WITNESS — stories behind historical photographs

Spectators at Coney Island lean over a wooden rail. On the other side a small girl sits among adults. Her name is unknown. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, international exhibitions and amusement parks displayed people from colonised countries in purpose-built “villages”. An encounter with another culture became a performance, while colonial rule was justified as a means of “civilising” its participants.

In 1897, the Brussels International Exhibition held its colonial section at Tervuren. It brought 267 people from Congo; today’s AfricaMuseum explicitly describes their removal as forced. Three fenced “villages” were built for them. A separate, fourth display was called the “village of Gijzegem”, after the Belgian commune where Abbot Van Impe taught young Congolese people. They were presented as evidence of his “civilising” work. The exhibition helped Leopold II seek support and investment for his colonial project.

The summer was cold and wet. Many participants fell ill, and seven died. Refused burial in the local cemetery, they were buried in unconsecrated ground. Their remains were later moved to the grounds of St John the Evangelist church in Tervuren. Contemporaries criticised the treatment of the Congolese, and their deaths caused a scandal. In 1898, the Colonial Palace nevertheless became a permanent Congo museum.

Zoos also put such shows on their programmes. In Hamburg in 1875, animal dealer Carl Hagenbeck exhibited Sámi people with reindeer. His business combined animal displays with performances by people brought from different countries. Around 1900, Hamburg also hosted Gustav Hagenbeck’s “Indian show”. A postcard shows participants standing beside elephants before a palace backdrop. The show carried its organiser’s name; the catalogue does not name the people pictured.

At St Louis in 1904, the Philippine exhibition served a similar purpose: to show Americans their new colonial possession and justify US rule there. The fair also staged Anthropology Days, recruiting people from its ethnographic displays. Contests in throwing, archery and other exercises were intended to support the organisers’ racist belief in white Americans’ physical superiority. They were separate from the official Olympic Games. Truman Hunt ran the fair’s “Igorrote village”. After the fair closed, he returned to the Philippines to recruit a new group to take to America.

In May 1905, 51 people from the Bontoc region of the northern Philippines arrived at Coney Island. Luna Park opened a “village” where visitors paid admission. Hunt promised each participant monthly wages and earnings from the sale of their handmade goods. The full terms of the agreements are not known. Visitors bought a ticket to see life in the Philippines; Hunt determined what they saw.

Participants were made to build structures over and over, stage ceremonies and hold “dog feasts”. Newspapers spread Hunt’s sensational accounts. According to research by the Coney Island Museum, people complained of long hours, inadequate food and being forbidden to leave the site. Part of the group was moved to the neighbouring Dreamland park in August 1905. Their stay at Coney Island ended in September, but the tour of America continued.

After leaving New York, participants told authorities that Hunt had withheld their pay. He was arrested in October 1906 and spent eight months in jail. The parks continued to welcome visitors. Dreamland, which had opened in 1904, burned on 27 May 1911. Luna Park operated from 1903 to 1944. The Bontoc exhibition had occupied only a few months in the history of this amusement district.

The photograph of the girl is often linked to the summer of 1905 and Hunt’s group. The Bain News Service negative itself says only “Filipino baby Coney Island”; the Library of Congress establishes neither the year nor the park. Her connection to that group is also unproven. The archive record gives no name and no account of her life after Coney Island.

Kaiser Wilhelm II was among Carl Hagenbeck’s visitors in 1909, speaking to participants in a display at the Hamburg zoo. The company continued to stage such shows after the First World War. According to Tierpark Hagenbeck’s published history, it organised more than 70 over six decades, in Hamburg and elsewhere. The last at Stellingen took place in 1932, when Circassian horse riders performed for the zoo’s twenty-fifth anniversary.

At the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, a “Congolese village” appeared again. More than 600 Congolese had come to Belgium; 120 were displayed by day in the “Tropical Gardens”. Racist treatment by visitors provoked protests. Many participants left, and the village closed early. Eight-month-old Juste Bonaventure Langa died during Expo 58; the cause is unknown. Congo became independent just two years after the exhibition.

