Photo Essays
Germany Surrenders at Reims, May 7, 1945: A Photographer’s Story
On a rainy Saturday night in early May, 1945, LIFE photographer Ralph Morse was working in his hotel room in Paris, writing captions for a series of photos he’d...
Behind the Picture: Goebbels Glares at Eisenstaedt, Geneva, 1933
The unsettling image of the Third Reich’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, glaring at photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt during a League of Nations conference...
Winston Churchill at Leisure: LIFE Portraits of the Private Man
On May 10, 1940, as Hitler’s Germany was invading Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, the British Conservative leader Winston Churchill took the reins of a...
LIFE Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945
Some photographs are so much of their time that, as years pass, they acquire an air of genuine authority — about an event, a person, a place — and even, perhaps,...
World War II in Color: American Bombers and Their Crews, 1942
Within weeks of the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s official entry into the Second World War, Allied forces in Europe activated the...
Hitler at 50: Color Photos of a Despot’s Birthday
We do not usually give so much space to the work of men we admire so little. So began a remarkable editor’s note to LIFE’s readers in an April 1970 issue of the...
LIFE at the Battle of the Bulge: Photos From Hitler’s Last Gamble
From mid-December 1944 through the end of January 1945, in the heavily forested Ardennes Mountains of Belgium, thousands of American, British, Canadian, Belgian...
Photographer Spotlight: Andreas Feininger
If one had to choose a single photographer whose work would serve as a visual biography of New York City in its postwar Golden Age — when Gotham became, in a...
After Pearl Harbor: LIFE in the Pacific and on the Homefront
President Franklin Roosevelt declared December 7, 1941 — when Japan launched more than 350 fighters, bombers, and torpedo planes against the U.S. naval base at...
A Brutal Pageantry: The Third Reich’s Myth-Making Machinery, in Color
A powerful insignia alone, Adolf Hitler once noted, “can spark interest in a political movement.” What Hitler did not say, but what is evident to anyone with...
LIFE at the Liberation of Paris: A Photographer’s Story
In the long, cruel struggle of World War II, opportunities for jubilation were scarce. But even among the era’s handful of “wish you were there” moments — the...
Return of the King: When Elvis Left the Army
It’s intriguing, and more than a little amusing, to imagine contemporary American music stars serving in the military. How would Kanye West fare in the Air...
‘Drama of Life Before Birth’: Landmark Work, Five Decades Later
In the five decades since Lennart Nilsson’s portrait of an 18-week-old human fetus appeared on the cover of the April 30, 1965, issue of LIFE — along with other,...
LIFE in the Middle East: Photos From Syria in 1940
The ongoing chaos and violence that have come to define the Syrian civil war — a war that has now raged for close to two years, with no signs of abating — not...
Secretary of State John Kerry’s First Overseas Trip
Three weeks after succeeding Hillary Clinton as U.S. Secretary of State, the long-time Senator and 2004 Presidential candidate left on a ten-day inaugural trip...
Party on Germany's Autobahn
Germany's Ruhr Valley region, the 2010 Capital of European Culture, shut down a stretch of one of the continent's busiest motorways. See what took place when the...
East Germany Makes Light of Its Dark Past
Nostalgia for the Communist past has found a new vogue in Berlin. Photographs for TIME by Hermann Bredehorst / Polaris
Pope Benedict XVI Visits Germany
The Supreme Pontiff journeys to his homeland on his first official state visit
Germany's Latest Polar Bear Celebrity
As interest in the Berlin zoo's now fully-grown polar bear sensation, Knut, fades, zoo officials in Nuremberg introduce Flocke
Hitler Exhibit Opens in Germany
The first major show on the Fuhrer since 1945 opens at the German Historical Museum in Berlin
