Motorcycle Blogs: FRANZ KRIEGER, MYSTERY PHOTOGRAPHER

A crudely-erected obstacle course for the rider of this BMW R51

A laborer in New Jersey regularly cut the grass of an elderly German man, upon whose death he inherited 50,000 baseball trading cards, and a photo album which was clearly from a professional photographer during WW2. The album held a curious blend of very personal snapshots, such as convalescing in a hospital, contrasted with closeups of Hitler and other heads of state during the eastward push of the Wehrmacht across the Soviet Union towards Stalingrad during 1941-2.

The mystery photo album

The laborer borrowed money from a New York garment district executive, and when he was unable to repay the loan, the exec was happy to take the baseball cards and photo album and settle the debt, recognizing the value of all-access photos of Hitler, obviously assembled by a professional photographer, although they bore no identification. This New Yorker recently fell on hard times after quadruple-bypass heart surgery, and anonymously contacted the New York Times to help identify the photographer, and to help value and sell the photographs, anonymously. The Times put the story online in late June, in association with Der Spiegel, and within 3 hours the mystery of the album was solved via the internet.

A slowly advancing German military column, somewhere in the Ukraine, 1941. Note the horses pulling Howitzers

Franz Krieger was a professional photographer in Salzburg between 1938-41, working on staff for the Nazi propaganda ministry, and very briefly joined the SS police in 1941, before quitting that notoriously nasty group, and joining the Goebbel's Propogandakompanie, which followed the military into battle, documenting the rapid advance of Hitler's army eastward, after Germany broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Agression Pact, which had made temporary allies of Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939. Hitler needed Ukraine's grain, and the oil fields of the Caucasus, to fuel his war machine, and invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Stalin's pact with Hitler was sheer expedience, as Hitler's autobiography and political blueprint 'Mein Kampf' ('My Struggle') laid out a plan to exterminate or deport to Siberia all 'subhuman' Russians in the valuable grain and oil fields of the western USSR. Stalin may have been simply buying time in 1939 to bolster his military, expecting to defend against an inevitable German invasion.

Two Propogandakompanie soldiers film the destruction of Minsk

Krieger documented the fall of Minsk and areas of the Ukraine, photographing ethnic Russian and Jewish prisoners taken along the way, the destruction of cities and towns, and the toll taken on German soldiers as well. As the Propogandakompanie went further into the Soviet Union, Krieger quit the SS photo unit, and was sent to Bregenz (in Austria) to train as a simple soldier, becoming a supply-truck driver. Krieger's move away from the elite and ideologically-driven SS (police and photo units) to the non-combatant status of a driver, hint that his initial enthusiasm for the Nazi party gave way to a distaste for the realities of war. His imagery changed from the pageantry of pre-war parades and rallies in Salzburg, historic meetings between heads of state, to troop movements, destroyed homes, ethnic and military prisoners (and the horrors of their treatment), and haunted German soldiers.

Training to ride a DKW RT125 over a tipping board...

While back in Germany in 1942, Krieger documented the Motor SportSchule, at which motorcyclists were trained for battle. His photographs show the unusual tactics and crude equipment used to raise the skill level of military motorcyclists, including giant teeter-totters and suspended truck tires the riders had to negotiate. The motorcycles in the photographs are a BMW R51 and DKW RT125, the BMW being quite a hot machine for training purposes; more typical for the military were BMW R71 sidevalve twins, which, ironically, were also made in the Soviet Union under license, and continue to be produced in modified form to this day in both Russia and China, as the Dnepr, Neval, Chiang Jiang, Yangtze, etc, making this the longest continuous-production motorcycle ever.

Two German infantry soldiers showing the toll of war on ordinary men

Krieger was sent back to the Eastern Front in 1942, just in time for the siege of Stalingrad, in which Soviet urban guerrilla tactics stymied the German army, who were trained for rapid heavy-artillery advances with air support, and not small-arms combat. With the Germans mired in Stalingrad, a heavy winter combined with a slow buildup of Soviet troops, who eventually surrounded the city, led to the defeat of the Germans and the turning point of WW2. Hitler had not secured his oil fields in the Middle East nor in Crimea, and could not supply bread for Germany from Ukranian fields; in truth his grand plans were finished, although it took two more years and millions more deaths to drive the point home. The battle of Stalingrad itself cost 2 million lives on all sides.

Kriegers' self-portrait in the mirror of his Kompanie bus

Our photographer Krieger was lucky though, developing jaundice before things got ugly in Stalingrad, and was sent by train back to Germany in late 1942. He survived the war, and died a merchant in Bavaria in 1993. How his photo album arrived in New Jersey is still a mystery.

Propogandakompanie buses, as seen in several of the photos

The Minsk Opera House shortly after the German occupation. Now known as the Bolshoi Theater of the Repulic of Belarus, the building was clearly spared by German guns...perhaps because Soviet fascist architecture was so similar to German fascist architecture!