Ernst Fleigel Family : seeing into the everyday life beneath the Nazi banner
The photographs depict a family not unlike any of ours, a mother, father, and children, a common dream and image of normalcy for so many of us still. The faces here are the family of Ernst Fleigel, the year was 1940. They lived each day like any of us do, our soldiers off in foreign lands, fighting for what we are merely told we understand. In the height of the 'success' of Adolf Hitler, the Nazis had just invaded Holland, luftwaffe bombed the city center of Rotterdam on the breezy afternoon of the 14th of May. It burned for days, devastating and displacing so much so that Holland was surrendered to the Nazis. They were rallying over their newly acquired nation, and turned their sights to making it 'Judenfrei' (free of Jews). Stood starkly on the Backdrop of a Nazi flag, perhaps as it was once at his desk - Ernst Fleigel's letter praises Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich's efforts to eliminate the Jews. The media (German controlled and funded newspapers and Radio, not to mention leaflets and films) portrayed the common enemy. I have left the letter in the very typewriter that he used to write it. It provides us a unique vision, a look through the eyes of not a high ranking official or famous name, but an everyday man - a German who truly and wholly believed the web of lies so intricately woven as to be seen as truth. History's lesson here is that we must think of Ernst's reality before we support unquestioned action - before there are all too many fallen to the same propagandist ploy. We must know what is real about our reality.
