This is the story of the Second World War as told in photographs taken by anonymous Wehrmacht soldiers.  The people who took these photos were ordinary soldiers, some of them officers.  When in September 1939 they went off to war against Poland, they took with them, in addition to a soldier's normal equipment, not only the obligatory picture of their girfriend or family, but also a camera.  The war, so they thought, was going to be a walkover, so they would need to document their devotion to the Fatherland in some way.  These unusually rare photographs vividly depict the cruelty of war with its exterminations, victims and executions.  More frequently, they foreshadow the catastrophe that was about to happen.  From today's vantage point, now we know what history held in store, all this is clear to us. We know about the extermination of the Jews and Roma, the murder of Poles and Russians and about the expulsion of millions of people, the razing to the ground of whole towns - the criminal plans for the annihilation of eastern Europe.
Nowadays it is not enough simply to condemn the institutions of Nazi power alone, we must also reflect more deeply on German identity and on the responsibility of the societies and ordinary, anonymous individuals involved. Confronted by such unimaginable crimes,  we cannot excuse them by saying we knew nothing about them, seeking to absolve ourselves by claiming: it had nothing to do with me - it was him; it had nothing to do with us - it was them...   (8586 fot.)