A Nazi magazine recurrently published manipulated photos and misinformation, long before the age of AI

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump claimed in August 2024 that a Photo of a giant crowd of supporters welcoming Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris in Detroit on August 7 was manipulated. Trump falsely wrote on Truth Social that the gang didn’t exist because “She did it with the help of artificial intelligence.”

Several independent news sources, including Reuters And the BBCconfirmed that the photo was not created by artificial intelligence. large crowds at other Harris rallies also suggested that this turnout was not an anomaly. But tiny details just like the obvious lack of reflections on the plane made some conspiracy theorists skeptical.

Trump himself got here under fire after his supporters took fake, AI-generated images of him amid crowds. smiling black supporters But even when Trump willing to share fake imageshe has no monopoly on this practice.

For example, after a bullet grazed Trump’s ear on July 13, some people – including those that described themselves as anti-MAGA activists – shared Social media posts And Memes to represent the false concept that the Assassination attempt was staged.

Accusations of this sort – that fake-looking images are real, or that real-looking images are fake – have been common practice in politics, especially amongst extremists, for the reason that early twentieth century.

This was the primary time that photographs became technically possible to routinely print in newspapers and magazines. A brand new type of media flourished during this era, as magazines began to make use of photographs for illustration purposes moderately than mere drawings. These magazines were particularly popular throughout the Weimar Republic, a government that was in power in Germany from 1919 to 1933, before the rise of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, mostly referred to as the NSDAP.

In the Twenties experienced an unstable economy, parliamentary paralysis and an increasingly polarized society.

During this economically and politically turbulent period in Germany, image manipulation was widespread in popular news publications – especially those run by the Nazis.

The rise of the Nazi publication

I’m a Germanist and as a part of my research about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, I researched a peculiar Nazi propaganda magazine called Illustrated Observer – or, in German, the Illustrated Observer.

Founded as a political party in 1920, the Nazis began publishing this magazine in 1926. Published until 1945, the magazine provides helpful historical context for understanding today's political mudslinging over fake and manipulated photos. It also shows how the publication of false information, if left unchecked, can potentially result in dire political consequences, including the rise of fascism.

As the name of the Illustrated Observer suggests, it belonged to a genre of publication called “Illustrierten” in German, which accurately means “illustrated” in English.

These magazines contained serious news and photojournalism, but in addition short fictional stories, jokes, cartoons, and crossword puzzles. And, resulting from advances in printing technology, additionally they contained many photographs.

This Glossy tabloids with stylish illustrations were so popular in Germany that the preferred publication, the Berlin Illustrated Newspaper – or Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung – had a circulation of 1,844,130 copies per week until 1929.

The actual readership figures exceeded this number, as several people in Germany shared a duplicate of the newspaper in private households, hotels and cafés.

“Who is lying?”

In July 1926, the Illustrated Observer published a double-page spread with eight large photographs of a Nazi rally in Weimar. Among them was a photograph taken with a wide-angle lens that exaggerated the scale of the gang.

In addition to this camera trick, the Nazis also used misleading captions and cropping to distort the interpretation of this and other photos.

In 1926, the Nazis were still a small political party, but they were gaining increasingly power, and this kind of photographic trickery contributed to their rise.

The caption to the photo, which shows a crowd on the Nazi rally, screams hatefully: “Who is lying? The photography or the Jewish newspapers?”

The Illustrated Observer's query was intended to discredit centrist newspapers that had accurately reported that the rally had been a loud and violent affair, including the participation of hooligans, whom one journalist derided as “Hitler people.”

Just a few months later, the 1926 Christmas issue of the Illustrated Observer featured a story headlined “The Jews and Their Servants.” A tightly cropped photograph showed U.S. President Calvin Coolidge surrounded by a few dozen rabbis dressed conservatively and wearing top hats and thick beards, as is traditional for Orthodox Jewish men.

But that wasn't the entire story. The photo was cropped, and the unique image showed a much larger group portrait of greater than 100 people attending a spiritual Zionist meeting on the White House. Through cuts and misleading headlines, the Illustrated Observer attempted to falsely show that a small, conspiratorial group of Jews controlled the American president.

A glance back to the Twenties

Such photo manipulation was widespread in the ultimate years of the Weimar Republic, Germany's first but ultimately failed experiment with democracy, which opened the door to the Nazi seizure of power in January 1933.

The Nazis used a visually striking mixture of inflammatory words and pictures of their magazines to continuously sow doubt in readers' minds. It was difficult to inform which photos were real and which were fake – and due to this fact who was telling the Germans the reality and who was not. This practice undermined trust within the news, fueled more conspiracy theories, and made it difficult to know which political party to trust.

These conflicts from a century ago will seem familiar to people after the 2024 US presidential election.

Now there are also accusations of image manipulation, indignant counterarguments, accusations of media bias, and an intense, conspiracy-theoretical fixation on details that supposedly expose certain images as fakes.

For some, it could be easier to dismiss the present political trend of photo manipulation as a fact of political life, knowing that it’s nothing recent. For others, nonetheless, the dire historical consequences of unchecked photo manipulation are too serious to disregard.