The Famous Little Boy Photo
is a propaganda photo from the Jewish Underground.

INTRODUCTION
1) It's Not A Photo A General Would Choose.
2) They Wouldn't Duplicate It That Way
3) The Caption Doesn't Fit The Photo
4) It's Part Of A Larger Fraudulent Work
5) The Real Photographer is George Kadish.
6) The boy is probably Tsvi Nussbaum
7) Problems With A Late Insert Of The Photo
CONCLUSION

It's the world's most well-known document of the holocaust, and this essay explains why it's a fraud. Everyone has seen the photo of the little boy with his hands raised. But few know that the photo is one of 53 photos from the Stroop Report, a book supposedly created by SS General Jürgen Stroop commemorating the defeat of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The Stroop Report has a written section, a daily report section, and a photo section. The little boy photo is from the photo section. That we get this photo from the Nazis themselves is a surprise to most people. The truth, however, is that we get it from the wartime Jewish Underground. It's just meant to appear like it's from the Nazis. The photo is a real Warsaw photo but outside the ghetto. The photographer, George Kadish, was a member of the Zionist Underground. Thus it's no mistake that the photo engenders sympathy for the Jews and anger toward the Nazis.

Sandwiched between the introduction and conclusion are seven sections, each offering a reason why the little boy photo is "black propaganda." Black propaganda is false information and material that purports to be from a source on one side of a conflict, but is actually from the opposing side. It is typically used to vilify, embarrass or misrepresent the enemy.1 The little boy photo is black propaganda in that it's taken by a member of the Jewish Underground and meant to look like General Stroop's staff took it. The photo was then inserted into a larger work of black propaganda known as the Stroop Report. Jürgen Stroop was sentenced to death and executed in Stalinist Poland. The prosecutors used the Stroop Report in their case against him. 2

Many of the discoveries about the photo come from Richard Raskin's book "A Child At Gunpoint" (Aarhus University Press 2004.) Raskin is an American Jewish professor living in Denmark who believes the standard story of the photo, but puzzles over aspects of it. These puzzling aspects point to the photo being black propaganda from the Jewish Underground, but Raskin never considers that. Even when he finds out that the most famous Jewish ghetto photographer of WWII mysteriously had a printing plate of it before the photo was known to the public. 3

As mentioned, the little boy photo comes from the Stroop Report. Study the two images below to visualize what the Stroop Report itself looks like.

Back Cover The front cover is just rough leather as well, with no text or image.	Cover Page Photos Source

Though it's known today as "The Stroop Report," a person coming upon it after the war would have seen it as a homemade assemblage notebook, with the title "The Warsaw Ghetto Is No More!" The exclamation point at the end perhaps revealing overzealousness on the part of the propagandists. The title isn't embossed on the cover like one would expect, but rather written in gothic script on the first piece of dirty paper inside. A big deal was made on the first day of the Nuremberg Trial over the leather bound aspect of it. 4 But as you can see that's overrated: It's a sort of stationery store-bought leather front and back that one uses in conjunction with a hole puncher. We can surmise that the Warsaw Ghetto Underground had limited resources and/or abilities. Or perhaps just not the greatest work ethic --a theme we'll return to when discussing how they duplicated the photo. Whoever made the two copies duplicated the famous photo by pointing a camera at it and clicking. Taking a "photo of a photo." A shoddy way of duplicating a photo.

The following are 7 sections which point to the photo being black propaganda from the Jewish Underground:

On face value, what impression does this photo give you? That it's not very nice for a grown man to point a gun in the direction of a little boy and make him put his hands up? That the little boy is being sent to the gas chambers? That's the impression that the Warsaw Jewish Underground wanted it to trigger. But consider which scenario seems more likely:

A) General Stroop thought this would be a good photo for a commemorative album, a photo that Heinrich Himmler would like.

B) The wartime Jewish Underground chose the photo because it elicits anger toward the Germans and sympathy for the Jews.

I think the answer is B. Would a German general choose such an un-chivalric, bullying photo for a commemorative book? To grasp the unlikelihood, try to imagine the United States forces doing that: General Patton sends General Eisenhower a commemorative book about victory in Germany, with the pompous title "We Beat Them!" that includes a photo of an American soldier herding 8-year old German children at gunpoint into some enclosure. 8 year olds with the look of injustice and fear on their faces. It's not the kind of photo that would be chosen.

The notion of soldiers being brutal to kids has been an effective propaganda theme since World War I, where it was instrumental in getting America to send troops to Europe, when presented in a three page propaganda spread in the New York Times titled "The Bryce Committee's Report on Deliberate Slaughter of Belgian Non-Combatants." 5 The NYT readers thought it was real news but it turned out it was British propaganda and false. The theme continued up through the 1991 when the New York Times repeated the propaganda story that Iraqi soldiers were pulling babies off incubators in Kuwait. 6 The famous little boy photo, which is probably in most every grade school, middle school, and high school textbook chapter dealing with World War II, is actually a propaganda photo in this vein.

Shoddy workmanship is mentioned in the introduction, and now we're going to see an example. To believe that the famous photo comes from General Stroop and his staff, you also have to believe that they duplicated it like this: by taking a photo of it. Every professional photographer knows you take a quality hit when you do that. Not only that, it slightly changes the proportions as well, depending on how close the camera lense is to the photograph. And why take a photo of a photo, in order to then get a negative, so you can then print a photo? Here's a better idea: just print two photos off the original negative. (That's what General Stroop's staff would have done.) But not only that, the Warsaw Jewish Underground duplicated the caption by photographing that also.

