In the late '30s, very few photographers were using color. Hugo Jaeger was an early adopter and Hitler liked what he saw. "The future," Hitler once said to Jaeger, "belongs to color photography."
Jaeger's story is nothing short of astonishing. In 1945, when the Allies were making their final push toward Munich, Jaeger found himself face to face with six American soldiers in a small town west of the city. During a search of the house where Jaeger was staying, the Americans found a leather suitcase in which Jaeger had hidden thousands of color photo transparencies. He knew he would be arrested (or worse) if the Americans discovered his film and his close connection to Hitler. He could never have imagined what happened next.
The American soldiers threw open the suitcase that held the Hitler images. Inside, they found a bottle of cognac that Jaeger had placed atop the transparencies. Elated, the soldiers proceeded to share the bottle with Jaeger and the owner of the house. The suitcase was forgotten.
After the Americans left, Jaeger packed the transparencies into 12 glass jars and buried them on the outskirts of town. In the years following the war, Jaeger occasionally returned to his multiple caches, digging them up, repacking, and reburying them. He finally retrieved the collection for good in 1955 - 2,000 transparencies, all of them, amazingly, still in good shape, stored them in a bank vault, and in 1965 sold them to LIFE. To date, only a fraction of the Jaeger collection has been published.
Hitler attends the 1939 launching of the battleship Tirpitz
Hitler observes military maneuvers in St. Polten, Austria, in the spring of 1939
Reichstag members salute Hitler at a session in Berlin's Kroll Opera House
Hitler's first schoolhouse was a tiny, one-room affair. "Our teachers were absolute tyrants," he later wrote, evidently blind to the terrible irony of his words
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