Weimar: a children's party under the swastika, 1937

Under the fruit trees of a large garden a long table covered in white is lined with small children on wooden chairs. Women in aprons and summer dresses pour for them from a big teapot and lift the smallest onto their seats; boys with cropped hair and sailor collars look up from their plates beside a little swastika flag tied to a chair with streamers of crepe paper; a girl with a huge bow bites into her cake, and children in folded paper hats crowd both sides of the table while parents watch.

Weimar, the town of Goethe and Schiller and of the republic's first constitution, was in 1937 the seat of Fritz Sauckel, Gauleiter of Thuringia, who was planning a vast party forum in its centre. That July the SS opened the Buchenwald concentration camp on the Ettersberg, a few kilometres above the town.