(Richard Raskin's book, Child At Gunpoint, pages 52 and 53. My comments in yellow)

Detail comparison: Image on right takes a quality-hit because it's a photo of a photo.

The standard story is that it was suggested to Stroop that he make a commemorative album for Heinrich Himmler, and 4 copies of the album would be made altogether. Besides Heinrich Himmler's copy, there was one for Stroop's superior general, Friedrich Krüger, and one for Stroop himself. (Richard Raskin believes there would have also been a file copy.) The photos apparently come from military units commanded by Stroop, photo documenters or propaganda photographers, so one would think that Stroop would pick around 50 photos he liked, and then have his staff make 4 prints from their negatives. A basic procedure.

But that's not what happened. There are two copies of the Stroop Report in existence today. (following the standard story, the logic would be that two copies disappeared during the war.) One copy is in Warsaw, and the other copy is at the United States National Archives and Records Administration (NARA.) We thus have two original sources of the famous little boy photo. All the images of the little boy originate from those. The NARA Stroop Report contains a "photo of a photo." Study images below. My comments in blue:

Richard Raskin discovered this. He writes "The caption, 'Mit Gewalt aus Bunkern hervorgeholt' ('Pulled from the bunkers by force'), is hand-written directly on the Bristol board, below the photograph." (p. 52)

But regarding the other photo, Raskin states "The caption...is photographically reproduced along with the image; in other words, the photo and caption on the Warsaw page were photographed, and reproduced on the photo paper mounted on the corresponding page in the NARA document. In the process, the upper, right and left edges of the Warsaw photo were slightly cropped." (p. 53)

To summarize, Stroop would have just had his staff print copies from their negative, and got the calligrapher to write the caption on the paper below both photos. But duplicating a photo (and caption) by photographing it is so jerry-rigged it implies limited abilities and resources: A probably scenario for the Warsaw Jewish Underground working secretively and with only a print but no original negative. But why did they need to photograph the caption if they originally wrote the caption? A theory for that is explained later in the essay.

3) The Caption Doesn't Fit The Photo

Most of the photos in the Stroop Report have a handwritten calligraphy caption underneath. The famous little boy photo has the caption "Pulled from the bunkers by force." The problem is the boy appears too dressed up for that:

Richard Raskin writes in his book A Child At Gunpoint:

"There is no sign of any kind – such as disheveled or dust-covered clothing – to indicate that the captives in the photo of the boy with his hands raised were 'pulled by force' from anything that might rightfully be called a 'bunker.'" (pg. 17)

Or take the woman next to the boy: She was pulled from a bunker by force but not before she could swing a large purse over her elbow and a handbag around her right fingers?

Umm, "pulled from the bunkers by force."

Not to mention that many of the faces in the photo don't look all that scared. When the photo is displayed in textbooks or in media around the world, the caption is rarely included since it doesn't fit the photo. But as black propaganda, the caption is understandable. The goal was to make the scene seem as worse as possible. A possible scenario that explains why they are nicely dressed and holding bags is explained later.

4) It's Part Of A Larger Fraudulent Work

It's important to keep in mind that the famous photo of the little boy first appeared within a larger piece of black propaganda known as the Stroop Report. Here are some examples why the Stroop Report is a forgery:

The text of the report describes dugouts that are huge, containing 60 people, 100 people, even 274 people; and yet the photos in the Stroop Report show hovels for maybe 3 people maximum, reflective of the real situation of a small uprising.

Wouldn't Stroop want a photo of that 274 person bunker rather than these?

Another "fraud clue" is found in the text of the Stroop Report: there's a passage where Stroop supposedly admires the female "young pioneers for Israel" commenting "Not infrequently, these women fired pistols with both hands." That's actually the Jewish Underground trying to make themselves look cool, rather than Stroop's admiring voice. Firing pistols with both hands is something from movies, but a relatively dumb move in real urban combat.

Then there's the action sequence where a German gets killed when a bullet hits his grenade while it is still in his hand. Another movie-like action scene but unlikely in real life.

And there's other fraudulent photos in the Stroop Report. In the Warsaw version of the Stroop Report, there's a photo of a man falling in mid-air, the cameraman clicking his shutter just as a man, but more likely a dummy, was jumping out of an apparent burning building, but in the NARA version of the Stroop Report the forgers include a separate photo of the very same building with no signs of burning, save for the smoke that was in the background of the first photo.

Purple arrow points to man jumping out of bulding. White background behind him is peeling plaster on building.

Same building (compare the peeling plaster.) The forgers left this picture out of the Warsaw Stroop Report, but it's in the NARA Stroop Report, betraying that the building wasn't really burning afterall to warrant jumping out. Except for that one window with smoke coming out, which is probably deliberate smoke meant to set the stage for the "falling man" shot.

Below: there's also a picture of a naked man with scoliosis with the black propaganda-ish caption "dregs of humanity." But Stroop would have known that scoliosis effects Germans as well.

In fancy penmanship writing "dregs of humanity."

Then there's a staged photo of supposed Germans wheeling a wood-spoked cannon down the middle of an urban street (not the smartest move in urban warfare.)

Subsequent photos in the report show them shooting into the wall in front of them and into that already destroyed building.

Above we see a photo of Stroop and the caption is "Leader of the Grand Operation" But isn't that a little boastful? Can you imagine Patton or Eisenhower writing a caption like that for their albums? It's an over-the-top caption, written in over-the-top gothic script, from the Jewish Underground.

