The Color of War

Here is a photo of Hitler you probably haven’t seen:

Strange, isn’t it? We are used to seeing Hitler in black-and-white, not color. And that’s the way Hitler wanted it, according to the Telegraph (UK) article about the photo:

The Nazi leader believed that traditional black and white photographs best highlighted the sinister nature of his regime, presenting dramatic images which were both powerful and menacing.

I think Hitler was right. The photo is anything but powerful and menacing, and not simply because Hitler is surrounded by a gaggle of little children clad in pastels. He looks strangely fragile in the photo. Very… human.

There is a flip-side, though. Black-and-white might have made Hitler and his minions look more imposing than they actually were, but it also made World War II itself seem far less bloody than it actually was, limiting its visceral impact. The right often claims that Americans would not been able to stomach World War II’s 600,000 wounded and 400,000 dead if they had been fed a daily diet of the graphic photos that were an integral part of the Vietnam war. I don’t agree: I think the American public knows the difference between a just war like World War II and an unjust war like Vietnam. That said, there is no question that the black-and-white images of World War II lacked the horror and emotional immediacy of Vietnam’s color images. That’s what made the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan such a revelation: we always knew that the landing at Omaha Beach was an awful, chaotic mess — but it wasn’t until Spielberg’s film that we knew just how awful, how chaotic, and how messy it really was.

For those who are interested, the History Channel recently released a 13-hour documentary about World War II entitled The Color of War. As the name implies, all of the war footage is in color. I can’t recommend the documentary highly enough — you will never see, or think about, World War II the same way again.

UPDATE: Until recently, I had no idea that the French took a number of color photos of World War I. (The first color photo was developed in 1907.) Here is an amazing one of Sengalese-born French soldiers:

Many others are available here.