From an early age, I knew that both my grandfathers had fought in the Second World War. I was not able to learn about the conflict from them, but I was interested in knowing what they had lived through. The first documentary I ever saw on the topic drew me in; the plotline was as intriguing as any adventure novel, yet I understood it to be real, which made the story all the more fascinating. It also fed an interesting dichotomy where I was learning about a world so foreign and fundamentally different, yet so recent and personal. I was hooked.
In time, I bought my first major publication about the war - a Time-Life hardcover anthology:
I still remember the day. I was browsing through a line of stores along a beachfront boardwalk and stumbled upon a bookstore where the publication caught my eye. It stood upright on a shelf, opened up to a page with colorized images. The images brought history to life in a way I had never seen before, and led my youthful self to believe the publication was a unique find and well worth the purchase. Needless to say, I used my birthday money to buy it.
Today, colorized photos from the past are quite common, and the publication, which has since gone out of print, now costs less than a dollar on Amazon. Nevertheless, the book was an important part of my early understanding of the Second World War, just as it surely was for thousands of others. For that reason, I was alarmed to discover in more recent years that the images I recognized from the book, which I had trustingly accepted as documented "truth" from a "trustworthy source", are manipulated distortions. The news angered me, as if I had been manipulated, too. It also left me wondering: why do people trust those who abuse our trust?
1) Photo manipulation: a primer
In the 1920s, supporters of the Soviet Union built from the work of D.W. Griffith and became masters of using the media for persuasive and manipulative purposes. By 1925, there was Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, which incorporated various editing techniques to convey public reaction to the Soviets in a way that presented the Soviet Union most favorably. Other works followed. In addition, the Soviets made use of political posters and other published media with carefully-chosen imagery and slogans to shape public response to their movement and ideology. The Soviets even became skilled at modifying photographic imagery to promote their agenda. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin took full advantage of this emerging industry and its technological capabilities; in one famous example, he had a photograph cropped and transformed into an artistic print to emphasize his position not just as a head figure in the Soviet Union, but as the head figure:
Another photograph, shown below, was physically retouched to hide the fact that the person on the right, Nikolai Yezhov, had been associated with Stalin (Yezhov was eventually murdered by Stalin's henchmen):
In the example, note the use of a "Gaussian blur" to retouch the edited area, as is evidenced by the puffy white clouding. The Soviets used the same technique on the image below, if only for optimal aesthetic, to eliminate the man behind the Soviet cosmonaut:
It was again used to remove Grigoriy Nelyubov from photographs after the Soviet elite no longer wanted to promote him:
But photograph manipulation in the Soviet Union went well beyond making Stalin appear more powerful or erasing whoever was deemed to be problematic to the Soviet state; in 1941, following the invasion of the Soviet Union by German and Axis forces, image modification tactics were again employed to depict the Axis in a certain way. The objective was to gain worldwide support against them. Here are several examples, which show the original above each of the manipulated copies:
As the image above might leave you wondering - no, the Soviets were not the only ones to take advantage of image modification.
2) Buchenwald liberation photo
The following photo is commonly used to represent the plight of the Jews during the Second World War:
It is currently featured on the National World War II Museum website:
But it is a fake photo; the originally-produced image, shown below, appears in the following, rare publication:
Note the difference...
Critically, when the mainstream-approved, albeit distorted photo is enlarged, the signs and symptoms of manipulation become apparent:
Notably, the version of the photo with the naked standing man creates an entire narrative that the photo lacks without him.
3) Hanging man in Buchenwald
In this example, the theme to pay attention to is the movie industry's power to shape our understanding of reality - as well as the power of mislabeling and captioning still frames. The results can be just as dramatic as any actual alternation of a physical image. The image appears in the Time-Life book I had purchased and instantly recognized in other contexts. In the book, the image was accompanied with the following caption: "[s]uspended by their wrists, two tortured inmates dangle from trees near Buchenwald. An SS guard stands over a fallen victim."
What the book fails to establish is that the image is not from Buchenwald, but rather from a post-war Communist East German film studio known as DEFA, dating back to 1958. The truth about the image was only revealed in 1996. The question is: who originally presented the image as authentic - and did so without doing the research?
Time-Life was not the only one to mislead the public about the image; as late as 2009, museums sometimes still featured it in their displays. Berlin's Jewish Museum, for example, had the full photo on public display on canvas, blown-up to near life-size proportion, in a display about Jews suffering in concentration camps.
3) The legacy of Buchenwald: a psychological warfare project?
More recently, I discovered that Time-Life, the company which had published my cherished book, had been involved with Hollywood filmmaker Billy Wilder and a division of the US intelligence committee that included Robert A. McClure and directly documented the events at Buchenwald in 1945. As part of that documentation, a number of materials were displayed to the German public there, including a lampshade that was supposedly made from human skin, a shrunken head and other dubious peculiarities. The authenticity of these items has been repeatedly called into question.
4) Photo alleging to portray Jews being killed near Ivangorod in 1942
The following image is commonly featured in displays and books dealing with the Second World War. It is presented as something like a "smoking gun" that shows the mass murder of Jews during that period as part of the so-called "Final Solution", in an event now known as the Holocaust:
Not surprisingly, the image appears in the Time-Life book, as shown below, as part of the section on the Second World War that purports to document the Holocaust:
Looking at what the image conveys, it is easy to see why; one sees a man in uniform who is armed and appears to be taking aim at a woman who is helpless, defenseless and holding a small, presumably innocent child tightly in her arms. In short, the image contains all the emotion, power dynamics and brutality that the public has been shown of, and has come to associate with, the Holocaust. But there are several problems with the image, raising the question whether there has been over the years a deliberate attempt to manipulate the public with it.
First of all, the image we are often shown is actually cropped; below is a less-cropped version, which is used on Wikipedia:
My Time-Life book features an even less cropped version of the same image, spread over two pages:
The caption at the bottom of the page guides the viewer, and states: "On a bleak plain in the Nazi-occupied East, an SS trooper takes aim at a Jewish mother and child while frightened peasants prepare a grave for them."
