SS tent camp at the Nuremberg Rally, 1937

Long flags hang side by side on a stone facade, the Italian tricolour alternating with swastika banners. Then the camera is in the camp: young men in sports shirts with SS runes hold out their mess tins to a smiling cook in white, eat at beer tables beside long white tents under SS and swastika flags, spoon from one tin in pairs and rinse up at a wooden washstand. A blond cook forks meat from a full board into the aluminium tins of a long queue, another stirs a great kettle at a mobile field kitchen with a smoking chimney. A column in steel helmets with rifles and packs wheels past the tents, below a row of new barrack blocks, and a band in black with drums, tubas and trombones leads another column along the dusty camp road.

During the rally week of 6 to 13 September 1937 the party's formations lived in tent cities on the edge of Nuremberg. The SS under Heinrich Himmler was still small beside the SA, but was already building its own armed units. Most of the men here are barely twenty.