Heinrich Hoffmann, ed.

Heinrich Hoffmann, was Adolf Hitler's official photographer and member of his intimate circle. Hoffman's photographs were a significant part of Hitler's propaganda campaign to present himself and the Nazi Party as a significant mass phenomenon. He received royalties from all uses of Hitler's image, even on postage stamps, which made him a millionaire over the course of Hitler's reign. After the Second World War he was tried and sentenced to four years in prison for war profiteering. He was classified by the Allies' Art Looting Investigators to be a "major offender" in Nazi art plundering of Jews, as both art dealer and collector and his art collection, which contained many artworks looted from Jews, was ordered confiscated by the Allies. He recovered the art in 1956 by order of the Bavarian State.

After completing his primary school education, Hoffmann trained as a photographer from 1901 to 1903. He found employment in Heidelberg, Frankfurt on the Main, Bad Homburg, Switzerland, France and England until 1909. In 1909 he owned his a photographic shop in Munich and started to work as a press photographer. In 1913 he founded the image agency Photobericht Hoffmann. In 1917 Hoffmann was conscripted to the German army and served as a photo correspondent with the Bavarian Fliegerersatz-Abteilung I in France. In 1919 Hoffmann joined the Bavarian Einwohnerwehren, a right-wing citizens' militia. That year he witnessed the short-lived post-war Bavarian Soviet Republic in Munich and published a collection of photographs he had taken as Ein Jahr bayerische Revolution im Bilde ("One Year of Bavarian Revolution in Pictures"). The accompanying text by Emil Herold suggested a connection between the "Jewish features" shown in the photographs and the subjects' left-wing policies.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023