Heinrich Hoffmann (photographer)

Heinrich Hoffmann (12 September 1885 – 15 December 1957) was a German photographer, art dealer, art collector, and magazine publisher who was for many years Adolf Hitler's official photographer and a part of his intimate circle. Historian Alan Bullock succinctly described Hoffmann as an "earthy Bavarian with a weakness for drinking parties and hearty jokes" who "enjoyed the license of a court jester" with Hitler.

Hoffmann worked in his father's photographic shop and as a photographer in Munich from 1908. In 1919 he published a collection of photographs taken during the short-lived post-war Bavarian Soviet Republic, Ein Jahr bayrische Revolution im Bilde ("One Year of Bavarian Revolution in Pictures"). The accompanying text by Emil Herold suggested a connection between the "Jewish features" shown in the photographs and the subjects' left-wing policies.

A noted photograph taken by Hoffmann in Munich's Odeonsplatz on 2 August 1914 apparently shows a young Hitler among the crowd cheering the outbreak of World War I. This was later used in Nazi propaganda, although its authenticity has been questioned.

Hoffmann claimed that he only discovered Hitler in the photograph in 1929, after the Nazi leader had visited the photographer's studio. Learning that Hoffmann had photographed the crowd in the Odeonsplatz, Hitler told Hoffmann that he had been there, and Hoffmann said he then searched the glass negative of the image until he found Hitler. The photograph was then published in the 12 March 1932 issue of the Illustrierter Beobachter ("Illustrated Observer"), a Nazi newspaper. After the war, the glass negative was not found.

After years of consideration of the photograph, in 2010 Professor Gerd Krumeuch, a noted German expert on the First World War, came to the conclusion that Hoffmann had doctored the image. Krumeich examined other images of the rally and was unable to find Hitler in the place where Hoffmann's photograph placed him. Also, in a different version of Hoffman's photo in the Bavarian State Archive, Hitler looks different than in the published image. Other analysts have pointed out that Hitler's moustache in the image is not the same style that can be seen in photographs of Hitler while he was serving in the German Army. They also point out that Hitler makes no mention in Mein Kampf of having been in the Odeonsplatz crowd.

...
Wikipedia