In September 1939 thousands of German soldiers were turned loose on Poland; in 1940 they descended on Holland, Belgium and France, in 1941 they went to the Balkans and then to the USSR. Armed with Leica and Rolleiflex cameras, some were officially commissioned as photographers and others were asked by their commanders to snap records of events. Among them were trainees who knew the Bauhaus and older men who remembered Weimar; some excelled at formal portraiture, others were storytellers, stylists or humanists who wept at what they saw. Art historian Ian Jeffrey has trawled through their albums to pick the most compelling images, an intimate record of anonymous lives experiencing the unprecedented, in which the style and content change with the collective mood after 1942.