When the operation is all over, the last thing they supposedly do that caps the entire operation is blow-up the synagogue, which is so "doctor evil" that it's just not believable. In fact after the propaganda theme of "soldiers hurting kids" the secont biggest propaganda theme tends to be "burning/destroying synagogues/churches."

There is a related essay written by this author that discusses many more reasons why the Stroop Report is a fraud.

5) The Real Photographer is George Kadish.

Holocaust historians will tell you that the the most well-known ghetto photographer of World War II is George Kadish; and Richard Raskin's book will tell you that Kadish, near the end of his life, was strangely in possession of an unusual copy of the famous photo of the little boy with his hands raised: an antiquated lead printing plate of it, which Kadish said he acquired shortly after the end of the war. The problem is that the photo wasn't known to the public until the mid-1950's. Doing the math, we can surmise that Kadish took the famous photo. This section offers circumstantial evidence that George Kadish was the photographer.

Notice the image is in reverse? Kadish's old lead photographic plate, seen in Raskin's book (p. 177)

Above. Picture of George Kadish in the book. Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto. Pg 55

Richard Raskin's book, A Child At Gunpoint ends with a one and a half-page chapter called "A Concluding Note." Here's the last part that tells us about George Kadish:

The above quote ends Raskin's book and tells us that Kadish found the famous little boy photo in a second hand bookstore shortly after the war; but that's a lame excuse for Kadish being the photographer. Consider which scenario makes more sense:

A) The most well-known ghetto photographer was in possession of ghetto photographs "bearing images of the Nazi persecution of Jews" which included the famous photo, because he took those photographs.

B) The most well-known ghetto photographer was perusing a second hand Munich bookstore at the end of the war and found someone else's ghetto photographs, one of which would become the most well-known photo of the holocaust.

Kadish wasn't allowed to say he was the photographer because that would destroy the Stroop Report's validity (he probably wished he could have, and claimed his fame) but that didn't preclude him, just years before he died in the 1990's, from making up a lame story as to why he owned an old lead printing plate of it.

Raskin writes,

The reason the famous photo of the little boy is in a collection of plates showing Nazi persecution of Jews is because it also is a photo meant to show Nazi persecution of Jews.

And the mysterious questions Raskin brings up are quite answerable. Raskin asks:

ANSWER: Kadish took the photo and was involved with putting it on the lead plate. They were going to mass produce the photo for underground anti-Nazi propaganda. But when higher Jewish Underground authorities decided to use it in the Stroop Report, not only could the photo no longer be used for that purpose, but Kadish could no longer claim it as his own. Even in the post-war period.

Another possibility to explain the lead printing plate collection, is the project of printing the images was aborted because the USSR came into Lithuania where George Kadish lived and underground operations against the Nazis were no longer needed there.

One reason Richard Raskin puzzles over Kadish finding this photo at the end of the war in a Munich second-hand bookstore, is the photo was largely not seen by the public until French film director Alain Resnais put the image in his film Nuit Et Brouillard in 1956. From that point on, the public awareness of the photo began to increase. (Raskin pg. 105)

But there's more evidence to tie Kadish to the famous photo: Below are four photos with a similar theme. They are taken in the Kovno ghetto (not the Warsaw ghetto) and officially attributed to Kadish. Could they be early attempts at the photo and message Kadish was striving for?

My guess is that the sign on the door is some Nazi administration Jewish persecution office of some sort.

In the above photo, the Jewish stars look large against the children's little clothing. The
viewer feels a heart rending sense of cruel injustice, and sympathy for the children.
But it may not be just a basic family photo. Kadish probably created the shot,
to elicit this very emotion from the viewer.

Who was George Kadish?

Here's the entry at Wikipedia on Kadish. Screen-captured on 1/2/9:

And here is what the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum says about Kadish:

We have shown that Kadish mysteriously had a printing plate of the famous photo, and we've shown examples of Kadish taking photos with a similar theme. Now we're going to offer an example of Kadish faking a propaganda photo for anti-Nazi purposes: Here we show two versions of a "words written in fake blood" photo: (8)

Here is the second "blood writing" photo:

Above we see two different versions of the same word written in blood. The caption of the second photo tells us it's blood written on a door of a murdered Jew's apartment. In other words the victim wrote it on the door before dying. It's from a book published by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum called "The Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto." 9 The first photo is written on the floor but hard to tell. Kadish probably thought it more self-explanatory to write it on a door as in the second photo. The stain of blood in the second photo also makes it more self-explanatory. And regarding the letters, he probably thought "less is more" with the first image being in Yiddish, "Jews Avenge" changed in the second photo to just "Revenge." The first photo appears to have spatters of blood on left, which Kadish left out in the second photo, opting for a pool of blood instead.

Comparing the two photos, which seems more plausible:

A) Kadish came upon two different scenes where a bleeding person decided to write "revenge" in their own blood. That, or a dying person wrote "revenge" in blood in one place in his apartment and then wrote it also in another place.

B) Kadish was working on a propaganda photo, and with no way to erase his negatives, he did more than one version of the "revenge written in blood" photo. When archivists found negatives of his work later, they chose different versions for different publications.

