Hồi này, trên mạng tiếng Việt xuát hiện ảnh:
Trong Thế chiến thứ hai, một mặt trận không kém phần khốc liệt và góp phần mang đến chiến thắng cho Hồng quân Liên Xô, đó chính là cuộc chiến tuyên truyền. Sử dụng những bức ảnh của đối phương, với kỹ thuật bấy giờ chủ yếu là chỉnh sửa, xử lý ảnh trong phòng tối và áp dụng các phương pháp vẽ tay, cắt dán, sau đó chụp lại để có phiên bản của một bức ảnh khác theo ý đồ muốn tuyên truyền.
Một công việc mà ngày nay mọi người có thể thực hiện dễ dàng với phần mềm Photoshop, các nhiếp ảnh gia ngày ấy phải mất không ít thời gian để chọn lựa những bức ảnh phù hợp và ghép lại sao cho những đối tượng trong bức ảnh có góc chụp, ánh sáng và tương tác với nhau trông thật nhất. Kết quả của họ thật ấn tượng. Mời các bạn cùng xem những bức ảnh dưới đây, nếu không nhìn thấy ảnh gốc chắc chắn bạn không thể phân biệt các bức ảnh đã được chỉnh sửa.
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Dù không dan nguồn như chỉ với vai click là ra nguồn:
Hồng quân Liên Xô đã sử dụng “kỹ thuật Photoshop” như thế nào?
Một công việc mà ngày nay mọi người có thể thực hiện dễ dàng với phần mềm Photoshop, các nhiếp ảnh gia ngày ấy phải mất không ít thời gian để chọn lựa những bức ảnh phù hợp và ghép lại sao cho những đối tượng trong bức ảnh có góc chụp, ánh sáng và tương tác với nhau trông thật nhất. Kết quả của họ thật ấn tượng. Mời các bạn cùng xem những bức ảnh dưới đây, nếu không nhìn thấy ảnh gốc chắc chắn bạn không thể phân biệt các bức ảnh đã được chỉnh sửa.
Dù không dan nguồn như chỉ với vai click là ra nguồn:
CHẾ TÁC ẢNH CỦA CHIẾN TRANH THẾ GIỚI II
Một trong những bức ảnh nổi tiếng nhất là lá cờ cộng sản trên Reichstag, đã được sửa lại thêm đủ khói để tăng cường kịch tính và loại bỏ chiếc đồng hồ của người lính cầm cờ. Dưới đây bạn sẽ thấy một số hình ảnh, ít được biết đến, được chụp trong Thế chiến II, người cũng bị lắp ráp. Hình ảnh trên đã được sửa lại và dưới là bản gốc.
Nhưng, ai, phía nào làm?
However modern techniques are now exposing many of these photos as fakes. - Tuy nhiên nhờ kỹ thuật hiện đại, bây giờ đã phơi bày rất nhiều những bức ảnh là hàng giả.
Here is a small sample below to show how it was done: - Dưới đây là vài mẫu nhỏ cho thấy nó đã được thực hiện như thế nào:
Dino A Brugioni: Photo Fakery: The History and Techniques of Photographic Deception and Manipulation - Man trá Làm giả Ảnh : Lịch sử và Kỹ thuật của nhiếp ảnh Lừa dối và Thao túng
Dino A. Brugioni was one of the founders of the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center. - Brugioni là một trong những người sáng lập Trung tâm Phân tích Nhiếp ảnh Quốc gia của CIA. He also co-authored the CIA’s “Retrospective Analysis of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Complex.” - Ông cũng là đồng tác giả "Hồi tưởng Phân tích về phức hợp trại Tập trung Hủy diệt Auschwitz-Birkenau." của CIA. In the “About the Author” section of this book it notes that he “became the CIA expert in photo fakery and photo manipulation.” - Trong "Về tác giả" của cuốn sách này có ghi chú rằng ông "đã trở thành chuyên gia CIA trong man trá làm giả ảnh trá và thao túng hình ảnh."
Of course this topic is of interest to revisionists. - Tất nhiên chủ đề này là mối quan tâm của những người xét lại. It is doubly interesting in that the self-admitted CIA expert in photo fakery is also the one who wrote the CIA’s report based on aerial photos to prove the Holocaust. - Thú vị nhân đôi ở chỗ là các chuyên gia CIA tự thừa nhận man trá làm giả ảnh cũng là một trong những người viết báo cáo của CIA dựa trên những bức ảnh từ trên không để chứng minh Holocaust.
Brugioni was hired by the CIA in 1948 - Brugioni được thuê bởi CIA vào năm 1948. He notes that - Ông ta lưu ý rằng:
Note that Brugioni in no way claims that these aerial photos are faked - Lưu ý rằng Brugioni không có cách nào cho rằng những hình ảnh trên không bị làm giả — although it strikes me as incredibly odd that they conclude his chapter on “spotting fakes.” It almost strikes one as a sort of game or challenge on the part of Brugioni.
The specific photos included in this chapter are one of Belsen after the British burned the barracks. - Những hình ảnh cụ thể bao gồm trong chương này là một trong số Belsen sau khi người Anh đốt doanh trại. It is followed by the same photo run through various stages of computer enhancement to “reconstruct” the camp from the ash left from the burned buildings. - Được theo sau bởi cùng một hình ảnh chạy qua các giai đoạn khác nhau của việc tăng cường tính toán để "tái tạo" trại từ tro tàn các tòa nhà bị đốt cháy.
Brugioni also includes an aerial shot of Belzec. -
The Auschwitz I photo is closest to Photo No. 2 on page 7 of the CIA report.
The Birkenau photo. In Photo Fakery the picture is cropped very differently (if it is the same photo).
The labels are also different. In Photo Fakery much more of the Women’s Camp is shown and the “Gas chambers” are at the very far right of the photo. Actually you can not even see the extreme right of KII or KIII. The photo goes right into the binding of the book. Therefore the Undressing Room which is clear in the CIA report (KIII) is not shown in Photo Fakery. In Photo Fakery there is a label reading “Gas Chamber Crematorium” which points to the thick line (fence? hedgerow?) behind KII.
The label in the CIA report that says “Engine Room” and points to KIII is now labed “Crematorium.” The label in CIA that reads “Prisoners on way to Gas Chambers” now reads “Group on way to Gas Chamber.”
Although the labels are different and the cropping is very different the prisoners seems to match up exactly. Therefore it seems that Brugioni chose to use the same photo in both books but to alter its appearance in the new book. The odd alleged “Zyklon openings” in KIII clearly visible in the CIA report are now off of the photo entirely. It’s not that they don’t appear, it’s that the photo is cropped to exclude them.
The four “dots” that line up behind KII are still visible in the new book. Note that the photo under discussion appears to be the same photo in John Ball’s “Air Photo Evidence” page 40. The new book crops it from “Prisoners undergoing disinfection” and cuts off at the vents of KII and KIII. The Auschwitz I photo is similar to Photo 2 from CIA.
However in the CIA report it claims the photo is from 4 April 1944 in Photo Fakery it is labeled 25 August 1944. The photo in Photo Fakery is on an angle. Whereas in CIA the barracks are straight up, they appear at an angle in Photo Fakery. All labels are different. Otherwise the photos cover the exact same section of the camp.
This photo is similar to John Ball’s on page 44. However the photo in Photo Fakery is upside down and cropped to only show the far right of this view. Actually there are details in Photo Fakery which go further to the right than the photo in Ball’s book.
A final word from Brugioni on False Captioning:
Một trong những bức ảnh nổi tiếng nhất là lá cờ cộng sản trên Reichstag, đã được sửa lại thêm đủ khói để tăng cường kịch tính và loại bỏ chiếc đồng hồ của người lính cầm cờ. Dưới đây bạn sẽ thấy một số hình ảnh, ít được biết đến, được chụp trong Thế chiến II, người cũng bị lắp ráp. Hình ảnh trên đã được sửa lại và dưới là bản gốc.
Nhưng, ai, phía nào làm?
