Sam Crowell urges readers: please look at the uncropped version of the questionable photo at this URL: http://www.ushmm.org/kovno/mass/mass.htm. He writes: "PLEASE NOTE multiple barrels to the left, body apparently at the foot of one shooter."

Harvard Review, May-June 1996, p. 98

GERMANS AND JEWS PAGE 23 OF YOUR MARCH-APRIL ISSUE ("ORDI-nary German Killers") contains an alleged atrocity photograph with the caption, in part, "a German soldier takes aim at a mother and child during the killing of the Jews in Ivangorod." This picture has long since been disclosed as an utter falsification. ANDREW GRAY '53 Washington D.C.

Editor's note: The photograph to which Gray refers appears in Daniel Goldhagen's new book, Hitler's Willing Executioners (Knopf). Genya Markon, director of the photograph archive at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, reports that the archive received this image from a Polish collector named Jerzy Tomaszewski.

During the war, Tomaszewski was employed as a postal worker in a Warsaw post office where he served the aims of the Home Army (Armia Krajowa) -- the central organ of the Polish (non-Jewish) underground -- by intercepting mail written by German soldiers on the Eastern Front. This photograph was enclosed in a letter that he intercepted. The original German inscription on the back of the photograph reads, "Ukraine 1942, Jewish Aktion [operation], Ivangorod."

Markon explains that the original, uncropped photograph shows a German soldier aiming a gun at a woman holding a child, while others (at the right) dig a grave with their hands. The full image has been published in The Nazis (Time-Life Books), on pages 152-3. The same photograph, usually cropped, has become a cliché in the neo-Nazi press (for example, in an article published in the Deutsche Soldaten Zeitung und National-Zeitung of September 6, 1963), where it is routinely described as a faked image.

WEBSITE COMMENT: Then why is the photograph never printed in full, i.e. uncropped? -- Because it shows, not others "digging a grave" with their hands, but taking cover from enemy fire behind a gun carriage, at which which enemy the soldier -- who may or may not be German -- is firing. There is no doubt, it should be emphasised, that such atrocities did occur; but to illustrate them with such dubious materials invites public censure.