Helmut Laux

He received denazification clearance and was soon able to reactivate his contacts abroad. He contributed glossy photos of various leading Nazis from D-Day 1944 to the 14 June 1948 edition of Life, signing as "Photographer Helmut Laux of the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung".

Laux's activity after 1945 is largely a mystery. He did spend considerable time in prisoner-of-war camps, but he does not seem to have been banned from exercising his profession as a photographer. An article in Der Spiegel in 1947 dealing with a camp in the neighbourhood of Darmstadt, where former SS personnel were being held, specifically mentions Laux as one of the inmates.

The mechanism for this interchange was that a courier flew to Lisbon and back each day transporting photos from and for Germany's wartime enemy, the US, via diplomatic pouch. The transactions were initially conducted at the AP bureau under Luiz Lupi in Lisbon, and from 1944, when the exchange via Lisbon took too long, also at the AP bureau in Stockholm under Eddie Shanke. Here, as a cover, the Swedish agency, Pressens Bild [sv], was involved as an intermediary. An estimated 40,000 photos were exchanged between the enemies in this way.

The Buro Laux was able to pursue its full range of activities from the spring/summer of 1942. It provided photographers who documented all important events involving Ribbentrop and even travelled abroad to produce pictures for the Foreign Office. These were mainly supplied to the German press through the Deutscher Verlag publishing house. The Buro Laux also supplied foreign newspapers with pictures and provided the press attachés at the German embassies with photos that made Ribbentrop and his translator Paul Schmidt look important.

Helmut Laux (10 June 1916 in Donaueschingen - 29 April, 1987) was a German photographer who rose to prominence in Nazi Germany and who headed the so-called Buro Laux, a photo news agency jointly-operated by the SS and the German Foreign Ministry.