Are any of the allegations that some Holocaust photos are frauds true?

[Sergey Romanov]

Their clothes are too good to be used in the fields, they look more like their "Formal wear", if they even had one.
Working in the fields women didn't bring their children with them, their children worked watching the cows or other farm animals, or were doing light farm chores.

Too many assumptions. What if the child was sick and couldn't be left at home, or the house was nearby, or maybe there was another reason we simply don't know about? Fact is, we don't know if the woman is the one being aimed at or that the woman is Jewish.

[Sergey Romanov]

Is the Rabbit arguing that the standing inmate was pasted onto the photo because the New York Times Magazine's version predates others? I don't think he fully appreciates how much easier it is to remove a person from a photo than to add one - lighting, angle and texture considered. Nor do I see what one stands to gain from adding another emaciated inmate to the group pictured? But suppose someone decided to merge two photos together for whatever reason, would that make either of the originals fake?
Here's the photo on April 29, 1945 - a week prior to the New York Times Magazine's doctored version:

Thank you!

[Knouterer]

Accordingly, the publication of the cropped photo was a knowing attempt to deceive the readers of the book, since the cropped version looks more like a killing of a woman and child than the whole photo does.

That's an extremely odd argument. The whole photo shows three rifles pointing towards the people on the right, plus what looks remarkably like a dead body. So it's not one man pointing a rifle, for whatever reason, but an execution squad. The whole photo is actually better evidence of an atrocity than the cropped one.

Also the people on the right are clearly not "working" - they're dropping to the ground, either because they're hit, or to avoid being hit.

[Sergey Romanov]

Is the Rabbit arguing that the standing inmate was pasted onto the photo because the New York Times Magazine's version predates others? I don't think he fully appreciates how much easier it is to remove a person from a photo than to add one - lighting, angle and texture considered. Nor do I see what one stands to gain from adding another emaciated inmate to the group pictured? But suppose someone decided to merge two photos together for whatever reason, would that make either of the originals fake?
Here's the photo on April 29, 1945 - a week prior to the New York Times Magazine's doctored version:

Thank you!

Now that I remember, the Rabbit did acknowledge that the photo appeared in April, he just thought that the NYTM accidentally published the original later, letting the cat out of the bag. The theory makes no sense and there is no evidence for it (and enough evidence against it).

[Konrad B.]

Since i'm living in a country where "denial" is a far-stretching term that i can't even tell anymore what is considered denial & i'm from a family that includes a convicted person in relation to 2 certain concentration camps, I try to answer some questions that appear in here but also in many other threads all the time relating to documents and photos without defending either side of the posters in here:

I often see people here asking if documents exist in any archives and the conclusion that if documents are not in any of the archives, the documents don't exist or were destroyed.
For some reason it leaves out the fact that many documents ended up in private property after the war. I also inherited certain interesting photographs and documents.
I'm neither interested in providing and helping revisionists out nor the other side of the coin. I have experienced that it seems, every historian, author and journalist can't be trusted to not either alter interviews (in this case with my family member mentioned above) to fit the prefered narrative.
This is a problem rampant on any side of historians and especially pop-historians, and probably also the reason why many private estates of documents and photos interesting for any historian or researcher, never ends up being put to good use.
After this bad experience, i am now forced to ask anyone to sign a contract so misquoting, half-quoting or only showing a part of a document instead of the whole document won't happen again. You'd be surprised how many historians, researchers and journalists won't sign such a contract that simply binds the historian, researcher or journalist to present the whole document and/or picture and doesn't cherry-pick certain lines from the conducted interview so the context gets lost.

People afraid of signing such simple demands include any ilk, from any side and any narrative. The same happened with family friends as well, people try to help serious researchers and trust them.

My point: Yes there are many many interesting documents, photos, films, letters etc. out there in families, not only from germany or austria, but also france, england, spain being passed on within the family.
I'm pretty sure if the historians, pop-historians and journalists would drop their agenda and be objective, families would love to help with their private property.
So yes, documents and photos or films of interest also exist in abundance outside of any archives with provenance dating back to WW2.

In fact, be cautious of any documents that lack provenance, there have been many thefts sadly, against private families as well as official archives.

I hope i could help anyone in here, especially those wondering about non-archive documents and photos.

[wm]

What if the child was sick and couldn't be left at home, or the house was nearby,

A sick child would be left home, maybe (but not likely) under the care of grandmother or other children. Long hours in the open in spring would probably kill him.
Those people had many children, sickness or even death of one of them didn't trouble them much. Child mortality was high, death was something natural for them.

