As Tuesday dawned, what we knew about an anonymous photo album by a Nazi photographer was only what could be inferred from its 214 pictures (all but one uncaptioned). We could see he had amazing access: taking portraits of Russian and Jewish prisoners one month, standing just a few feet from Adolf Hitler the next. We knew he had been to the Eastern Front, we surmised that he worked for the Propagandakompanie and we guessed that the pretty woman in the album’s closing pages was someone special.

There was a striking divide in the album between his Eastern Front pictures, which ended with his convalescence somewhere, and the postcard pictures he took around the Bavarian countryside and in central Munich, when the young woman seemed always at his side.

It was as if war could somehow be partitioned from everyday life. And love.

Of course, that isn’t how war goes.

We now know that the photographer was Franz Krieger, a native of Salzburg, Austria, who lived until 1993. And we know that the woman was Frieda Krieger, his wife. She was killed on Nov. 17, 1944 — as was their 2-year-old daughter, Heidrun — when America’s 15th Air Force bombed Salzburg.

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

The death and devastation seen in Eastern Europe at the beginning of the album, seemingly so distant from the photographer’s own world, had enveloped Bavaria and Austria within two years and claimed most of Krieger’s family in the bargain. (A baby boy died in October 1944.)

We know all this Tuesday evening because on Tuesday morning, Lens and EinesTages, a Spiegel Online site (loosely translated as Once Upon a Time), simultaneously published posts asking readers to help us find out who had created this chilling, fascinating and unidentified document. (“Mysteries of a Nazi Photo Album” on Lens; “Das Rätsel des Nazi-Fotoalbums,” by Marc Pitzke, on EinesTages.)

Before lunchtime in New York, Harriet Scharnberg had written from Hamburg, Germany, to say:

The photographs, at least a lot of them, were taken by the photographer Franz Krieger (1914-1993). Krieger worked as a photojournalist in Salzburg, Austria. In the summer of 1941, he went to Minsk as a member of the Reichs-Autozug Deutschland. In Minsk, he took pictures of Soviet prisoners of war and he also visited the Jewish ghetto and photographed the poor people there. On his way back to Berlin, he took the pictures of Hitler meeting [Adm. Miklos] Horthy in Marienburg.

Ms. Scharnberg explained in a subsequent e-mail that she is writing her Ph.D. dissertation at Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg on German propaganda photographs depicting Jews. This is her specialty as a historian, she said. She has worked in the photo archives of the Neuengamme concentration camp memorial and at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research.

In the course of trying to learn more about photos of the Minsk ghetto, Ms. Scharnberg said, she came across the 2008 book, “The Salzburg Press Photographer Franz Krieger (1914-1993): Photojournalism in the Shadow of Nazi Propaganda and War,” by Peter F. Kramml.

“Of course, the pictures came to my mind immediately when I saw them and read the descriptions today at Spiegel Online and The New York Times Lens,” she said. We received her communiqué 3 hours 45 minutes after publishing the post.

Dr. Kramml, too, was most forthcoming, all but clinching the case for Krieger’s authorship by sending a copy of a self-portrait in a rear-view mirror identical to one of the prints in the mystery album. (Slide 16.) The city of Salzburg, Dr. Kramml said, holds 35,000 negatives by Krieger in its municipal archive. He shared the outlines of Krieger’s life:

Salzburg Municipal Archive

After graduating with a business degree from the University of Vienna, Krieger opened a business in Salzburg. But he wanted to be a photojournalist. Between 1935 and 1937, he photographed the Salzburg Festival — and stars like Marlene Dietrich. After the German annexation of Austria, Krieger went to work for the Salzburg reichsgau, a Nazi administrative subdivision. In that capacity, Dr. Kramml said, “he took most of the important pictures in Salzburg from 1938 until 1941.”

Krieger joined the Nazi Party and the Schutzstaffel, the Nazi special police, but left the SS in 1941 and became a member of the Propagandakompanie, a propaganda unit of the Wehrmacht. In August 1941, he set out on the trip to the Eastern Front that is chronicled in the album: from Berlin to Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland) to Minsk, Belarus. “Here, he took pictures of the Jewish ghetto and the soldiers’ cemetery,” Dr. Kramml wrote, adding that the Germans buried outside the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus had been killed in August.

On his way home, as Ms. Scharnberg noted, Krieger photographed the meeting in Marienburg (now Malbork, Poland) in early September 1941 between Hitler and Admiral Horthy, the regent of Hungary. Heinrich Hoffmann’s photos, on the BPK Photo Agency site, also record that event, as a commenter named Kassandra noted.

After that, Krieger left the Propagandakompanie and “became a simple soldier, a driver,” Dr. Kramml said. He began training in Bregenz, Austria, in November 1941, which explains the presence in the album of the picture captioned “Bregenz 1.1.1942.”

Private collection, via The New York Times

By August 1942, Krieger was back in Russia; this time as a supply driver. That placed him near Stalingrad. In what might be considered a lucky break, he developed jaundice and was evacuated by train before the momentous Battle of Stalingrad began. “Otherwise,” Dr. Kramml said, “he would have been surrounded.” His illness may explain the convalescent pictures toward the end of the album. Frieda Krieger was making frequent appearances in the album pages by this time, in picturesque mountain settings and around the streets of Munich.

After the war, Dr. Kramml said, Krieger picked up his business career again and left professional photography behind. He would later say that some of his wartime photographs had been given away by his mother. “Perhaps he wanted to hide them,” Dr. Kramml said. Some of those pictures — perhaps the very album that is now in the hands of a garment executive in New York who lent it to The Times — were presumed to have ended up in Bavaria. “Probably one of the U.S. soldiers in Bavaria took them to the U.S.A. after 1945,” Dr. Kramml said.

If what he says is true, it may be that the American soldier had no sense of the album’s significance, besides the remarkable proximity of prisoners and Führer. Neither, perhaps, did any subsequent owner. Neither did the editors at The Times and Der Spiegel. All we had on Tuesday morning were a few facts and a lot of conjecture.

Now, we have what journalists are always looking for: a story.

William P. O’Donnell, assistant editor and manager of image support, made the scans. J. P. Roth contributed reporting.