Faked Photos Used to Allege Nazi Atrocities

The left picture below has been used to illustrate an example of the deportations of Jews into ghettos and extermination camps,¹⁾ but the photo archives of the Federal Railway Administration in Hamburg show that it was a freight train crowded with German refugees bound for the Ruhr region, standing in the Hamburg train station in 1946 (unretouched picture on the right, which hangs in the Hamburg Main Station).²⁾

The following picture allegedly shows a pyre with Jews killed by the Germans in the Estonia camp Klooga.³⁾ “What is remarkable here, for one, is that some of the bodies stacked between the wooden beams are wearing their hats (top left). This would be possible only if the 'Nazi thugs' had glued the caps onto the heads of these corpses - or if the people lying there were not dead at all, and had put their caps on by themselves after getting into the position shown. The latter possibility is supported by the fact that the people depicted in this photo show not even the slightest sign of rigor mortis: their limbs are perfectly adjusted to their new position on the pyre; see for example the arms of the man at bottom left, or the arm of the man at top right. In fact, what we have here is not only a mis-captioned photo, but one that probably has also been cropped. Off towards the side, a photo of the same scenery, but a different perspective, shows people in Soviet uniforms, and their smug grins at this posed scene are clearly visible. There exist at least seven different photos of this scene, all off them showing men with hats, but without any sign of rigor mortis, as J. Kuras has shown.”⁴⁾

Below left, the title page of Nazi Hunter and Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal's Holocaust memoirs, 'KZ Mauthausen Bild und Wort' and below right, an illustration of three Jews, shot by Nazis at the stake, as signed by Wiesenthal (his signature in the bottom left hand corner) and purporting to be a scene in the Mauthausen camp.

Although Wiesenthal alleged in his book that the drawing of the three shot Jews occurred in Mauthausen, the truth is that he plagiarized this picture from a series of photographs which appeared in the Life magazine of June 1945. The series of photographs were of German soldiers, captured during the “Battle of the Bulge,” wearing American uniforms, and executed by the firing squad as allowed by the Geneva Convention. Wiesenthal copied his picture of “three shot Jews” from a Life photo essay which showed three Germans being shot by Americans!

Below is the full set of pictures from the Life Magazine of June 1945, along with that magazine's cover. Note the three photographs on the third inside page reproduced below.

Below are the photographs of the three shot Germans, from the above last page of Life Magazine, put side by side, and under that, Wiesenthal's “Mauthausen execution” drawing once again; a comparison of the two can leave no doubt as to where this world famous “Nazi hunter” stole this image for his “memoirs.”