Child like him weren't wandering aimlessly among the grown ups, just because their home was nearby. They were required to work.

or maybe there was another reason we simply don't know about? Fact is, we don't know if the woman is the one being aimed at or that the woman is Jewish.

Unknowns are always possible in most cases. But here someone wrote in German at the back Jewish action in Ivanhorod.

[wm]

Accordingly, the publication of the cropped photo was a knowing attempt to deceive the readers of the book, since the cropped version looks more like a killing of a woman and child than the whole photo does.

Maybe it was not the publishers of the book who cropped the photo, but whoever it was, the cropping was obviously done for propaganda purposes, to distort what the full photograph actually shows.

Deceived about what? Propaganda proving what? That the Holocaust did happen?
To people who witnessed the Holocaust with their own eyes? At that time in every Polish town or city you could meet people who had survived Auschwitz or saw the atrocities. They didn't need mass spectrometers to know what had happened, they merely had to ask their neighbours.
It would be like doctoring photographs to prove the British monarch is a woman today.
For me it was as simple as listening to the stories told by my grandparents, about what happened to the tens of thousands of Jews living in their towns. And it was common sense and extrapolation to know the Polish Jews didn't die of illnesses or didn't flee to Mongolia, but were all murdered in cold blood.

Even more, cropping, enhancing, enlarging of photos before publication is done all the time. Similarly shortening of texts to fit some word count limit. It's not something unusual, it's an accepted standard in the publishing industry.
It wasn't a historical work, it was just a commemorative publication anyway.

[history1]

[...]Child like him weren't wandering aimlessly among the grown ups, just because their home was nearby. They were required to work. [...]

To work? You figured out the size of the child? I can´t believe that ~ 5 years old children were required to work on the field or on a pasture.
It simply could be a mother which was accompanied by it´s child when bringing lunch onto the field. That was common and nothing special. We´ll never know.

[Sergey Romanov]

What if the child was sick and couldn't be left at home, or the house was nearby,

A sick child would be left home, maybe (but not likely) under the care of grandmother or other children.

What if there was no grandmother and no other children?

Long hours in the open in spring would probably kill him.

What if there were no long hours/the house was nearby?

Those people had many children

You don't know how many children that woman had.

or maybe there was another reason we simply don't know about? Fact is, we don't know if the woman is the one being aimed at or that the woman is Jewish.

Unknowns are always possible in most cases. But here someone wrote in German at the back Jewish action in Ivanhorod.

You don't know whether the reference applies to all non-Germans in the photo or only to the men.

IOW, as I said, those are just assumptions based on very general ideas of how things should have been. Not a good way to proceed.

[Sergey Romanov]

I mean, assumptions are OK when the alternatives are implausible. The thing is that there is nothing implausible about this being a gentile woman caught up in a situation she hadn't expected. It's equally plausible to her being a Jewish woman being shot at. It's a "slice of life" without a clear defining context as far as the woman and the child are concerned.

[wm]

To work? You figured out the size of the child? I can´t believe that ~ 5 years old children were required to work on the field or on a pasture.

Yes, and they liked it. Commonly when they reached the age of six. The younger children accompanied them, women only brought toddlers with them.

It simply could be a mother which was accompanied by it´s child when bringing lunch onto the field. That was common and nothing special. We´ll never know.

Yes, burgers from the nearest McDonald's.
Who was going to prepare the lunch if all their parents were working from dawn to dusk on the fields?

What if there was no grandmother and no other children?

Then there were left alone in home.

there were no long hours

Non long working hours didn't exist.

You don't know whether the reference applies to all non-Germans in the photo or only to the men.

The [killed] woman in the lower left corner doesn't look like a man.

[Sergey Romanov]

What if there was no grandmother and no other children?

Then there were left alone in home.

Says who?

there were no long hours

Non long working hours didn't exist.

Says who?

You don't know whether the reference applies to all non-Germans in the photo or only to the men.

The [killed] woman in the lower left corner doesn't look like a man.

We were not discussing that person (who might have been a woman and might have been killed, although both is not conclusive) but rather the woman with the child, so this comment is a red herring since the point was not about gender. Rather it was the following: you have no idea whether the description applies to all non-German persons in the photo or not. Had only the woman with the child been depicted on a photo with such a description, then the context would have been unambiguous.

Since there are quite a lot of other figures on the photo to make the description of Judenaktion meaningful, the assumption that this particular woman also *had* to be a victim is no longer safe.

[wm]

Says who?

All the diaries and memoirs written by peasants I've read. And I've read lots of them. Eastem Europe wasn't some freaking Germany, or the universe of their yodeling movies. Those people lived really shitty life.