Fourteen-year-old Waneek Horn-Miller was carrying her four-year-old sister, Kaniehtiio, towards the barricade where reporters were gathered. On 26 September 1990, people were leaving the army-encircled camp at Kanehsatà:ke when fighting broke out between those leaving and the soldiers. Waneek recalled recognising one of the soldiers and speaking to him; a moment later she was struck in the chest. The sisters fell to the ground and were dragged back towards the perimeter.

The standoff began over plans to expand a golf course on traditional Mohawk land beside a Mohawk cemetery. The blockade at the pine grove known as the Pines grew into a 78-day confrontation with Quebec police and the Canadian Army. The sisters' mother, activist Kahentinetha Horn, remained behind the barricades with her daughters. On the final day, she recalled, the military proposed that women and children should leave first. At a community meeting, those inside decided to leave together and then made their way towards the reporters.

A soldier's bayonet had wounded Waneek. She remembered noticing the blood on her shirt as people were being put onto buses. She was then held in custody. In her CBC interview, she said about 22 hours passed before she was released and returned to Kahnawake, where a doctor examined her. The wound was at her breastbone, close to her heart. Ryan Remiorz's photograph shows her still holding Kaniehtiio; it does not show the blow itself.

In 1999, Horn-Miller helped Canada win water polo gold at the Pan American Games in Winnipeg. The following year, she co-captained Canada's first women's Olympic water polo team. The team finished fifth in Sydney and won world championship bronze in 2001. Horn-Miller graduated from Carleton University, where she was named Athlete of the Year three times.

After her years on the national team, she helped the Assembly of First Nations develop programmes for sport, fitness and health, encouraging Indigenous young people to combine sport with education. In 2015, she returned to the Pan American Games as an assistant chef de mission for the Canadian delegation. She was inducted into Canada's Sports Hall of Fame in 2019.

In September 1939, seven women went out to dig potatoes on the edge of besieged Warsaw. American photographer Julien Bryan later recounted that two German aircraft first bombed a nearby house. The women lay down for cover, then returned to work because they needed food. The aircraft came back and machine-gunned the field. Two women died; one was Anna Kostewicz.

Bryan arrived after the attack. While he was photographing the dead, Anna's younger sister Kazimiera ran to her. He recalled putting his arm around the girl to comfort her; the Polish officers accompanying him were also in tears. Anna was fourteen. Sources disagree about Kazimiera's age and the date of the photographs: captions give both 9 and 13 September.

Bryan reached Warsaw on 7 September and stayed for two weeks. When he left on the 21st, he took out negatives and film showing streets under fire, wounded people and wrecked buildings. His photographs of the sisters appeared in American and European newspapers. He edited his Warsaw footage into Siege, which reached American cinemas in spring 1940.

He returned to Warsaw in 1958 and began looking for the people he had photographed during the siege. The newspaper Express Wieczorny printed the pictures and helped him find Kazimiera. By then she was married, with the surname Mika, and raising two children. In his account for Look magazine, Bryan described her husband's work as a tram driver and her own job cleaning at a medical school. The war had ended her education. The family invited him home for dinner.

In September 2019, eighty years after the photographs were taken, Kazimiera attended an exhibition of Bryan's work in Warsaw. His son Sam was there. The photographer himself had long since died; she remembered his light-coloured suit and the way he had held her in the field. Kazimiera Mika died on 28 August 2020.

On 18 November 1978, several Jonestown residents reached the Port Kaituma airstrip with Congressman Leo Ryan. They had asked him to help them leave the Peoples Temple settlement. As the party boarded the aircraft, armed Temple members opened fire. Ryan, three journalists and Patricia Parks, who had chosen to leave the community, were killed. Survivors who remained on the ground hid near the airstrip until the following morning.

Jonestown was an agricultural project established by Peoples Temple, an American religious movement. Its members moved from the United States to Guyana for the communal life Jim Jones promised them. Relatives reported that people were being held against their will and pressed for an investigation. Former members described rehearsals for collective suicide. Ryan came to investigate these accounts; on the first evening of his visit, a resident passed a reporter a note asking for help to leave.

