In July of 1945 LIFE MAGAZINE photographer William Vandivert (1912 – 1989) was on assignment in Berlin documenting the earliest days of the Allied occupation of that city. He snapped pictures of Hitler’s bunker, starving Berliners and jubilant Cossacks; his images of that vanquished capital will live forever more – but in this article that he penned for the editors of PAGEANT, he remembers how he came upon a trove of some of the most famous pictures of W.W. II.
Pictured above is the film canister that Vandivert found; it is labeled “the last pictures of Hitler”.
Read about the earliest sightings of Hitler: 1945-1955
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