Anonymous citizen shoots Hitler. March 1938, a triumphant Führer tours Berlin in an open top car. Someone in the waiting crowd shoots. The results have stayed hidden for 83 years.

83 years after they happened, a few moments, rare image fragments of life inside Hitler’s Germany have just surfaced in a Hungarian archive for found and donated public photography. The images hold the misplaced mass fervour of an entire nation in microcosm. It’s all there, the all pervading evil, still as fresh as it was then.

They were taken by an anonymous civilian photographer.

It’s March 16, 1938. Berlin. The Führer has returned triumphant from Vienna today. It’s a huge moment for the little man who is back on German soil and is feeling chuffed with himself after his Anschluss, Germany’s occupation & annexation of Austria. He’s made his life’s dream, a reality. He’s standing up in the lead car of a motorcade which is snaking through a city in the throes of a rising fascist fatherland frenzy. Our photographer is standing about 20 feet back from the road on Stresemannstrasse facing a beerhall on Anhalter strasse, a speck in the crowds that line the streets of Berlin. Tens of thousands who want to glimpse him, greet him, salute him as he passes.

The photographer waits, camera in hand. Any moment now. He or she isn’t here to cheer or salute, but hopes instead to snap him, to get him on film as he flies by seig-hailing like a motherfucker. He always stands up in his open top car, so the people can see him, So there’s a chance, they’ll have to be quick.

Hitler is sliding rapidly through the swastika festooned city in his shiny black motorcade. Saluting and waving his way towards our nameless photographer standing on Stresemannstrasse. The sound of the masses is rising and the Mexican wave of nazi salutes is approaching the photographer fast. Getting louder. The camera is readied. For a second or two everything is tip toed neck-craning, awed yelling, fervent saluting and, within the tiny window of time that the Führer passes, there’s our photographer, pointing the camera in the general direction of the moving target.

The sea of nazi arms move left to right, palms down, fingertips pointing upward, following Hitler’s progress. Pointing toward him. Within this, the photographer fires off 1, 2, 3 shots, and he’s gone.

The photographer succeeds. Only just, but they got him. Twice. The first and the third shot.

If only it had been with a bullet.

Our photographer will take a couple more snaps on that March day in Berlin, and a good handful more in April and May.

– 16 March 1938, Stresemannstrasse, Berlin –

**S H O T 1** : March 16, 1938. Berlin.
Anonymous.
*Fortepan / Buzinkay Géza*

Massive zoom into our photographer’s 1st shot – & there he is!
He’s behind the windshield of his convertable Führermobile.
He’s taking a break from all that saluting & waving.

He’s tiny in frame but our photographer got the bastard.

It’s hard not to imagine our photographer’s can’t-wait-to-get-my -photos-back anticipation, picking up the prints from a Berlin photolab and rushing home with them. Getting out a magnifying glass.

Did I get him?

Yes!

There he is!

Or perhaps they were sure they’d missed him and never realised they’d shot Hitler.

**S H O T 2** : March 16, 1938. Berlin.
Anonymous.
*Fortepan / Buzinkay Géza*

Nothing. Missed him. He’s lost behind a sea of heads and outstretched, saluting arms.

You can see the windscreen of the car following his.

The people in it are sitting down.

**S H O T 3** : March 16, 1938. Berlin.
Anonymous.
*Fortepan / Buzinkay Géza*

Massive zoom into our photographer’s 3rd shot. His mini break (shot 1) is over and he’s turned to resume saluting and waving.

He’s busting out one of those half-wave, half salute things he does.

A Führer has to come up with something different to do with their hands.
You can’t salute yourself, right?

BOOM!

Got him again.

Our photographer would have been reasonably proficient with a camera. We can know that much.

There was no such thing as automatic film winding in 1938. In the few seconds as Hitler passed, to get off 3 shots the photographer would have had to shoot then manually wind the film on before being able to aim the camera, and shoot again.

Very much like Lee Harvey Oswald sitting in his awkward perch in the Texas Book Depository 25 years in the future.

Aim. Shoot. Reload.

Aim. Shoot.

Either while they were waiting for Hitler’s cortege to arrive, or after it had slid past and off up Stresemannstrasse, our photographer took another 5 shots.

So 8 shots in all, in Berlin, on 16 March 1938.

