Robert Capa (1913–1954) - Surrendering German soldiers...

Leipzig: Surrendering German soldiers cross the Zeppelin Bridge while US soldiers advance (1945) The photograph is part of a crucial, multi-layered series captured by legendary war photographer Robert Capa on April 18, 1945, during the Battle of Leipzig. It captures the definitive, chaotic closing moments of World War II in Europe. Context: The Battle for the Zeppelin Bridge In April 1945, the U.S. 2nd and 69th Infantry Divisions entered Leipzig. The German resistance was collapsing, but fanatical pockets of soldiers and snipers remained. To fully capture the city, the American forces needed to cross the Zeppelin Bridge (Zeppelinbrücke) over the Elster basin. German troops on the other side were putting up considerable resistance, turning the bridge into a highly dangerous bottleneck. To provide covering fire for the troops advancing across the Zeppelin Bridge, an American machine gun platoon from the 23rd Infantry Regiment entered a residential apartment building at Frankfurter Allee 39 (now Jahnallee 61), just 100 yards from the bridge. Capa followed them into a second-floor flat. While photographing 21-year-old U.S. Private First Class Raymond J. Bowman operating the machine gun on the balcony, a German sniper shot Bowman through the cheek, killing him instantly. Capa photographed Bowman’s body and the pooling blood. Disturbed by the proximity of the death so close to the war's end, Capa later stated it was the image he remembered most from the war. The photograph of the surrendering soldiers happened immediately following the clearing of those German sniper positions. The entire sequence of events on April 18, 1945, has a massive footprint in Leipzig today: • The apartment building where the battle was waged was saved from demolition by local citizens and is widely known as the Capa Haus. • It houses a permanent exhibition curated by the Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Leipzig dedicated to Capa, his partner Gerda Taro, and the soldiers involved. • The surrounding streets were officially renamed Capastraße and Bowmanstraße to honor the photographer and the fallen soldier Robert Capa born Endre Ernő Friedmann (Budapest, October 22, 1913 – Thái Bình Province, Vietnam, May 25, 1954) Friedman had fled political repression in Hungary when he was a teenager, moving to Berlin, where he enrolled in the university. He worked part-time as a darkroom assistant for income and then became a staff photographer for the German photographic agency, Dephot. He witnessed the rise of Hitler, which led him to move to Paris, where he met and began to work with his professional partner Gerda Taro, and they began to publish their work separately. He subsequently covered five wars: the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, World War II across Europe, the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, and the First Indochina War, with his photos published in major magazines and newspapers. In 1947, for his work recording World War II in pictures, U.S. general Dwight D. Eisenhower awarded Capa the Medal of Freedom. That same year, Capa co-founded Magnum Photos in Paris. His biography is well described in Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Capa

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