Rather it was the following: you have no idea whether the description applies to all non-German persons in the photo or not.

Then what about the footwear the woman is wearing. Peasant women wouldn't wear such flimsy and fancy shoes working on the fields. And they couldn't afford them anyway.

[wm]

The Story of the Ivangorod Photograph
from: Private Pictures: Soldiers' Inside View of War by Janina Struk

In Warsaw, as in other Polish towns and cities, many pre-war photo studios and photo suppliers continued to function under the direction of the German occupying forces. They were largely staffed by Poles who had worked in the film and photographic industries before the war began. Niemczyński encouraged these workers to use their positions for the benefit of the resistance. In 1942 write, broadcast, and documentary filmmaker Antoni Bohdziewicz established a photo studio called Foto Tres with colleagues Mieczysław Chojnowski and Andrzej Ancuta in one of Warsaw's most fashionable city centre streets. Besides functioning as a commercial portrait studio, it acted as a front for clandestine work — producing false identity cards for the beleaguered population, microfilming manuscripts of unpublished books by outlawed Polish writers including the acclaimed poet Czeslaw Miłosz, and preparing documents for dispatch to London.
Bohdziewicz was also chief of the film department in the Home Army's Biuro Informacji i Propagandy Komendy Głównej ZWZ-AK (Main Command Office for Information and Propaganda) and used the studio, as well as his apartment, to run secretly held courses on the basic techniques of filmmaking, including script-directing and editing.
One of the largest photo shops in central Warsaw was called Fotoris, where in 1940 the young Jerzy Tomaszewski was employment as a darkroom worker [...] Fotoris was frequented by all ranks of the German Armed Forces. Besides official photographs, they brought in their private pictures that featured girlfriends, social occasions — and at times images of Jewish ghettos, deportations, executions and atrocities. 'The Germans loved photography', said Tomaszewski.

The Polish workers were encouraged to talk with their German customers to find out as much information about the pictures brought in by them as was possible— where they had been taken, by whom, and exactly what they showed. 'We had to be careful because it was highly dangerous work', Tomaszewski said, 'but we were young and we didn't always understand the danger, or he importance, of the work we were doing''
On occasions Tomaszewski and his colleagues processed film that they suspected showed Poles who were being sought after by the Nazi, or underground hiding places. Then they would damage the film by scratching it or ruining it with chemicals. Tomaszewski recalled that on one occasion he spoiled a film brought in by a German officer that showed portraits of Poles whom he thought were wanted. When the officer returned Fotoris to collect his photographs he was furious that the film had been ruined and threatened to send Tomaszewski to a concentration camp. Kucharski intervened and argued that it was an accident, that he was only a boy, though competent, and had developed hundreds of films. The young darkroom worker was spared.

As the war dragged on, the photographs brought in to Fotoris became increasingly macabre. As the marauding German Army swept through Poland, thousands of members of the Polish armed threes as well as Polish and Jewish civilians were arrested, deported to concentration camps or publicly hanged or executed. Many of these crimes were photographed. An image taken at Palmiry, near Warsaw, shows some of the hundreds of civilians who were taken to a forest and shot; during four years of occupation more than 2,000 people would be murdered at Palmiry. In Bochnia, on 18 December 1939, fifty-one civilians, including two Jews were taken to a nearby forest, made to dig their own graves and then shot and buried. Two other civilians were publicly hanged from one of the town's lampposts. They were murdered as reprisal for an attack on a German police station. After the war an official photo album was found in the home of a former SS man in Bavaria enticed: 'Retaliation in Bochnia'. It contained a detailed police report about the operation and pictures of the execution. During the war some of these pictures found their way into the hands of underground workers, including Tomaszewski and his colleagues. Tomaszewski does not remember when he first saw them, but he was horrified. 'It was a shock for everyone', he said. It is possible they were distributed by a photo laboratory worker in Bochnia called Stanislaw Broszkiewicz, who was known to have smuggled photographs from his workplace. Evidence suggests that many Polish workers in photo shops throughout Poland were involved with duplicating or distributing incriminating pictures taken by Nazis or German soldiers.` At Fotoris photographs and negatives that were thought to contain valuable information were copied and smuggled out of the shop by the workers themselves, or they were placed in waste paper bins so that underground workers disguised as cleaners could pick them up. In early 1941 some of these pictures—including those from Bochnia — had begun to reach the government-in-exile in London.