Holocaust Or Holohoax: The Faked Atrocity Photos - Holocaust Hay Holohoax: Những Hình ảnh Tàn ác Giả mạo
Whenever anyone questions the extent of Nazi atrocities and the “Holocaust” the jew zionist controlled main stream media always trot out photos as evidence. - Bất cứ khi nào có ai đặt câu hỏi về mức độ tàn bạo của Đức Quốc xã và "Holocaust" là các phương tiện truyền thông dòng chính do người Do Thái phục quốc kiểm soát luôn trưng ra những bức ảnh làm bằng chứng. (Và, những bức ảnh này cũng đã xuát hiện trên mạng TQ trong những dịp người TQ lên án Nhật Bản: http://www.fmjsy.com/zixun/8771/erzhanqijianbeijianfunvtupian.html)However modern techniques are now exposing many of these photos as fakes. - Tuy nhiên nhờ kỹ thuật hiện đại, bây giờ đã phơi bày rất nhiều những bức ảnh là hàng giả.
Here is a small sample below to show how it was done: - Dưới đây là vài mẫu nhỏ cho thấy nó đã được thực hiện như thế nào:
Dino A. Brugioni was one of the founders of the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center. - Brugioni là một trong những người sáng lập Trung tâm Phân tích Nhiếp ảnh Quốc gia của CIA. He also co-authored the CIA’s “Retrospective Analysis of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Complex.” - Ông cũng là đồng tác giả "Hồi tưởng Phân tích về phức hợp trại Tập trung Hủy diệt Auschwitz-Birkenau." của CIA. In the “About the Author” section of this book it notes that he “became the CIA expert in photo fakery and photo manipulation.” - Trong "Về tác giả" của cuốn sách này có ghi chú rằng ông "đã trở thành chuyên gia CIA trong man trá làm giả ảnh trá và thao túng hình ảnh."
Of course this topic is of interest to revisionists. - Tất nhiên chủ đề này là mối quan tâm của những người xét lại. It is doubly interesting in that the self-admitted CIA expert in photo fakery is also the one who wrote the CIA’s report based on aerial photos to prove the Holocaust. - Thú vị nhân đôi ở chỗ là các chuyên gia CIA tự thừa nhận man trá làm giả ảnh cũng là một trong những người viết báo cáo của CIA dựa trên những bức ảnh từ trên không để chứng minh Holocaust.
Brugioni was hired by the CIA in 1948 - Brugioni được thuê bởi CIA vào năm 1948. He notes that - Ông ta lưu ý rằng:
“it became immediately apparent to me, even as a neophyte in the intelligence game, that the Soviets had embarked on a massive program of misinformation during the war years. - nó ngay lập tức trở nên rõ ràng với tôi, như một người mới vào nghề trong trò chơi tình báo, rằng Liên Xô đã bắt tay vào một chương trình thông tin sai lạc lớn trong những năm chiến tranh. On reviewing still photos, I found that the Soviets had used heavy brush techniques to delete details of their weapons. - Rà soát các hình ảnh tĩnh, tôi thấy rằng Liên Xô đã sử dụng kỹ thuật chải nặng để xóa các chi tiết về vũ khí của họ. Care had also been taken to portray their leaders in the most favorable light. - Tương tự cũng đã được thực hiện để miêu tả các nhà lãnh đạo của họ trong ánh sáng thuận lợi nhất. Reviewing Soviet newsreels, I found that many battle scenes had been deliberately staged; often, dramatic scenes of one battle would be superimposed to show up in films of other battles. - Xem xét phim thời Xô viết, tôi thấy rằng nhiều cảnh chiến đấu đã được cố tình dàn dựng; thường là, những cảnh ấn tượng của một trận chiến sẽ xếp chồng để hiển thị trong phim của các trận chiến khác”With this said, Brugioni attempts to lead the uninitiated and the neophytes through the history and techniques of photo fakery. - Với điều này, Brugioni nỗ lực để dẫn dắt người mới vào nghề thông qua lịch sử và các kỹ thuật về man trá làm giả ảnh. The book is filled with photographic fakes. - Cuốn sách chứa đầy giả mạo nhiếp ảnh. Interestingly the 5th chapter, entitled “Spotting Fakes” includes a discussion of the concentration camps and Brugioni’s work on the subject. - Điều thú vị là chương 5, mang tên "Phát hiện ra Giả mạo" bao gồm một cuộc thảo luận về các trại tập trung và công việc Brugioni về đề tài này.
Note that Brugioni in no way claims that these aerial photos are faked - Lưu ý rằng Brugioni không có cách nào cho rằng những hình ảnh trên không bị làm giả — although it strikes me as incredibly odd that they conclude his chapter on “spotting fakes.” It almost strikes one as a sort of game or challenge on the part of Brugioni.
The specific photos included in this chapter are one of Belsen after the British burned the barracks. - Những hình ảnh cụ thể bao gồm trong chương này là một trong số Belsen sau khi người Anh đốt doanh trại. It is followed by the same photo run through various stages of computer enhancement to “reconstruct” the camp from the ash left from the burned buildings. - Được theo sau bởi cùng một hình ảnh chạy qua các giai đoạn khác nhau của việc tăng cường tính toán để "tái tạo" trại từ tro tàn các tòa nhà bị đốt cháy.
Brugioni also includes an aerial shot of Belzec. -
Brugioni cũng bao gồm một ảnh Belzec từ trên không. He notes that the photo “revealed the massive pits where the bodies were buried.” - Ông lưu ý rằng những hình ảnh "tiết lộ những chiếc hố khổng lồ nơi các thi thể được chôn cất." He also includes one shot of the Birkenau camp from 25 August 1944 and one of Auschwitz I from the same date. In his text he notes - Ông cũng bao gồm một ảnh trại Birkenau từ 25 tháng tám năm 1944 và là một ảnh Auschwitz I cùng một ngày. Trong văn bản của mình, ông lưu ý:
“In 1978, photo interpreter Robert Poirier and I discovered World War II aerial photos of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp that had inadvertently been taken on leader film during an Allied reconnaissance mission against the nearby I.G. Farben Synthetic Rubber and Fuel Plant. Using a variety of density slicing and enlargement techniques, Holocaust victims who had arrived in boxcars at Auschwitz could be seen being marched to their deaths in the gas chamber. Others could be seen lined up at a processing center for slave labor assignments. - Năm 1978, thông dịch hình ảnh Robert Poirier và tôi khám phá ra không ảnh Chiến tranh Thế giới II về những cái chết ở trại Auschwitz-Birkenau mà đã vô tình được chụp trong một phi vụ trinh sát của Đồng minh chống lại I.G lân cận Farben Rubber Synthetic và nhà máy nhiên liệu. Sử dụng một loạt các mật cắt và kỹ thuật mở rộng, những nạn nhân Holocaust, những người đã đến Auschwitz trong xe thùng có thể nhìn thấy được họ đi đến cái chết của họ trong các phòng hơi ngạt. Những người khác có thể được nhìn thấy xếp hàng tại một trung tâm phân công những nhiệm vụ lao động khổ sai."An examination of these two photos in comparison with the CIA report is interesting. Neither picture matches that in the CIA report. The photo in the new book of Birkenau might be the same photo that is labeled No. 4 on page 9 of the CIA report.
The Auschwitz I photo is closest to Photo No. 2 on page 7 of the CIA report.
The Birkenau photo. In Photo Fakery the picture is cropped very differently (if it is the same photo).
The labels are also different. In Photo Fakery much more of the Women’s Camp is shown and the “Gas chambers” are at the very far right of the photo. Actually you can not even see the extreme right of KII or KIII. The photo goes right into the binding of the book. Therefore the Undressing Room which is clear in the CIA report (KIII) is not shown in Photo Fakery. In Photo Fakery there is a label reading “Gas Chamber Crematorium” which points to the thick line (fence? hedgerow?) behind KII.
The label in the CIA report that says “Engine Room” and points to KIII is now labed “Crematorium.” The label in CIA that reads “Prisoners on way to Gas Chambers” now reads “Group on way to Gas Chamber.”
Although the labels are different and the cropping is very different the prisoners seems to match up exactly. Therefore it seems that Brugioni chose to use the same photo in both books but to alter its appearance in the new book. The odd alleged “Zyklon openings” in KIII clearly visible in the CIA report are now off of the photo entirely. It’s not that they don’t appear, it’s that the photo is cropped to exclude them.
The four “dots” that line up behind KII are still visible in the new book. Note that the photo under discussion appears to be the same photo in John Ball’s “Air Photo Evidence” page 40. The new book crops it from “Prisoners undergoing disinfection” and cuts off at the vents of KII and KIII. The Auschwitz I photo is similar to Photo 2 from CIA.
