The twelve portraits in this series were taken by the German photographer August Sander in Cologne and nearby towns around 1938, at the height of Hitler's power. Although Sander's Jewish subjects were probably friends and neighbors, he labeled these photographs simply "Persecuted Jews." It is possible that Sander, who was not Jewish, made the photographs to help desperate German Jews obtain exit papers. Sander himself had been a victim of Nazi persecution in 1934 when many of his plates were destroyed by the authorities and his eldest son was imprisoned for his antifascist activities.

Born in 1876 in the Rhineland, Sander became one of the most influential modernist photographers. During the 1920s, he was strongly influenced by a style of sharply focused social realism known as Die Neue Sachlichkeit - the New Objectivity. Applying this objectivity to photography, Sander believed that a systematic documentation of different human types, grouped according to their roles in German soci