Postcard Booklet – "The Black Album" – An Early Visual Documentation of Nazi Crimes on European Soil, April 1940

The Black Album. Tel-Aviv: The Anti-Nazi League, Series A, April 1940. Hebrew, English and French.
A complete postcard booklet holding ten postcards.
This booklet is a very early public visual documentation, maybe the first of its kind, of Nazi crimes on European soil, especially in Poland.
The Anti-Nazi League, which published the booklet in April 1940, aimed to set up "propaganda and publicity in Israel and abroad against the Nazi regime, the Nazi spirit and racial hate". These ideas have been realized in this booklet; not only in the photographs printed on the postcards, but also, and especially, in the introduction added by the anti-Nazi league members. Printed on the inside cover: "Hitlerism means return to the savagery of the dark Middle Ages. In Poland, the Jews are compelled to wear on their backs the yellow badge as reproduced on the envelope of the Black Album. The Black Album contains the first series of pictures disclosing Nazi atrocities in Poland. The Black Album gives a vivid description of the Nazi regime and its cruel systems. Everybody is hereby enabled to unmask Hitlerism by sending the post-cards of the Album to his friends and acquaintances all over the world". Similar words appear in the introduction: "… In Hitler's Germany, vast concentration camps have been established where Nazi sadists torture their unfortunate victims to an extent never before conceived by human imagination. In these camps of suffering and death, the prisoners, principally Jewish, are submitted to most cruel corporal and spiritual humiliation, to hard labor, starvation and severe molestation leading to aberration of the mind and death".
Each postcard is titled – "Death in Hitler's step", "Nazi hangmen at work","One of the hundreds of victims in Poland", "Migration of nations into misery", "Nazi victims converted into ashes", and more – and is accompanied by captions specifying some of the methods of Nazi brutality and destruction which were publicly verified and published only years later: death of thousands from disease, cold and hunger; daily execution and hanging of bodies on gallows in central streets of Polish cities; slave labor; cleaning streets with mouths and hands; cremating bodies to ash, etc. The titles are in English. The introduction is in Hebrew and English. The captions are in Hebrew and French.
Booklet: 16X10.5 cm. Postcards: 14X10 cm. Good condition. Two of the postcards are completely detached from the booklet while several others are partly detached. Creases to cover. Several stains on cover and postcards.
Provenance: The Raphael Grünzweig Collection.