By Fabrizio Bensch

Photos of significant gestures between two politicians often mirror the state of the relations between the two countries – and become part of our collective consciousness. As a photojournalist, I am often witness to politicians shaking hands or embracing as part of major engagements. Often it’s daily routine.

REUTERS/Bundesregierung/Guido Bergmann/Pool

However, these days if a German chancellor and a French president reach out for one another, this signifies an important development in international relations – and is a very significant symbol for a united Europe. Historically, relations were dominated by wars – for the generation of our grandfathers and grandmothers, seeing the other country as “the enemy” rather than a neighbor was a defining political and cultural force, which molded everyday actions and experiences.

At the borders where battles used to be fought, we can now pass through freely without immigration control and without having to switch currency. Rather than having francs and Deutsche Marks, French and Germans now both use the Euro. Trade is closely linked. When going shopping in a standard German supermarket, it’s possible to choose from baguettes, different French wines and a large selection of cheeses among other things. It is part of our normality; our everyday.

In the past, Germans and French have fought bitter wars with one another, and many German cities still bear witness to the numerous confrontations.

When Berlin was the state capital of Prussia in 1806, Napoleon led his troops through the Brandenburg Gate to demonstrate his power on his way to Moscow. He never reached Russia, and when his army retreated, it was crushed in the battle of Leipzig in 1813.

This battle was one of the largest in world history before the start of the 20th century – and today, relations have improved so much that we shake hands in the same spots where we used to fight.

The Siegessaeule (Victory column) in Berlin commemorates the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. The monument itself is decorated with the cannon vessels of the French troops to signify Prussia’s victory over “the enemy”. Today, we know it is better known as the center of the Love Parade, which used to be held annually in Berlin.

The dream of a peaceful bilateral relationship was only possible after the horrors of the two world wars: in 1963, two statesmen saw a future in a united Europe and thus became a political force in world politics when they signed the Elysee Treaty. This contract laid the foundation for close relations between Germany and France, and thus marked the start of realizing the dream of a peacefully united Europe.

When I covered the 50th anniversary earlier this year, I witnessed both governments coming together under one roof – the German Bundestag and the French national convention. Only then was I struck by the significance of the gestures: I am part of a generation in which French and German politicians embrace.

This week I covered French and German soldiers of the German-French brigade at their camp in the Saxony-based Oberlausitz. I was able to see first-hand how soldiers from both countries jointly train for the fight against insurgents in an imaginary country.

The military training area was not far away from where Napoleonic troops took part in a battle against the Prussian-Russian soldiers in 1813. By coincidence 200 years later, I was covering soldiers in the same area and a bridge was built between the past and the present.

They speak German and French and work under the same commanding officer. This made me think of an iconic image from 1984 of great national and international importance: the German chancellor Helmut Kohl reaching out for the hand of French President Francois Mitterand during their state visit to the Douaumont cemetery in Verdun, where 150,000 French soldiers are buried. It is a significant gesture because it highlights both countries’ present and future commitment to peaceful relations as a historical legacy.

All this shows the international progress made by having a united Europe: nowadays it is a normal for soldiers to train together, whereas in past decades this would have been unthinkable. And in 2013, it is usual for politicians to shake hands and embrace as part of their political discourse, and I get to capture that with my pictures.

When I was taking pictures during the training routine in the icy snow of late March 2013, I realized how many decades and centuries it took to come to where we are today. “Au revoir, Auf Wiedersehen” said one soldier as I left at the end of the day – and I began to understand the dimension of our present day German-French relations on a whole new level.

By Fabrizio Bensch

There are thousands of miles that separate the German soldiers in Afghanistan from home.  For up to one year, they may be stationed in Afghanistan, but for most of them no more than four to five months.

The lead up to Christmas in Germany has a very long tradition and the arriving season is dominated by beautifully decorated shop windows in department stores and the smell of gingerbread and cinnamon. Christmas trees are festively illuminated in the streets with Christmas decoration and Christmas markets and Santa Claus are in every city.

But for the German armed forces Bundeswehr soldiers far away, each of them tries to maintain a little bit of these traditions and so everywhere in the camps are signs of Christmas.