**S H O T 4** : After Hitler passed by, the anonymous photographer captures the adoring crowd. Anonymous.
*Fortepan / Buzinkay Géza*

**S H O T 5** : March 16, 1938. Berlin.
Anonymous.
*Fortepan / Buzinkay Géza*

**S H O T 6** : March 16, 1938. Berlin.
Anonymous.
*Fortepan / Buzinkay Géza*

**S H O T 7** : March 16, 1938. Berlin. Anonymous.
This 7th shot is captioned:
*“The SS policing guard on standby when Hitler returned from Vienna on March 16, 1938.”*
*Fortepan / Buzinkay Géza*

**S H O T 8** : March 16, 1938. Berlin. Anonymous.
This 8th shot is captioned:
“Rahel Hirsch Strasse and Alt-Moabit corner,
opposite the flagged Lehrter Bahnhof.”
*Fortepan / Buzinkay Géza*

The anonymous photographer has a few more images to give us.

Between March & May, 1938, they exposed other frames on their roll of film:

The legend “E.T.” Compton (1849 –1921). The Quaker boy from N.E. London who taught art to a Princess, climbed over 300 humungous mountains all over the planet and painted sights few humans, even today, will ever see.

Nature Obscurity

– 9 April 1938 – Berlin –

Luftwaffe planes fly over the city on the eve of the Austrian referendum results. April 9, 1938. Anonymous.
*Fortepan / Buzinkay Géza*

– 10 April 1938 – Berlin –

At Altes Museum at Museum Island, soldiers wait for the Austrian referendum result announcement. April 10, 1938. Anonymous.
*Fortepan / Buzinkay Géza*

Museum Island, Lustgarten from Schlossplatz. Crowds begin to gather in front of the decorated Altes Museum
waiting for the outcome of the farcical Austrian referendum. Berlin. April 10, 1938. Anonymous.
*Fortepan / Buzinkay Géza*

“Do you agree with the reunification of Austria with the German Reich that was enacted on 13 March 1938 and do you vote for the list of our leader Adolf Hitler?”
*Wikipedia Commons*

After German troops had been occupying the country for a month, a referendum on the Anschluss with Germany was held in German-occupied Austria on 10th April 1938.

The ballots featured a large circle for ‘yes’ votes and a small one for ‘no’ votes. This was described as “a ‘subtle’ hint to the people, to help them understand which way to vote.”

The official result was reported as 99.73% in favour, with a 99.71% turnout. Political enemies (communists, socialists, etc.) and Romani or Jewish Austrian citizens – roughly 360,000 people or 8% of the population – were not allowed to vote.

– 1938, unknown month –

Berlin’s Wilhelmstrasse festooned with swastika flags. 1938. Anonymous.
*Fortepan / Buzinkay Géza*

Unter den Linden facing the Zeughaus (now the German History Museum), in the background on the left is the dome of the Duomo, on the right the tower of the Town Hall. 1938.
Anonymous.
*Fortepan / Buzinkay Géza*

So far, and their own small, civilian way, our anonymous photographer has touched on two huge stories from inside Berlin. Hitler’s return to Germany after occupying & annexing Austria and the subsequent Anchluss referendum farce.

They’ll go on to cover more, snapping for us the anti-semetic graphiti daubed on a Jewish restaurant and on a shoestore (date unknown) and (on 2 May 1938) showing us how Hitler’s trip to Rome to meet Mussolini for the the pair’s second meeting, affected Berlin traffic.

Anti-semitic grafitti in red paint daubed on the shopfront of Alligator leather goods and shoes store,
corner of Marburgstrasse & Tauentzientstrasse during the Jewish boycott. 1938. Anonymous.
*Fortepan / Buzinkay Géza*

Anti-semitic grafitti in red paint daubed on the Weisz Tavern at Kurfürstendamm 11th. 1938. Anonymous.
*Fortepan / Buzinkay Géza*

– 2 May 1938, Leipziger Strasse, Berlin –

Hitler’s motorcade is on the move again. This time he’s headed to the Rome to meet fellow fascist & Italian supremo Mussolini, the Duce. It won’t be the first time the pair have met. They first met 5 years ago, in Venice when Hitler was a just a rising star fascist and Mussolini visited Berlin a year before in 1937. Now the Führer is indebted to Mussolini due to the Duce’s non-intervention in the Austrian Aschluss and he’s tralling to Rome.

This all means that, on 2 May 1938, our photographer is sitting in a tram on Leipziger Strasse, stuck in the heavy traffic caused by Hitler’s entourage moving through the city once more. Perhaps out of boredom with the delay, our photographer snaps a shot inside the tram, then a two more while leaning out of the window. Finally he takes one one more picture out on the street, of the crowds gathering to goodbye to their leader as he passes them once more, en route to Rome.

Helene Schjerfbeck began as a precociously skilled, slightly melancholic late-19th-century academic realist. She finished as a painter whose sublime abstract images are an exquisite harmony of pure paint and cryptic description.

“I have to draw to the point of madness, just draw. Just work, work and think of nothing else”, said the brilliant Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. It did him no good, he was just another “degenerate” artist to the Nazis.