However in the CIA report it claims the photo is from 4 April 1944 in Photo Fakery it is labeled 25 August 1944. The photo in Photo Fakery is on an angle. Whereas in CIA the barracks are straight up, they appear at an angle in Photo Fakery. All labels are different. Otherwise the photos cover the exact same section of the camp.
This photo is similar to John Ball’s on page 44. However the photo in Photo Fakery is upside down and cropped to only show the far right of this view. Actually there are details in Photo Fakery which go further to the right than the photo in Ball’s book.
A final word from Brugioni on False Captioning:
“The falsely captioned photo differs from other groups of fake photos in that, although the photography has not been altered, the context of what the photograph purportedly conveys is simply falsified. Proper captioning of a photograph includes descriptive data regarding the ‘who, what, where, when, and why’ of the subject or scene. In falsely captioned photos only one or more of these elements is usually mentioned. This type of fake is frequently used in criminal cases to trap defendants who have tried to silence witnesses from testifying against them.”One wonders is that “group on way to Gas chamber” “Prsioners on way to gas chambers” or “Prisoners on way to Barracks” or “Group out on morning jog?”
6 World War II Propaganda Broadcasters
During
World War II, the Allies and the Axis powers made heavy use of radio
for propaganda purposes. Most of this spin was aimed at their own
populations, but some was tailor made for consumption by enemy soldiers
and civilians. Both sides recruited native speakers to broadcast radio
messages to the opposition in the hopes of spreading disinformation and
sowing discontent. These mysterious radio personalities became minor
celebrities during the war, and some were even arrested and branded as
traitors when the fighting ended. Find out more about six World War II
broadcasters who used the radio waves as a weapon.
1. Axis Sally (Mildred Gillars)
Several American Nazi sympathizers worked as broadcasters for German state radio, but perhaps none was as famous as Mildred Gillars. Born in Maine, Gillars was a former Broadway showgirl who moved to Berlin in 1934. She remained in Germany after the war broke out, and eventually became one of the Third Reich’s most prominent radio personalities with “Home Sweet Home,” a propaganda show directed at American troops. Gillars broadcasted under the radio handle “Midge,” but American GIs soon gave her a more infamous nickname: “Axis Sally.”
Gillars’ Axis Sally spoke in a friendly, conversational tone, but her goal was to unsettle her listeners. One of her favorite tactics was to mention the soldiers’ wives and girlfriends and then muse about whether the women would remain faithful, “especially if you boys get all mutilated and do not return in one piece.” Prior to the Allied invasion of France, she also starred in a radio play, called “Vision of Invasion,” as an American mother whose son needlessly drowns during the attack. Like a lot of propaganda, Gillars’ radio shows rarely had their desired effect—many GI’s only listened because they found them funny—but she was still considered a traitor by the U.S. government. When the war ended, the voice of Axis Sally was arrested and eventually spent 12 years behind bars.
2. Lord Haw Haw (William Joyce)
Beginning in 1939, millions of Britons regularly tuned in to a German propaganda broadcast hosted by a smug Nazi sympathizer nicknamed “Lord Haw Haw.” Several men were identified with the name, but it was most famously associated with William Joyce, an American-born fascist who had spent most of his life in the United Kingdom. Joyce was an outspoken acolyte of Adolf Hitler who had fled to Berlin at the beginning of the war. He soon joined the state broadcasting system, where he found an outlet for his particularly fiery brand of rhetoric.
Speaking in a clipped, cosmopolitan British accent, Joyce’s Lord Haw Haw dished out taunts and pro-Hitler rants intended to break the spirit of his beleaguered listeners. In between chastising Jews and the British government, he would gleefully report on the most recent casualties of the Blitz, often warning his audience to expect further punishment from the German Luftwaffe. Joyce’s influence waned in the later years of the war, and he was eventually captured near Flensburg, Germany in 1945 after occupying British troops recognized his famous voice. Found guilty of aiding the enemy, Britain’s most famous turncoat was executed by hanging in January 1946.
3. Tokyo Rose (Iva Toguri)
More than a dozen female Japanese broadcasters were dubbed “Tokyo Rose,” but the nickname was most famously linked to an American named Iva Toguri. A native of Los Angeles, Toguri was stranded in Japan after World War II broke out while she was visiting family members. She eventually took a job at Radio Tokyo, where she found herself ushered into a role as an on-air presenter. Using the handle “Orphan Ann,” the smoky-voiced Toguri soon became a legend of the Pacific Theater. By late 1943, thousands of GIs regularly tuned in to “The Zero Hour,” a radio show where she played pop music in between slanted battle reports and put-downs aimed at U.S. troops.
Toguri’s prominence saw her branded as one of the war’s most notorious propagandists, but evidence shows that she was not a Japanese sympathizer. Not only did she refuse to renounce her U.S. citizenship, she often willfully undermined her anti-American radio scripts by reading them in a playful, tongue-in-cheek fashion, even going so far as to warn her listeners to expect a “subtle attack” on their morale. Nevertheless, Toguri’s program became conflated with more vicious propaganda, and she was arrested and convicted of treason after the Japanese surrender. She was released from prison in 1956, but it would take more than 20 years before she finally received an official presidential pardon for her role in the war.
4. Sefton Delmer
As the head maestro of Britain’s “black propaganda” radio programs, Sefton Delmer used cloak-and-dagger methods to turn the airwaves into a tool for psychological warfare. Beginning in 1941, Delmer operated a phony German radio station called Gustav Siegfried Eins, or GS1. Unlike most propaganda outfits, which merely beamed their messages into enemy territory, GS1 masqueraded as an actual Nazi radio station broadcasting to fellow Germans from within the Fatherland.
To act as the voice of GS1, Delmer masterminded the creation of a fake radio personality known as “Der Chef” (“The Chief”). Played by a German defector named Peter Seckelmann, the character posed as a high-ranking Nazi and loyal Hitler supporter who appeared disillusioned with the rest of the party leadership. Der Chef built his credibility by criticizing the British and the Russians, but he also railed against Nazi officials and generals, helping to create the appearance of a rift within the German high command. Among other tactics, the phantom malcontent accused Nazi leaders of having tainted the party with acts of sexual deviancy ranging from rape to pedophilia. To cement his role as a persecuted patriot, Der Chef was even “assassinated” on air during GS1’s final broadcast in late-1943. Delmer would go on to set up several more propaganda stations including Soldatensender Calais, which posed as a German station for troops in France, and Atlantiksender, which spread targeted disinformation to Nazi U-boats in the Atlantic.
5. Philippe Henriot
In the dying days of the Nazi occupation of France, propagandist Philippe Henriot lit up the airwaves with a series of pro-German radio broadcasts aimed at pacifying the resistance. The French-born Henriot was a right wing firebrand who had eagerly aligned himself with the collaborationist Vichy government. In January 1944, he was appointed as the regime’s chief propagandist and spin doctor.
An eloquent speaker, Henriot played on the anxieties of the French people by arguing that the hardships they faced stemmed from their continued association with the Allies and native resistance groups, whom he labeled “terrorists.” He also used his radio programs as a platform to counter the arguments espoused by the Free French Forces, who were then broadcasting in exile from the BBC in London. Henriot’s twice-daily radio shows were appointment listening for the French public—many of whom called him the “French Goebbels”—but his influence was ultimately short-lived. In June 1944, he was assassinated in a targeted hit by French resistance fighters.
6. Fred W. Kaltenbach
As early as 1939, Germany began hiring expatriate Americans to host radio programs aimed at deterring U.S. intervention in the war. These American-born fascists included Robert Henry Best, an ex-journalist who used the handle “Mr. Guess Who,” and Jane Anderson, better known as “The Georgia Peach.” Still, perhaps the most enthusiastic broadcaster was Fred W. Kaltenbach. A former Iowa high school teacher, Kaltenbach had been fired in 1936 after he tried to organize an American copy of the Hitler Youth. Following his dismissal, he moved to Berlin and became host of one of the first German radio programs produced for Americans. He soon earned the nickname “Lord Hee Haw” for his homespun style and similarity to the British propagandist “Lord Haw Haw.”
