There's a picture I can't forget since my visit to the Imperial War Museum’s new Blavatnik Art, Film and Photography Galleries. It’s a photograph, taken immediately after the end of the Second World War. In it, a harried-looking woman hurries, arms around her two fair-headed sons, her hand curled around the younger boy’s eyes to keep him from seeing what lies next to them as they pass – a line of decomposing bodies; murdered Soviet citizens in Warstein, Germany.
The photograph, by a member of the United States Army Signal Corps is a piece of reportage, a record of the Allies’s practice of forcing German civilians to personally witness the horrifying consequences of their actions and inactions. And they made the children do it too.