But let us forget all of these cropped versions and look at the full picture - or, at least, all of its known parts:
Several things immediately jump out at you. First, there is a body at the foot of the soldier:
In the Time-Life book, the body is blurred and lightened out of existence, as shown below:
The image on Wikipedia had the body not only lightened out of existence, but cropped out for good measure.
And what about the guns on the left side of the full picture?
They were cropped out of the Time-Life book image:
That is also the case with the version of the image that Wikipedia chose to feature:
One might argue that at the cropping and removals simply eliminate the distraction and allow the viewer to focus on certain parts, like the soldier and the helpless mother with the child or, when a more complete image is used, the people crouching in front of her. In that case, there really would not be much at issue here. But take a closer look at a version without such tampering and you will see several important things. To begin, let us concentrate on the dark, shadowy patch below the man pictured with the gun:
The dark patch kind of looks like a shadow, but does not really sit like one. It hardly fits the natural landscape and does not trace back to anything observable. It also ends too abruptly to be attached to anything out of frame and there is even an unnatural-looking raised area in the middle of the dark patch:
What is that?
Perhaps this is a mark left from tampering with the image or transporting it, which leads one to question whether the black patch ever really existed in the landscape. We also have to wonder if it was possibly even inserted to cover up something that took away from the narrative we are expected to believe the image conveys. Here, it is important to note that, with all the cropping and high contrast editing, the black patch just looks like a shadow created by some out-of-frame element, regardless whether that means another soldier, a landscape object or something else. In other words, whatever it was, there seems like a deliberate attempt was made to make it less distracting:
But there is more. Have another look at the full picture - or rather, its known parts:
Do you see anything peculiar that disappeared in the modified versions of the photograph? If not, recall the white blurs on the photos manipulated by the Soviets, like the ones below:
The issue becomes more apparent if you colorize the photograph:
What could possibly be the explanation for the giant smoke-like blur that extends downwards from the sky, or the halo of a blur that appears around the stick object, as shown above? Indeed, notice that the same smoky-white discoloration wraps around the body of the woman and the child. Perhaps these features suggest some sort of insertion into a landscape stock image - that is, the woman and child were not part of the original photo. The same is maybe true of the soldier, especially as there is a faintly visible, thin line to the right of his leg which extends the length of his leg and outline. That supports the theory that the solider was perhaps not even part of this landscape photo, but also spliced over it:
Finally, notice how the body lying on the ground, which doesn't have these features, is also a different shade than all the other, highly-silhouetted figures. The shading on the body lying on the ground is really the only part that looks like it is part of the natural, original photograph. So maybe that was the original photo: a body lying in a field somewhere.
But let's have a closer look at the only man pictured holding a gun:
Does that look like the face of a German to you? It fits the profile of a Soviet soldier practically to the point of caricature, at least as well as our earlier, admittedly-staged photo reveals a clearly Russian face. Moreover, for the picture in question, note the fat, black line across the suspicious soldier's orbital region/eye area. It happens to hide part of the facial area that would provide the best opportunity to determine the soldier's ethnic profile - especially if his features, given the Mongoloid facial structure, were to reveal an epicanthic fold characteristic of people from Siberia, Mongolia and the Far East (i.e. Soviet). If you wanted to hide the fact that you took a photo of a Soviet actor posing in a German uniform and inserted it into a landscape photo, that is exactly what you would do: find a way to blacken out the facial features. Combine this with the fact that the high-contrast of the soldier does not really fit the image, add to to all the other problems (the contrast issues with the other figures, the edit lines running parallel to the man's trousers and the smoky blur around the periphery of the figures) and there is reason to suspect that there was some image-tampering going on.
Finally, there is the history of the image to consider;as it turns out, the photo was first presented to authorities by a Polish photojournalist named Jerzy Tomaszewski. Tomaszewski worked in a secret, Warsaw-based photography lab called Foto-Ris, which served the underground Polish resistance by producing war-time propaganda. The lab was fully capable of doing things like editing and manipulating photos for propaganda purposes - and would have plenty of reasons for doing so.
Tomaszewski claimed that he had merely intercepted the image after it was seized in a Warsaw Post Office as it was being delivered from Soviet territory to Germany. Defending himself against accusations that the image was fake, Tomaszewski produced another photo that he alleged had been intercepted. It featured one of the same civilians and several soldiers in uniform standing. The image had the same inscription on the back, with the date and location, with handwriting comparably similar to the handwriting on the other, more controversial photo. Tomaszewski claimed the images were part of a series of shots that he had found all in the same attempted mailing.
Apart from whether Tomaszewski is a reliable witness or not, looking beyond his motivation to not go from fame to fraud and potential impact in so far as the public's understanding of the Holocaust, the fact that somebody wrote on the back of the two photos in the same handwriting proves nothing. Nor does the fact that multiple takes exist featuring the same citizens or men in uniform. Likewise, the idea that the Soviets would not be able to sew a uniform that looked like a German one or take a German one based on all the dead German soldiers lying around their country, is laughable, considering the Soviets already did exactly that.