Since December 1st, I’ve been embedded with the German armed forces in northern Afghanistan, where the Bundeswehr contingent has been operating along with other nations of the ISAF International Security Assistance Force.  The Germans have changed how they provide security in the northern cities of Kunduz, the combat outpost observation point north and Mazar-e-Sharif  in the last few years. The Bundeswehr has partnered with the Afghan security forces and is now more visible.

Whereas in the past , the operations against the Taliban in the north of the country were led by soldiers of the Bundeswehr, the Afghan army is now conducting their own operations.

I travel with patrols and the danger is invisible and everywhere because improvised explosive devices can be hidden anywhere.  There is still war in the country.

The little changes are visible. The German police mentor the training of Afghan policemen. There are now some women  as trainees in police training centers.

Women can be police officers in Afghanistan’s future. They have even opened a kindergarten in the police training center in Mazar-e-Sharif, so the police trainees and female staff working in the training facility can leave their children there.

The women often come from far away and without this help they could never be policewomen. For women in this country to be a policewoman is a big step, but so much in Afghanistan needs time as well as peace.

We are on day 5 of competition at the London 2012 Olympic games and our robotic cameras triggered by the team of Reuters photographers are producing amazing pictures from the most unusual angles whenever athletes all over the world are competing for gold, silver and bronze medals.

GALLERY: OLYMPIC BEST FROM LONDON 2012

We had big expectations to create pictures from new perspectives and they have been surpassed by what we are seeing right now. From the colorful opening ceremony to the athletes’ reactions, many Olympic moments have been captured by the remote robotic cameras. At the moment I’m covering the fencing events at the ExCel venue and I trigger the remote cameras with the help of wireless Pocket Wizard wireless transmitters, simultaneously as I shoot with my hand-held camera with the 400 to 800mm lenses. When I see a new angle on the field of play, I can make corrections remotely with the joystick to control the two axis camera head.

Below is a selection of images made by our photographers (Michael Dalder, Adrees Latif, Murad Sezer, Sergio Perez, Mike Segar, Dominic Ebenbichler, Pawel Kopczynski and Fabrizio Bensch) with their eyes but through the lenses of the robotic DSLRs catching the dramatic moments at many different Olympic venues.

Is it possible to get 11 photographers into a box and put them in a position where you could never place a photographer? Normally, it would be absolutely impossible. But nothing is impossible when it comes to the Olympic games.

The London Olympic summer games will produce huge emotions, records and we as the Reuters photographers team will catch it from any extraordinary angle. When athletes from around the world compete against each other for the glory of an Olympic medal, hundreds of photographers try to capture the one and only moment which makes the Olympic games so unique.

On any sports event where there isn’t a place for a photographer or there is a need to freeze a moment from different perspectives we use remote technology – cameras triggered by cable wire or with a wireless transmitter. We wanted to make impossible things possible; just like the athletes at the Olympic games.

Reuters photographer Pawel Kopczynski and I have been developing since the 2009 athletics World Championships in Berlin a new technology, which enables Reuters sports photography to shoot pictures from unusual angles and make them available to our customers around the world in minutes. We tested the technology at the World Athletics Championships in Daegu, South Korea and at the world indoor athletics championships in Istanbul.

At the upcoming Olympics for the first time we are using robotic cameras made specifically for the high elevated roof positions that can only be covered by a remote camera and not by a photographer.

Over the next few weeks until the Olympic Games open on July 27, I will install our new robotic cameras, often using climbing equipment. From now on, getting up early in the morning and spending more than 12 hours at the various venues is my daily business as a photographer to make this picture dream come true.

Even before the boxing arena is completed, I have installed the first of several robotic remote cameras at the Excel arena (one of the Olympic venues) with the help of our technician Colin Dowson.

The robotic camera can be released by a photographer over wireless transmitters or externally triggered by a cable. All images are directly transferred into our Paneikon remote editing system and from there can be transmitted on the wire.

Moreover, the movement of the camera can be controlled along each axis and the camera operator can control the zoom lens remotely with a joystick.

A lot of athletes will look into these robotic cameras but they will never see the photographer behind the lens. They will only see the image when it has been sent around the world.

Every year I know how my Labour day will end in Berlin. May day concludes in Kreuzberg with riots between radical leftists, the so-called “Autonomen” (autonomists), masked and wearing mostly black clothes and the police.

