A well-known German photographer and journalist Benno Wundshammer (right), who served in the Joseph Goebbels company of the Nazi propaganda (Propagandakompanie), poses next to the Luftwaffe officers and the Hanomag Sd.Kfz.250/3 armored car in the Battle of Stalingrad.
Place of Photography: Stalingrad, USSR
Shooting time: October 1942
Benno Wundshammer (April 11, 1913, Cologne, Kingdom of Prussia – 1987 or 1986, Rottach-Egern, Bavaria) famous German journalist and photojournalist.
From 1933 to 1936, Benno Wundshammer trained as a photographer in Cologne. He has worked as a journalist (including Westbild), sports journalist, war correspondent and journalist (for example, Penguin, Ruf, Bild, Revue). From 1937 he worked as a reporter for the sports federation in Berlin.
As a member of the Luftwaffe propaganda company, Benno Wundshammer was one of the most important and best known reporters in the service of the National Socialist regime, along with Hilmar Pabel, Hans Hubmann or Alfred Tritschler during World War II. From 1942 to 1945 he was a member of the editorial board of the international Nazi propaganda magazine Signal.
After the war, Benno Wundshammer was able to continue his career as a reporter for the magazine “Quick” and editor-in-chief of the famous magazine “Revue” (until 1952). With his photographs of post-war celebrities such as Konrad Adenauer, Franz Josef Strauss, Romy Schneider or Arndt von Bohlen and Halbach, he had a great influence on German photojournalism. He also worked as a fashion photographer and was interested in the possibilities of color photography from the very beginning. Much of his photographic legacy belongs to the Photo Archive of the Prussian Cultural Heritage in Berlin.
Exhibition “War Photographer in World War II. Benno Wundshammer” (November 2014 – February 2015) in the German-Russian Museum in Berlin-Karlshorst showed the work of his life in the context of modern history. An exhibition catalog with examples of Wundshammer’s photo essays from the early 1930s analyzes the work of a German war correspondent.