The photo of slave laborers at Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp after liberation and Holocaust denial

On April 11, 1945, the Buchenwald Nazi Concentration Camp was liberated by the 6th Armoured Division of General Patton’s Third Army. Knowing of the Allied advance the Nazis had evacuated many of the inmates but on arrival US soldiers discovered over 21,000 emaciated men and boys including members of the Jewish and Roma community, resistance fighters and Soviet prisoners of war, who had been left behind.

Shocked by the condition of the men and to ensure the world fully understood the depravity they had faced, including forced labour and medical experiments, which many had experienced, orders were given that the Signal Corp should document the scene.

On April 16, 1945, military photographer Harry Miller arrived at Buchenwald to make an official record of the condition the inmates had endured, and here he took some of the most harrowing photos taken in Nazi Camps, photos which are displayed in the National Archives and official Buchenwald Memorial Foundation site.

For one of his photographs Miller asked the inmates to return to their bunks to show the conditions they lived under. Here he captured the famous image of malnourished men lying on wooden bunks and an emaciated, unclothed man, Simon Toncman, a Dutch Jew, leaning against a wooden pillar to the the side of the frame. By the end of April this photo had appeared in US and German newspapers, including The New York Times (NYT) who printed a cropped version of the photo, which cut the naked Simon from the image.

Over the next few weeks the NYT would go on to publish the full, uncropped image twice. On May 6, 1945, in the NYT Magazine, the copy was so dark and grainy Simon could not be seen, possibly in an attempt to censor the shot and three weeks later, on May 29, 1945, the NYT newspaper published a lighter, clearer version. But this edition showed just the men lying on their bunks with empty bunks in the background now visible because Simon wasn’t there.

In recent years, the glaring difference between the photographs has been seized upon by extremist sites to spread conspiracy theories, claiming the photograph in which Simon appears was obviously a photomontage and if the photos of the Holocaust had to be staged, manipulated and forged, it proves the Holocaust, itself, was a hoax – claims which are continually shared across social media by Holocaust deniers and antisemitic accounts.

Their ‘evidence’ centres around the blurring which can be seen around Simon’s arm and head as proof his image was added into the shot and as the photo without Simon would be used years later for the cover of the book ‘By Bread Alone’ written by Mel Mermelstein, who was one of the Buchenwald survivors, and also pictured in the image, this must be the original, genuine photograph.

But the genuine photograph is the one which shows the skeletal Simon, standing next to his fellow inmates.

These are slave laborers in the Buchenwald concentration camp near Jena, many had died from malnutrition when U.S. troops of the 80th Div. entered the camp. 16 April 1945. Image source: https://fotoarchiv.buchenwald.de/detail/2478

The ghosting around Simon’s arm and head has been replicated and discovered to be nothing more than motion blur, something which can be seen in other parts of the photograph, and the ‘proof’ that only the genuine photo would be used for the book written by a man who was actually there has proven quite the opposite.

In the NYT’s version of the photo you can still see the shadow Simon’s body casts on the floor and, as there wasn’t enough detail to work with, the man whose face is clearly visible below Simon’s right axilla in the original photograph couldn’t be reproduced, so he too is removed from the shot. Most importantly, further evidence that the NYT’s photo was not authentic is provided by the very claim that the real photograph would be used for a book written by a man who had been there himself. Because Simon is in the original photograph, the version The New York Times published is missing a support post below the bunk beds because it had been hidden behind Simon’s right leg. For the cover of the 1979 edition of Mermelstein’s book this error was noticed and corrected by editing in the missing post therefore proving this was, indeed, a manipulated version of the original.

Exactly why the NYT chose to manipulate the original photograph, which has helped feed Holocaust denial, is not known. The very poor quality of the photo in the NYT Magazine could have been deliberate to hide the barely covered Simon so he then had to be fully removed from the image printed three weeks later. What is known, however, is that the NYT deliberately withheld news about the Holocaust from its readers, usually burying articles about Hitler’s attempts to wipe out Euro­pean Jew­ry in the back pages of their publications.

Sources

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