Without the technological advances made by Agfa in the decade leading up to the war, many of the colour images shown here would never have been taken. The Second World War was the first war that could be photographed easily in colour, rather than in black and white. Despite colour photography being around since the 1840s, before the 1930s it was still rare and you required specialised equipment to produce colour images.
It was the German Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, who pushed the Agfa company to produce its colour film as a direct result of the impact of Kodachrome, which had been introduced by Eastman Kodak in the USA in 1935, and also Technicolor’s motion picture colour film. By late 1936, Agfacolor film had become available and it was trialled at the Berlin Summer Olympics. It was a success!
The new film, marketed as Agfacolor Neu, was accessible in the stores from late 1936, making it the first commercially available colour film. The Agfa patent was released after the war and the method was used by other companies.
(National Archives of Norway)
Agfacolor was originally a reversal film for making colour slides, or transparencies, but by 1939 it had been adapted into a negative film for colour prints. The biggest advantage of the Agfacolor film was its ability to be processed easily and in a similar fashion to black and white film, which meant that it greatly simplified the processing using standard equipment. Kodachrome, on the other hand, needed to be sent back to the manufacturer for processing, which meant that the film could not be processed quickly, as each colour (red, blue and green) required processing separately.
The German printworks, already among the best in the world, took to the new colour photography like ducks to water, and soon they were producing all sorts of colour books using the new Agfacolor film. Some featured landscapes and everyday scenes of German life, but increasingly as the war clouds gathered their content concerned more overtly propaganda-inspired militaristic themes.