To fill out our understanding of Kadish, the book Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto tells us that early on he "joined the rightist Zionist movement called Betar." (p. 55) Could Betar have sent him from the Kovno ghetto, to a bigger and more important ghetto, the Warsaw Ghetto, to continue his propaganda work? We know that the Kovno ghetto wasn't sealed until the very end. The Kovno ghetto was similar to the Warsaw ghetto in that Jews were required to live there. But the Kovno ghetto was different from the Warsaw ghetto in that Jews went to work in labor groups throughout the larger surroundings of the city of Kovno. 10 There was a comparative laxity that allowed Jews, once outside the ghetto to take off their stars and trade with the townspeople. 11

Another sign of comparative laxity in the Kovno ghetto: It was the Jewish administration within the ghetto who recorded who didn't come back to the ghetto after work. Not the Germans. 12 We read in the book Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto that Jews in the ghetto were becoming partisans and leaving the ghetto to become fighters. Meanwhile Soviet partisans (like Gessia Glezer) could enter the Kovno ghetto and hold discussions with leaders of the underground. 13 Thus it's conceivable Kadish could have left to do photographs in Warsaw.

To summarize, there are three pieces of circumstantial evidence that point to Kadish being the photographer: A) Kadish had a lead printing plate of the famous photo, "at the end of the war" -- a time when the public wasn't aware of the photo. B) Kadish took photos with a similar theme to the little boy with raised hands, meant to evoke the same emotions. C) Kadish was an anti-Nazi propaganda photographer as can be seen with his blood-writing photos.

6) The Boy is probably Tsvi Nussbaum

This chapter is about the complicated reasons why the little boy is probably Tsvi Nussbaum. We've just covered 5 topics which point to the famous photo of the little boy being black propaganda. These topics didn't hinge on the identity of the little boy. But Nussbaum being the boy fits into a scenario of how the photo was taken and became black propaganda: Nussbaum thinks the photo might be of him at a hotel. Did he walk out of a hotel and did George Kadish, looking for anti-German photographs, then take his photo? Did the Jewish Underground then obtain this photo and mislabel it in the Stroop Report, so that it looked like a boy being taken to a gas chamber? There's evidence for and against, with complications from people lying, primarily Nussbaum himself.

When Nussbaum's story came out in a 1982 New York Times article, it wasn't perceived by all as a happy ending to a tragic incident as Nussbaum might have thought. Rather he drew criticism from some Jewish sources. The NYT reporter wrote, "But some individuals, convinced that the symbolic power of the picture would be diminished were the boy shown to have survived, refuse to consider it at all." The reporter then quoted Nussbaum's chagrined response: "I never realized that everyone puts the entire weight of 6 million Jews on this photograph. To me it looked like an incident in which I was involved, and that was it."

In a sense, Nussbaum was appearing to some as almost a holocaust denier: Denying the implied narrative of the photo. That wasn't something Nussbaum wanted to do. 8 years later, in 1990 when a video came out about Nussbaum, he may have synthesized a way around this problem: by maintaining he was the boy in the photo, but also having a lot of personal Nazi brutality stories to tell. I.e. mom shot in the back by the head of the gestapo. Soldiers discussing whether to kill him now or later, being secretly transported to Warsaw by a blonde non-Jewish looking woman, and more stories.

The best source for information on Tsvi Nussbaum (pronounced "tsvee") is the video "Tsvi Nussbaum. A Boy From Warsaw." Produced and written by Matti-Juhani Karila for MTV Finland in 1990. Directed by Ilkka Ahopalo. Distributed in 1992 by Ergo Media. It will be referred to as the "MTV Finland video" in this essay. This and the 1982 New York Times article is where we get our information on Nussbaum.

Who is Tsvi Nussbaum?

Nussbaum in 1990 was a practicing medical doctor, an ear, nose and throat specialist, just outside New York City. His parents were Jews from Poland who moved to Palestine in the 1930's, and Tsvi Nussbaum was born in Palestine in 1935. His parents decided to move back to Poland in 1939, shortly before the Germans invaded. Being born in Palestine gave Tsvi Nussbaum something unusual in Poland: a Palestine passport which becomes important to this story. After the war Tsvi Nussbaum moved to Israel again, and then in his teens, to the United States where he has lived since.

What is his story?

When Nussbaum was settled in New York as a doctor, he would sometimes come across the famous little boy photo, and it reminded him of one day in his life. That day was at the Hotel Polski in Warsaw. The Germans had decided that any Jew who had a foreign passport could leave Poland, and the assembly place for those people was at the Hotel Polski (which was not in the ghetto. The ghetto, by then, had been cleared out.) Nussbaum and his aunt and uncle had foreign passports. So the photo, Nussbaum believes, was taken when he and others were walking out of the hotel to get onto a truck to take them to the train station. He could remember putting his hands up in the air that day. But instead of being taken abroad, they were taken to the Bergen Belsen camp, where they were treated better than the rest of the camp population, as a category called "Palestine Jews." Near the end of the war, they were put on a train and taken out of the camp just when the camp infrastructure broke down and became a nightmare of disease and starvation. The better treatment of the "Palestine Jews" at Belsen is one reason he survived. 14

We'll look at 4 pieces of circumstantial evidence that support Nussbaum's story. Followed by 3 items which hurt his story. They are identified as "pros and cons":

The "pros" are:

Pro 1. He looks like boy in photo
Pro 2. His description matches how people are dressed.
Pro 3. The Entrance in background of photo slightly resembles hotel entrance.
Pro 4. If he was lying, why make up a bizarre hotel story?

The "cons" are:

Con 1. Nussbaum's connection to Marc Berkowitz
Con 2. Nussbaum's own lying
Con 3. An ear lobe comparison

Pro 1: He looks like the boy in the photo

Dr. Tsvi Nussbaum in the video "Tsvi Nussbaum A Boy From Warsaw"
---

Still from "Tsvi Nussbaum A Boy From Warsaw": A collage on the wall of Nussbaum's doctor's office waiting room.
---

Photo comparison in the video.
On the right is a passport photo from a couple years later.

