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‘In wächserner Blässe wie Schaufensterpuppen’: Leichenbilder aus dem Luftkrieg und ihr sozialer Gebrauch (1940-1960)

This research-based article explores visual representations of death in the Allied Strategic Air War and their social usage in Germany between 1940 and c.1960. It engages critically with the existing historiography that tends to treat evocations of charred corpses as a deliberate attempt, on the part of German society, to draw away attention from the responsibility for the war and the Holocaust. Noting the discrepancy between the production of these photographs (often for propagandistic purposes) and their limited usage during and after the war, the article argues that, more often than not, Germans hoped to leave these images behind.