I posted about a photo displayed at the museum which was taken by Robert Capa, but this is perhaps his most well known image. A number of his photos appeared in Life Magazine in 1945 and they have become widely shared around the world.
The photograph shows Private Raymond J. Bowman, a 21-year-old American soldier, lying dead on a balcony after being struck by a sniper’s bullet while reloading his weapon. He had taken up position to support advancing infantry near Leipzig’s Zeppelin Bridge when he fell. Capa climbed through the balcony window and documented the scene with this photo.
The name of this photo, which I’ve used in the title of this blog post, isn’t accurate as there were a couple more weeks until the end of the Second World War in Europe, let alone in other theatres around the world. I didn’t realise when I visited the city, otherwise I would have visited, that the house that this photo was taken in has been saved from demolition and is now known as Capa House.
One element that is really poignant is that Lehman Riggs visited Capa House in 2019 as part of a ceremony to commemorate those who died in the conflict. Riggs was an American veteran who saw the killing of Bowman on that balcony and he said:
“I was 3ft from him when it happened. I could have reached out and touched him, but I knew he was dead. I had to carry on in his place, as I’d been trained to do.”
Riggs died in 2021 at the age of 101, surviving over 75 years longer than Bowman. The owners of the flat struggled to get Bowman’s blood out of their carpet, it was “a permanent reminder of the horrors that happened” a family member said. There’s a Guardian article about the flat, the killing and the photo which I found interesting.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t realised about the flat when I visited Leipzig, although looking at photos I was very close to it when walking into the city centre from the hotel. I’ll put it on my seemingly never ending places to visit list….