At the settlement on 18 November, Jones ordered residents to gather at the communal pavilion. There, people were given a cyanide-laced drink. A surviving recording captures Jones urging those assembled to accept death; one woman objects and others argue with her. Adults poisoned the children. The recordings and survivors' accounts do not establish how many adults took the poison willingly and how many were coerced.

Nine hundred and nine people died at Jonestown itself. Jones was found with a gunshot wound to the head. Five more people died at the Port Kaituma airstrip and four at the Temple house in Georgetown. Across the three locations, the death toll was 918, including 304 people under eighteen.

Photographer David Hume Kennerly heard about the attack on Ryan while in Miami and flew to Guyana with TIME correspondent Don Neff. They later reached Jonestown in a small aircraft. Kennerly recalled initially mistaking the bodies around the pavilion for living people. The aircraft circled several times, its pilot tilting a wing so that he could take photographs.

Hundreds of bodies had to be removed from the remote settlement. In military photographer Jose L. Sanchez's image of 20 November, US Army personnel place remains in body bags. The work of identifying the dead continued for decades, with researchers comparing residents' lists against survivors' accounts and information from relatives. In May 2011, four granite plaques bearing the names of those who died on 18 November 1978 were installed at Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland.

At an intersection in Saigon, the Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức sat on the ground and set himself on fire. It was 11 June 1963. Monks and onlookers stood around him while the American correspondent Malcolm Browne photographed the scene. Quảng Đức died protesting the South Vietnamese authorities’ persecution of Buddhists.

A month earlier, on 8 May, civilians had been killed during a demonstration in Huế. President Ngô Đình Diệm was Catholic; Catholics enjoyed privileges under his U.S.-backed government. Buddhist monks and nuns took to the streets demanding religious freedom and political change. The authorities suppressed the protests, and the confrontation grew.

A monk alerted Browne the night before. The AP correspondent joined the procession from the pagoda. He later told Patrick Witty that he had shot about ten rolls with a Petri camera. A passenger carried the film from Saigon to Manila, where the photographs were transmitted by radiophoto.

On 12 June, The Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times printed the photograph on inside pages. The New York Times initially declined to publish it; two weeks later, it appeared in a full-page advertisement paid for by a group of clergymen. LIFE devoted a spread to Browne’s photographs in its 21 June issue.

The Buddhist crisis continued after Quảng Đức’s death. In August, forces directed by the president’s brother, Ngô Đình Nhu, raided Buddhist pagodas. Washington debated whether to continue supporting Diệm and how to respond to a possible coup. South Vietnamese military officers overthrew him on 1 November; Diệm and Nhu were killed on 2 November. That day, Washington told the American ambassador that their deaths had caused shock and that the new government needed to explain the circumstances.

In December 1963, Browne travelled to Amsterdam to receive the World Press Photo of the Year award. The following year, he shared the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting with David Halberstam of The New York Times. The prize recognised their reporting on the Vietnam War and the overthrow of Diệm’s government.

People who had recently been held behind the camp wire were being carried into the SS barracks. After Buchenwald’s liberation, about 4,700 sick prisoners needed urgent care. The American 120th Evacuation Hospital arrived on the evening of 15 April 1945. Its staff worked with 270 doctors and nurses from among the former prisoners, led by the French physician Joseph Anselme Brau. The camp was free, but exhaustion and disease were still killing people.

Buchenwald had existed for almost eight years. It was established in the summer of 1937 on the Ettersberg near Weimar. Prisoners were subjected to forced labour, starvation, beatings and murder. In the winter of 1945, further transports arrived from camps the SS were evacuating ahead of the advancing Allies. The overcrowded Little Camp received people already exhausted by the journey. A camp medical report recorded more than 13,000 prisoner deaths at Buchenwald and its subcamps in the first three months of 1945.

In early April, the SS forced thousands of prisoners out of Buchenwald on foot. On 11 April, American tanks overran the nearby garrison and the prisoners’ underground organisation took control of the camp. American reconnaissance troops entered that afternoon. More than 21,000 people remained at Buchenwald.

While doctors treated the sick, the camp was being opened to the outside world. On 16 April, the American command brought about a thousand Weimar residents here. Former prisoners explained the camp’s workings and showed visitors where people had been killed. Army photographers and correspondents gathered evidence of the crimes. Two days later, Ardean R. Miller III was working there, one of only four U.S. Army photographers using colour film in Europe. A week had passed since liberation; bodies still lay in the crematorium courtyard and the hospital was receiving patients.

