Photographing the Final Days of World War II in Germany
Archival images from the last weeks of World War II, taken by an American Army combat photographer during a push across eastern France into southern Germany.
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In the last weeks of World War II, Harold W. Clover, a combat photographer in the S-2 Section of the U.S. Army’s 31st Combat Engineer Battalion, documented the scenes and events around him as his unit pushed from the French Alsace into Nazi Germany, then into Austria, where they served occupation duty, in 1945. Clover donated many of his film negatives to the U.S. National Archives—where I recently visited, digitizing most of these prints below for the first time. Clover’s striking photographs capture the lives of war-weary civilians as well as soldiers—sometimes in a playful light—while still depicting the ugly reality of war.
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