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Soviet photo-fakery exposed
Adolf Heusinger, Friedrich Paulus, and Adolf Hitler
In April 1961, Adolf Heusinger, the former chief of the Operations Section of the High Command of the Wehrmacht, was appointed Chairman of the NATO Military Committee, which made him in effect its chief [non-American] military strategist.
Communist-Jewish groups in the U.S. were quick to protest (CIA report) his appointment, claiming he was responsible for numerous war crimes committed within the Soviet Union during the war. Heusinger had never been tried by the Allies but he did give an affidavit that was presented at the main Nuremberg trial as part of the prosecution's case against Jodl, in which he'd declared that the military leaders of Germany had a plan for "the systematic extermination of Slavism and Jewry." His former comrade Major-general von Buttlar-Brandenfels was surprised to hear of this, stating under oath: "He never said anything to me which might express this view and I cannot explain this statement of his," (IMT/15/570) because "I never heard so much as a hint of such a thing. Such an interpretation would have been quite contrary to the intentions of the military leaders." (Ibid/567)
The Soviet government quickly followed the lead of the American-Jewish communists and launched a propaganda offensive of their own against the new head of the NATO Military Committee. In December 1961 a press conference was held at which they presented purported evidence of atrocities committed by troops under Heusinger's control during WWII, and demanded that the U.S. immediately hand him over so he could face trial.
One of the pieces of evidence presented at the press conference was a photograph which purportedly showed Heusinger's troops burning a Soviet village, and the same photo was also published in the following day's edition of the state-published newspaper Krasnaia Zvezda (Red Star) in an article titled "Hitlerite Heusinger—Prosecute Him!"
Within a few weeks, journalists in West Germany published an exposé on the photograph, proving that in 1960 the same State controlled military publishing house that printed Krasnaia Zvezda had published the same photo in its prestigious leather-bound, six volume History of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union 1941-1945, but on that occasion had stated that the photo showed Japanese troops burning a Chinese village in 1932.
Newspapers in the U.S. quickly picked-up on the story (as can be seen in this collection of articles on CODOH discovered by hermod—from which I originally learnt of this fraud), some even published an official comment from the U.S. government on the matter, who labelled it "a crude propaganda manoeuvre."
This incident demonstrates the Soviet's unscrupulous dishonesty in presenting deliberately mislabelled photographs as evidence of alleged German atrocities during WWII; something Holocaust promoters were proved to still be doing in 1999.
Above are images from pages 1 and 3 of the December 13, 1961, edition of the Red Army newspaper Krasnaia Zvezda obtained from a microfilm collection held by a British university; I was unfortunately unable to obtain better copies despite several, not inconsiderable efforts to do so.
This is the photo in discussion; the caption beneath it reads:
Эти чудовищные преступления немецко-фашистских карателей совершались но приказам Хойзингера. На снимках: (вверху) расстрел мирных жителей в Орловской; (внизу) Фашистские поджнгателн окружили и сжигают советскую деревню.Translated:
These monstrous crimes were committed by fascist executioners on orders of Heusinger. In pictures: (top [not shown here]) the shooting of civilians in Oryol; (bottom) Fascist incendiarists surround and set fire to a Soviet village.Incidentally, the caption for the the top photograph on the same page on Krasnaia Zvezda article is at least consistent with what is written on the back of the purported original ("Shooting (to death) of peaceful Soviet citizens by German occupiers. Photograph found on a killed German officer in the Orlow(sky) Oblast, end of July 1942"), which is now held by the Yad Vashem. Although the poor quality of the print strongly suggests that this can not be a print from the original film.
Above are scans of the cover and title pages of История Великой Отечественной войны Советского Союза 1941-1945 Том Первый, Военное И3дательство Министерства Обороны Союза СCP Москва, 1960 (History of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union 1941-1945 Volume One, Moscow: Military Publishing House of the Ministry of Defence of the USSR, 1960) edited by P. N. Pospelov et al.; there is an online version of this publication.
A scan of page 8 and the and its opposite unnumbered picture page (enlarged image).
The caption reads: "Японские интервенты сжигают китайские деревни (Район Шанхая, 1932 г.)", which translates as: "Japanese interventionists burn a Chinese Village (Shanghai district, 1932)"
Here is a gif of the two images overlaid (a better quality one will soon replace this temporary imgflip one). As one of the images is a digital scan from a book which proved impossible to keep precisely flat whilst scanning it, and the other images is a photograph, of a printout, from a substandard quality microfilm, of a 1961 Soviet newspaper, the quality is inevitably very poor—despite my best efforts I was not able to obtain a scan from an original copy of the newspaper.
Above is this entire blog post cut-to-the-chase.
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