About 90 unique works are presented in the photo album "Vitebsk Region in 1941-1944: Occupation and Liberation"

July 1, Vitebsk / Sergey Kotovets - BELTA/. About 90 unique military photographs are presented in the photo album "Vitebsk Region in 1941-1944: Occupation and Liberation", which was published by the regional museum of local lore on the eve of Belarus Independence Day. Svetlana Davidovskaya, senior researcher and keeper of the museum's photographic collection, told a BELTA correspondent about this.

The publishing project combines already known photo works and previously unpublished pictures from the collections of the museum of local lore, which were acquired by the museum through various channels. The collection consists of three sections: "Occupation Regime", "Genocide", and "Liberation". The authors of the photographs are war correspondents of TASS, the newspaper "For the Glory of the Motherland", the magazine "Ogonyok", and Vitebsk photographer Petr Azarchenko. In addition, some of the published works were discovered at the time among the belongings of deceased German soldiers, and some photos were donated by residents of Germany in the post-war period.

Among the first museum acquisitions of photographs of the city during the occupation were two pictures depicting a gallows in front of the city hall and the barracks of the "5th Regiment" concentration camp on the outskirts of the regional center. These materials were transferred to the museum in 1945 by one of the city's household service enterprises, "Artel 'Gigiena'". The last batch of military period photographs was received by the museum's collections in 2003. Wolfgang Engel, a resident of the German city of Osnabrück, donated 13 photo works to the museum showing views of streets, churches, and buildings of the occupied city in 1942-1943.

 The project was implemented jointly by researchers from the regional museum and higher educational institutions of Vitebsk and Minsk. The publication will be in demand by scientists, researchers, teachers, and students of educational institutions, and will also attract everyone interested in the history of the Great Patriotic War and their native region.

In total, the collections of the regional museum of local lore hold about 25 thousand photographs, of which approximately a quarter are dedicated to the events of the Great Patriotic War.-0-