The picture that destroyed Germany

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WarBastard

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...that's what it was called, but really it was two pictures. Printed side-by-side, in black and white, they depicted an event, one which was probably repeated dozens if not hundereds of times during the war, that came to symbolize the descent of the German people in the eyes of the world to the lowest rung of bestiality.

It was taken just outside Warsaw in October 1944. The photographer was never identified, though it is often suspected it was a German soldier, as anyone else who could have been in a position to take the photo would surely have been killed for doing so. Krasnaya Zvezda published it on the front page, and extra copies were printed up so as many Red Army soldiers possible saw it. Within a week, it was published in Pravda and Izvestia, and became known throughout the Soviet Union.

After the war, a widely-circulated story said that when shown the photos, Joseph Stalin asked to be left alone and appeared to have been weeping when he emerged from his office twenty minutes later. Few believe the story, but the fact is, many people did cry when they saw the images. Roosevelt openly admited to having done so, as did many of even the most battle-hardened men on Earth...

Henry Morgenthau Jr. was said to have been especially repulsed. Some remarked on the similarity of the children in the photo to his own... in the first picture, at any rate.
 
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So the photo contains a German soldier, some children, and is set in Poland. What couldn't go wrong here? That's said, I'm certainly interested in seeing how it "destroys Germany", if what happened at Auschwitz hadn't in OTL.
 
I'm assuming it's the mean, mean Nazis gang-raping poor children, while gouging out their eyes and skull-fucking them, and at the same time carving swastikas into their flesh and screaming in joy. The second picture has the Nazis ejaculating into their eye sockets and burning the kids alive for the glory of the Führer.

* Rolls eyes at this whole thread *
 
* Rolls eyes at this whole thread *


I'm very sure you're not the only one.

I'm also sure everyone has already imagined just what the pictures show, although so far only you have felt the need to share with everyone what you imagined. :rolleyes:

This thread is heading for an early lock and watching the coming wreck should be entertaining in a morbid way.
 

WarBastard

Banned
Picture of atocities were ten-a-penny in WW2. The photos that emerged from Auschwitz and the other concentration camps were thoroughly disgusting. Dresden gave photographers its fair share of unimaginable horror. Photos of Hiroshima even showed the world a scene that could not have even be imagined a few weeks previously.

But none depicted the personalised horror of the Warsaw Angels, as the two brothers* in these photos came to be known.

The first photo shows a small toddler, almost still a baby, staring towards the camera, looking frightened but calm. In the background four houses can be seen burning and the bodies of two men lie face down in a puddle beside a tank. An older boy, aged roughly three, is reaching towards the baby with an expression which has since come to horror. The boy's face, since reproduced so many times in popular culture, most famously in Allan Darrow's masterpiece painting Mankind bears a terror and horror almost impossible to describe.

Years after the war, psychiatrists have spent thousands of hours studying exactly what it is about the boy's face that inspires such universal and fundamental disgust in people. The photographs were famously banned from being published in some American states after the war, though the Supreme Court deemed those laws unconstitutional.

At the side of the first photograph, almost too small to be seen, is a nozzle with a small flame at the end of it.

The second photo, despite the fact that it actually depicts the horrific event, is generally agreed to be the less powerful of the two. It shows one German soldier incinerating the two boys with a flamethrower as two other soldiers laugh. Within the flames, the older boy can be seen with his arms around the baby in a futile attempt to protect him. One of the laughing soldiers has thrown his head back; his laugh looks like an exaggeration. The other soldier has a manic look on his face, as though he may be in some sort of shock, though he is very clearly laughing and not grimacing. It was often noted in the post-war years that when the photos were described, the first was usually described in emotional terms, whereas the second was usually given a clinical account.


*it has always been assumed they were brothers, but there isn't and never will be a way to prove this.
 
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Henry Morgenthau Jr. was said to have been especially repulsed. Some remarked on the similarity of the children in the photo to his own... in the first picture, at any rate.

I think you may want to change this.

In 1944, Henry Morgenthau Jr.'s Children are 27 (Henry III born 1917), 25 (Robert M. born 1919) and 22 (Joan Elizabeth born 1922). While FDR and Eleanor have known Henry Morgenthau, Jr long enough to remember his kids at a young age (Henry met FDR and Eleanor in 1913 and Henry married Elinor in 1915), pretty much no one else in Government will remember them as (really small kids). He first had a federal job in 1933 (at the Federal Farm Board) and became secretary of the Treasury in 1934. So other people in Washington *might* remember him with an 11, 14 and 16 year old, but not any younger than that.

See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Morgenthau_Jr.#Early_life
http://www.mjhnyc.org/morgenthaus/MLS_tree.pdf
and
http://politicalgraveyard.com/bio/morgan-mork.html
 
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