Dmitry Baltermants worked as a photojournalist for the ‘Izvestiya’ newspaper when World War II started. He was immediately sent to the front, where he stayed until the storming of Berlin. War became the main subject of his photos and wrote Baltermants’ name onto the list of the best photographers of the world. The photographer’s personal exhibitions with his war photos were held in London and New York from the 1960s onwards.
He took one of his most famous photos in 1941 during a battle near Moscow. Sitting in a trench with the soldiers, he took a photo of them rushing into the attack.
In 1942, he found himself in the recently occupied Kerch and saw a heartbreaking scene: how people, mad with grief, were looking for the remains of their loved ones in the Bagerovo ditch – an anti-tank ditch in the village of Bagerovo, where the Nazis had dumped the bodies of a thousand shot civilians. His photo titled ‘Grief’ became the first documented evidence of German atrocities for the world.
‘Tchaikovsky’ is another iconic photo by Baltermants – about a remnant of a peaceful life amidst the horrors of war, taken by him during the liberation of Poland. In a half-destroyed house, a group of soldiers sits near a surviving piano in Polish Breslau (now Wrocław); one of them is playing, while the others listen, fascinated.
Below, we highlight the most revealing photographs that the Soviet photojournalism maestro took during the war.
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