USC Dornsife history Professor Wolf Gruner has helped launch an effort — the #LastSeen Project — to recover photos of the Nazis’ mass deportations, identify victims and tell their stories.
The project is called #LastSeen Project-Pictures of Nazi Deportations-it aims to locate photographs, identify victim of forced deportations and tell their stories.
Between 1938 and 1945, the Nazis deported hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children from the German Reich to ghettos and camps. Yet, so far a relatively small number of photos of deportations are known. The 550 existing photographs of deportations from the German Reich are often the last known images of the victims of persecution before they were murdered. The pictures show the crimes in a local context. The deportations took place on public squares, in front of buildings and on streets that are often still part of towns today.
Photos of Nazi mass deportations have never before been brought together, made available as a collection, and analyzed collectively in any systematic way. Nor has there been a concerted effort to search for more photos. The #LastSeen project aims to gather, analyze, and digitally publish pictures of Nazi mass deportations of Jews, Romani people and people with disabilities from the German Reich between 1938 and 1945.
The #LastSeen project is a cooperation of the Arolsen Archives, the City Archives of Munich, the Center for the Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University Berlin, the House of the Wannsee Conference memorial site, and the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research.
To read more on how you canbe involved see: https://dornsife.usc.edu/cagr-news/news/2022/04/33261-center-searches-photographs-nazi-mass-deportations-part-lastseen-project