Since 1987, May Day has become known for very violent riots in Berlin’s Kreuzberg or Prenzlauerberg districts. This annual ritual is repeated but with less violence in recent years. Three years before the Berlin wall came down, violent riots broke out in West Berlin by radical leftists during a demonstration in Kreuzberg, where protesters set cars on fire, built barricades and looted a supermarket.

After Germany’s reunification in 1990, the riots moved to the eastern district of Prenzlauerberg. Riots often broke out during Walpurgis night, on the eve of May Day. That’s the history of the 25-year-old bad tradition in Berlin.

To work in such an environment requires good planning and experience in how to cover riots. In the old days when we shot on film, one of the photographers left the scene as soon we had our first riot pictures, to develop the film, print or later scan the negatives and then send on the wire.

After we changed our technology in 1998 to digital, we were able to stay longer on the spot. One photographer collected the memory cards of his colleagues and would start editing and filing from one of the Turkish Kebab restaurants in Kreuzberg.

Today we have a much more comfortable workflow – no laptops anymore to edit and file the pictures to the desk. We are able to send our images directly from the camera using a wireless lan transmitter attached to the camera body. We have manpower to edit and send the photos out to clients with the help of our own remote editing system. If the mobile phone network is stable enough in such a crowd during riots, you can stay much longer on the spot, taking pictures and transmitting the best frames fast to the desk.

What a change from developing film to digital photography. The sensitivity of the latest generation of digital cameras is amazing, you can even shoot pictures on ASA 12800. Pictures shot with available light are more atmospheric and without using flash, you are more likely to stay undiscovered as a photojournalist during riots.

We always use our own personal protective gear, like a stab vest, helmet and cleaning liquid against pepper spray during such riots. Over the last 20 years the protective equipment helped me to avoid being seriously injured during the riots.

But one thing remains each year; the streets are always covered with shards, bottles and stones.

A lot has been written about Andres Behring Breivik, the 33 year-old Norwegian man who a year ago was unknown.

He lived completely withdrawn on a small farm far from Oslo, alone to work on his diabolical plan. He built bombs to explode in central Oslo, and in the following chaos drove to Utoeya island and shot as many teenagers as possible. In all, he killed 77 people that day.

Today, for the first time, I looked directly into the eyes of this man – the eyes of a mass murderer.

Back on the afternoon of July 22nd, I heard the first news about what was happening in downtown Oslo and on the island of Utoeya. Of course at that time, no one knew the full dimension of these two attacks. I took the very first flight from Berlin to Oslo, then drove straight through the night to Utoeya island. The first photographs I took were of survivors. As the number of victims on the island grew, clues emerged as to what terrible tragedy was hitting this country.

It was early the next morning when a colleague and I rented a boat to go to the island. Red Cross boats were everywhere, as were police searching for bodies in the Tyrifjorden lake. As we approached the island I looked through my telephoto lens at the white sheets on the shore. The closer we got, the more and more precise the details became. Shoes, jeans and feet. The bodies of the victims were still laying on the shore.

That photograph burned into my memory – the white sheets on the gray rock of Utoeya island and the eerie silence of Tyrifjorden lake, broken only by the monotonous sound of motor boats.

I came back to Oslo, to be in the the same room with defendant Breivik on the first day of his trial. It was a sunny but chilly morning and I was one of hundreds of journalists standing in a long line.

All my colleagues were in a very quiet mood, not only because they were tired but also curious about what would happen when Breivik entered the courtroom.

Passing the serious security check like at an airport, I entered the court and put myself in the next line to be one of 15 photographers allowed to enter the courtroom itself.

When I entered the room I looked for a good spot where I could see the arrival of Breivik and the place where he would sit. Around 8:30am the room was filled with relatives of the victims, survivors, the defense team of Breivik, prosecutors and journalists. The courtroom was fully occupied. It was not a big room, maybe 15 x 20 meters.

At exactly 8:53 am, Breivik entered the room, handcuffed and escorted by police officers. He wore a black suit. He stood in the front row in the center next to his lawyers. He raised his two hands up to be removed from the handcuffs by a police officer. It was quiet in the courtroom, all attention was on him.

He used this attention as soon as his right hand was free from the handcuffs. He put his clenched right hand to the left side of his chest and stretched out his arm with his fist to a salute. He wanted to provoke all.

