March
12 ,
2004
Holyoke
Photographer Documents History at Nuremberg Trials
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Raymond D’Addario
(American, b. 1920), The Defendants, gelatin silver print,
1945. Courtesy of the artist
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On the first day of the Nuremberg Trials in November
1945, 21 major Nazi officials took their seats in the rear of
the draped and dark-paneled room of the Palace of Justice to
face their indictments. The moment marked the first time that
an International Military Tribunal (IMT) would call for an individual
accounting of and punishment for conspiratorial and criminal
actions committed against the Jews and others before and during
a war. There to record the scene—and so many others during
the subsequent months—was
26-year-old Army photographer Raymond D’Addario of Holyoke,
Massachusetts. D’Addario’s images can be seen at
the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum until March 28 in Witnessing
the Nuremberg Trials: Photographs by Raymond D’Addario.
It was D’Addario’s job, as chief of a handful of Army photographers
receiving the assignment to Nuremberg, to prepare news coverage for the war crimes
trials. He observed on a daily basis—from November 1945 until October 1946—the
two rows of defendants, including Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, and Joachim von
Ribbentrop, making them forever part of the historic record. His stirring images,
which have been distributed worldwide in magazines, books, and newspapers, also
capture the judges and prosecutors from the four victorious nations, the defense,
and a variety of witnesses as well as the almost total devastation of Nuremberg
itself by the Allied Forces before the end of the war. Despite the IMT’s
restrictions against the use of flashbulbs in the courtroom, D’Addario’s
imagery, mostly in black and white, is outstanding.
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