Pro 2: His description matches how people are dressed.

More so than the photo's caption. The caption of the photo is "pulled from the bunkers by force." Many of the people in the photo don't seem to have fear in their eyes. They're nicely dressed. They don't look disheveled from being pulled from a bunker. All this is consistent with Nussbaum's assertion that they're leaving the Hotel Polski.

Pro 3: The entrance in background of photo slightly resembles hotel entrance.

Richard Raskin points out something that would be hard for Nussbaum to make up or get right if he were lying: the front of the Hotel Polski resembles the background of the famous photo.

It's hard to imagine how an ear, nose and throat specialist in New York City could pull off this background similarity if he were making up a story. Particularly since most hotels don't look like this in front. The Hotel Polski entrance was an archway leading into a courtyard. Richard Raskin, weighing the evidence of whether Nussbaum might be the boy writes:

"However, one additional factor that counts on the other side of the balance sheet, concerns the location at Dluga Street 29. I have visited the address, no longer the Hotel Polski, and - making allowances for whatever rebuilding and renovations were done in the sixty intervening years - I found the physical layout of the gateway consistent with that of the 1943 photgraph." (pg. 91)

Pro 4: If he was lying, why make up a bizarre hotel story?

If Nussbaum was lying and just wanted the fame. Why not say he was in a Warsaw ghetto bunker rather than the Hotel Polski? He already had the resemblance, why make it a weird story involving a hotel? Particularly when the background to the famous photo doesn't look like a hotel at all?

Nussbaum says he was in front of a hotel, yet the photo appears to be in the street with an archway in the background. But then one finds that the front of the Hotel Polski is on a street going through an archway.

Cons: 3 Aspects That Hurt Nussbaum's Story:

Con 1: Nussbaum's connection Marc Berkowitz.

Early in the 1990 MTV Finland video, Nussbaum explains how he asked one of his patients to research whether he might be the boy in the photo. His patient was a holocaust survivor from Auschwitz who was familar with the era. Nussbaum relates the conversation: "

"Marc" is mentioned in the above quote, and a New York Times article about Nussbaum on May 28, 1982, tells us that Marc is Marc Berkowitz. Digging deeper into the New York Times archive, we find that Marc had a very similar story to to tell. He also recognized himself in a photo -- a still from a movie, and got a write-up in the New York Times because of it in 1961. Here's the article:

Tsvi Nussbaum knowing Marc Berkowitz and having a similar story that makes it into the New York Times, makes one wonder, "what are the chances?"

24 years after being in the New York Times, Berkowitz began a new round of New York Times exposure, in a January 1985 New York Times article, he tells a reporter:

Berkowitz had been in the NYT three days earlier also, with an unlikely story that involves such a personal involvement with Josef Mengele, as to be ridiculous:

So Berkowitz was in a field picking brussel sprouts for Mengele, and Mengele was watching him pick those brussel sprouts. Then Marc Berkowitz saw his mom passing with a group, going to the gas chamber. And Mengele saw Berkowitz seeing his mom passing. Mengele then gave Berkowitz a courier note, which served as a "camp pass" so Berkowitz could walk around Auschwitz pretending to be on an errand, but in actuality following his mom to the gas chamber.

We also read about how a wily, taunting Josef Mengele was calling Berkowitz on the telephone 40 years later:

A problem with Berkowitz' Mengele phone call story, was that it was later determined that Mengele had died 6 years earlier, on February 7, 1979 from accidentally drowning or perhaps a stroke, while swimming in the sea in Brazil.

Berkowitz was quite adept at getting publicity in the mid-1980's. He organized 8 Auschwitz twin survivors to visit Auschwitz, accompanied by a whopping 17 camera crews. In an article that began on the front page of the New York Times we read about the trip:

It appears that Berkowitz is a media manipulating fraud, and he's the person Tsvi Nussbaum teamed up with to determine if Nussbaum was the boy in the photo.

Con 2. Nussbaum's own lying

In the 1990 MTV Finland video, Nussbaum tells of how as a child he lived in a house in a suburb of Sandomierz, Poland. When the Germans occupied the area, one official, "possibly the head of the gestapo," he says, lived on the second floor of this very same house in the suburb. We thus have a two-story house in the suburbs and Nussbaum's family lives on the first floor and a Gestapo official lives on the second floor. That's already pretty hard to believe, but the story continues. Nussbaum says,

I suppose a foreign occupying military and secret police force would be admired for not taking mansions and castles for themselves to live in, and instead live modestly, but a second story of a house above a Jewish family? In the suburbs where things are usually a little more spread out?

And Nussbaum remembers the general moment the famous photo was taken. He remembers putting his hands up. He also remembers a conversation he supposedly overheard between two German soldiers there in front of the Hotel Polski at that moment. He was trying to get on a truck with his aunt and uncle, but there was a bureaucratic snag. The 8-year old Tsvi Nussbaum then heard two German soldiers discussing him and deciding to let him on the truck. One German soldier said to the other:

Similar to Berkowitz, things seem too self-centered. Soldiers discussing Nussbaum right in front of him, talking about killing him? He eavesdrops? His Yiddish and their German being close enough where he can understand them?