He used the court like a stage for himself. He sat on his chair looking at the audience. It seemed as if he would smile from time to time. His eyes were bright and cold.

When the judges appeared everybody in the courtroom stood up to pay their respects. Just Breivik remained seated. He refused to accept the legitimacy of the court, and consequently didnn’t stand. The first session started.

It was a scary feeling that a man who killed 77 people was standing opposite me, less than four meters away, and I was looking through my lens at his eyes. He was looking nervously around, talking to his lawyer and trying to be cool, a controlled impression.

I tried as much as possible to take pictures of everything that happened in front of me, trying to get any angle. Using my wide-angle 14mm to 300mm on my camera bodies.

Breivik was asked by the judge whether he felt guilty or not, which he denied. At 9:16 am all photographers, except two pool photographers, had to leave the court for the day. It was a depressing feeling when I left the room. My photos were already wirelessly transmitted while photographing in the courtroom to our Berlin picture desk, where my colleagues cropped and captioned them and sent them out on our picture wire around the world.

Today I looked into the motionless, cold eyes of the mass murderer Andres Behring Breivik.

At the press working area we watched a live broadcast of the trial from the courtroom. As part of the prosecutor’s evidence an original telephone conversation between a young woman on Utoeya island and the police was played. The young woman, in mortal fear, described what was happening, crying and asking for help; her voice getting quieter and quieter. Then several shots were fired from the weapon of Breivik and the woman went silent.

In the hall there was dead silence, until the prosecutor continued with his remarks.

(View a slideshow of images from the trial here)

126 hours from La Hague to Gorleben; the longest ever nuclear waste transport from Germany to France

This is a retrospective on the past 10 years, during which I have covered the nuclear waste transportation from France to Germany many times. The German nuclear waste from power plants is transported in Castor (Cask for Storage and Transport of Radioactive material) containers by train to the northern German interim storage facility of Gorleben.

As the train came closer to its final destination, I would end up with only a few hours sleep, mile-long marches on foot through forests and fields and never-ending police checkpoints. But in the end each castor transport reached its intended destination.

Nuclear waste from German nuclear power plants was reprocessed at the French plant at La Hague. The train used to transport it was protected in Germany by up to 20,000 policemen. Each transportation was different, but the pictures each year were very similar. There were blockades on the railway tracks, activists chaining themselves to the tracks, peaceful and violent protests along the route and the waiting patiently for hours for the train to move further along.

But this year the protest was very violent. Thousands of activists blocked the transport route between Danneberg and Gorleben and they were displaced by police using water cannons. Local farmers constructed a concrete pyramid, which stood on the tracks. Four of them chained themselves together with a sophisticated mechanism. Specialist police tried for hours to open the mechanism and to clear the railway tracks but after more than 10 hours they gave up. The activists had won.

Ten years ago I took a very special picture, which I will never forget. An anti-nuclear activist managed to climb one of the castor containers forcing the train to stop for a while before he was removed by the police.

Nowhere in the world are anti-nuclear protest so symbolic and visible as in Gorleben. But in the end even in this agricultural region the last castor container still reached its final destination after 126 hours and 1200 kilometers (745 miles).

REUTERS/Berit Roald/Scanpix

REUTERS/Morten Holm/Scanpix

REUTERS/Per Thrana

I booked the next flight from Berlin to Oslo. I had just two and a half hours until departure. I quickly packed my equipment, took a 500 mm telephoto lens and a few days worth of personal belongings. At the airport check-in I met other journalists — a mix of foreign colleagues and the Reuters cameraman with whom I would fly to Oslo. The plane was packed, every seat occupied, mainly with journalists. This was one of the fastest routes to Norway after the bombing. There was free internet onboard so I was able to check the latest news non-stop. There was now concrete news trickling in about a shooting on Utoeya island, about 40 kilometers (24 miles) northwest of Oslo, with a number of people reported dead.