Part of Tomaszewski's theory also conflicts with what we know about history. As this book explains, all mail which the German soldiers sent from the Soviet Union back to Germany was opened and searched through by German military services. The objective was to locate and censor whatever was necessary to hide the gravity of the situation on the war front and preserve morale back home. And, at least according to the mainstream interpretation of history, censorship was ''also'' practiced to cover up the genocide that the German forces were supposedly involved in. After all, that same commitment to secrecy is why we are told there is no order in direct language revealing what we are told was happening in the context of the Final Solution; that is why, we are told, the meeting minutes from the Wannsee Conference do not give any explicit indication of what was supposedly happening; that is why, we are told, Allied intelligence, despite cracking the German code, could never produce a single memorandum detailing what we are told the German forces were carrying out, in explicit terms. We are also told German soldiers on the Eastern Front were well aware of what was supposedly happening, but sworn to secrecy. If we accept everything we are told in the mainstream as truth, then, the decision to send incriminating photos back to Germany in a self-addressed letter would have been suicide. Moreover, a photo depicting something that was supposedly happening and no ordinary civilian was to know about - which Hitler, the Wannsee Conference attendees and every commander refused to speak of in explicit terms - would have most certainly been thrown out. Just as importantly, the envelope with the pictures, which the Polish post claimed to have intercepted in transit, was never produced as part of the record. So, we do not know who the letter was addressed to, to check the authenticity, just as we do not know who sent it or when it was stamped, which is really what would be clear and convincing evidence that the image is not a forgery. Unfortunately, all we have is this photo and the myriad of questions it raises.
5) Photo of prisoners in Nordhausen who were allegedly burned alive by the Germans in a barn
When the British bombed Nordhausen on April 3 and 4, 1945, about 8800 people were killed as well as an additional 1500 sick prisoners who had been interned at the Boelcke-Kaserne in the area. It is unknown how many survivors died in the week that followed - until April 11, 1945, when the U.S. Army arrived and laid out the dead, away from the rubble.
Covering up the bombing and utilizing its aftermath for propaganda purposes, the U.S. forces claimed that the Germans had lit the prisoner facilities on fire and burned it to the ground. Time (before the merger with Life to create Time-Life) was on site to frame the narrative in this manner, giving rise to the following, which was presented as evidence of German war crimes:
The caption for the Time photograph states: "At Nordhausen, bodies of almost 3,000 slave laborers are laid out along a bombed street before burial by U.S. troops. These dead once worked at the Nordhausen underground factory which made parts for V-1 and V-2 bombs. The plant was started in September 1943 and its construction probably cost the lives of 20,000 slaves who died from starvation, overwork and beatings."
Notice how the caption fails to indicate that the bodies laid out in the street were victims of the bombings, and instead throws in some "probably" assessment which, in connection with the bodies in the image, could lead the viewer to conclude that the dead pictured died from starvation, overwork and beatings going back to 1943, save the fact that two-year old corpses would look much, much different if that old.
The US produced the following newsreel for the public about Nordhausen, which is just as disinformative:
Today, the false narrative that carefully navigated around the cause/effect of the US bombings has been corrected - but not before it ostensibly led American troops to go on a murdering spree in what was left of the city of Nordhausen, targeting the local population. This was said to be "revenge" for discovering the deceased prisoners laid out there, and assuming - from the newsreels and all the propaganda - that the Germans did it.
Very similar was the situation at Dachau.
6) Dachau gas chamber
Photographs captioned like the one below, US Army photo SC 206194, were used to forward the false claim that Dachau was an extermination camp equipped with gas chambers:
The original caption stated: "these chambers were used by the Nazi guards for killing prisoners of the infamous Dachau concentration camp."
The rumors of gas chamber exterminations had begun long before the Allies had even reached Dachau, and quite possibly influenced what the Allied troops also did afterwards here. But the truth is Dachau did not have gas chambers for any purpose other than delousing (spraying clothing to kill lice and thus prevent typhus).
7) Mass-murdered prisoners at Dachau
Yad Vashem - a Holocaust memorial site - captions the following image of Dachau as "Prisoners' bodies cast in a corner after liberation":
The caption is worded so ambiguously - and, if done on purpose, so slyly - that the viewer might conclude the prisoner bodies mentioned were those of the inmates held by the Germans and discovered by the US in 1945, when the Germans were "caught red-handed". But a closer look suggests otherwise. Below we see the same, textured wall in the image above, as well as the cart-like object from a different angle. You can see several men up against the wall with their hands up while the American soldier aims his machine gun, and others are already lying dead on the ground. And just who is lying dead on the ground?
So it appears those "bodies cast in in a corner" were theoretically prisoners, but not the kind expected; they were Germans who the Allied forces ''should have'' taken prisoner under the standards of international law, but instead murdered. We know this for a fact because, when pressed for details after the incident, those under investigation Lieutenant Howard Buchnercame clean about what the American forces had done:
Meanwhile, the prisoners held at Dachau, which Yad Vashem failed to distinguish from the murdered victims along the wall, were liberated:
The prisoners actually look relatively healthy and well-fed, which is odd considering Dachau was a concentration camp for political prisoners - i.e. those tied to and sympathetic towards the Soviet Union. One would think such individuals would instead be singled out for torture and abuse, especially in retribution as word spread about the atrocities that the Soviets unleashed on the retreating and nearly-conquered German people. Perhaps the Germans at Dachau did not have a handle on the whole "point the machine gun and paint them full of hot lead" tactic that the Americans evidently understood well? Ironic.
8) "Symbols of the Final Solution"
Here are two photographs from the Time-Life book which appear above the caption: "Symbols of the "Final Solution."
To recall, the Final Solution was, according to the conventional understanding of history, a plan established by German leadership at the Wannsee Conference in 1942 to exterminate the Jews of Europe. But the first photograph, to the left, merely shows the number that was tattooed on a camp inmate. The connection to the Final Solution - mass extermination - is not established, especially if the person was alive and holding out his or her arm to pose for the photograph.
The second photograph, on the right, is of a skull that was found atop a German vehicle. It is not clear under what circumstances the skull was left there, nor is it clear to whom the skull belongs or whether that skull has anything to do with the Final Solution. The caption does not specify who the skull belong to either, and does not clarify that the skull was not that of a combat casualty. It is worth noting that the skulls of deceased Japanese were a collector's item for some Americans who came across them in the Pacific.
9) "A convict released by the Germans" and the "pogroms against Jews" in the formerly Soviet-controlled Baltic region
A considerable part of the Time-Life book focuses on the violence that took place inside the Soviet-occupied Baltic states in June 1941, as the Germans and their allies in Central Europe invaded the Soviet Union. According to the Time-Life book, in the midst of the chaos, Jews were pummeled and clubbed and stomped".
