Picturing perpetration The Holocaust seen through “the image as message”

In summary, this research focuses on the National Socialist visuality related to the Holocaust. It analyses the visual and textual sources that exemplify a coordinated visual policy that supported processes of perpetration. Most Holocaust related photography, during the twelve years of National Socialism, was made by perpetrators and documents not only directly or indirectly their ideological framework, but also several aspects of perpetration and implication. In approaching the (perpetrator) imagery as a source itself, I analyse how the created and distributed imagery shaped a National Socialist visuality that gradually involved people in processes of perpetration or at least made them look away from the processes of victimization. The envisioning towards perpetration can be found in commissioned photographic albums and other coordinated visual representations in media or exhibitions, but it can also be seen in private (perpetrator) photography working towards the visual frames desired by the state. In five chapters and visual sections I focus on some visual markers of evil from Auschwitz and other camps, the way the concentration camp as an new and necessary instrument was visualised by emerging National Socialist state, the way hard core perpetrators visualised their own lives and work within the camps, the way how atrocity photography can act as a performative (visual frameworks of reference) that normalise, stimulate or even initiate perpetration and finally how we can approach perpetrator photography as a source that shows us "moments of truth" from which we can learn.