Eleven hospital wards were set up in the former SS barracks. By 22 April, the medical teams had begun to curb the deaths. Investigators were gathering testimony and evidence of the crimes. In June 1945, former commandant Hermann Pister was found and arrested in a prisoner-of-war camp near Munich. At the Dachau trial in 1947, he was sentenced to death; he died in custody before the sentence was carried out.

Black-and-white photographs of the liberated camps were appearing outside Germany in the spring of 1945. Miller’s colour work followed a different path. According to the Buchenwald Memorial, the Army then regarded colour photography as an experiment, and the images remained unused for many years. The thirteen surviving slides were rediscovered and published only in the 1990s.

On the night after Otto von Bismarck’s death, two photographers entered his home in Friedrichsruh without permission. The former imperial chancellor had died on the evening of 30 July 1898, eight years after leaving office. Willy Wilcke and Max Priester photographed him in bed without his family’s consent. The image, made in the early hours of 31 July, soon became the subject of legal proceedings.

Bismarck lies among pillows, with white cloth wrapped around his chin. A cup, candles and a clock stand beside the bed. According to a Deutsches Museum study, the photographers moved the clock from about four in the morning to 11.20 p.m., the time of Bismarck’s death.

Wilcke and Priester offered the photograph for sale. Bismarck’s son Herbert had it seized and prevented its publication. Contemporary reporting in August 1898 described proceedings against the photographers over their nighttime entry. Bismarck’s children also sued for the photographs to be handed over and the negatives, plates and copies destroyed.

The dispute reached the Imperial Court. On 28 December 1899, it based its decision on the violation of the family’s rights in its home. The judges applied the principle of restitution for what had been obtained unlawfully: the photographers could not retain the benefit of their intrusion.

The image survived. The Deutsches Museum study identifies its first publication as the 14 December 1952 issue of Frankfurter Illustrierte, more than half a century after it was taken.

His face was so well preserved that the Højgaard family, digging for peat, thought they had found a recent murder victim. They discovered the body on 6 May 1950 in a bog near Bjældskovdal outside Silkeborg and reported it to the police on 8 May. It lay deep in the peat, with no sign of recent digging. Museum staff accompanied the officers to the site. The find became known as Tollund Man, after the nearby village where his finders lived.

The man had died in the Iron Age. Recent radiocarbon dating places his death in 405–380 BCE at 95.4 percent probability; examination of the body suggested he was about thirty to forty years old. The acidic, oxygen-poor bog preserved his skin and facial features. A sheepskin cap remained on his head, secured by leather straps beneath his chin.

A noose was still around his neck. Doctors examining the body at Copenhagen’s Bispebjerg Hospital concluded that he had died by hanging, a finding supported by later examinations. His neck vertebrae were unbroken. Although the cause of death could be established, his name and the circumstances of his death remain unknown.

Once the body was out of the bog, conservators faced a new task: preserving tissues that would dry out without the peat water. At the National Museum of Denmark, they treated the head with wax and also preserved the feet and a thumb. The rest of the body dried out. Museum Silkeborg later displayed the original head with a reconstruction showing the body as it had appeared when found.

Research continued seventy years after the discovery. In 2021, scientists re-examined the intestinal contents to identify his last meal: a porridge of barley, flaxseed and weed seeds. Charred crumbs indicated that the food had been slightly burnt. Protein analysis also identified fish, which the 1950 investigation had missed.

Conrad Schumann had been sent to guard the barrier dividing Berlin. On the afternoon of 15 August 1961, the 19-year-old East German policeman crossed it himself: he ran, cleared the barbed wire and headed for a West Berlin police vehicle. It was the third day after the border had been sealed. There was no concrete wall yet at the corner of Bernauer Strasse and Ruppiner Strasse.

Schumann had trained as a shepherd before joining the police. His unit moved from Dresden to Berlin in July 1961 and was sent to the border on 12 August. West Berlin police recorded these dates after questioning him at the Wedding station following his escape; their memorandum is dated 16 August.

