operation “Vent Printanier.” The absence of children, the empty space in the stands, the disposition of the women and men visible on the lawn in the background of the snapshot allow him to establish that the internees in the famous photograph were persons accused of collaboration, gathered at the Vél’ d’Hiv’ shortly after the liberation of Paris.24

This important discovery has as its principal effect to relaunch the quest for images of the roundup, investing them with a strong moral dimension:

“Thus 13,000 Jews were captured at home in the Parisian agglomeration on 16 and 17 July 1942 in clear weather, without a single amateur photographer, without a single professional reporter feeling the necessity of making an effort to fix on film this hunt not only of men or women but of Jewish children.”25

Nearly thirty years later, no snapshot of the Vél’ d’Hiv’ having been exhumed,26 Serge Klarsfeld puts his renown and his advice at the service of the fiction film La Rafle (2010). Its director, Rose Bosh, reconstitutes there the arrest and internment of the Jewish families herded into the Vélodrome d’Hiver, which she had rebuilt in a studio. “Cinema compensates for the absence of images of the historical reality,” Klarsfeld congratulates himself; “that is why La Rafle is a necessary film.”27

Rose Bosch responds to this “necessity” with an aesthetic of the surfeit that seeks to show everything and to say everything, proposing an event entirely decipherable whose hyper-visibility would offer the public direct access to the past. These fictional images, enriched by color, and which espouse the ways of seeing of the present, are thus erected into the ideal vector for “touching” young spectators and “plunging them back” into the past. The film’s promotion is accompanied, unsurprisingly, by a pedagogical booklet intended for teachers in middle schools and high schools. And, in 2012, photograms from the fiction film are used in the framework of the decennial commemoration of the Vél’ d’Hiv’. The roundup is no longer an event without image…

“Cinema fabricates the world, first; then it replaces it,”28 wrote Jean-Louis Comolli. The confusion between the ages of the visible, which fills in the gaps and denies the articulation of times, is a powerful symptom of the “presentism” that affects our era. This regime of historicity draws the past into an entirely dilated present whose moral judgments, ways of seeing and rendering sensible it espouses: a “massive, invasive, omnipresent present, which has no horizon other than itself, fabricating daily the past and the future that it needs, day after day.”29

  1. See Annette Wieviorka in Déportation et Génocide. Entre la mémoire et l’oubli, Paris, Plon, 1992.↩︎

  2. The Lüneburg trial was organized by the British authorities in their zone of occupation, to judge 44 officials and guards of the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen camps. The hearings were held from 17 September to 17 November 1945. It was on this occasion that there were projected, for the first time within a judicial enclosure, sequences on the liberation of the camps: those of Auschwitz filmed by the Soviets; those of Bergen-Belsen filmed by the British. There was thus a precedent to the Nuremberg trial, which opened three days after the pronouncement of the Lüneburg verdict. See Sylvie Lindeperg, Nuremberg, la bataille des images, Paris, Payot, 2021, p. 480.↩︎

  3. Hearing of 29 November 1945. Minutes françaises du Tribunal militaire international TMI, tome II, p. 429. On this screening, see in particular L. Douglas, “Film as Witness: Screening Nazi Concentration Camps before the Nuremberg Tribunal,” The Yale Law Journal, vol. 105, no. 2, 1995; C. Delage, La Vérité par l’image. De Nuremberg au procès Milosevic, Paris, Denoël, 2006, pp. 129–135; U. Weckel, “The Power of Images. Real Fictional Roles of Atrocity Film Footage at Nuremberg,” in Kim C. Priemel and Alexa Stiller (eds.), Reassessing the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, New York–Oxford, Berghahn, 2012, pp. 221–246; S. Lindeperg, Nuremberg, la bataille des images, op. cit., pp. 206–212.↩︎

  4. See Sylvie Lindeperg, Nuit et Brouillard. Un film dans l’histoire, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2007.↩︎

  5. The pages on Shoah and the “quarrel of images” were developed from articles previously published in S. Lindeperg, Clio de 5 à 7. Les actualités filmées de la Libération : archives du futur (CNRS Editions, 2000); S. Lindeperg, Nuit et Brouillard, op. cit.; S. Lindeperg, “Présences de Shoah,” in C. Charles and L. Jeanpierre (eds.), La Vie intellectuelle en France. Tome 2. De 1914 à nos jours (Seuil, 2016); and S. Lindeperg “De l’absence au manque,” in Les images manquantes, Carnets du Bal, no. 3, October 2012.↩︎

  6. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “L’épreuve de l’historien,” in Michel Deguy (ed.), Au sujet de Shoah. Le film de Claude Lanzmann, Paris, Belin, 1990, p. 206.↩︎

  7. Shoshana Felman, “À l’âge du témoignage : Shoah de Claude Lanzmann,” ibid., p. 61.↩︎

  8. As Georges Didi-Huberman notes — rightly considering the Destruction of the Jews of Europe as “a broad historical phenomenon, complex, ramified, multiform” — Images malgré tout, Paris, Éd. de Minuit, 2004, p. 77.↩︎

