Not sure if this is the right forum for this, but I’d like opinions on what we should do with some photos.
My husband’s dad (who died long before I came along) acted as photographer for his unit, and it was his division that ultimately liberated Dachau.
My brother-in-law, Gene, now possesses the photos that my father-in-law took throughout the war. A large number of them are of Dachau – his division’s approach, the prisoners, the corpses, the grounds, the facilities. My husband saw them once as a child by, as he put it, poking around in drawers he shouldn’t have been poking around in. The images still haunt him. My husband’s dad never talked about his wartime experiences and would immediately change the subject when asked, so no one knows what his wishes for the photos might have been.
Our whole family has been watching the Ken Burns documentary, which led to Gene asking my husband what he thought should be done with their dad’s photos. Gene has contacted the Army (in which Gene also served) but never received much of a response. He’s now thinking of donating the pictures to the Holocaust museum in D.C.
What else should we consider doing with them? What use would you put them to, if any?
Stephen Spielberg endowed the Shoah Institute at the University of Southern California. They would also LOVE to have them. They collect and preserve anything connected to the Holocaust.
You could also call the Minnesota Historical Society. They are interested in things that happened to Minnesotans as well as things that happened in Minnesota. They certainly have less of that sort of material than the Holocaust museum or Shoah Institute - and if they think its more appropriate for them to be one of those places, they will probably tell you.
Thank you for the suggestions. I wasn’t aware of the Shoah Institute, so that could be a good match. The MN Historical Society is an angle I hadn’t considered at all – I’ll get in touch with them. Thanks!
I wouldn’t donate them to a major archive: they’ll just get filed with all the others. Keep them in an album as a special item of family history. And when some neo-Nazi twonk says that the camps didn’t exist, you can bring out the album.
Keeping them private would be the last thing I would do with them.
Until you decide, I hope they are stored in a safe place favorable to photographs. You know they can fade. I don’t know if the negatives can deteriorate.
The Donations page of the U.S. Holocaust Museum’s website describes the materials they are looking for (they would definitely be interested in your photos) and provides a number of different ways to contact them.
