World War II Database

Contributor: C. Peter Chen

ww2dbaseFriedrich Franz Bauer was born in Pfaffenhofen an der Ilm in the Bavaria region of southern Germany in 1903. Trained as a photographer, he opened his own photography studio in München (Munich) in the 1920s with his younger brother Karl Ferdinand Bauer. His studio was later acquired by the German Nazi organization SS Main Economic and Administrative Department and was renamed Friedrich Franz Bauer GmbH in 1937. Not long after the Nazi Party came into power, he became Heinrich Himmler's favorite photographer; in this role, he photo-documented scenes during the German entries into Austria and Czechoslovakia, and created studio portraits of a number of SS officers. His 1933 report on the Dachau Concentration Camp, in which he presented the prisoners as if they were reasonably treated, was arguably the work that he was best known for. He passed away in 1972.

Photographs Taken by Friedrich Bauer