Also in the MTV Finland video there is an interview where Nussbaum describes an important woman's physical characteristics totally wrong. That woman is then interviewed and she in turn describes Nussbaum's physical characteristics totally wrong:

Nussbaum describes Miriam Szydlowski, the woman who secretly transported him, as a boy, from Sandomierz to Warsaw in Poland. Nussbaum says in the video that his aunt and uncle:

That woman is in the MTV Finland video. Ask yourself if she fits the description of being blonde with no so-called Jewish characteristics:

Above, Nussbaum and the video production crew traveled to Israel to interview Miriam Szydlowski. However it has to be considered that it has been 40 years. Perhaps the woman now dyes her hair, or dyed it back then.

Above, Nussbaum in Israel talking to Miriam Szydlowski.

Miriam Szydlowski then describes Nussbaum incorrectly. But again keep in mind it's been over 40 years and perhaps her contrast makes for a good story:

This is what Miriam Szydlowski says about Nussbaum:

We see one more odd aspect of Miriam Szydlowski's testimony: She doesn't seem to be aware of what happened to Nussbaum's mother. She is obviously intimately acquainted with the family, so why isn't she aware that Nussbaum's mother was shot in the back by a Gestapo member who lived on the second floor above them? Miriam Szydlowski mentions in another part of her interview that she lived with Tsvi Nussbaum, his aunt and uncle in a cramped room in Warsaw for a long time. And we see in the above passage that she knew Nussbaum's grandmother, who entrusted Szydlowski to transport Nussbaum to Warsaw. Yet from the transcript above, here's Szydlowski's account of what happened to Nussbaum's mother: "The Germans arrested your mother and father right after your arrival. You were the sole survivor." Szydlowski doesn't seem to be aware of the Gestapo on the 2nd floor shooting Nussbaum's mother in the back.

There are more doubtful passages in the video, but let's move on.

Con 3. An ear lobe comparison

The last point in doubting Nussbaum being the boy in the photo is the ear lobe issue. Richard Raskin in his book A Child At Gunpoint, describes how he sent the famous photo, along with boyhood photos of Nussbaum, to Dr. Karen Ramey Burns, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Georgia. She agreed the boys looked like they could be the same person but wrote,

"the ear lobes of the 1943 boy appear to be attached, whereas the earlobes of the 1945 boy are not attached. This genetic trait cannot change with age and the difference indicates the pictures are not of the same boy." 17

Photo-still from the MTV Finland video.

However, being that there's no known negative of the photo to use to enlarge the image better, and being that, from looking at the direction of the shadows in other parts of the photo, it's early morning with the sun low in the sky, shining on the left side of his face, can one really tell?

Tsvi Nussbaum Summary

Amid all the lies of Tsvi Nussbaum, Miriam Szydlowski, and Marc Berkowitz, credibility is greatly damaged regarding Tsvi Nussbaum being the boy in the famous photo. Richard Raskin, in weighing a lot of evidence from both sides wasn't sure what to believe. This author thinks Nussbaum probably is the boy in the photo because 1) it's too bizarre of a story for a liar to make up. 2) His story fits the photo better than the caption in the Stroop Report. 3) Nussbaum said it's in front of a hotel, however the photo doesn't come off as being in front of a hotel. But when one sees a photo of the entrance to the former Hotel Polski, it has similarities with the photo. In other words, the photo background fits with elements of the hotel, elements that a falsifier would have a hard time coming up with.

Not to mention that it's a bizarre story for someone to even concoct. Why not just say "I was in the ghetto." What makes the story complicated is a lot of added lying by Nussbaum. But this can be explained by the criticism Nussbaum got from prominent people once his story became big. The New York Times tells us how Nussbaum's account originally came off:

In other words, there was a survivor/Zionist angle when Nussbaum first started publicizing his story. But when criticized by prominent Jewish holocaust scholars (and closer thinking showed almost a holocaust denial aspect to his account) Nussbaum added lies to make his story work with the original goal. Aspects like his mother being shot in the back by the upstairs Gestapo neighbor, or being smuggled to Warsaw by a blonde woman.

Much of the reasoning in this essay is about how the photo didn't come from Stroop and has nothing to do with Nussbaum being the little boy. However a scenario of how the black propanda photo came about, does involve Nussbaum being the boy. In weighing the factors, it appears the little boy is Nussbaum eventhough Nussbaum didn't grow up to be an honest person.

7) Problems With A Late Insert Of The Photo

Imagine again that you're making a photo album. You use a nice paper called "bristol board" which will be your album's pages. You mount your photos onto the bristol board. It is white, rough to the touch, slightly stiff paper, with fancy rough-cut edges. After you mount your photos, you put the pages together and the album is finished. But then, as an afterthought, you decide you want to add a couple more photos. The problem is you have run out of your nice paper. What do you do? You get a piece of white smooth cardboard paper instead, and mount the photos onto that and then insert the pages. It's noticeably different paper but it's not too big of a deal.

That's what the makers of the Stroop Report did with the little boy photo in the NARA copy.

Richard Raskin, in his book A Child At Gunpoint displays all the photos in the Stroop Report, and includes this introductory note that tells us about the paper in both copies of the Stroop Report:

In other words, the photo of the boy with his hands raised, in the NARA copy is an exception (along with two other photos in the NARA copy.) It's mounted on white cardboard. It points to the little boy photo being a last minute insert into the NARA version.

