Beginning in the early 1920s, August Sander took hundreds of portraits of German citizens—primarily in the region around Cologne—and then classified them according to occupation and social type: farmers, tradesmen, women, professions, artists, city, and “the last people” (people with disabilities). In 1929, when Sander published a selection of these photographs in Antlitz der Zeit (Face of Our Time), he offered subscriptions for a series of forty-five portfolios entitled Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts (People of the Twentieth Century). The Nazis confiscated and destroyed all the available copies of Face of Our Time (as well as the printing plates) in 1936. Although Sander survived the war, many of his glass-plate negatives did not, and his ambitious project remained unrealized.