How a German peasant became the face of Nazi race laws

Many histories of Nazi Germany are accompanied by a photograph of two scientists measuring a man’s facial features with a caliper. The picture is often contextualized, in these books, museums, and image archives as an illustration of the National Socialist obsession with quantifiable racial purity, particularly as it was applied to Jews.

There’s just one problem, however, with this long narrative: the photograph, at its origin, had nothing to do with the Nazi state.

A new article titled “An Image of the Past: Press Photography, Nazi Propaganda, and the Making of Politicized Memory,” appearing in the Journal of Modern History, locates the true origins of this photograph, taken three years before the Nazis’ rise to power, and traces the ways that the picture has been used, over the decades, to support various, shifting political aims.

The man in the photograph was, in fact, a German peasant from the northern village of Sieseby. His image was captured as part of a relatively benign anthropological study, in 1929, of indigenous German “racial” types. His photo, along with many others from the village, was sent to Berlin, where it was stored in an image databank, and left undisturbed for years.

In 1932, the popular German periodical Berlin Illustrated Magazine ran a photo essay on anthropometry and included the peasant’s image in its spread. The magazine used the image as part of an essay praising the work of scientists who continued their research despite the hardships imposed by Germany’s economic depression. Inadvertently, it implied that the expedition that generated the image had taken place in late 1932, thus confusing the pedigree of the image for decades to come.

The communist Workers’ Illustrated Magazine, in 1933, also repurposed the image of the Sieseby peasant. Protesting new Aryan ancestry laws, the editors of this magazine placed the photo on the front cover of their issue dedicated to exposing Nazi racial theory as a cover for class discrimination. The caption, under the cover image, reads: “Do not forget to let your nose be measured—Only then will you be able to determine whether you can remain unemployed in the Third Reich as a Jewish-Marxist subhuman or as a racially pure luminary.”

The image was reused again in 1933, this time to accompany an article written by chief Nazi genealogist Achim Gercke, and in order to demonstrate a purported exemplar of Aryanism. Gercke’s essay, an explicit rejection of the attack in Worker’s Illustrated, was published in regime-sympathetic outlet New Illustrated Journal. The article was titled “Who is an Aryan?” and held up the peasant from Sieseby as a prime specimen of the pure, hearty northern German Volk.

In 1980, the photo of the man from Sieseby was picked up again, in a history book, where it was used to illustrate a section on the 1935 Nuremberg Laws that had codified discrimination against Jews in Germany. This time, the caption read: “A German has his credentials as an Aryan measured by caliper rule.” This new positioning strongly implied that the person measured in the photo had been suspected as a Jew and identified as such through anthropometric methods. It is perhaps due to this attribution that multiple Holocaust museums, including Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, erroneously employ the Sieseby peasant image in exhibits dedicated to documenting the racial essentialism of the Nazis.

Even more recently, the image has developed an afterlife discrete from its associations with Jewishness and Nazi Germany. In 2015, the photo was posted to a Facebook page for supporters of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, presented as an artifact of life under the founding father of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. The poster suggests that in the 1920s, the Atatürk administration enforced the measurement of men’s mustaches, and positions this alleged interference as representative of his anti-Muslim, “international” secularism, in contrast to Erdoğan’s current policies of “Islamization and authoritarianism.”

“Freedom (!) imposed on people by force,” declaims a commenter on the post. “I ask you: whom was this republic founded for?” Similar arguments, deploying the photo of the Sieseby man, circulated on Twitter, despite numerous, and similarly fallacious, attempts to “verify” the image as dating from Nazi Germany.

Ultimately, however, “An Image of the Past” suggests that researchers should not merely view the history of the Sieseby man photograph as a history of misattributions and errors. Instead, it should be regarded as a type of stock photograph from its very beginning—and as such, its many recontextualizations allow audiences to learn about the political and cultural lenses through which societies have viewed the image at different periods in time. The photo’s easy availability in stock image clearinghouses, and its intriguing combination of particularity and universality, write the authors, have made it easily manipulable in the hands of many different groups.

“Fundamentally,” the authors conclude, “since the sum of all photographic evidence shapes in large part our perceptions of the past, it is our role as historians to dismantle, reconstruct, and historicize not only photographs but the visual cultures that condition their viewing as well.”