REUTERS/Jan Bjerkeli

REUTERS/Morten Edvardsen/Scanpix

REUTERS/Morten Edvardsen/Scanpix

When the plane landed in Oslo at 22:30 it was still light out and given the situation and the information about the shooting on the island Utoeya, I decided to go there immediately. I rented a car at the airport and drove off, with the help of my GPS navigation. Meanwhile I had contacted the Reuters text correspondent and our local photographer who had made one of the first pictures for us from the island. I told him that I would drive to Sundvollen, which is the closest village to the island. There was a hotel where all the survivors and their relatives were being taken. It was raining when I reached the hotel after midnight. I parked and walked into the hotel. There were rescue workers and survivors everywhere and parents who had managed to reunite their children who survived the shooting. When I asked at reception for a room for the night, I realized I was standing in a group of survivors. To stay there — or even to photograph it — was quite impossible. People were crying and hugging each other. There were reports that a considerable number of people had been killed during the shooting on Utoeya island and that there was a connection with the bombing in Oslo. It was after leaving the hotel that I took the first photos of survivors, from outside the police cordon.

It must have been about 3am when I met my colleagues and we decided to rent a boat the next day and take pictures of the island. We wanted to try to get closer to the spot.

Early in the morning we drove to the hotel where the survivors were staying and then to a campsite where we rented a boat. The Norwegian photographer Truls Brekke who knew the area very well, steered the boat in the direction of Utoeya island. Rescue workers were everywhere on lake Tyrifjorden which surrounds the island and were searching for missing victims. News reports said a total of 80 people died in the bombing and shooting.

We got closer to Utoeya, from the boat I saw white spots on the rocks along the shoreline of the island. What could have been covered with what seemed to be white blankets?

As we approached the island I connected my double converter to get a 1000mm telephoto lens. With the help of that lens I could see legs and feet under the white blankets. Everywhere on the shore were corpses of the youths shot by the Norwegian right-wing extremist Anders Breivik Behring. It was an eerie, gruesome and frightening moment. We drove around the island and when we arrived on the other side, we were finally stopped by a police boat.

The police told us nicely but firmly that we were no longer allowed to approach the island since it was a crime scene and that we should go along the shore to get back. We took the boat to a police post on the shore in order to get information on whether the media would be allowed on the island later. We were referred to the police spokesman by a policemen who stood on the shore beside a body.

The body was covered but you could see the hair. This image has been engraved in my memory — a picture which I never took with my camera. One nightmarish moment.

Later we went back to the hotel in Sundvollen, where the Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, his wife Sonya, King Harald and Crown Prince Haakon were meeting the survivors and the families of the victims and trying to comfort them.

REUTERS/Wolfgang Rattay

It was noticeable how shocked and paralyzed the Norwegians had become over the past 24 hours. The shock was followed by the mourning that shrouded the country. Nobody thought something like this could happen in Norway.

Taking pictures of the Wall had always fascinated me. Earlier in my 20th year I even rode my bike all along the west side of the 160-km (100-mile) barrier. I’ve still got the pictures I took with my trusty Altix camera.

So there I was on November 9 at the Checkpoint Charlie border crossing, waiting with hundreds of Westerners on the west side of the Cold War barrier that had split my hometown for 28 years.

At first there was nothing, but you could feel the tension rise as the crowd on the East side grew. Finally at about 9 p.m. one man came running through the crossing holding up his blue East German passport.

He dashed over to the first Westerners he saw, total strangers, embraced them and just started crying. It was an incredible sight. After that thousands came pouring through.

At 11 p.m. I heard that some people had climbed up on top of the Wall at the Brandenburg Gate, which was about two km away, and I ran over.

The 3.6-meter high Wall, which was built on East German territory, was always a no-go zone for us in the west and especially those over in the east.

But tonight everything was different.

Someone on top reached out a hand to help pull me up. It was unreal. I grew up with the Wall but never dreamed I’d be able to walk on it. Something that had always been way out of bounds was suddenly reality.

As I climbed down on the east side and walked through the Brandenburg Gate, another verboten zone, I felt like I was in a trance. This was the death strip just a few hours earlier and here I was strolling through it with hundreds of others.

I spent the night wandering through East Berlin, savoring the moment and taking hundreds of pictures. And I knew from that moment what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

I worked my way through college in Berlin selling pictures to newspapers and joined Reuters in 1992.

Looking back, the quality of most of the pictures I took that night wasn’t all that great even if the memories are.

But I’ve got one shot that sums it all up for me: two women, one from the East and one from the West, are embracing at a border crossing while an East German border guard looks on — you can tell by the look on his face that he knows the jig is up.

(Writing by Erik Kirschbaum; editing by Sonya Hepinstall)