Vor aller Augen

The photos of the deportation of the local Jews from Lörrach and its environs on October 22, 1940 preserved in the Lörrach Municipal Archive are devastating documents. They were taken during the deportation of more than 6,500 Jews in Southwest Germany in the autumn of 1940. The pictures that capture the auctions of property from the victims’ homes are especially significant. The photos published here, taken by a policeman, show the perpetrators and the organization of their crimes. They demonstrate that these acts were committed largely in public, before the eyes of hundreds of bystanders. They document the crowds who thronged the auctions of the household goods of deported Jews in Lörrach, evidence of the monstrous indifference of many Germans to the fate of the German Jews.