The Eyes of Hate
On This Day in History: December 6,
Ten seconds earlier Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, was all smiles to have his photograph taken. Then Goebbels was informed that the man taking his picture, Alfred Eisenstaedt, was Jewish. The Nazi’s demeanor changed to an evil scowl in an instant. Unwavering, Eisenstaedt snapped another photo. He named the resulting image “The Eyes of Hate.”
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: December 6, 1912--
The exact date the photos were taken is uncertain, but it was during a three-day meeting of the League of Nations in Geneva in late September/early October 1933. For this world-changing “shit went down day” I’ve selected Eisenstaedt’s fourteenth birthday, December 6, 1912, when he received his first camera as a gift from his uncle.
Goebbels was a murderous piece of shit known for his “homicidal antisemitism.” But he didn’t want just Jews to die. On May 1, 1945, the day after Hitler killed himself, Goebbels and his wife murdered their six children before killing themselves. Fuck that guy and fuck all Nazis. Let’s talk about the photographer.
Eisenstaedt was born in 1898 in Dirschau, West Prussia, then part of Germany. As mentioned, he received a camera for his birthday, but quickly lost interest in it. He was drafted into the German army at eighteen and served on the Western Front of World War I as a cannoneer. In December 1917, a year before the war officially ended, it was over for Alfred when his artillery unit was hit by a British shell. The rest of his unit was killed, and Eisenstaedt nearly lost both his legs.
The postwar depression in Germany ruined the family business, and Alfred struggled to make ends meet. During the 1920s his interest in photography renewed, and in 1927 he sold his first photograph, of a woman playing tennis, for three dollars to a German weekly publication. His talent would win him many clients and his star as a photographer rose. In regard to taking the “Eyes of Hate” photo, Alfred said of Goebbels: “He looked at me with hateful eyes and waited for me to wither. But I didn’t wither. If I have a camera in my hand, I don’t know fear.”
Alfred moved to the United States in 1935 and became well known for his celebrity photography. He photographed Marilyn Monroe, Bob Hope, Eleanor Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and the Kennedy and Clinton families. Eisenstaedt’s most famous photo is one you likely have seen. It’s during the Victory over Japan celebration in Times Square taken on August 14, 1945, of a U.S. Navy sailor grabbing a dental assistant and kissing her. It was several decades before the woman in the iconic photo was (most likely) identified as Greta Friedman, who said of the assault sixty years later, “It wasn’t my choice to be kissed . . . The guy just came over and grabbed!”
Those who cannot remember the past need a history teacher who says “fuck” a lot. Get both volumes of On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down. They make great gifts and ‘tis the season n’ shit.
My first real job out of college was at the Time Inc Picture Collection, starting in 1995. I had the pleasure of meeting Eisenstaedt, who still had an office at Life Magazine upstairs and sometimes attended our Friday breakfast meetings. It was amazing to be in the presence of someone who had seen so much shit go down. A big regret is I didn't engage with him more. He passed only a few months after I started the job. At the time all the original images were checked out by hand to the photo editors like a library. I must have handled the original copy of the Goebbels photo, as well as the sailor kissing the nurse, hundreds of times by the time the collection was digitized in the early 2000s. Thank you for writing this!
Powerful stuff. Thank you for sharing!
My daughter is 20 and just told me she knew the history of the famous sailor kissing (grabbing) a dental assistant photo; apparently they teach this in school now (or some of them at least). I sure didn’t learn about that.
F*** Goebbels is right.