Kaltenbach’s show took the form of fictional letters to his American friends back home in which he championed a policy of isolationism and railed against the evils of Jews and the British Empire. After the United States entered the conflict, he began broadcasting pro-Nazi news stories along with attacks on Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom he labeled a “warmonger.” Kaltenbach’s diatribes saw him charged with treason along with seven other American propagandists, but he never faced trial. Captured by the advancing Red Army, he disappeared shortly after the war ended and was later reported to have died in Soviet custody.
Several American Nazi sympathizers worked as broadcasters for German state radio, but perhaps none was as famous as Mildred Gillars. Born in Maine, Gillars was a former Broadway showgirl who moved to Berlin in 1934. She remained in Germany after the war broke out, and eventually became one of the Third Reich’s most prominent radio personalities with “Home Sweet Home,” a propaganda show directed at American troops. Gillars broadcasted under the radio handle “Midge,” but American GIs soon gave her a more infamous nickname: “Axis Sally.”
Gillars’ Axis Sally spoke in a friendly, conversational tone, but her goal was to unsettle her listeners. One of her favorite tactics was to mention the soldiers’ wives and girlfriends and then muse about whether the women would remain faithful, “especially if you boys get all mutilated and do not return in one piece.” Prior to the Allied invasion of France, she also starred in a radio play, called “Vision of Invasion,” as an American mother whose son needlessly drowns during the attack. Like a lot of propaganda, Gillars’ radio shows rarely had their desired effect—many GI’s only listened because they found them funny—but she was still considered a traitor by the U.S. government. When the war ended, the voice of Axis Sally was arrested and eventually spent 12 years behind bars.
2. Lord Haw Haw (William Joyce)
Beginning in 1939, millions of Britons regularly tuned in to a German propaganda broadcast hosted by a smug Nazi sympathizer nicknamed “Lord Haw Haw.” Several men were identified with the name, but it was most famously associated with William Joyce, an American-born fascist who had spent most of his life in the United Kingdom. Joyce was an outspoken acolyte of Adolf Hitler who had fled to Berlin at the beginning of the war. He soon joined the state broadcasting system, where he found an outlet for his particularly fiery brand of rhetoric.
Speaking in a clipped, cosmopolitan British accent, Joyce’s Lord Haw Haw dished out taunts and pro-Hitler rants intended to break the spirit of his beleaguered listeners. In between chastising Jews and the British government, he would gleefully report on the most recent casualties of the Blitz, often warning his audience to expect further punishment from the German Luftwaffe. Joyce’s influence waned in the later years of the war, and he was eventually captured near Flensburg, Germany in 1945 after occupying British troops recognized his famous voice. Found guilty of aiding the enemy, Britain’s most famous turncoat was executed by hanging in January 1946.
3. Tokyo Rose (Iva Toguri)
More than a dozen female Japanese broadcasters were dubbed “Tokyo Rose,” but the nickname was most famously linked to an American named Iva Toguri. A native of Los Angeles, Toguri was stranded in Japan after World War II broke out while she was visiting family members. She eventually took a job at Radio Tokyo, where she found herself ushered into a role as an on-air presenter. Using the handle “Orphan Ann,” the smoky-voiced Toguri soon became a legend of the Pacific Theater. By late 1943, thousands of GIs regularly tuned in to “The Zero Hour,” a radio show where she played pop music in between slanted battle reports and put-downs aimed at U.S. troops.
Toguri’s prominence saw her branded as one of the war’s most notorious propagandists, but evidence shows that she was not a Japanese sympathizer. Not only did she refuse to renounce her U.S. citizenship, she often willfully undermined her anti-American radio scripts by reading them in a playful, tongue-in-cheek fashion, even going so far as to warn her listeners to expect a “subtle attack” on their morale. Nevertheless, Toguri’s program became conflated with more vicious propaganda, and she was arrested and convicted of treason after the Japanese surrender. She was released from prison in 1956, but it would take more than 20 years before she finally received an official presidential pardon for her role in the war.
4. Sefton Delmer
As the head maestro of Britain’s “black propaganda” radio programs, Sefton Delmer used cloak-and-dagger methods to turn the airwaves into a tool for psychological warfare. Beginning in 1941, Delmer operated a phony German radio station called Gustav Siegfried Eins, or GS1. Unlike most propaganda outfits, which merely beamed their messages into enemy territory, GS1 masqueraded as an actual Nazi radio station broadcasting to fellow Germans from within the Fatherland.
To act as the voice of GS1, Delmer masterminded the creation of a fake radio personality known as “Der Chef” (“The Chief”). Played by a German defector named Peter Seckelmann, the character posed as a high-ranking Nazi and loyal Hitler supporter who appeared disillusioned with the rest of the party leadership. Der Chef built his credibility by criticizing the British and the Russians, but he also railed against Nazi officials and generals, helping to create the appearance of a rift within the German high command. Among other tactics, the phantom malcontent accused Nazi leaders of having tainted the party with acts of sexual deviancy ranging from rape to pedophilia. To cement his role as a persecuted patriot, Der Chef was even “assassinated” on air during GS1’s final broadcast in late-1943. Delmer would go on to set up several more propaganda stations including Soldatensender Calais, which posed as a German station for troops in France, and Atlantiksender, which spread targeted disinformation to Nazi U-boats in the Atlantic.
5. Philippe Henriot
In the dying days of the Nazi occupation of France, propagandist Philippe Henriot lit up the airwaves with a series of pro-German radio broadcasts aimed at pacifying the resistance. The French-born Henriot was a right wing firebrand who had eagerly aligned himself with the collaborationist Vichy government. In January 1944, he was appointed as the regime’s chief propagandist and spin doctor.
An eloquent speaker, Henriot played on the anxieties of the French people by arguing that the hardships they faced stemmed from their continued association with the Allies and native resistance groups, whom he labeled “terrorists.” He also used his radio programs as a platform to counter the arguments espoused by the Free French Forces, who were then broadcasting in exile from the BBC in London. Henriot’s twice-daily radio shows were appointment listening for the French public—many of whom called him the “French Goebbels”—but his influence was ultimately short-lived. In June 1944, he was assassinated in a targeted hit by French resistance fighters.
6. Fred W. Kaltenbach
As early as 1939, Germany began hiring expatriate Americans to host radio programs aimed at deterring U.S. intervention in the war. These American-born fascists included Robert Henry Best, an ex-journalist who used the handle “Mr. Guess Who,” and Jane Anderson, better known as “The Georgia Peach.” Still, perhaps the most enthusiastic broadcaster was Fred W. Kaltenbach. A former Iowa high school teacher, Kaltenbach had been fired in 1936 after he tried to organize an American copy of the Hitler Youth. Following his dismissal, he moved to Berlin and became host of one of the first German radio programs produced for Americans. He soon earned the nickname “Lord Hee Haw” for his homespun style and similarity to the British propagandist “Lord Haw Haw.”
Kaltenbach’s show took the form of fictional letters to his American friends back home in which he championed a policy of isolationism and railed against the evils of Jews and the British Empire. After the United States entered the conflict, he began broadcasting pro-Nazi news stories along with attacks on Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom he labeled a “warmonger.” Kaltenbach’s diatribes saw him charged with treason along with seven other American propagandists, but he never faced trial. Captured by the advancing Red Army, he disappeared shortly after the war ended and was later reported to have died in Soviet custody.
The Soviet photographer Schekoldin was taking
photos of people in the USSR. - Nhà nhiếp ảnh Liên Xô Schekoldin đã chụp ảnh mọi người ở Liên Xô. As it is was reported in the article, he
was taking his photos but was not publishing them as they for sure were
different from the propaganda photos of that time. - Như nó được được ghi trong bài viết, ông đã chụp ảnh nhưng lại không được xuất bản chúng như họ chắc chắn là khác biệt từ các bức ảnh tuyên truyền của thời điểm đó. In the interview
Schekoldin describes his style as "soc. cretinism - socialistic
cretinism". - Trong cuộc phỏng vấn Schekoldin mô tả phong cách của mình là "soc. cretinism - socialistic
cretinism". "It was my reaction to the official propaganda, for the
brainwashing." - "Đó là phản ứng của tôi với công tác tuyên truyền chính thức, cho việc tẩy não".