There was probably some distance between the two copies. Raskin mentions how around the end of the war, the British were in possession of one copy (the one with the photo of a photo) and the Americans had the other copy. 19 If the Jewish Underground sent one of the copies West as black propaganda and then afterward decided to add a photo, one can imagine the problems. Calligraphy for instance. Most photos in the Stroop Report have a caption. It's done in an unusual flowery handwritten calligraphy; a New York Times reporter called it "ornate gothic script." 20 Raskin determined that it was not Stroop's own writing. 21 The script was possibly meant to be in sync with the "commemoration" theme of the report. But how is the calligrapher going to write a caption in both copies if one has already been sent West? Solution: take a photo of the caption.

Here's a scenario:

George Kadish perhaps traveled from the Kovno ghetto to Warsaw in July 1943 in connection with being a propaganda photographer for the right wing Zionist organization, Betar. By then, the Warsaw ghetto no longer existed: it was empty and closed. So Kadish was in the city of Warsaw itself, looking to take anti-German photos, and he took a photo of Tsvi Nussbaum leaving the Hotel Polski, which the Jewish Underground later purposely mislabeled as a ghetto photograph.

Tsvi Nussbaum's account explains why the people in the photo are dressed up and tidy, clutching purses and bags, rather than disheveled from being "pulled from the bunkers by force" as the Stroop Report caption states. Because letting Jews leave for Palestine and other places was good publicity for the Germans (or so they thought) George Kadish may have taken this photo openly. But did Kadish, as a secret photographer, contribute other photos to the Stroop Report? It's hard to know. It's worth noting that there are a number of photos in the report which look as if they could be have been taken secretively:

Photos taken secretively? Photo source: Raskin, page 40 and 43.

The Jewish Underground came upon Kadish's little boy with raised hands photo and realized it was better than any other propaganda photo they had. Kadish had only supplied prints, not negatives. A photo of the photo and caption was taken to duplicate it, and a courier (or maybe just the post office) transported it to the place of the other Stroop Report copy. A place where the British would eventually obtain it. But once the photo arrives, it's realized that there's no Bristol board anywhere. The "photo of the photo and caption" is then mounted on white cardboard and inserted. It's just a scenario.

Was there a shortage of Bristol board during World War II? The English city of Bristol was bombed by the Germans, and the paper was historically invented there, but I don't know if by the 1940's if Bristol was still a principal manufacturing place for the paper.

In the NARA copy, the little boy photo is the only photo where the caption is photographed, rather than written directly on the paper. And of 53 photos it's one of three on different paper. That points to it being a late insert. The Warsaw Underground recognized the propaganda value of the photo and went to troubles to haphazardly get it into their second copy. But can you imagine General Stroop resorting to odd and shoddy lengths to add a photo of a despicable representation of his troops? A photo of a soldier pointing a gun in the direction of a little boy with his hands raised? General Stroop: running out of paper, losing the negative, the calligrapher not around, but coming up with some nice jerry-rigged solutions.

CONCLUSION

The little boy photo is presented as Nazi hate for the Jews. But it's really Jewish hate for the Nazis. People can't really grasp that 'hate' could have gone both ways during World War II. Nor can people grasp the idea that the Jewish Underground, small in number and without an army, might have used clever means to effect world opinion as part of their own fight strategy. Though the photo fits into the most common theme of war propaganda: soldiers hurting kids. No one ever considers if the photo of the little boy with raised hands could be that.

We can imagine the framed Jürgen Stroop in a Polish jail cell after World War II. He had been caught in the American sector and the Americans turned him (and one of the copies of the Stroop Report) over to Poland. Probably beaten, tortured and abused as revenge, and in court seeing this strange notebook, hearing the translator say it was his, himself knowing it wasn't, getting sentenced to death and then executed.

While awaiting execution, imagine if Jürgen Stroop had known (though he couldn't have) that within the notebook, there was a photo that would become in future generations, the most well-known photo of the holocaust.

As an aside, postwar Stalinist Poland was run by three men, two (possibly all three) were Jewish. 22 The person in charge of Police in Poland was Jakub Berman, whose brother, Adolf Berman, was one of the top leaders of the wartime Warsaw Jewish Underground. In other words, one brother was a leader in the group that made the forgery, and the other brother was a leader in the area of government in charge of Stroop's trial and execution. We don't know if the brothers were directly involved but it's still interesting.

In a way, George Kadish's photo of the little boy with his hands raised, is no different than his fake blood-writing photos. It's hard to wrap one's head around the idea that someone could be making art that uses sadness to trigger the viewer's sense of injustice, but the real motivation for the photo is hate for the enemy.

War is a hatefest. While the hatefest between the Nazis and Jews was going on, there was a jury of other powers, there's also one's own ethnic or national jury. In other words, various levels of public opinion. They can be convinced to get involved. After the war is over, they can be convinced that the good side won. Then it becomes Moral High Ground, Museum of Tolerance, Right and Wrong. A lofty veneer created by the winners, covering up what was really a hatefest between two groups. The famous photo is an example of that: It tends to be prominently displayed near the entrance of holocaust museums, and meant to be contemplative of good and bad. But it's really part and parcel with a fake blood-writing photo. It's the most well known document of the holcoaust, but it's actually a document of Jewish aggression towards the Germans.

But the biggest picture of the holocaust has a bigger picture: that the holocaust itself is also a hoax, along the same lines. Needed for the good/evil narrative of World War II. That core belief that "sometimes people are evil and thus war is sometimes necessary." In reality war is never necessary, people aren't evil, sometimes people hate for a reason, and there's just the difficult goal of understanding people. War is always a disaster. WWII was a European disaster.