Throughout the war the Polish underground continued with their covert operation. But in January 1943 underground operations at Fotoris were uncovered. It is thought that the Nazi intelligence service, which was monitoring material publish. in the Allied countries, had managed to trace the origins of some of the German soldiers' pictures back to Fotoris. The shop was raided. Tomaszewski and Kucharski were tipped off and got away, but Andrzej Honowski was not so lucky. He was killed during a struggle with German police. It transpired that he had been denounced to the authorities by Ludwik Herbert. As a consequence, Herbert was sentenced to death by the Polish underground's Special Tribunal: the sentence was carried out on 16 January 1943 in front of his family in his apartment in Walecznych Street, Warsaw.
After Herbert's execution Tomaszewski and Kucharski went into hiding until They received orders to organise a secret laboratory in Warsaw. It was in this laboratory in Chmielna Street in early 1943 that Tomaszewski first saw the photograph taken in Ivangorod. Although the laboratory workers were instructed to destroy material after it had been microfilmed, Tomaszewski often kept and hid pictures and documents in locations in and around the city, sometimes with help from his mother. She was known to stash photographs behind the altar of a church near the family home or to take them to the homes of relatives in the suburbs. In this way some of these images survived the war. Jerzy Tomaszewski and Mieczysław Kucharski continued their illicit work until The beginning of 1944, when they received news that a Polish courier who had visited their laboratory had been arrested by the Nazis. The underground authorities were worried that he would be tortured and reveal its location. As a consequence it was closed down. The two underground workers were not deterred. They opened a new laboratory in an empty apartment in a district of the city where German officials and soldiers were housed. They continued to work there until 1 August 1944 when the Warsaw Uprising began.

By that time the thousands of reports, document and photographs that had been smuggled from Poland had begun to gather dust in archives in the West. In London those that had accumulated in the offices of the Polish government-in-exile were divided between the Polish Underground Movement (1939-1945) Study Trust where documents and photographs related to the Home Army were deposited, and the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum that kept official documents related to the government-in-exile. There seems to have been no logic to how the photographs were divided as copies of some of the same images can be found in both.

In the archive of the Study Trust there are a few strips of original microfilm sent from Poland that have survived. They could have been made in the laboratory in Chmielna Street, although this is impossible to verify. But there is evidence that some photographs sent by Jerzy Tomaszewski did reach their destination. In an old filing cabinet in the basement of the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum I found two brown envelopes that seemed to have been undisturbed for many years. In them were photographic prints and a list of typed photo captions. According to records in the Institute, the pictures were received some time in 1941-1942. In one envelope are pictures taken in the Warsaw Ghetto that show emaciated children, including the picture of the man holding the young child's naked emaciated body that was used on British propaganda leaflets. Other pictures show piles of corpses in mass graves in the Warsaw Ghetto cemetery. In the second envelope are prints which, according to the captions, show the emaciated naked corpses of Soviet POWs. These prisoners of war, whose status was not recognised by the Nazis, were routinely rounded up and enclosed in 'camps', which were little more than enclosures surrounded by barbed-wire fencing. It is estimated that approximately 3.5 million Soviet POWs died at the hands of the Nazis of disease, starvation or execution. One of these pictures shows a uniformed German soldier with a gun over his shoulder posed for the camera alongside rows of naked corpses strewn in a field. In 1943 this picture was used by the British Foreign Office on propaganda leaflets dropped over Germany, though the victims were said to be Polish peasants. The pictures in the old brown envelopes are of poor quality and lacking in tone and detail, indicating that they had been copied many times. I sent copies of them to Jerzy Tomaszewski in Warsaw. It was the first confirmation he had in more than sixty years that some of how he had helped smuggle had arrived at their destination.

In 1959, more than a decade after the war had ended, Jerzy Tomaszewski was one of three editors commissioned by the Polish Foreign Office to compile a book entitled 1939-1345: We Have Not Forgotten. Officially its publication commemorated the twentieth anniversary of the invasion of Poland by the German Army in September 1939, but there was a more pressing reason: as a response to what the communist-led government saw as the rearmament of West Germany and the rise of neo-Nazists in Western Europe. The introduction stated:
5 years after the liberation of 0świecim (Auschwitz)...when the memorials to the victims of fascism ere being violated, when a wave of anti-Semitism is spreading in various directions and when young people in schools are presented with a false picture of the past that is loathing to the memory of the victims of fascism. In order to warn the young generation against the recurrence of genocide, to protect young minds from racial hatred and a desire for revenge, we shall continue to disseminate the truth about the Third Reich and its policy of national extermination which led to such horrible results.

