I am a second generation American, an artist and a Jew. I saw combat in World War II and knew first hand of the evils of Nazism and the need to defeat its policies of world domination and genocide. For years I have struggled with the question of how I, as an artist, could deal visually with the atrocities of the Third Reich in a meaningful way. It was frustrating because I believe nothing could equal the truths of documentary still and motion picture photography that revealed the horror of the camps and victims. Today, older people seem either inured against those ghastly images or are disinterested.
Whole generations are uninformed.
We even have a ban of revisionist academics who are claiming that The Holocaust never happened. Worse yet, and sadly, totalitarian governments, anti-Semitism, racism and genocide are still ugly realities. In 1990, after extensive research on the Nazi era, Perpetrators began to take shape. Rather than depicting victims, I decided to portray the people who made Hitler possible. I began to focus mainly on a representative group of men who helped Hitler to power and implemented his policies.