To support its claim, the book features a snapshot of the man being attacked, complete with the following caption: "a convict released by the Germans uses a lead pipe on a Jewish pogrom victim in Lithuania. The pogrom took place on June 28, 1941, just days after the invasion of the Soviet Union."
Here is another popular image from the event, which contains all the emotion, power dynamics and brutality that the public has come to associate with the Holocaust. Not surprisingly, it is used to demonstrate such:
For Time-Lifeand the unquestioning viewer/reader, the violence in that photograph existed in a vacuum of time and place and demonstrates that people are anti-Semitic and genocidal when told by Nazis that Jews are bad. But the photo is important for what it does not show, along with what it does not tell and how it is captioned.
In time, I bought my first major publication about the war - a Time-Life hardcover anthology:
I still remember the day. I was browsing through a line of stores along a beachfront boardwalk and stumbled upon a bookstore where the publication caught my eye. It stood upright on a shelf, opened up to a page with colorized images. The images brought history to life in a way I had never seen before, and led my youthful self to believe the publication was a unique find and well worth the purchase. Needless to say, I used my birthday money to buy it.
Today, colorized photos from the past are quite common, and the publication, which has since gone out of print, now costs less than a dollar on Amazon. Nevertheless, the book was an important part of my early understanding of the Second World War, just as it surely was for thousands of others. For that reason, I was alarmed to discover in more recent years that the images I recognized from the book, which I had trustingly accepted as documented "truth" from a "trustworthy source", are manipulated distortions. The news angered me, as if I had been manipulated, too. It also left me wondering: why do people trust those who abuse our trust?
1) Photo manipulation: a primer
In the 1920s, supporters of the Soviet Union built from the work of D.W. Griffith and became masters of using the media for persuasive and manipulative purposes. By 1925, there was Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, which incorporated various editing techniques to convey public reaction to the Soviets in a way that presented the Soviet Union most favorably. Other works followed. In addition, the Soviets made use of political posters and other published media with carefully-chosen imagery and slogans to shape public response to their movement and ideology. The Soviets even became skilled at modifying photographic imagery to promote their agenda. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin took full advantage of this emerging industry and its technological capabilities; in one famous example, he had a photograph cropped and transformed into an artistic print to emphasize his position not just as a head figure in the Soviet Union, but as the head figure:
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| Top left: the original photo, followed by increasingly-selective renderings |
Another photograph, shown below, was physically retouched to hide the fact that the person on the right, Nikolai Yezhov, had been associated with Stalin (Yezhov was eventually murdered by Stalin's henchmen):
In the example, note the use of a "Gaussian blur" to retouch the edited area, as is evidenced by the puffy white clouding. The Soviets used the same technique on the image below, if only for optimal aesthetic, to eliminate the man behind the Soviet cosmonaut:
It was again used to remove Grigoriy Nelyubov from photographs after the Soviet elite no longer wanted to promote him:
But photograph manipulation in the Soviet Union went well beyond making Stalin appear more powerful or erasing whoever was deemed to be problematic to the Soviet state; in 1941, following the invasion of the Soviet Union by German and Axis forces, image modification tactics were again employed to depict the Axis in a certain way. The objective was to gain worldwide support against them. Here are several examples, which show the original above each of the manipulated copies:
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| In the manipulated photo above, note the facial features of the man, suggesting he is of Russian heritage. Also, note the white smudge/Gaussian blur where the figure in the original photo was edited out. |
As the image above might leave you wondering - no, the Soviets were not the only ones to take advantage of image modification.
2) Buchenwald liberation photo
The following photo is commonly used to represent the plight of the Jews during the Second World War:
 |
| A former Buchenwald inmate, holding up the widely-used photograph |
It is currently featured on the National World War II Museum website:
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| Website of the National WWII Museum |
But it is a fake photo; the originally-produced image, shown below, appears in the following, rare publication:
Note the difference...
Critically, when the mainstream-approved, albeit distorted photo is enlarged, the signs and symptoms of manipulation become apparent:
 |
The standing man's shoulder is blended into the post (above). No wonder the museums crop the image (below). |
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| Indeed, note where the photo - now blown up to be a print on the wall - ends, just before the manipulation could be present. Above, we see U.S. President Obama looking at the print during a tour of the Buchenwald Museum in 2012. |
Notably, the version of the photo with the naked standing man creates an entire narrative that the photo lacks without him.
3) Hanging man in Buchenwald
In this example, the theme to pay attention to is the movie industry's power to shape our understanding of reality - as well as the power of mislabeling and captioning still frames. The results can be just as dramatic as any actual alternation of a physical image. The image appears in the Time-Life book I had purchased and instantly recognized in other contexts. In the book, the image was accompanied with the following caption: "[s]uspended by their wrists, two tortured inmates dangle from trees near Buchenwald. An SS guard stands over a fallen victim."
What the book fails to establish is that the image is not from Buchenwald, but rather from a post-war Communist East German film studio known as DEFA, dating back to 1958. The truth about the image was only revealed in 1996. The question is: who originally presented the image as authentic - and did so without doing the research?
Time-Life was not the only one to mislead the public about the image; as late as 2009, museums sometimes still featured it in their displays. Berlin's Jewish Museum, for example, had the full photo on public display on canvas, blown-up to near life-size proportion, in a display about Jews suffering in concentration camps.
3) The legacy of Buchenwald: a psychological warfare project?
More recently, I discovered that Time-Life, the company which had published my cherished book, had been involved with Hollywood filmmaker Billy Wilder and a division of the US intelligence committee that included Robert A. McClure and directly documented the events at Buchenwald in 1945. As part of that documentation, a number of materials were displayed to the German public there, including a lampshade that was supposedly made from human skin, a shrunken head and other dubious peculiarities. The authenticity of these items has been repeatedly called into question.
