Willi Georg - Warsaw ghetto street, Poland 1939 – 1943


Willi Georg - Warsaw ghetto street, Poland 1939 – 1943 

The radio operator Willy Georg from Münster, who was born in 1911 and thus enlisted as an “old soldier”, was an accomplished photographer, and in the army he also supplemented his income by taking pictures of his fellow soldiers with his Leica camera.

 In the summer of 1941, when their unit was stationed in Warsaw, he was issued a pass by one of his officers and instructed to enter the enclosed ghetto and take photos of what he saw there. Georg shot four rolls of films and began to shoot a fifth one when the German military police stopped him. 

They confiscated the film in his camera, but fortunately they did not check his pockets before escorting him out of the ghetto. Georg developed the four rolls in Warsaw and preserved the photos in the next fifty years together with his other war pictures.

 In the late 1980s he met Rafael Scharf from London, a researcher of Polish-Jewish studies, to whom he gave these photos and who published them in 1993 in the book In the Warsaw Ghetto: Summer 1941.

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