SS-Kriegsberichter Franz Roth

SS-Untersturmführer and SS-Kriegsberichter Franz Seraphicus Roth (5 April 1911 – 17 March 1943) was an Austrian photographer who worked as a free-lance photo reporter at the US-American Associated Press. His military career began before the war, when he - as an Austrian journalist working for a German newspaper - covered the Italian conquest of Abyssinia and the Spanish Civil War. Roth joined the SS soon after the Anschluss, and became an SS-Kriegsberichter (SS war-correspondent). At that time he also worked for the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda and as a photo editor for the American news agency Associated Press (The Associated Press photo department entered a formal cooperation with the Nazi regime in the 1930s and worked under the auspices of the German Ministry of Propaganda). Roth joined the Kriegsberichterstatter-Zug of the Leibstandarte SS under SS-Sturmbannführer Kurt Meyer in 1940, and covered the division in Greece (April 1941) and the first year in the Soviet Union (when this photo was taken, summer of 1941), through rebuilding in the west during the second half of 1942, and finally in the fighting around Kharkov in early 1943. He was awarded the Eisernes Kreuz II.Klasse in 1941 and promoted to SS-Untersturmführer in September 1942. Franz Roth died on 17 March 1943, after he was seriously wounded during the Third Battle of Kharkov. He was covering Kurt Meyer's reconaissance battlegroup (Kampfgruppe “Meyer”) at the time. Meyer mentioned Roth’s death in his memoirs ‘Grenadiere’. Roth left more than 120 rolls of film that give historians and history lovers a precious account of the war. The album contains more than 600 photographs from contact sheets kept by the U.S. National Archives in Washington D.C. Franz Roth was buried at Heldenfriedhof Askold's Grave on the right bank of the Dnieper River in Kiev in Ukraine, and posthumously awarded the Eisernes Kreuz I.Klasse on 25 March 1943. His images can be found in a variety of European World War II propaganda publications and in American newspapers.

Source :
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Franz_Roth_(Fotograf)
https://www.instagram.com/p/BtO_BV6HESq/
http://stabswache-de-euros.blogspot.com/2012/02/ss-unterscharfuhrer-hamsun-waffen-ss.html