4) Photo alleging to portray Jews being killed near Ivangorod in 1942
The following image is commonly featured in displays and books dealing with the Second World War. It is presented as something like a "smoking gun" that shows the mass murder of Jews during that period as part of the so-called "Final Solution", in an event now known as the Holocaust:
Not surprisingly, the image appears in the Time-Life book, as shown below, as part of the section on the Second World War that purports to document the Holocaust:
Looking at what the image conveys, it is easy to see why; one sees a man in uniform who is armed and appears to be taking aim at a woman who is helpless, defenseless and holding a small, presumably innocent child tightly in her arms. In short, the image contains all the emotion, power dynamics and brutality that the public has been shown of, and has come to associate with, the Holocaust. But there are several problems with the image, raising the question whether there has been over the years a deliberate attempt to manipulate the public with it.
First of all, the image we are often shown is actually cropped; below is a less-cropped version, which is used on Wikipedia:
My Time-Life book features an even less cropped version of the same image, spread over two pages:
The caption at the bottom of the page guides the viewer, and states: "On a bleak plain in the Nazi-occupied East, an SS trooper takes aim at a Jewish mother and child while frightened peasants prepare a grave for them."
But let us forget all of these cropped versions and look at the full picture - or, at least, all of its known parts:
Several things immediately jump out at you. First, there is a body at the foot of the soldier:
In the Time-Life book, the body is blurred and lightened out of existence, as shown below:
The image on Wikipedia had the body not only lightened out of existence, but cropped out for good measure.
And what about the guns on the left side of the full picture?
They were cropped out of the Time-Life book image:
That is also the case with the version of the image that Wikipedia chose to feature:
One might argue that at the cropping and removals simply eliminate the distraction and allow the viewer to focus on certain parts, like the soldier and the helpless mother with the child or, when a more complete image is used, the people crouching in front of her. In that case, there really would not be much at issue here. But take a closer look at a version without such tampering and you will see several important things. To begin, let us concentrate on the dark, shadowy patch below the man pictured with the gun:
The dark patch kind of looks like a shadow, but does not really sit like one. It hardly fits the natural landscape and does not trace back to anything observable. It also ends too abruptly to be attached to anything out of frame and there is even an unnatural-looking raised area in the middle of the dark patch:
What is that?
Perhaps this is a mark left from tampering with the image or transporting it, which leads one to question whether the black patch ever really existed in the landscape. We also have to wonder if it was possibly even inserted to cover up something that took away from the narrative we are expected to believe the image conveys. Here, it is important to note that, with all the cropping and high contrast editing, the black patch just looks like a shadow created by some out-of-frame element, regardless whether that means another soldier, a landscape object or something else. In other words, whatever it was, there seems like a deliberate attempt was made to make it less distracting:
But there is more. Have another look at the full picture - or rather, its known parts:
Do you see anything peculiar that disappeared in the modified versions of the photograph? If not, recall the white blurs on the photos manipulated by the Soviets, like the ones below:
The issue becomes more apparent if you colorize the photograph:
What could possibly be the explanation for the giant smoke-like blur that extends downwards from the sky, or the halo of a blur that appears around the stick object, as shown above? Indeed, notice that the same smoky-white discoloration wraps around the body of the woman and the child. Perhaps these features suggest some sort of insertion into a landscape stock image - that is, the woman and child were not part of the original photo. The same is maybe true of the soldier, especially as there is a faintly visible, thin line to the right of his leg which extends the length of his leg and outline. That supports the theory that the solider was perhaps not even part of this landscape photo, but also spliced over it:
Finally, notice how the body lying on the ground, which doesn't have these features, is also a different shade than all the other, highly-silhouetted figures. The shading on the body lying on the ground is really the only part that looks like it is part of the natural, original photograph. So maybe that was the original photo: a body lying in a field somewhere.
But let's have a closer look at the only man pictured holding a gun:
Does that look like the face of a German to you? It fits the profile of a Soviet soldier practically to the point of caricature, at least as well as our earlier, admittedly-staged photo reveals a clearly Russian face. Moreover, for the picture in question, note the fat, black line across the suspicious soldier's orbital region/eye area. It happens to hide part of the facial area that would provide the best opportunity to determine the soldier's ethnic profile - especially if his features, given the Mongoloid facial structure, were to reveal an epicanthic fold characteristic of people from Siberia, Mongolia and the Far East (i.e. Soviet). If you wanted to hide the fact that you took a photo of a Soviet actor posing in a German uniform and inserted it into a landscape photo, that is exactly what you would do: find a way to blacken out the facial features. Combine this with the fact that the high-contrast of the soldier does not really fit the image, add to to all the other problems (the contrast issues with the other figures, the edit lines running parallel to the man's trousers and the smoky blur around the periphery of the figures) and there is reason to suspect that there was some image-tampering going on.
Finally, there is the history of the image to consider;as it turns out, the photo was first presented to authorities by a Polish photojournalist named Jerzy Tomaszewski. Tomaszewski worked in a secret, Warsaw-based photography lab called Foto-Ris, which served the underground Polish resistance by producing war-time propaganda. The lab was fully capable of doing things like editing and manipulating photos for propaganda purposes - and would have plenty of reasons for doing so.
Tomaszewski claimed that he had merely intercepted the image after it was seized in a Warsaw Post Office as it was being delivered from Soviet territory to Germany. Defending himself against accusations that the image was fake, Tomaszewski produced another photo that he alleged had been intercepted. It featured one of the same civilians and several soldiers in uniform standing. The image had the same inscription on the back, with the date and location, with handwriting comparably similar to the handwriting on the other, more controversial photo. Tomaszewski claimed the images were part of a series of shots that he had found all in the same attempted mailing.
