Arnold E. Samuelson

Before America's entry into World War II, Samuelson worked for the Eastman Kodak Company in Portland, Oregon.

He served in the Army Air Forces and later joined the Signal Corps in January 1943.

Three months after D-Day (June 6, 1944), Samuelson came ashore on the Normandy beaches with the 167th Signal Photographic Company and began documenting the Allied military campaigns in France and Belgium.

That unit consisted of two motion picture cameramen, John O'Brian and Edward Urban, and two still photographers, J Malan Heslop and Walter McDonald.

During this campaign, Samuelson's crew was the first group of Allied photographers to document Nazi crimes and the plight of concentration camp prisoners at Lenzing and Ebensee, two subcamps of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.

Portrait of U.S. combat photographer Arnold E. Samuelson. France, 1944-1945, courtesy of J Malan Heslop , United States Holocaust Memorial Museum .
Photograph of Mauthausen prisoners by Arnold E. Samuelson