After the Americans left, Jaeger packed the transparencies into 12 glass jars and buried them on the outskirts of town. In the years following the war, Jaeger occasionally returned to his multiple caches, digging them up, repacking, and reburying them. He finally retrieved the collection for good in 1955 -- 2,000 transparencies, all of them, amazingly, still in good shape -- stored them in a bank vault, and in 1965 sold them to LIFE. To date, only a fraction of the Jaeger collection has been published. (Pictured: Adolf Hitler and other Nazi officials attend a Christmas Party in 1941, at the height of the second World War.)