Apart from whether Tomaszewski is a reliable witness or not, looking beyond his motivation to not go from fame to fraud and potential impact in so far as the public's understanding of the Holocaust, the fact that somebody wrote on the back of the two photos in the same handwriting proves nothing. Nor does the fact that multiple takes exist featuring the same citizens or men in uniform. Likewise, the idea that the Soviets would not be able to sew a uniform that looked like a German one or take a German one based on all the dead German soldiers lying around their country, is laughable, considering the Soviets already did exactly that.
Part of Tomaszewski's theory also conflicts with what we know about history. As this book explains, all mail which the German soldiers sent from the Soviet Union back to Germany was opened and searched through by German military services. The objective was to locate and censor whatever was necessary to hide the gravity of the situation on the war front and preserve morale back home. And, at least according to the mainstream interpretation of history, censorship was ''also'' practiced to cover up the genocide that the German forces were supposedly involved in. After all, that same commitment to secrecy is why we are told there is no order in direct language revealing what we are told was happening in the context of the Final Solution; that is why, we are told, the meeting minutes from the Wannsee Conference do not give any explicit indication of what was supposedly happening; that is why, we are told, Allied intelligence, despite cracking the German code, could never produce a single memorandum detailing what we are told the German forces were carrying out, in explicit terms. We are also told German soldiers on the Eastern Front were well aware of what was supposedly happening, but sworn to secrecy. If we accept everything we are told in the mainstream as truth, then, the decision to send incriminating photos back to Germany in a self-addressed letter would have been suicide. Moreover, a photo depicting something that was supposedly happening and no ordinary civilian was to know about - which Hitler, the Wannsee Conference attendees and every commander refused to speak of in explicit terms - would have most certainly been thrown out. Just as importantly, the envelope with the pictures, which the Polish post claimed to have intercepted in transit, was never produced as part of the record. So, we do not know who the letter was addressed to, to check the authenticity, just as we do not know who sent it or when it was stamped, which is really what would be clear and convincing evidence that the image is not a forgery. Unfortunately, all we have is this photo and the myriad of questions it raises.
5) Photo of prisoners in Nordhausen who were allegedly burned alive by the Germans in a barn
When the British bombed Nordhausen on April 3 and 4, 1945, about 8800 people were killed as well as an additional 1500 sick prisoners who had been interned at the Boelcke-Kaserne in the area. It is unknown how many survivors died in the week that followed - until April 11, 1945, when the U.S. Army arrived and laid out the dead, away from the rubble.
Covering up the bombing and utilizing its aftermath for propaganda purposes, the U.S. forces claimed that the Germans had lit the prisoner facilities on fire and burned it to the ground. Time (before the merger with Life to create Time-Life) was on site to frame the narrative in this manner, giving rise to the following, which was presented as evidence of German war crimes:
The caption for the Time photograph states: "At Nordhausen, bodies of almost 3,000 slave laborers are laid out along a bombed street before burial by U.S. troops. These dead once worked at the Nordhausen underground factory which made parts for V-1 and V-2 bombs. The plant was started in September 1943 and its construction probably cost the lives of 20,000 slaves who died from starvation, overwork and beatings."
Notice how the caption fails to indicate that the bodies laid out in the street were victims of the bombings, and instead throws in some "probably" assessment which, in connection with the bodies in the image, could lead the viewer to conclude that the dead pictured died from starvation, overwork and beatings going back to 1943, save the fact that two-year old corpses would look much, much different if that old.
The US produced the following newsreel for the public about Nordhausen, which is just as disinformative:
Today, the false narrative that carefully navigated around the cause/effect of the US bombings has been corrected - but not before it ostensibly led American troops to go on a murdering spree in what was left of the city of Nordhausen, targeting the local population. This was said to be "revenge" for discovering the deceased prisoners laid out there, and assuming - from the newsreels and all the propaganda - that the Germans did it.
Very similar was the situation at Dachau.
6) Dachau gas chamber
Photographs captioned like the one below, US Army photo SC 206194, were used to forward the false claim that Dachau was an extermination camp equipped with gas chambers:
The original caption stated: "these chambers were used by the Nazi guards for killing prisoners of the infamous Dachau concentration camp."
The rumors of gas chamber exterminations had begun long before the Allies had even reached Dachau, and quite possibly influenced what the Allied troops also did afterwards here. But the truth is Dachau did not have gas chambers for any purpose other than delousing (spraying clothing to kill lice and thus prevent typhus).
7) Mass-murdered prisoners at Dachau
Yad Vashem - a Holocaust memorial site - captions the following image of Dachau as "Prisoners' bodies cast in a corner after liberation":
The caption is worded so ambiguously - and, if done on purpose, so slyly - that the viewer might conclude the prisoner bodies mentioned were those of the inmates held by the Germans and discovered by the US in 1945, when the Germans were "caught red-handed". But a closer look suggests otherwise. Below we see the same, textured wall in the image above, as well as the cart-like object from a different angle. You can see several men up against the wall with their hands up while the American soldier aims his machine gun, and others are already lying dead on the ground. And just who is lying dead on the ground?
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| The eagle on the breast of the uniform gives away that these bodies are German |
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| ...as does the American soldier squatting triumphantly over top of him |
So it appears those "bodies cast in in a corner" were theoretically prisoners, but not the kind expected; they were Germans who the Allied forces ''should have'' taken prisoner under the standards of international law, but instead murdered. We know this for a fact because, when pressed for details after the incident, those under investigation Lieutenant Howard Buchnercame clean about what the American forces had done:
Meanwhile, the prisoners held at Dachau, which Yad Vashem failed to distinguish from the murdered victims along the wall, were liberated:
The prisoners actually look relatively healthy and well-fed, which is odd considering Dachau was a concentration camp for political prisoners - i.e. those tied to and sympathetic towards the Soviet Union. One would think such individuals would instead be singled out for torture and abuse, especially in retribution as word spread about the atrocities that the Soviets unleashed on the retreating and nearly-conquered German people. Perhaps the Germans at Dachau did not have a handle on the whole "point the machine gun and paint them full of hot lead" tactic that the Americans evidently understood well? Ironic.