Contemporary news agencies are often
blamed for photo manipulations. - Các cơ quan thông đương đại vẫn thường đổ lỗi cho các thao tác hình ảnh. It started long ago in fact. - Nó bắt đầu từ lâu trong thực tế. Back in
the times of WWII graphic artists learnt to distor reality and show what
they wanted to show but not what really had happened. - Trở lại trong thời kỳ WWII nghệ sĩ đồ họa học được cách lưu trữ thực tế và cho thấy những gì họ muốn thể hiện nhưng không phải những gì thực sự đã xảy ra. Thus, they often
added excessive Nazi atrocities, terrible ruins and looting to fill
papers with horrifying images. - Vì vậy, họ thường thêm vào quá mức những tội ác của Đức Quốc xã, tàn tích khủng khiếp và cướp bóc để lấp đầy báo với những hình ảnh kinh hoàng.
However we do not have to exclude that
such atrocities and other terrific events could really happen, it was
just difficult to catch them with a camera due to their spontaneity.
- Tuy nhiên, chúng tôi không cần phải loại trừ rằng hành động tàn bạo như vậy và các sự kiện khủng khiếp khác thực sự có thể xảy ra, chỉ là rất khó để chụp chúng với một máy ảnh nhờ tính tự phát của họ. Photographers were rarely in a right time and in a right place. - Nhiếp ảnh gia hiếm khi ở một thời điểm và một nơi thích hợp. It's
today when everyone has a cameraphone we can shoot everything we see. - Đâu như ngày nay mọi người đều có cameraphone chúng ta có thể chụp tất cả mọi thứ chúng ta thấy.
Photo manipulations as an instrument of
propaganda is claimed to be natural. - Hình ảnh đã được dùng như một công cụ tuyên truyền được tuyên bố là tự nhiên. Below you will see some photos
taken during WWII that underwent montage for the purpose of propaganda. - Dưới đây bạn sẽ thấy một số hình ảnh trong Thế chiến II đuợc dàn dựng cho mục đích tuyên truyền.
Falsification and the original below. - Giả mạo và bản gốc bên dưới.
The soldier is shooting at the woman
with the child because women were often told to lap their babies before
the shooting so that only one shot would be necessary. - Lính đang bắn vào người phụ nữ với con bởi vì người phụ nữ thường nói với đứa con trong lòng của họ trước khi chụp ðể chỉ một cú là cần thiết. However, the
photo is a fake. -Tuy nhiên, bức ảnh là giả mạo. Neither the soldier nor the woman throw shadows. - Cả người lính lẫn người phụ nữ không bóng đổ. The
rifle is directed to the right side, away from the woman's head. - Súng trường được hướng về phía bên phải, ở xa đầu của người phụ nữ.
Famous Fakes — 10 Celebrated Wartime Photos That Were Staged, Altered or Fabricated
announced that it had cut ties with award-winning combat photographer Narciso Contreras
after the journalist used Photoshop to doctor an image he’d taken of
combat in Syria. The offending frame, which was snapped in September
2013, shows an anti-government insurgent armed with a Kalashnikov taking
cover behind a rock during fighting in Idlib province. A video camera
is clearly visible in the bottom left corner of the original photo — a
supposedly distracting element that the Mexican-based, Pulitzer Prize
winning correspondent edited out before filing. The U.S.-based wire
service blasted Contreras for what it deemed an unforgivable distortion.
“AP’s reputation is paramount and we react decisively and vigorously when it is tarnished by actions in violation of our ethics code,” said the company in a statement. “Deliberately removing elements from our photographs is completely unacceptable.”
The veteran combat journalist was quick to own up to the error.
“I took the wrong decision when I removed the camera,” he said “I feel ashamed about that.”
Interestingly enough, such photo flaps are hardly new. In fact, some of history’s most iconic images of warfare were fabricated, staged or manipulated. Here are some of the more famous examples:
Having a Lot of Balls
One of the first battlefield photographs ever taken is now widely believed to be a sham. Crimean War correspondent Roger Fenton’s acclaimed shot entitled “The Valley of the Shadow of Death” was snapped in 1855 after heavy fighting around Sevastopol. The image, which depicts an unpaved road strewn with spent cannonballs, was heralded at the time as testimony to the withering fire endured by British troops. Yet in 2007, the American documentary filmmaker Errol Morris unearthed another Fenton picture taken on the very same spot in which the rounds appear only in the ditches — not on the road itself. Morris asserts that the photographer scattered nearly two-dozen of the projectiles into the roadway himself for dramatic effect.
Gardner’s Gettysburg Gaffe
U.S. Civil War photographers like Matthew Brady famously snapped hundreds of haunting images of the aftermath of the conflict’s many battles. Yet in a number of cases, such scenes were manipulated, with cameramen often physically arranging objects, debris and even dead bodies within the frame to add to the scenes of devastation. Such is believed to be the case with Alexander Gardner’s post-Gettysburg image: “A Sharpshooter’s Last Sleep”. The famous shot features a corpse strangely similar to one that appears in another image taken on the same day entitled: “Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter”. Experts maintain that Gardner used the same fallen soldier for both pictures, reportedly dragging the body more than 40 yards between the two locations.[1]
Over the Top?
One of the most stirring images of British soldiers in action during the First World War wasn’t captured in No Man’s Land at all, but far behind the lines where it was safe. The legendary still, which depicts Tommies advancing through a field of barbed wire into the smoke of battle, was clipped from newsreel footage shot for the 1916 British documentary The Battle of the Somme (you can watch the full sequence here). While much of what appears in rest of the 77-minute film was indeed recorded at the front, the segment in question, which shows a number of the soldiers being mowed down as their comrades press the attack, was actually staged 65 km from the action two weeks after the battle was already underway.
Death in the Air
It took more than 50 years before a series of spectacular pictures of First World War dogfights were revealed to be make-believe. Gladys Cockburn-Lange, the supposed widow of a deceased British photographer and flier, made the eye-popping images of the air war public in 1933. In one of the shots supposedly taken over the Western Front, a German plane can be seen breaking apart in mid-air, while another photo shows an enemy pilot leaping to certain death from his flaming fighter. It wasn’t until the 1980s that an investigator with the Smithsonian Institute concluded that the pictures were faked using models, likely manufactured and photographed by early Hollywood special effects artist Wesley David Archer. [2]
Was “Falling Soldier” Really Just a Soldier Falling?
On Sept. 6, 1936, the Hungarian photojournalist Robert Capa snapped one of the most moving images of the 20th Century. It shows the exact moment life ended for a 24-year-old Spanish Republican soldier named Federico Borrell García. The powerful scene was believed to have been captured at Cerro Muriano during the Spanish Civil War. Yet years after the conflict, historians discovered a series of problems with the famous picture known as “Falling Soldier”. First of all, Borrell García’s own comrades reported that he was killed while hiding behind a tree, not out in the open as the photo depicts. Also, the ill-fated rifleman supposedly looked much different than the man in the frame. Some have also since have questioned if the image was even taken at Cerro Muriano. Locals say it looks more like the fields outside a town called Espejo, nearly 60 km away. And since that particular region of Spain was relatively quiet in the late summer of ‘36, some have concluded that the entire incident was probably staged. As recently as 2013, Japanese documentary filmmakers asserted that Capa might not have even take the photograph at all. Instead, it may have been the handiwork of female war correspondent Gerda Taro. The investigators also speculate that the soldier may have just slipped the moment the shutter opened. [2] Capa’s most famous photos would come eight years later as he captured the action at Normandy during the D-Day landings.
Take Two. Action!
Whether the celebrated Jo Rosenthal photograph showing the raising of the U.S. flag on Mount Suribachi during the 1945 fight for Iwo Jima was “staged” is a question of semantics. But it’s a matter of historical record that the immortalized hoisting of the Stars and Stripes was preceded by a similar incident earlier in the day. A Marine named Louis Lowery snapped the lesser-known photo hours before Rosenthal had even reached the summit. But it was the second (and more dramatic) image that featured prominently in a successful $26 Billion war bond drive in 1945. The shot also appeared on stamps, magazine covers, recruiting posters and was the basis of the U.S. Marine memorial in Washington D.C.