People might say, "but Hitler took over countries." Britain took over way more countries. There is a saying "the sun never sets over the British Empire." And in the 20th century those countries got their freedom not through fighting, but in large part by a simple dissolution of the British Empire. Stalin's government was a tyrannical regime, but it dissolved from within. War isn't necessary.

The Nuremberg Trial was 10 months long. In the very first prosecution speech, on the second day of the trial, US prosecutor Robert Jackson held up the Stroop Report and mentioned (but didn't show) the famous photo. It was the first public mention of the photo and report. 23 Black propaganda masquerading as evidence. The Jewish Underground convincing the Americans it was real evidence. But previous to the trial, during the war, the medieval city center of Nuremberg was needlessly carpet bombed by the British. It wasn't a military target, just a symbolic one. Thousands of civilians who lived in the city center died in the bombing. Fitting that the trial took place there. A lofty veneer of democratic ideals, created by the winners, covering up what was really a wartime hatefest.

If you can be convinced that someone else is evil, then you can be convinced to wage war on them. And after the war, you can be convinced that the war was justified. Kids learn from the famous photo of the little boy that sometimes grown-ups are so evil that war is necessary. What kids should be learning is that "evil people" is a dumb concept, used as a manipulative pro-war tool. Perhaps if "evil people" wasn't the theme of so many dumb movies and t.v. shows, people could see that it's dumb in real life.

Today the little boy photo explains that during World War II there were bad people who pointed guns at kids and sent them to the gas chambers. Hopefully people will someday see through a lie concocted by the winners, this babyish narrative of World War II.

Denierbud
May 2009, San Francisco

Notes

1. Daniel Lerner, Sykewar (New York: George W. Stewart, 1949), 262.

2. Richard Raskin, A Child At Gunpoint. A Case Study in the Life of a Photo (Denmark, Aarhus University Press, 2004), 29.

3. Ibid., 177.

4. On the second day of the Nuremberg Trial, on Nov. 21, 1945, the American Chief prosecutor, Robert Jackson, opened the trial with the prosecution's opening statement. Midway through his speech, Jackson holds up a copy of the Stroop Report, telling the court:

"I shall not dwell on this subject longer than to quote one more sickening document which evidences the planned and systematic character of the Jewish persecutions. I hold a report written with Teutonic devotion to detail, illustrated with photographs to authenticate its almost incredible text, and beautifully bound in leather with the loving care bestowed on a proud work. It is the original report of the SS Brigadier General Stroop in charge of the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, and its title page carries the inscription, "The Jewish ghetto in Warsaw no longer exists." It is characteristic that one of the captions explains that the photograph concerned shows the driving out of Jewish "bandits"; those whom the photograph shows being driven out are almost entirely women and little children."

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/11-21-45.asp

5. New York Times, May 13, 1915.

6. "Baghdad Schoolchildren Are Made Ready For War" New York Times. January 8, 1991.

7. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website. Photo Archives. The design of this part of their website doesn't allow the web page to be linked to, but here is a link to a screen capture of it from 5/27/9.

8. Ibid.

9. Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto. A project of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, Washington D.C. (Bullfinch Press, 1997), 58.

10. Ibid., 131.

11 Ibid., 125.

12. Avraham Tory. Surviving The Holocaust. The Kovno Ghetto Diary (Harvard University Press, 1990), 165. Avraham Tory describes how due to a problem, the Gestapo asked the Jewish police for their own list of Jewish ghetto residents who had failed to return from work. In other words the Jews kept those records themselves, and up till then, the Nazis did not have them. On the previous page, pg. 164, we read how Tory could leave the ghetto to walk over to the theater where some Jewish ghetto residents worked. The passage shows that the Kovno ghetto had differences with the Warsaw ghetto. It wasn't sealed. It also shows that George Kadish could have left the Kovno ghetto to go to Warsaw if the underground had wanted him to.

13. Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto, 40.

14. Nussbaum's story of being put on a train and sent East at the very end of the war, due to his Palestinian passport, is consistent with the Belsen narrative. Putting the Palestinian Jews or "exchange Jews" on the train kept them from getting lice and thus typhus, though they had other less contagious diseases like typhoid and dysentery, which one gets from contaminated water. They were transported out to prevent them from catching the typhus epidemic. See Ben Shephard, After Daybreak (New York: Shocken Books, 2005), 18-19.

15. It a frequent theme of WWII Jewish stories: The blonde aryan-looking person that can get past the Nazis easier. But considering that probably most Poles on the so-called "aryan side" had brown hair and brown eyes, is it really necessary?

16. Raskin, A Child at Gunpoint, 90. We have to take Nussbaum's word that the photo is his and genuine. Nussbaum said it was taken in Aug. 1945. Nussbaum gave it to Raskin during an interview.

17. Ibid., 90.

18. Ibid., 39.

19. Ibid., 28-29, 61-62

20. New York Times, May 28, 1982. "Rockland Physician Thinks He is the Boy in Holocaust Photo Taken in Warsaw."

21. Raskin, A Child at Gunpoint, 68.

22. Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique (1stbooks, 1998), 61. They were Jakub Berman, Hilary Minc, and Boleslaw Bierut. MacDonald says they were all Jews, though I couldn't find a second confirmation about Bierut.

23. Nuremberg Trial Proceedings, Volume 2. Wednesday, 21 November 1945 Day 2. Robert Jackson speech, page 125. Richard Raskin discusses the moment in his book A Child At Gunpoint, pages 32-34, regarding how Jackson mentioned the photo but told the court an erroneous caption for the photo.

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/11-21-45.asp