8) "Symbols of the Final Solution"
Here are two photographs from the Time-Life book which appear above the caption: "Symbols of the "Final Solution."
To recall, the Final Solution was, according to the conventional understanding of history, a plan established by German leadership at the Wannsee Conference in 1942 to exterminate the Jews of Europe. But the first photograph, to the left, merely shows the number that was tattooed on a camp inmate. The connection to the Final Solution - mass extermination - is not established, especially if the person was alive and holding out his or her arm to pose for the photograph.
The second photograph, on the right, is of a skull that was found atop a German vehicle. It is not clear under what circumstances the skull was left there, nor is it clear to whom the skull belongs or whether that skull has anything to do with the Final Solution. The caption does not specify who the skull belong to either, and does not clarify that the skull was not that of a combat casualty. It is worth noting that the skulls of deceased Japanese were a collector's item for some Americans who came across them in the Pacific.
9) "A convict released by the Germans" and the "pogroms against Jews" in the formerly Soviet-controlled Baltic region
A considerable part of the Time-Life book focuses on the violence that took place inside the Soviet-occupied Baltic states in June 1941, as the Germans and their allies in Central Europe invaded the Soviet Union. According to the Time-Life book, in the midst of the chaos, Jews were pummeled and clubbed and stomped".
To support its claim, the book features a snapshot of the man being attacked, complete with the following caption: "a convict released by the Germans uses a lead pipe on a Jewish pogrom victim in Lithuania. The pogrom took place on June 28, 1941, just days after the invasion of the Soviet Union."
Here is another popular image from the event, which contains all the emotion, power dynamics and brutality that the public has come to associate with the Holocaust. Not surprisingly, it is used to demonstrate such:
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| In Lithuanian: "Genocide: the day on which we remember the Jews" |
For Time-Lifeand the unquestioning viewer/reader, the violence in that photograph existed in a vacuum of time and place and demonstrates that people are anti-Semitic and genocidal when told by Nazis that Jews are bad. But the photo is important for what it does not show, along with what it does not tell and how it is captioned.
Let's start with the caption "Lithuanian convict released by the Germans beating the Jews". It sounds like the Germans arrived, freed a bunch of criminals with a penchant for violence and steered them towards some random Jews for kicks. In fact, that description fits quite well with the widely-published photo. But this assessment is missing all of the backstory which is that, in 1940, the Soviets had annexed Lithuania and initiated a program of brutal repression; they deported the Lithuanians to Siberian labor camps, murdered anti-Soviet partisans, priests and even politicians who supported an independent Lithuania. As the Lithuanian resistance movement grew, contributing to mass incarceration. Then, in 1941, shortly before the above photographs were taken, terrible events occurred as the Soviets prepared to retreat from the area in view of the advancing German army. As the Baltic Times reported in 1996:
"During a massacre of members of Lithuanian patriotic organizations on June 22, 1941, in the Rainiai forest of western Lithuania, Soviet soldiers cut men’s genitals and put them into the mouths of victims. Soviet activists cut tongues, ears, scalps, took out eyes, made belts from the skins of the victims and used for tying their hands – all that was done on living people. Pulling off fingernails was a common torture of NKVD [the Soviet secret police]."
The Soviets' carnage continued into the morning of June 25, 1941 and, under the command of a Jew named Petras Rasianas, 70-80 Lithuanian political prisoners were killed in the Rainiai forest. In another example, in the Estonian city of Tartu, the Soviets murdered nearly 250 people. By the end of the month, the Soviets had butchered several hundred thousand people across the Baltic, whether Lithuania, Estonia or Latvia. One of the other leading perpetrators, a Soviet agent and Jew named Noachim Dusanski, is currently living out his days in Israel peacefully, despite the efforts by the Baltic Unity Organization (BVO) to bring him and Rasianas to justice.
Needless to say, the Time-Life book fails to mention any of this backstory and instead creates its own, extremely simplistic interpretation for why the "Lithuanian convict" grabbed his lead pipe and went after the person he was targeting. Perhaps we can learn something from the case of a young boy who participated in the same incident, called the "Lietukis garage" incident. Here he is, pictured with a crowbar:
A photographer attached to a German army unit gave the following account:
"I noticed a crowd of people in the forecourt of a petrol station which was surrounded by a wall on three sides. The way to the road was completely blocked by a wall of people. I was confronted by the following scene: in the left corner of the yard there was a group of men aged between thirty and fifty. There must have been forty to fifty of them. They were herded together and kept under guard by some civilians. The civilians were armed with rifles and wore armbands, as can be seen in the pictures I took. A young man—he must have been a Lithuanian...with rolled-up sleeves was armed with an iron crowbar. He dragged one man at a time from the group and struck him with the crowbar with one or more blows on the back of his head. Within three-quarters of an hour he had been beaten to death the entire group of forty-five to fifty people in this way. I took a series of photographs of the victims...
After the entire group [had] been beaten to death, the young man put the crowbar to one side, fetched an accordion and went and stood on the mountain of corpses and played the Lithuanian national anthem. I recognised the tune and was informed by bystanders that it was the national anthem. The behavior of the civilians present (women and children) was unbelievable. After each man had been killed they began to clap and when the national anthem started up they joined in singing and clapping. In the front row there were women with small children in their arms who stayed there right until the end of the whole proceedings. I found out from some people who knew German what was happening here. They explained to me that the parents of the young man who had killed the other people had been taken from their beds two days earlier and immediately shot, because they were suspected of being nationalists, and this was the young man’s revenge. Not far away there was a large number of dead people who according to the civilians had been killed by the withdrawing Commissars and Communists...