From hat shop girl to Dutch art icon. But who was the Girl in the Kimono? The opaque story of an 1890s working class teenager immortalised by George Hendrik Breitner.

Descendant of samurai and relentless entrepreneur, Ogawa Kazumasa opened Tokyo’s first photo studio, shot Japan’s art treasures, the 100 prettiest geisha in Tokyo and taught photography to the military. His legacy is these exquisite images of flowers.

L’Estampe Moderne; the 1890s Parisian Art Nouveau “best of” album feat. various international artists. 4 lithographs every month. Just 3₣r 50c an issue.

It’s easy to see how, in the mid 1800s, Paul Gustave Doré “hypnotized the widest public ever captured by a major illustrator”. Even Van Gogh was a fan, he copied Doré shortly before shooting himself.

In the 1890s the Dutch painter, George Hendrik Breitner took nude reference photos for his paintings. In the 1990s they were found.

Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach. 1880s free love messiah, naturist, pacifist, vegetarian, sun worshipper and unique symbolist painter.

Found photos : Three lost decades of Iowa Speedway recovered. With Merlin Benning, Lester “Red” Dralle. Claus Stricker, Don & Dick Feckers & Red Droste. 1950>1970.

The Art of Protest: Albert Hahn was righteous anger manifest. A graphic character assassin that even the mighty Germany Kaiser feared.

It’s 1914. and Orientalism meets Art Nouveau and the early stirrings of Art Deco in Emile-Allain Séguy’s “Samarkande: 20 Compositions en couleurs dans le Style oriental”.

The 1920s French Art Deco influencer who drew pure design inspiration from the natural world. Insectes (1929) by Émile-Allain Séguy.

The forgotten Finska Vyer birch bark album, by I.K Inha, 1892. Inside are raw natural landscape photographs of Finland. It won the 1st international photographic competion in Paris.

William Morris. Strawberry Thief . “You can picture my Father going out in the early morning and watching the rascally thrushes at work on the fruit beds…”

The Swiss artist, Ernst Kreidolf (1863-1956). A Princess helped him give up the life of a farmer to put his faith and future in the hands of the flower fairies. He lived magically ever after.

Dope fiends busted. 1950s narcotics crime photography from the archives of L.A. Enquirer.

John Martin’s sister was murdered by a neighbour, one brother was a “perfectly cracked” eccentric philosopher/inventor & the other an insane religious firestarter. Perhaps it’s no surprise John became the ultimate harbinger of The Apocolypse.

Outraged. The 1896 murder of Helen Thomson. Markinch, Fife, Scotland.

Achille Lemot learns the exact price of a mistress in 1870s Paris.

Erland Soderburg. A 1907 matricide. “Then I grabbed a small kitchen knife that was lying on the table. I hacked at her throat, then slashed it and the blood spurted out on me.”

Children of the Runestones. 300 A.D. Sweden.

The Dutch ocean liner Hooft, plagued by rats, burned three times and cursed by a French shipyard that lost 3 ocean liners to fire between 1930-1933.

1800s India. A mystery blue-eyed, pale skinned redhead is painted alongside those of 28 Mughal royals. An anonymous court artist evokes how richly the Indian “1%” lived, in these exquisite and rarely seen paintings.

Found. 3 Untitled works (1974). By an unknown artist working in a daylight atelier in Budapest.

8 mystery photographs from 1908/1910. From within some kind of medical institution or sanitorium somewhere in Eastern Europe. There’s one small clue: The Trendelenburg Position. Maybe.

Painter & early street photographer. The astonishing early street photography that helped George Hendrik Breitner add social realism to his famous paintings of Amsterdam.

India mid-1800s : Dr John Murray, cholera specialist an photographer. He spent 40 years travelling with gear weighing 400 pounds and a servant. His ever so slightly psychedelic negatives made it all worth it.

Samarkand, early 1900s. The first ever colour photographs of the ancient Persian city by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, an unknown Russian who invented his own colour photography process.

It’s 1914. and Orientalism meets Art Nouveau and the early stirrings of Art Deco in Emile-Allain Séguy’s “Samarkande: 20 Compositions en couleurs dans le Style oriental”.

Around the world with the rare travel drawings by the American painter, Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900). Found in the archives of the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

Anonymous citizen shoots Hitler. March 1938, a triumphant Führer tours Berlin in an open top car. Someone in the waiting crowd shoots. The results have stayed hidden for 83 years.

The legend “E.T.” Compton (1849 –1921). The Quaker boy from N.E. London who taught art to a Princess, climbed over 300 humungous mountains all over the planet and painted sights few humans, even today, will ever see.