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Hitler’s Nazi Party is well-known for its heavy use of symbolism in campaigns. Today, that use of massive banners and massive eagles and massive crowds all lined up at attention has left a deservedly sinister impression, and has been effectively copied in just about every brutal totalitarian state in fiction. Yet while many of us know how powerful Hitler’s propaganda and imagery machine was, seeing it in on the ground in full color in this stunning Life photo series is like a punch in the gut.
Life has been digging through its archives lately for great retrospectives of old, and sometimes unseen, photos. (The tribute to war photographer Larry Burrows is particularly powerful.) But Life has outdone itself with this series from Hugo Jaeger, who was one of Hitler’s personal photographers.
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To see entire towns swathed in swastika banners is haunting. But to see it in color is to see how jarring those red banners are in the landscape. It’s like a red tide flooding every nook and cranny of a town.
That’s obviously the impression that Hitler and his propaganda machine wanted; that the Nazi Party was an unstoppable force washing through the land, and the only option was to join in.