Here is another account, given by Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF) member Alexandras Bendinskas. It was published in a Lithuanian journal called Pergale in 1989, and later cited in Bitter Legacy:
What occurred on the “side of the Bolsheviks” I and others did not know. But already on the evening of June 22 in the general commotion the Bolsheviks began to flee en masse. But not everyone fled on the first day. Some top security, police, Party and government officials remained to destroy documents which testified to their crimes and their scope, the lists of their agents, the direct involvement of Moscow in provocations of that time. Among these zealous ones were Russians, Lithuanians, and Jews. Toward evening on June 23, security personnel (the majority of whom were investigators) also decided to save themselves. They ran to the Lietukis garage for cars. They were caught by [autonomous Lithuanian freedom fighters], disarmed and locked up in the garage, since the prison and security departments were not yet fully in our hands. Furthermore, street battles were going on. In some plants and institutions the security departments were broken into and lists were used to find out the names of their heads. Some of these were caught and they also were put into the garage. On June 25, some political prisoners liberated from Soviet jails found out that security personnel were being held in the garage. They came to check this out and recognized some of them. There began something which no one could have foreseen in advance: filled with malice, their backs bloody, driven by revenge, with broken fingers, some had lost their families carried off in train cars to Siberia, the former prisoners killed those held in the garage. They beat them with whatever they found in the garage – with metal bars, with spades, etc. It was a terrible sight! The Lord’s commandment “Thou shalt not kill” was broken. There are people still alive who saw this execution. They are known to me. Neither I nor others whom I know find any justification for the bacchanalia of death.
What kind of people were killed in the Lietukis garage? Most authors who wrote about this event have presented it as a pogrom of Jews. Was it that in fact? According to the facts, the majority of those killed were investigators of the security organs and heads of the “special departments” of enterprises and institutions; they were killed as officials rather than as representatives of a certain nationality. It turned out that a majority of the victims were Jews (documents found show this).
One is amazed by the manipulations of authors who in describing this crime continually inflate the figures. At the time of the uprising, people spoke of more than ten killed. Later the Soviet press reported thirty, subsequently forty, and recently the respected E Zilberis already mentioned seventy. Only competent legal organs can establish the number killed, the identity of the victims and the circumstances of this horrible event; if necessary – with the participation of foreign observers. All the spots in this ugly incident of our country – the white ones, the black ones, and the red ones – must be clarified.
Odd how the same people who Time-Life thinks would goad the locals into attacking random Jews for fun are not presenting that face at all and instead providing a narrative consistent with the message coming from Lithuania. None of this surfaces in the Time-Life book; nor does it register in the minds of the general population, thanks to articles like this one, which only tell one side of the story - the same side everybody always hears, thanks to the monopoly and reach of major publishing companies like those under Time-Life's umbrella.
10) "Execution in a Nazi camp sketch by Simon Wiesenthal"
Odd how a drawing said to illustrate how the Germans supposedly tied Jews to poles with rope and executed them mirrors, almost exactly, these real, live photographs of German soldiers who were tied to poles with rope and executed:
11) "Shower baths of death": the seven gas chambers in Majdanek
The Time-Life book claims that there were seven gas chambers at Majdanek and, in it claiming 1.3 victims, only Auschwitz took more lives.
Apart from the fact that this assessment is based on the longstanding and now-discredited claim that 4 million people died at Auschwitz, the problem is the figure of 1.3 million deaths at Majdanek lacks any factual support. Even Tomasz Kranz, the director of the Research Department of the State Museum at Majdanek, disagrees with the figure, despite insisting that there were still mass deaths at the site - about 78,000, to be exact. But wait: Kranz' figure was determined in view of a German memorandum that supposedly surfaced in 2000 and merely provides figures on the number of inmates who arrived at Majdanek and other camps. If we are to take Anne Frank as an example, the Jewish icon whose "diary" is part and parcel to nearly every child's education, people were shuffled from camp to camp, even if they were supposedly extermination camps. In any case, how a figure on arrivals pertains to the number of prisoners who actually died while interned by the Germans is unclear, considering the grueling mass retreat as the Soviet Red Army approached, the subsequent disease epidemics following that relocation to sites like Bergen-Belsen, and other factors, but it is the number that Kranz is forwarding.
As for the Time-Life book's claim that there were seven gas chambers, that number was more recently reduced to four and then only one, at Block 41. The allegations concerning Block 41 were based on the testimony of Rudolf Hoess, a German commandant who was tortured by the Allies, and subsequently the only site where residue from Zyklon B gas, the gas supposedly used for mass extermination, was found. But the claim that gas was used in Block 41 for gassing prisoners as part of the Final Solution (and not just for delousing clothing) is being challenged.
As far as the Final Solution is concerned, it is worth nothing that, alongside the gas chamber narrative, there is a conventional belief - accepted from Soviet documentation - that on one single day in November 1943, in response to mass uprisings, 18,400 Jews were executed by firing squad. If so, that would be nearly 40% of the total alleged Jewish deaths during the camp's entire operation. Equally perplexing, between when the mass gassings supposedly began in 1942 and ended in 1944, the trainloads of people sent to the camp swelled upwards, but half the arrivals were not even Jewish, which is inconsistent with the "mass transport for Jewish gassings" narrative. Furthermore, for such a camp with the purpose of mass extermination, it is unclear how a number of Jews there who rose to fame in later years - Halina Birenbaum, Maria Albin Boniecki, Marian Filar, Otto Freundlich, Mietek Grocher, Israel Gutman and Rudolf Vrba - survived. And, as a final point of consideration, the Germans allowed inmates to receive food packages from the Polish Red Cross and Central Welfare Council on name order, and evidence of over 10,300 packaged items has survived the war.
12) Piles of bodies at Auschwitz: mislabeled photo
After a train crash occurred in the Dresden, Ohio in 1912, the following snapshot was taken (left). It was later used to show "evidence" of a burning pile of bodies at Auschwitz (right, and below).
The caption, in Spanish, reads: "when the numerous ovens were still insufficient to incinerate the number of individuals sent to the gas chambers, the bodies were incinerated in large ditches, as can be seen in the above picture taken from the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp."