Jerzy Tomaszewski was well aware of the book's propaganda value. It wasn't the history would have chosen to write he told me, but he sawn as an opportunity to publish some of the photographs from his archive, including a few than during the Warsaw Uprising — although the picture captions were adapted to play up the communist role.
But it was the image taken in Ivangorod that became the center of a political storm. On 26 January 1962, the West German newspaper, Deutsche Soldaten Zeitung (DSZ, The German Soldiers' Daily) rounded in 1951, known for its right-wing views and its willingness to defend Germany's Nazi past, published an attack on the picture taken at Ivangorod. The newspaper, which reportedly received funding from 'US agencies' and the West German government, printed the photograph on its front page with the headline 'Achtung Falschung' ('Beware Falsification!). The allegation was that the soldier pointing the gun at the woman and child was not a German soldier at all; he was neither wearing the uniform of a German soldier nor using a German weapon. The accompanying article, written by German Professor Otto Croy, a writer on photographic technique, accused the Polish authorities of fabricating photographic evidence in order to make false accusations against West Germany. Asa response to the article in DSZ on 25 February 1962, Jerzy Tomaszewski and fellow editor Tadeusz Mazur published an article M the Polish illustrated colour weekly magazine, Swiat. It said that the readership of DSZ were 'old believers in the Third Reich' and accused them of 'a priceless "revisionist" campaign'. To support their claim they published five photographs as evidence of the atrocities that had been committed in Poland and in the Soviet Union by German soldiers, including the one taken at Ivangorod. Printed directly underneath this controversial picture there was a second image. It showed five armed men — four in uniform and one dressed as a civilian — standing looking towards the camera behind a number of bodies on the ground. We assume them to be dead. The flat barren landscape is identical to that featured in the fire photograph. One of the uniformed men, with a weapon slung around his neck, looks remarkably like the an pointing the gun at the woman and the child. On the back of the photograph, in the same handwriting as the first, is written: 'Ukraine 1942'. As far as I am aware this is the only occasion that this image has been printed alongside the image of the soldier pointing his weapon. The image of the dead does nor have the same dramatic impact as the image of the woman with the child, whom we imagine is about to be shot. But the controversy over the picture taken at Ivangorod did not die down. The accusations continued for more than two years in what Tomaszewski called 'a press war’.
The Polish authorities grew concerned that if the allegations made by Croy were true, Poland could have a diplomatic incident on its hands. On one occasion officials from the Polish Interior Ministry of Security visited a concerned Jerzy Tomaszewski at his home in Warsaw. But when Tomaszewski showed them the original photograph they left his apartment seemingly convinced.

In 1965 the dispute appeared to have been resolved when Der Spiegel published a letter from a former German soldier called Kurt Vieweg. Vieweg verified that the uniform of the soldier in the photograph was indeed that worn by members of the German Police Battalions (the Einsatz), groups involved in ‘actions’ in Poland and in the Soviet Union. He knew this because he had been a member of a battalion but had been ‘lucky enough,’ he said, to be stationed in Norway and not on the Eastern Front.
After the publication of Vieweg’s letter the matter was dropped. For almost forty years little more was written about the phOtograph and it received no special attention. But stories concerning Tomaszewski’s wartime photo archive did not end there.

[Sergey Romanov]

Says who?

All the diaries and memoirs written by peasants I've read. And I've read lots of them. Eastem Europe wasn't some freaking Germany, or the universe of their yodeling movies. Those people lived really shitty life.

IOW you generalize from a general way of life of many folks to one particular incident on one particular day with very specific circumstances without knowing the details about this particular woman or what had happened to her before that photo was taken. This seems fallacious to me. Saying "kid would have been left at home", for example, is merely what you imagine would have happened in many cases on a normal day, but without knowing anything about this particular woman you have exactly no idea whether she would have left the kid at home or not. You simply cannot postdict such details no matter how many memoirs you have read.

Rather it was the following: you have no idea whether the description applies to all non-German persons in the photo or not.

Then what about the footwear the woman is wearing. Peasant women wouldn't wear such flimsy and fancy shoes working on the fields. And they couldn't afford them anyway.

Some of the shoes at https://187011.selcdn.ru/thumbnails/pho ... 1_1024.jpg seem to be just as flimsy. I can't judge the fanciness. Anyway, it would depend on the nature of the work, who said she would have been doing hard work, if she was doing any? Plus as I said, this is not the only hypothesis. Maybe she indeed brought food to someone who was working nearby (we only see a small part of the landscape, we don't know what was on the left, right or behind the camera). Maybe she was from a nearby house and was walking with the kid. Or something we just have no idea about.