Apartment where Capa took iconic 'the last man to die' photo is saved

The German apartment building where famed war photographer Robert Capa took an iconic photo of the ‘last man to die’ in WWII has been saved from demolition.

On 18 April 1945, Capa was observing an American soldier standing on a balcony in the city of Leipzig when the serviceman was gunned down by a German sniper.

Capa, who was embedded with the US Army and dressed in unmarked Army fatigues, rushed up to the flat and captured striking images of the dead soldier in a heap on the floor.

The photos appeared in Life magazine’s 14 May 1945 edition.

‘Until the very last moment of the war Allied soldiers were losing their lives in Europe.

‘All during the last week, with surrender rumours everywhere and the big battles over, Americans were still dying in mopping-up operations and in street fighting,’ the accompanying article read.

The soldier shot dead was 21-year-old Raymond J Bowman, from Rochester, New York.

He was tasked with protecting foot soldiers of the 2nd US Infantry who were advancing over a bridge when the German bullet ‘pierced his forehead’.

There were plans to demolish the crumbling building in which the soldier died after it fell into disrepair.

The house had stood empty for many years and on New Year’s Eve 2011 part of it burned down.

But a local group who knew about its history campaigned to save it and a Munich investor answered their calls, reports.

A £9 million refurbishment of ‘Capa Haus’ has now taken place and an exhibition of Capa’s photos has been installed in a ground floor cafe.

The road where the building is situated has also been renamed ‘Capa Strasse’.

The campaign group got in touch with former US serviceman who took part in the Leipzig battle, including the soldier in the apartment with Bowman when he died – Lehman Riggs.

The 96-year-old now lives in Tennessee and in an interview in 2012 he described how the Germans had blocked the bridges in Leipzig ‘with burned-out tanks and streetcars’ to stop them getting across on the day the iconic photo was taken.

‘There was a park in front of this building, and they [German troops] were dug in and we couldn’t see them. 

‘We had orders to go up to the third floor of this apartment building and set up our guns to spray that area out there in the park to try to keep them pinned down until our troops could cross that bridge,’ Riggs said. 

He had just been firing the gun and stepped off the balcony for Bowman to take over when his comrade was killed.

‘In 30 seconds, I happened to look up and see the bullet pierce his nose. The bullet that hit him killed him, ricocheted around the room, and it’s a miracle that it didn’t hit me. 

‘As soon as he got hit, somebody had to take the gun. I had to jump over him and start firing the gun,’ he recalled.

Riggs travelled back to the historic site to see the unveiling of a plaque on Capa house, in tribute to Bowman, on April 17 2016.

Capa shot some of the most violent conflicts of the first half of the 20th century and his candid photos were unlike any seen in the world of photojournalism before. They led to him being labelled the ‘greatest war photographer in the world’.

But he is said to have hated the subject that he made his name shooting with his trusty 35mm camera.

The Hungarian photographer, who died aged 40, was there when Allied troops stormed the beach at Omaha in 1944, and witnessed the brutal civil war that ripped apart Spain for much of the later 1930s.

He was on hand to chronicle some of the most important moments in world history in the last century and his photos of the D Day landings in particular offer the most vivid depiction of the bloody but crucial invasion of France.

Capa was born Andre Friedmann in Hungarian capital Budapest in 1913 but moved to Berlin when he was 17 enrolling in the Deutsche Hochschule Fur Politik where he studied journalism and political science while working part time in a dark room.

He remained in Berlin until Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933 and the rise of the Nazis gained pace, moving to Paris.

Along with his companion Gerda Jaro, Capa made regular trips to Spain between 1936 and 1939 to photograph the Spanish Civil War.

During that time he took arguably his most famous photograph – Death of a Loyalist Soldier – which graphically depicted the death of anarchist Federico Borrell García.

He also travelled to China in 1938 to document resistance to the Japanese invasion there.

The Picture Post described him as the ‘greatest war photographer in the world’ later the same year.

Capa fled to America when the Second World War started and gacor77 began working as a freelance photographer for LIFE, Time and several other publications.

From 1941 until 1946, Capa was war correspondent for LIFE and Collier’s and travelled with the U.S Army.

He captured Allied victories in North Africa, the Normandy landings in 1944 and the capture of Leipzig, Nuremberg and Berlin.

Following the war, he co-founded the Magnum photo agency before heading to Israel to capture the turmoil surrounding the country’s declaration of independence between 1948 and 1950.

Not just a war photographer, Capa also met and photographed the likes of Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemmingway and Leon Trotsky.

The photographer became a casualty of war himself in 1954.

Capa travelled to Hanoi to cover the French war in Indochina but was killed when he stepped on a landmine shortly after arriving.

He was posthumously awarded the Croix de Guerre with Palm by the French and the Robert Capa Gold Medal Award for excellence in the field of photojournalism was established the year after his death.