What happens when art becomes barbaric? The Lodz Ghetto’s chief accountant pursued his passion for photography during the Holocaust by photographing imprisoned Jews, creating a collection that required particular attention to detail and utter disregard for the artist’s human subjects. Photographer uses his color slides to tell the story of the Jews imprisoned in the Lodz Ghetto and reveals how the Nazi campaign turned otherwise “normal” people into callous witnesses of mass murder.

“To us, a working Jew is capital to be used, like a machine in a large, well-organized company,” wrote the chief accountant, Walter Genewein.

Photographer captures the story of the Lodz Ghetto from the perspective of a man who personified the Nazi ideals of order and efficiency in the midst of mass murder. Through the images Genewein shot as an amateur photographer, and his correspondence with his superiors in the Nazi hierarchy, the viewer is shown what everyday life — and death — in the Lodz Ghetto really meant. Most of the 204,000 Jews imprisoned there eventually died, either killed in concentration camps elsewhere, or dying of hunger and disease in the ghetto itself. All of this death in the short time of the ghetto’s existence – it was founded in February 1940 and had its final liquidation in August 1944 – is testament to the efficiency of the Nazi killing machine for which Genewein kept the books.

Among the earliest color slides in the history of photography, Genewein’s images of Jews in the Lodz Ghetto are unsettling in their detail. Emaciated men work the machinery in a ghetto factory; women with sickly, greenish complexions bend over sewing machines; the elderly and young children are put into forced labor for the Nazi war machine.

Indeed, the results are telling in the inventory lists drawn up: 416,744 pairs of suspenders; 6,599 boys’ trousers; 321,622 brassieres.

Together, the Jews of the Lodz Ghetto toiled away under the illusion that “arbeit macht frei” — work makes you free — according to the advice of the ghetto’s Nazi-appointed Jewish leader, Chaim Rumkowski. Thus, the Lodz Ghetto Jews became an indispensable resource for the Nazi war campaign, which perhaps explains why the Lodz Ghetto lasted longer than any other ghetto in Europe.

As the Jews made do on minimal rations of food and subhuman living conditions, Genewein remained focused on perfecting his artistic ambition, complaining of a “bluish hue” or an “ugly brownish red in developed film,” never stopping to give thought to the great moral errors of the horrors he was capturing on camera and the carnage his film was witness to. Though well aware of the death and destruction wrought on an entire community of Jews, Genewein photographed these Jews as they stood at death’s door with chilling indifference and an utter disregard for their humanity. Both in his work as an accountant managing the ghetto’s efficiency of production, and in his art, Genewein saw the Jews as mere tools to be used and then discarded.

Indeed, like many Nazi officials, Genewein found personal gain in the Nazi campaign against the Jews. With the same matter-of-factness he used to capture dying Jews on camera, Genewein notes his purchases of jewelry and gifts for his wife and friends from the confiscated belongings of the Lodz Ghetto Jews.

Nearly seventy years after the Holocaust, Genewein and most of the survivors of the ghetto have died. But his color slides live on, and remain relevant not for what they captured about the Holocaust and its victims, but for the way they illustrate what happens when the value of art eclipses the value of human life.