  9. See L’Album d’Auschwitz, Éditions Al Dante/Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, Paris, 2005, and, more recently, Tal Bruttmann, Stefan Hördler and Christoph Kreutzmüller, Un album d’Auschwitz. Comment les nazis ont photographié leurs crimes, Paris, Seuil, 2023. During his testimony at the Frankfurt trial (1963–65), the photographer Wilhelm Brasse affirmed that one of the films from which the album was constituted came directly from the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss. See Un album d’Auschwitz, op. cit.↩︎

  10. The mixed nature of the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex — prisoner camp, concentration camp, and killing center — has not facilitated the apprehension of this rarity of images. For the first two functions of the camp, one has at one’s disposal, as for the Western camps, a significant number of snapshots.↩︎

  11. Le Monde, 3 March 1994.↩︎

  12. See in particular Jean-Jacques Delfour, “La pellicule maudite. Sur la figuration du réel de la Shoah : le débat entre Semprun et Lanzmann,” in L’Arche, no. 508, June 2000. As early as 1995, in an interview with Régis Debray for the film Vie et mort de l’image, Godard declared: “With digital, Le Pen or Berlusconi will be able to produce all the idyllic visions of the concentration camps that they want, and my little granddaughter will say: but what are you saying, look at all those green spaces […]. The image will no longer be proof.”↩︎

  13. Les Inrockuptibles, no. 170, 21–27 October 1998, p. 28.↩︎

  14. See Gérard Wajcman, “Saint Paul Godard contre Moïse Lanzmann ?” in Le Monde, 3 December 1998.↩︎

  15. The injunction of proof indeed contradicts a number of Godard’s declarations, including: “It’s not a just image, it’s just an image,” or again “not blood, red” (in response to a journalist who pointed out the excess of hemoglobin in Pierrot le Fou).↩︎

  16. These four snapshots, long attributed to David Szmulewski (member of the Auschwitz camp resistance who participated in the operation), were taken by the Greek Jew Alberto Errera, known as “Alex.” Three other members of the Sonderkommando lent their assistance: the brothers Abraham and Shlomo Dragon, and Alter Szmul Fajnzylberg. Cf. Clément Chéroux in Mémoire des camps, op. cit., p. 86; G. Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout, op. cit. This information is completed by Christophe Cognet, Éclats. Prises de vues clandestines des camps nazis, Paris, Seuil, 2019.↩︎

  17. In fact, these images have been known since the Liberation and exhibited at the Auschwitz museum since its creation; one of them — that of the pyre — figures in Nuit et Brouillard.↩︎

  18. Mémoire des camps, op. cit., p. 217.↩︎

  19. Godard’s declaration nevertheless rested on the postulate of a recording made by the Nazis.↩︎

  20. The fact that the photographs of the incineration operation were taken by the photographer from inside the gas chamber does not modify this factual observation, even though it adds to the symbolic import of this testamentary gesture. On this subject, Georges Didi-Huberman published Écorces (Paris, Minuit, 2011) reacting to Lanzmann’s remarks refuting the hypothesis of Images malgré tout on the photographer’s positioning; Écorces itself provoked new reactions from the filmmaker and his circle… See Ch. Cognet, op. cit.↩︎

  21. This last part was developed from texts previously published in S. Lindeperg, La Voie des images. Quatre histoires de tournage au printemps-été 1944, Lagrasse, Verdier, 2013 (chapter 1) and S. Lindeperg, “De l’absence au manque,” op. cit.↩︎

  22. Jean-Louis Comolli, Voir et pouvoir. L’innocence perdue : cinéma, télévision, fiction, documentaire, Lagrasse, Verdier, 2004, p. 8.↩︎

  23. Jean-Louis Comolli, Cinéma contre spectacle, Lagrasse, Verdier, 2009, p. 115.↩︎

  24. The first re-attribution of the photograph was made by Serge Klarsfeld in Vichy-Auschwitz. Le rôle de Vichy dans la Solution finale de la question juive en France. 1942 (Paris, Fayard, 1983). His demonstration was subsequently substantiated, developed and prolonged in 1941-Les Juifs en France. Préludes à la Solution Finale (Paris, Éd. de l’Association “Les Fils et Filles des Déportés Juifs de France,” 1991) and then in Le Calendrier de la persécution des Juifs en France 1940-44 (eds. of 1993 and reissue Paris, Fayard, vol. 2, 2001).↩︎

  25. Serge Klarsfeld, 1941-Les Juifs en France. Préludes à la Solution Finale 1941, op. cit., p. 94.↩︎

  26. To this day, only a single photograph of the great roundup is known, showing the buses parked in front of the enclosure of the Vél’ d’Hiv’. No snapshot taken from the inside has been found.↩︎

  27. Le Journal du Dimanche, 7 March 2010.↩︎

  28. Jean-Louis Comolli, “Le miroir à deux faces,” in Arrêt sur histoire (with Jacques Rancière), Paris, Éd. Centre Pompidou, 1997, p. 43.↩︎

  29. François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité. Présentisme et expériences du temps, Paris, Seuil, 2003, p. 200.↩︎

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