War Fiction
A similar photograph of a Red Army soldier waving the Soviet banner from atop the bombed out ruins of Berlin’s Reichstag was indeed staged. Military photographer Yevgeny Khaldei wanted to engineer a historic moment reminiscent of the American Iwo Jima picture, which was taken only weeks earlier. The 28-year-old correspondent hastily stitched together an ad hoc Hammer and Sickle using an old tablecloth and scaled the top of the Nazi legislature with some volunteers to set up the shot. Within two weeks, his image was the toast of Russia, but not before being retouched on the orders of the Kremlin. Moscow demanded the flag be enhanced in the darkroom to make it appear a little less improvised. More smoke was added to the horizon of the shot too. Finally, a second wristwatch on the soldier’s forearm (presumably looted) was rubbed off the negative, lest it sully the purity of the scene. [3]
More Recent Controversies
Such fakery didn’t end with World War Two. Consider these examples from our own era (click each photo to enlarge it):
• While campaigning as a “wartime president” in 2004, George W. Bush appeared in a photo surrounded by legions of U.S. troops. Days after the image was made public, bloggers noted that some of the faces of the soldiers behind the Commander-in-Chief appeared to have been duplicated using a copy and paste Photoshop tool known as “clone stamp”. The White House yanked the image and apologized.
• Freelance Lebanese photographer Adnan Hajj used the same software feature to enhance images of Israeli air strikes on Beirut in 2006. The Reuters stringer blatantly darkened and duplicated plumes of smoke on the city skyline in a ham-fisted attempt to make the image appear more exciting. It was just one of many examples of photo tampering to come out of the brief but intense war. The incident became known as “Reutersgate”.
• MilitaryHistorynow.com reported this case of a photo showing a North Korean military exercise in 2013 that was enhanced by Pyongyang propagandists. According to the MHN story, the image features a fleet of landing craft disembarking troops onto a beachhead. After being published worldwide, experts noted that several of the vessels appeared to be reflecting light identically, suggesting that there were simply copied and pasted into the frame. Also, the wakes being thrown up by the hovercraft also looked to have been enhanced digitally. The international media promptly pulled the photo from circulation.
War is hell, but as we've demonstrated previously (twice,
even), it's also often bizarre to look at. When you start sifting
through rare photos of secret projects and behind-the-scenes shenanigans
that didn't make into the history books, you get lots of pictures that
just look downright fake. Like ...
Called "dazzle" camouflage, the idea was to cover the ships in psychedelic designs that made it damn nigh impossible for an enemy spotter to determine speed, distance, and type of craft when spying the ships from afar. Try to stare hard at one of these -- your brain will start to hurt:
The camouflage saw widespread use during World War I and (to a lesser degree) World War II, but it ultimately died out when the introduction of LSD allowed enemy spotters to operate on the same plane of consciousness as those creating the designs.
You see, Hitler ruined several perfectly good things forever -- tiny mustaches, the swastika as a good luck charm, and all hand signals that look anything like the "Heil Hitler" salute. But Hitler didn't invent any of them.
For instance, in 1892, Francis Bellamy decided that your average American just wasn't pissing quite enough red, white, and blue. To counter this, he came up with the Pledge of Allegiance, along with a nifty little hand gesture to do while taking the pledge.
That's right: For decades, children across America happily heiled the Stars 'n' Stripes in what was then known as the Bellamy salute. Then along came this big, bald bag of dicks:
That's Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini. When he came to power, he resurrected the so-called Roman salute, and Hitler thought that shit looked so badass that he later adopted it as his own Nazi salute. This caused an obvious conflict when America entered World War II -- we couldn't very well have born-and-bred American kids doing the same salute as the Hitler Youth, and Nazis were notoriously ignorant of the concept of dibs. So during the war, Roosevelt signed off on a new salute proposed by Congress, and placing the right hand over the heart narrowly beat out flying the double bird in Germany's general direction.
Back in the days when countries would actually disarm once the war was over, fighter planes (which were basically useless in peacetime and couldn't be resold for civilian purposes) would just be scrapped. So these Curtiss P-40 Warhawks ($44,892 each to build in 1944 -- that's $590,000 in today's dollars) were scrapped and melted down. To save space as they awaited their fate, the planes were arranged like they'd taken a mass nosedive in perfect formation and somehow stuck neatly in the mud instead of exploding.
This is just a single site: Walnut Ridge airfield in Arkansas. All over the world, there were thousands of planes lined up like this, just begging for some smartass to happen by and play him some warplane dominoes.
"Things I dislike: The Kaiser, feds, soup ..."
But it turns out that Harrow's plight is based on similarly wounded
vets of the early 20th century. Decades before things like facial
surgery and skin grafts were commonplace, disfigured vets covered their
horrible wounds with facial plates just like the one featured on the
show. There are more examples out there, but we wouldn't recommend looking at them if you happen to be reading this article while eating or before bed.
And don't worry, it wasn't just faces that got state-of-the-art protection from concerned scientists of the day. Wartime inventiveness also gave us ...
After all, if we endanger the boobies, what do our boys overseas have left to come home to?
Even after World War I was over, the American government decided that it needed one more bond drive to raise enough cash to tie up any loose ends. Dubbed the Victory Liberty Loan parade, the party visited New York City in May of 1919 and set up a huge display of American guns and various pillars and pyramids smack in the middle of Madison Avenue. Pyramids made of the helmets of (presumably dead) German soldiers.
Yes, harking back to the days of the victory pyramids that the Mongols decorated Asia with, America decided that we needed some victory pyramids of our very own. In case you're not familiar with the pyramids we're referring to, we mean those constructed of skulls that the men of the horde lovingly cleaned and polished after having severed them from their previous owners. That's right: Someone had the bright idea that reminding American citizens that each and every one of those helmets represented a dead or captured German soldier would inspire them to donate to the post-war drive.
Oh, and it totally worked. U-S-A! U-S-A!
But those are in fact military surveillance pigeons, and yes, they really existed. It was kind of a good idea, if you think about it -- aerial photos of enemy trench lines were highly sought after, but newfangled surveillance planes were just starting to be introduced (prior to World War I, if you wanted aerial surveillance, you did it using vulnerable hot air balloons and kites). Then along came Dr. Julius Neubronner with his patented miniature pigeon camera.
And just as depressing as that sentence ...
During World War II, the British Special Operations Executive was always looking for ways to pull a James Bond on their SS rivals. One thing that added difficulty to their espionaging was providing their soldiers with mobility once they dropped them behind enemy lines to get their spy on -- the logistics of dropping everything out of airplanes meant that there were severe size and weight restraints. So engineers worked hand-in-hand with Barnum & Bailey to develop these adorable wittle motorcycles.
The Welbike featured a single-cylinder engine and a collapsible design that allowed it to be packed into an airdrop container and chucked out over enemy territory for retrieval by special forces operatives, with just enough space left over to cram the size 28 shoes and giant red Afro wig in there.
Before computers, the only way to make sure that a new fighter plane didn't fall apart right as you were dogfighting over a cactus patch was to hang it up and expose it to the wind. Sure, you could build a model and put it in a tiny wind tunnel, but damn it, nothing beats going full scale.
That's a German facility above, but the Americans were also in the big wind game with this facility at Langley Field near Hampton, Virginia, that tested everything from World War II fighters to space capsules:
Unfortunately, the context of many of the photos we're about to show you has been lost to time, but if a picture is worth a thousand words, then these photos are a veritable word goldmine. Because they paint a picture of Nazi soldiers as a bunch of tiny horse ridin' ...
... alcohol swillin' ...
... uh, crossdressers?
It seems that, no matter the surrounding circumstances, when you stir together a group of fraternity-age males, stick them in a confined space, and let them simmer for a while, you've just concocted the recipe for an instant kegger. Maybe you'll end up with a fake-mustache party ...
... or even a "totally not gay even though we're all in our underwear and some of us are totally kissing" party ...
... but you'll always end up with a party. Seeing these photos almost makes us think that Nazi military life was equal parts fun, beer, and homoeroticism -- but then again, if you look just a little closer, this party bus does a power slide onto Disturbing Avenue:
Yeah, OK, never mind. Turns out that, even at a drunken Nazi frat
party, Evil's still right there, lurking in the background and hogging
up all the good booze.
SOURCES
IN JANUARY, the Associated Press “AP’s reputation is paramount and we react decisively and vigorously when it is tarnished by actions in violation of our ethics code,” said the company in a statement. “Deliberately removing elements from our photographs is completely unacceptable.”
The veteran combat journalist was quick to own up to the error.
“I took the wrong decision when I removed the camera,” he said “I feel ashamed about that.”
