My father moved my family back to Germany when I was only two years old. At that age, I had yet to understand the conflicts and struggles that would arise. My father was a Holocaust survivor returning to the country which betrayed him. He has survived the horrors of being incarcerated in a concentration camp by only mere luck when the Americans liberated all of the remaining inmates at Camp Dora. I cannot begin to understand the trauma that such an experience would have on a young boy of 12 years of age. The horrors only depended with the murder of his mother Rachel Schmeidler and brother Samuel Schmeidler in Auschwitz. My father’s extended family fared no better under the cruel Nazi regime.

For my father this historical event was not only some distant affair but a memory which has had a profound impact on his life. Through his experience, I find myself drawn to the history behind my own heritage and questioning the impact of such a horrific past. I remember distinctly wondering what a Nazi looked like as a child once I was old enough to understand the implications of being Jewish living in Germany. The war was only 40 years in the past and many of those who were part of the Nazi regime where living among our neighbors in our community. They moved on with their lives after the war and were now part of my daily life. In school, I would sometimes question my teachers if they were Nazi. This type of question was unusual for a child to ask but it was symbolic of the situation I was living in. Even at that young age, I was attempting to understand and search for answers.

My questions, to this day, have never been answered. I still wonder: what do these people look like? Did they look like monsters from a Brother Grimm fairy tale? I have always wanted to know who these people were and what they looked like.

naziface.com is an exploration and search for the answer to this question. naziface.com takes 15 mugshots of Dora Camp perpetrators who were put to trial at The Dora Trial, which was conducted by the United Sates Army between August 7 and December 30, 1947.

Dividing the mugshots by head, eyes, nose and mouth components and rotating them on each other, creates a variation of over 750,000 Nazi faces. The mugshots are of the following men: Dr. Heinrich Schmidt, Richard Walenta, Walter Ernst Ulbricht, Wilhelm Simon, Willi Zwiener, Hans Karl Möser, Josef Fuchsloch, Erhard Richard Brauny, Heinrich Georg Alfred Detmers, Emil Otto Bühring, Josef Kilian, Rudolf Ewald Otto Jacobi, Richard Kurt Heinrich, Georg Wilhelm König, Otto Georg and Werner Brinkmann.

Rachel Schmeidler is an American multi-media artist based in Los Angeles whose work has been mainly noted to transform celebrity mugshots into art. She explores themes of celebrity culture and communal schadenfreude. Subsequent series using mug shots expanded her subjects to include Jewish, Irish and Italian mobsters – in attempt to explore American history, immigration, and the Americana. This series, naziface.com, is an exploration of World War 2, specifically, the perpetrators of the Nordhausen-Dora Buchenwald concentration camp; where her father, a Holocaust survivor, was liberated from at the age of 11 by the Americans.

Schmeidler was born in Israel and moved to Germany when she was 2 years old. She lived in Germany, where she endured harassment and alienation [as a Jew]. Her father, a Holocaust survivor, moved the family to the Philadelphia, PA when she was 12 to avoid the trappings of that environment.

Her work has received attention from both the traditional and celebrity media. Schmeidler is founder of Hollywood Least Wanted