Albert Reich

Albert Reich (January 14, 1881, Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz – April 12, 1942, Munich), was a German painter, graphic designer, draftsman and illustrator. During the First World War, he was attached as a war painter to the Alpenkorps. After the war, he joined the Nazi Party and contributed to its propaganda with paintings.



Early life
Albert Reich, was born to a shoemaker in Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz in the Kingdom of Bavaria, then part of the German Empire. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts of Nuremberg in 1898. In 1901–1902, he received a scholarship of 360 German marks from the Maximilian Foundation. In October 1902, he entered the Academy of Fine Arts of Munich, where he was taught by Johann Caspar Herterich, Heinrich von Zügel and Peter Halm. Herterich introduced him to Michael Laßleben, a publisher from Kallmünz in his native Upper Palatinate, for whom he worked as an illustrator from 1907. From 1911, he studied the technique of plein air painting at the school of Melchior Kern, whom he succeeded as head of the school on the eve of First World War.

On May 31, 1912, he married his student, Elisabeth (Lisbeth) Anna Karla Martha Sellschopp (1884-1958), who worked with him on the production of his albums. The couple had four daughters.

From the First World War to the Third Reich
During the First World War, Albert Reich became the war painter of the Alpenkorps, a unit formed for mountain warfare which he accompanied in the Balkans Theatre during the Serbian Campaign, the Eastern Front in Romania, the Italian Front and on the Western Front. In his albums, he gives an idealized and heroic image of the war.

Posthumously
Around the year 2000, the memory of Albert Reich was the subject of disputes because of his adherence to Nazism. A street that was named after him in his hometown, Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz, was renamed in 2011. It was renamed after Josef Geiß, a local Social Democratic Party of Germany activist who was deported to Dachau concentration camp in 1933. Geiß survived his imprisonment and the Nazi regime.