What can you see?
The photo shows men on a construction site. A steep mountainside forms the left-hand border of the photo; the summit is not visible. On the right, we see a slope that has been partially excavated, in the middle a flat area that rises towards the rear. Here, there are rails on which small mine cars are shunted back and forth. Rubble is being loaded onto the mine cars.
Most of the men in the photograph are performing heavy manual work on the rocks with picks and shovels. They are levelling the hillside. Our eyes are first drawn to the people in the foreground: workers of different ages. It is noticeable that the men are wearing everyday clothes – shorts or caps for some, shaved heads or short hair for others. The man second from right is barefoot, as is the boy on the far right. His clothing is torn and his left hand appears to be reaching for something to eat from a small container.
A person in the middle ground catches our attention. He is wearing boots and light-coloured clothing and has a cudgel attached to his belt. He is standing behind two workers and appears to be guarding them. The photographer’s position – slightly elevated and to the right – is perhaps on top of a pile of rubble. He is higher than the workers in the foreground. At the same time, he is standing below the mass of stone and rock; the choice of camera angle lends the rocks a monumental appearance.
What can’t you see?
The photograph does not reveal who the workers are, how many hours a day they have to work or whether they are suffering from hunger, thirst or the heat. We can’t see the size of their food rations. We are not told anything about how the guards treat the workers.
The photographer is not in the picture. But his choice of perspective tells us something about him. He is documenting the size of the construction site and the progress of the project by photographing the mountainside and the cut in the rocks from below (worm’s-eye view). By doing this, he is aware that the image will depict the difficult working conditions.
What do we know?
Based on the rudimentary captions that accompany the series of photographs and especially the research carried out by Andreas Assael, who discovered the photo collection, we know the photo shows Jewish forced labourers from Thessaloniki on the construction site in Karya. We also know that the photograph was taken by Hanns Rössler, the chief civil engineer on the construction site. Based on field surveys carried out by the University of Osnabrück, we know that the men had to excavate a cutting in the mountainside metres long and 20 metres deep.
There were few survivors. They reported that they were given hardly any food and no work clothing. They had to use their own clothes and shoes.
The man in the light-coloured clothes presumably worked for Organisation Todt (OT). This is apparent from the military-style clothing. He was responsible for issuing instructions and guarding the Jewish forced labourers. The survivors reported that maltreatment by German guards and OT employees was the order of the day. There are also reports that exhausted or sick forced labourers were sometimes murdered.
What do we know about the photographer?
Hanns Rössler – born in Nuremberg in 1905 – worked in motorway construction in Lower Franconia before the war and met his future wife Hilde (1908-2007) in a forester’s lodge near Bad Brückenau. The marriage remained childless. Rössler joins the NSDAP in 1930. During the war, he was stationed in the Balkans and, from 1942, worked in various places in Greece as head of construction sites for the Todt organisation, including Karya. After the war, Rössler was employed by Fränkisches Überlandwerk AG (now N-Ergie AG), a regional electricity supplier in Roth. The Rössler couple travelled a lot, including to Greece. Until his death in 1995, Rössler lived with his wife in a small detached house in Freiligrathstraße in Roth.
