Heinrich Hoffmann

Heinrich Hoffmann (12 September 1885 – 16 December 1957) was Adolf Hitler's official photographer, and a Nazi politician and publisher, who was a member of Hitler's intimate circle.

Hoffmann's photographs were a significant part of Hitler's propaganda campaign to present himself and the Nazi Party as a significant mass phenomenon.

He received royalties from all uses of Hitler's image, which made him a millionaire over the course of Hitler's rule.

After the Second World War he was tried and sentenced to 10 years in prison for war profiteering.

He was classified by the Allies' Art Looting Investigators to be a "major offender" in Nazi art plundering of Jews, as both art dealer and collector and his art collection, which contained many artworks looted from Jews, was ordered confiscated by the Allies.

He trained as a photographer from 1901 to 1903, in the studio of his father Robert (born 1860) and his uncle Heinrich (1862–1928).

Until 1909, he found employment in Heidelberg, Frankfurt am Main, Bad Homburg, Switzerland, France and England.

In 1909 he founded a photographic studio on Schellingstraße in Munich and started to work as a press photographer.

In 1913, he founded the image agency Photobericht Hoffmann.

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.

The photo was later used in Nazi propaganda, although its authenticity has been questioned.

In 1917, Hoffmann was conscripted into the German Army and served in France as a photo correspondent with the Bavarian Fliegerersatz-Abteilung I.

In 1919, he joined the Bavarian Einwohnerwehren, a right-wing citizens' militia.

That year he witnessed the short-lived post-war Bavarian Soviet Republic in Munich, and published a collection of photographs he had taken as 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.

Hoffmann met Hitler in 1919 and joined the Nazi Party on 6 April 1920.

He participated in the Beer Hall Putsch as a photographic correspondent.

After Hitler had taken control of the party in 1921, he named Hoffmann his official photographer, a post he held for over a quarter-century.

No other photographer but Hoffmann was allowed to take pictures of Hitler.

Hoffmann himself was forbidden to take candid shots.

Once, at the Berghof, Hitler's mountain retreat, Hoffmann took a picture of Hitler playing with his mistress Eva Braun's terrier.

Hitler told Hoffmann that he could not publish the picture, because "a statesman does not permit himself to be photographed with a little dog. A German sheepdog is the only dog worthy of a real man".

While the Nazi Party was banned in 1923, Hoffmann joined the ephemeral Großdeutsche Volksgemeinschaft then rejoined the Nazi Party in 1925.

The following year he co-founded the Illustrierter Beobachter.

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.

In November 1929, he represented the Nazi Party in the district assembly of Upper Bavaria and, from December 1929 to December 1933, he served as a city councillor of Munich.

The photograph was published in the 12 March 1932 issue of the Illustrierter Beobachter ("Illustrated Observer"), a Nazi newspaper.

After the war, the glass negative could not be found.

Footage of the event from a similar angle has also been claimed to show Hitler, but there is no evidence he adopted a toothbrush moustache before the war.

Hitler strictly controlled his public image in all respects, having himself photographed in any new suit before he would wear it in public, according to Hoffmann, and ordering in 1933 that all images of himself wearing lederhosen be withdrawn from circulation.

He also expressed his disapproval of Benito Mussolini allowing himself to be photographed in his bathing suit.

In 1940, Hoffmann became a member of the Nazi German Reichstag.

Hoffmann's sentence was reduced to 4 years on appeal, and he was released from prison in 1950.

In 1956, the Bavarian State ordered all art under its control and formerly possessed by Hoffmann to be returned to him.

Hoffmann was born in Fürth and grew up in Regensburg.

In 2010, historian Gerd Krumeich, a 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 Hoffmann's photo in the Bavarian State Archive, Hitler looks like a different man than in the published image.

As a result of the doubt raised by those considerations, the curators of a 2010 Berlin exhibition about Hitler's influence inserted a notice saying that the image's authenticity could not be vouched for.