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Unlike most images of World War II that are in black and white, these never-before-publicly-seen photos of Adolf Hitler are all in color.
The immediacy of these photographs is one of the most chilling aspects of them. They look like they were snapshots taken four days ago.
Life.com deputy editor Ben Cosgrove says Life bought some two thousand pictures in the 1960s from Hugo Jaeger, a Nazi himself and Hitler’s personal photographer.
Cosgrove says an interview transcript reveals Jaeger hid negatives like these for decades after Ally troops confronted him in 1945 near Munich.
They went down to a basement in the house where he was staying. There was a large leather suitcase, in which he had his entire archive of thousands of color photographs. Along the way they came across an unopened bottle of cognac that Jaeger claims he had saved to wash down the cyanide that he was gonna take when the Allies came.
The photographs which were in negatives were unnoticed when the soldiers were said to have taken more of an interest in the cognac. Jaeger reportedly buried his negatives in 12 glass jars for a decade before moving them to a bank vault and then selling them to Life for 50,000 dollars. Until now, only a few were published. Asked about the decision to make them all public now.
The fear is always that there might be a glorification, or even a perceived glorification of these people in this era by putting out these images, so we discussed it and very quickly and unanimously said: No, of course, we have to publish these. It captures an entire era like nothing else that I’ve ever seen.