Henry Ries, 86; Jewish Refugee Returned to Germany to Photograph Postwar Recovery

Henry Ries, whose photographs of a battered postwar Germany documented the struggle of people trying to regain life’s normalcy, has died. He was 86.

Ries died Monday at his home in Ghent, N.Y. The cause of death was not announced.

A Berlin-born Jew who fled Hitler in 1938, Ries returned to Germany after the war and often used images of mundane life to contrast the darkness of war’s aftermath. Much of his work appeared in the New York Times.

Ries’ most famous image is of a crowd of people, mostly children, standing on a hillside watching an American plane fly over as it is about to touch down in Berlin. It was made into a commemorative stamp in 1998 to mark the 50th anniversary of the Berlin airlift.

Over a 15-month period between 1948 and 1949 the United States, Britain and France supplied an isolated West Berlin with food and other essentials to counter a Soviet blockade of the then-divided city.

Born in Berlin on Sept. 22, 1917, Ries was the son of a linen factory operator. His mother committed suicide when he was 13.

In 1937, Ries fled to the United States, but was sent back to Germany because he did not have immigration papers.

He was successful in emigrating the next year and earned a living selling vacuum cleaners and working in a garment factory.

Captivated by photography, Ries joined the U.S. Army in 1943 and became an aerial photographer. He worked first in the Pacific theater and then in Europe. He returned to Berlin at the end of the war in 1945 and joined the New York Times in 1947.

After leaving the newspaper in 1955, he opened an advertising studio in Manhattan.

Last year, he was awarded the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, the highest award for citizens of other countries.

Ries is survived by his second wife, Wanda.