iMunich Documentation Centre for the History of National SocialismMaxvorstadt
The Class Photo
A 1937 photo of 48 Jewish third-graders in Munich anchors a search into their fates: survival, flight, displacement, and loss under the Nazi regime.
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Preview: written before the show opened
In 1937, 48 third-graders at Munich's Jewish elementary school on Herzog-Rudolf-Straße lined up in the schoolyard with their teacher, Ferdinand Kissinger. It is the last picture of them together. The historian Kristina Milz found it among the papers of the orientalist Karl Süßheim, whose daughter Margot is in it. He had numbered every child and written their names on the back.
The show follows those children out of the frame: how they survived, the routes they fled by, what losing a home did to them, and how they arrived somewhere new. The children murdered by the Nazis appear as blank spaces. Research with LMU students found that eleven of Margot's classmates were killed, and Kissinger too; others became lawyers, academics, artists and diplomats abroad.
You start from one photograph, and the rest of the show is the search for what happened to each face in it. It is on the first floor of the NS-Dokumentationszentrum, open Tuesday to Sunday from 10am to 7pm, and entry is free.
Editor's pick
Forty-eight Jewish third-graders lined up in a Munich schoolyard in 1937, and one pupil's father numbered every face on the back. The show traces where each child went; those murdered by the Nazis appear as blank spaces. Entry is free.
Look for
The 1937 class photo
Forty-eight children assembled in the schoolyard, the last picture in which the whole class appears together and the starting point for everything else in the show.
The blank spaces
Look for the gaps the curators leave in place of the children who were murdered by the Nazis, marking their absence rather than filling it.
Good for
- Cheap Culture
- Nerding Out
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Image credits
8
- The Class Photo© Privately owned by the Suesheim D’Angelo family
- Collecting with Style: Caroline Murat, Ludwig I and AntiquityCourtesy of State Collections of Antiquities
- Shifting the Silence© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025
- Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National SocialismRaimond Spekking, CC BY-SA 4.0
- GlyptothekDaderot, Public domain
- State Museum of Egyptian ArtFred Romero / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
- State Collections of AntiquitiesDiego Delso, delso.photo, CC BY-SA 4.0
- LenbachhausBurkhard Mücke / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0