Interestingly enough, such photo flaps are hardly new. In fact, some of history’s most iconic images of warfare were fabricated, staged or manipulated. Here are some of the more famous examples:
Having a Lot of Balls
One of the first battlefield photographs ever taken is now widely believed to be a sham. Crimean War correspondent Roger Fenton’s acclaimed shot entitled “The Valley of the Shadow of Death” was snapped in 1855 after heavy fighting around Sevastopol. The image, which depicts an unpaved road strewn with spent cannonballs, was heralded at the time as testimony to the withering fire endured by British troops. Yet in 2007, the American documentary filmmaker Errol Morris unearthed another Fenton picture taken on the very same spot in which the rounds appear only in the ditches — not on the road itself. Morris asserts that the photographer scattered nearly two-dozen of the projectiles into the roadway himself for dramatic effect.
Gardner’s Gettysburg Gaffe
U.S. Civil War photographers like Matthew Brady famously snapped hundreds of haunting images of the aftermath of the conflict’s many battles. Yet in a number of cases, such scenes were manipulated, with cameramen often physically arranging objects, debris and even dead bodies within the frame to add to the scenes of devastation. Such is believed to be the case with Alexander Gardner’s post-Gettysburg image: “A Sharpshooter’s Last Sleep”. The famous shot features a corpse strangely similar to one that appears in another image taken on the same day entitled: “Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter”. Experts maintain that Gardner used the same fallen soldier for both pictures, reportedly dragging the body more than 40 yards between the two locations.[1]
Over the Top?
One of the most stirring images of British soldiers in action during the First World War wasn’t captured in No Man’s Land at all, but far behind the lines where it was safe. The legendary still, which depicts Tommies advancing through a field of barbed wire into the smoke of battle, was clipped from newsreel footage shot for the 1916 British documentary The Battle of the Somme (you can watch the full sequence here). While much of what appears in rest of the 77-minute film was indeed recorded at the front, the segment in question, which shows a number of the soldiers being mowed down as their comrades press the attack, was actually staged 65 km from the action two weeks after the battle was already underway.
Death in the Air
It took more than 50 years before a series of spectacular pictures of First World War dogfights were revealed to be make-believe. Gladys Cockburn-Lange, the supposed widow of a deceased British photographer and flier, made the eye-popping images of the air war public in 1933. In one of the shots supposedly taken over the Western Front, a German plane can be seen breaking apart in mid-air, while another photo shows an enemy pilot leaping to certain death from his flaming fighter. It wasn’t until the 1980s that an investigator with the Smithsonian Institute concluded that the pictures were faked using models, likely manufactured and photographed by early Hollywood special effects artist Wesley David Archer. [2]
Was “Falling Soldier” Really Just a Soldier Falling?
On Sept. 6, 1936, the Hungarian photojournalist Robert Capa snapped one of the most moving images of the 20th Century. It shows the exact moment life ended for a 24-year-old Spanish Republican soldier named Federico Borrell García. The powerful scene was believed to have been captured at Cerro Muriano during the Spanish Civil War. Yet years after the conflict, historians discovered a series of problems with the famous picture known as “Falling Soldier”. First of all, Borrell García’s own comrades reported that he was killed while hiding behind a tree, not out in the open as the photo depicts. Also, the ill-fated rifleman supposedly looked much different than the man in the frame. Some have also since have questioned if the image was even taken at Cerro Muriano. Locals say it looks more like the fields outside a town called Espejo, nearly 60 km away. And since that particular region of Spain was relatively quiet in the late summer of ‘36, some have concluded that the entire incident was probably staged. As recently as 2013, Japanese documentary filmmakers asserted that Capa might not have even take the photograph at all. Instead, it may have been the handiwork of female war correspondent Gerda Taro. The investigators also speculate that the soldier may have just slipped the moment the shutter opened. [2] Capa’s most famous photos would come eight years later as he captured the action at Normandy during the D-Day landings.
Take Two. Action!
Whether the celebrated Jo Rosenthal photograph showing the raising of the U.S. flag on Mount Suribachi during the 1945 fight for Iwo Jima was “staged” is a question of semantics. But it’s a matter of historical record that the immortalized hoisting of the Stars and Stripes was preceded by a similar incident earlier in the day. A Marine named Louis Lowery snapped the lesser-known photo hours before Rosenthal had even reached the summit. But it was the second (and more dramatic) image that featured prominently in a successful $26 Billion war bond drive in 1945. The shot also appeared on stamps, magazine covers, recruiting posters and was the basis of the U.S. Marine memorial in Washington D.C.
War Fiction
A similar photograph of a Red Army soldier waving the Soviet banner from atop the bombed out ruins of Berlin’s Reichstag was indeed staged. Military photographer Yevgeny Khaldei wanted to engineer a historic moment reminiscent of the American Iwo Jima picture, which was taken only weeks earlier. The 28-year-old correspondent hastily stitched together an ad hoc Hammer and Sickle using an old tablecloth and scaled the top of the Nazi legislature with some volunteers to set up the shot. Within two weeks, his image was the toast of Russia, but not before being retouched on the orders of the Kremlin. Moscow demanded the flag be enhanced in the darkroom to make it appear a little less improvised. More smoke was added to the horizon of the shot too. Finally, a second wristwatch on the soldier’s forearm (presumably looted) was rubbed off the negative, lest it sully the purity of the scene. [3]
More Recent Controversies
Such fakery didn’t end with World War Two. Consider these examples from our own era (click each photo to enlarge it):
• While campaigning as a “wartime president” in 2004, George W. Bush appeared in a photo surrounded by legions of U.S. troops. Days after the image was made public, bloggers noted that some of the faces of the soldiers behind the Commander-in-Chief appeared to have been duplicated using a copy and paste Photoshop tool known as “clone stamp”. The White House yanked the image and apologized.
• Freelance Lebanese photographer Adnan Hajj used the same software feature to enhance images of Israeli air strikes on Beirut in 2006. The Reuters stringer blatantly darkened and duplicated plumes of smoke on the city skyline in a ham-fisted attempt to make the image appear more exciting. It was just one of many examples of photo tampering to come out of the brief but intense war. The incident became known as “Reutersgate”.
• MilitaryHistorynow.com reported this case of a photo showing a North Korean military exercise in 2013 that was enhanced by Pyongyang propagandists. According to the MHN story, the image features a fleet of landing craft disembarking troops onto a beachhead. After being published worldwide, experts noted that several of the vessels appeared to be reflecting light identically, suggesting that there were simply copied and pasted into the frame. Also, the wakes being thrown up by the hovercraft also looked to have been enhanced digitally. The international media promptly pulled the photo from circulation.
11 Old War Photographs You Won't Believe Aren't Photoshopped
#11. Dazzle Ships
Before the invention of radar, naval battles were like a hardcore version of Marco Polo: Each side blindly lobbed shots at the other in hopes of connecting with something (yes, the board game Battleship was actually a fairly realistic representation). So ships of the early 20th century tried to make it even harder for their opponents by blending into the water with light-colored paint schemes. That is, until the British decided to try something a little ... different.Called "dazzle" camouflage, the idea was to cover the ships in psychedelic designs that made it damn nigh impossible for an enemy spotter to determine speed, distance, and type of craft when spying the ships from afar. Try to stare hard at one of these -- your brain will start to hurt:
The camouflage saw widespread use during World War I and (to a lesser degree) World War II, but it ultimately died out when the introduction of LSD allowed enemy spotters to operate on the same plane of consciousness as those creating the designs.
#10. Heil America!
This is not a still from some old "What if the Nazis win the war?" propaganda film. That is a real, undoctored photo of an American classroom.You see, Hitler ruined several perfectly good things forever -- tiny mustaches, the swastika as a good luck charm, and all hand signals that look anything like the "Heil Hitler" salute. But Hitler didn't invent any of them.
For instance, in 1892, Francis Bellamy decided that your average American just wasn't pissing quite enough red, white, and blue. To counter this, he came up with the Pledge of Allegiance, along with a nifty little hand gesture to do while taking the pledge.
That's right: For decades, children across America happily heiled the Stars 'n' Stripes in what was then known as the Bellamy salute. Then along came this big, bald bag of dicks:
That's Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini. When he came to power, he resurrected the so-called Roman salute, and Hitler thought that shit looked so badass that he later adopted it as his own Nazi salute. This caused an obvious conflict when America entered World War II -- we couldn't very well have born-and-bred American kids doing the same salute as the Hitler Youth, and Nazis were notoriously ignorant of the concept of dibs. So during the war, Roosevelt signed off on a new salute proposed by Congress, and placing the right hand over the heart narrowly beat out flying the double bird in Germany's general direction.
#9. They Stayed in Formation, Right Until They Crashed
As much as that looks like the aftermath of the most cartoonish disaster in military history, it is actually just the product of space-saving efficiency and horrific waste.Back in the days when countries would actually disarm once the war was over, fighter planes (which were basically useless in peacetime and couldn't be resold for civilian purposes) would just be scrapped. So these Curtiss P-40 Warhawks ($44,892 each to build in 1944 -- that's $590,000 in today's dollars) were scrapped and melted down. To save space as they awaited their fate, the planes were arranged like they'd taken a mass nosedive in perfect formation and somehow stuck neatly in the mud instead of exploding.
This is just a single site: Walnut Ridge airfield in Arkansas. All over the world, there were thousands of planes lined up like this, just begging for some smartass to happen by and play him some warplane dominoes.
#8. Boardwalk Empire?
HBO's Boardwalk Empire features a character named Richard Harrow, a former World War I sniper whose face was horribly disfigured when he got face-sniped by an enemy marksman. In what seems like a purely Hollywood touch to make him look more terrifying, Harrow covers his brutalized face with a lifelike mask that attaches to his head via eyeglasses:"Things I dislike: The Kaiser, feds, soup ..."
And don't worry, it wasn't just faces that got state-of-the-art protection from concerned scientists of the day. Wartime inventiveness also gave us ...
#7. Industrial Breast Protectors
When the men moved to the front during World War II, the women entered a new environment as well: the factory floor. As the Rosie Riveters and Wendy Welders were performing jobs they had never done before, men became very concerned about their safety. Well, the safety of particular parts of them, at least. So Acme developed the industrial plastic boulder holder that this young gal is so kindly demonstrating.After all, if we endanger the boobies, what do our boys overseas have left to come home to?
#6. American Pyramid of Skulls ... Er, Helmets
Even after World War I was over, the American government decided that it needed one more bond drive to raise enough cash to tie up any loose ends. Dubbed the Victory Liberty Loan parade, the party visited New York City in May of 1919 and set up a huge display of American guns and various pillars and pyramids smack in the middle of Madison Avenue. Pyramids made of the helmets of (presumably dead) German soldiers.
Yes, harking back to the days of the victory pyramids that the Mongols decorated Asia with, America decided that we needed some victory pyramids of our very own. In case you're not familiar with the pyramids we're referring to, we mean those constructed of skulls that the men of the horde lovingly cleaned and polished after having severed them from their previous owners. That's right: Someone had the bright idea that reminding American citizens that each and every one of those helmets represented a dead or captured German soldier would inspire them to donate to the post-war drive.
Oh, and it totally worked. U-S-A! U-S-A!
#5. Pigeon Photographers
OK, now that's just ridiculous. Look at them! Carrying cameras around like little feathered tourists.But those are in fact military surveillance pigeons, and yes, they really existed. It was kind of a good idea, if you think about it -- aerial photos of enemy trench lines were highly sought after, but newfangled surveillance planes were just starting to be introduced (prior to World War I, if you wanted aerial surveillance, you did it using vulnerable hot air balloons and kites). Then along came Dr. Julius Neubronner with his patented miniature pigeon camera.
Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R01996/CC-BY-SA via Wiki
The word "miniature" had a loose definition in the early 1900s.
Neubronner's specially trained pigeons could be carried into battle
in a customized mobile dovecote and then strapped into camera vests like
the one seen above. When released, they were able to take a series of
highly detailed photographs of the layout of enemy lines before
returning to their roost and dropping off their film to be developed for
HQ.The word "miniature" had a loose definition in the early 1900s.
Wiki
"Sir, is there a reason half our missions are near that all-girls college?"
"Never question my orders."
These avian reconnoiterers saw some decent action alongside German
forces during the war, judging by all the cartoonishly exploded pigeons found behind Allied lines.
Sadly, though, when he inquired about further developing the technology
after the war, the War Ministry told Neubronner to "fuck off with that
pigeon bullshit" (loosely translated from the original German)."Sir, is there a reason half our missions are near that all-girls college?"
"Never question my orders."
And just as depressing as that sentence ...
#4. Doggy Gas Masks
Keystone/Getty
Throughout the history of warfare, opposing forces have sprayed some particularly nasty shit
all over each other. So gas masks have long been a universal piece of
equipment for our human soldiers, but what about their best friends?
Don't worry, Fido, because we thought of you, too! Pre-Geneva Protocol
pooches had nothing to fear once their human companions forced them to
strap one of these babies onto their little doggie craniums. Except for,
you know, all the bullets and explosions and stuff.#3. Special Forces Mini-Bikes
Ha! Look at that guy riding his tiny little clown bike back there! How could you even bring yourself to shoot that guy?During World War II, the British Special Operations Executive was always looking for ways to pull a James Bond on their SS rivals. One thing that added difficulty to their espionaging was providing their soldiers with mobility once they dropped them behind enemy lines to get their spy on -- the logistics of dropping everything out of airplanes meant that there were severe size and weight restraints. So engineers worked hand-in-hand with Barnum & Bailey to develop these adorable wittle motorcycles.
The Welbike featured a single-cylinder engine and a collapsible design that allowed it to be packed into an airdrop container and chucked out over enemy territory for retrieval by special forces operatives, with just enough space left over to cram the size 28 shoes and giant red Afro wig in there.
#2. Wind Tunnels
Note the tiny little engineers at the bottom. That's not a model airplane up there.Before computers, the only way to make sure that a new fighter plane didn't fall apart right as you were dogfighting over a cactus patch was to hang it up and expose it to the wind. Sure, you could build a model and put it in a tiny wind tunnel, but damn it, nothing beats going full scale.
That's a German facility above, but the Americans were also in the big wind game with this facility at Langley Field near Hampton, Virginia, that tested everything from World War II fighters to space capsules:
#1. Nazis Just Wanna Have Fun
The Nazis made for such perfect villains that we tend to forget that their military was largely made up of kids who were conscripted to serve their country, just like the armies that were fighting them. And like all soldiers, they liked to occasionally take time out and make a big sign with their butts.Unfortunately, the context of many of the photos we're about to show you has been lost to time, but if a picture is worth a thousand words, then these photos are a veritable word goldmine. Because they paint a picture of Nazi soldiers as a bunch of tiny horse ridin' ...
... alcohol swillin' ...
... uh, crossdressers?
It seems that, no matter the surrounding circumstances, when you stir together a group of fraternity-age males, stick them in a confined space, and let them simmer for a while, you've just concocted the recipe for an instant kegger. Maybe you'll end up with a fake-mustache party ...
... or even a "totally not gay even though we're all in our underwear and some of us are totally kissing" party ...
... but you'll always end up with a party. Seeing these photos almost makes us think that Nazi military life was equal parts fun, beer, and homoeroticism -- but then again, if you look just a little closer, this party bus does a power slide onto Disturbing Avenue:
http://militaryhistorynow.com/2012/06/12/how-early-photographers-captured-historys-first-images-of-war/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/01/valley-of-the-shadow-of-death-fake_n_1928760.html
http://petapixel.com/2012/10/01/famous-valley-of-the-shadow-of-death-photo-was-most-likely-staged/
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/photo_database/image/a_sharpshooters_last_sleep
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/photo_database/image/death_in_the_air
http://www.metafilter.com/130999/Death-on-Wires-the-fake-war-diary-and-photographs-of-a-Flying-Corps-Pilot
http://www.luminous-lint.com/app/contents/fra/_ww1_dogfight_fakes_01/
http://io9.com/these-wwi-aerial-dogfight-photos-are-incredible-too-ba-1134100268
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/10/09/world/yevgeny-khaldei-80-war-photographer-dies.html
For more old photos that are clearly fake (but totally aren't), check out 18 Old-Timey Photos You Won't Believe Aren't Photoshopped and 16 Real Old-Timey Photographs That Will Give you Nightmares.
If you're pressed for time and just looking for a quick fix, then check out 3 Terrible Stadiums You Won't Believe Were Actually Built.
And stop by LinkSTORM where you can continue to practice screaming FAKE.