The memorandum also records how he crossed. Journalists asked Schumann whether he wanted to come over; he replied that he would come at night. The photographers then began taking pictures of another patrol. The other guards turned their backs and walked further into the eastern sector. Schumann stayed at the barrier and jumped when they were far enough away.

Schumann later said an encounter with a girl had influenced his decision to flee. She had visited her grandmother in East Berlin but was not allowed to return to her parents on the western side.

Peter Leibing photographed Schumann in mid-air, and the image travelled around the world. Schumann went on to live and work in Bavaria. In November 1989 he spoke of his joy that East Germans could travel west freely. He visited Bernauer Strasse and, as he recalled, could not hold back his tears. He did not consider himself a hero.

Schumann died by suicide on 20 June 1998. An information marker commemorates his escape at the corner of Bernauer Strasse and Ruppiner Strasse, where the barbed-wire barrier stood in August 1961.

Five Black and two white activists entered the whites-only pool at the Monson Motor Lodge together. While rabbis protested outside the motel, the seven swimmers stayed in the water. It was 18 June 1964 in St. Augustine, Florida. They included J.T. Johnson, Al Lingo and 17-year-old Mamie Nell Ford, later known as Mimi Jones.

The St. Augustine campaign had been under way for months. Local activists sought equal access to hotels, restaurants and beaches, joined by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. A week earlier, Martin Luther King Jr. had been arrested at the same motel after trying to eat in its restaurant. Black and white protesters now challenged the pool's colour bar together.

Motel manager James Brock brought a container of muriatic acid, a chemical also used in pool maintenance, and began pouring it into the water. ‘I’m cleaning the pool,’ he said, according to the caption beneath The Tampa Tribune's photograph. Johnson later recalled trying to calm the frightened swimmers: he believed the volume of water would dilute the acid enough to prevent it from harming them.

A police officer jumped into the pool, and the protesters were taken away under arrest. Photographs of the protest appeared in newspapers. The next day, 19 June, the US Senate passed the Civil Rights bill; President Lyndon Johnson signed it on 2 July, barring racial discrimination in public accommodations. Resistance to desegregation continued in St. Augustine. A Molotov cocktail was thrown into the Monson after it began admitting Black guests, and federal courts had to intervene to make private businesses comply with the law.

Mimi Jones continued her studies, earning a degree at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She worked in education and community organisations and remained active in the civil-rights movement. Jones died in Boston on 26 July 2020.

About forty years after the protest, Johnson returned to the Monson's site, now occupied by a Hilton. In his StoryCorps conversation, he recalled telling the manager he would not stay there because the hotel had no African American employees. The manager promised that would change before his next visit.

A German serviceman sent a photograph of an execution home from the Eastern Front. The photograph was intercepted in Warsaw and passed to Jerzy Tomaszewski. On the back was the inscription “Ukraine 1942. Judenaktion in Iwangorod”—“Ukraine, 1942. Jewish action in Ivanhorod.” The Nazis used “action” as a euphemism for mass killing. An image made from the perpetrators’ side entered a collection of evidence of their crimes.

After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, units that shot Jews followed the advancing front. The killers included the Einsatzgruppen and other German forces, among them the police. Entire communities were murdered: men, women and children. The Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum dates this execution to 1942 at Ivanhorod, a village in Ukraine. Yad Vashem identifies the gunmen as German policemen. Neither museum account names the photographer or a specific unit.

In 1959, the photograph appeared on the cover of the Polish album 1939–1945. We Have Not Forgotten. Later publications often cropped it to three figures: a man with a rifle, a woman and the child in her arms. The complete image shows other people bent towards the ground on the right and two more gun barrels on the left. Beyond the familiar crop, the same mass execution continues.

In January 1962, the far-right West German newspaper Deutsche Soldaten-Zeitung called the photograph a Polish forgery. The article’s author, Otto Croy, challenged the gunman’s weapon and uniform. Tomaszewski and Tadeusz Mazur, one of the album’s editors, replied in the Polish magazine Świat on 25 February by publishing another photograph from the same source. It shows five armed men standing behind bodies. The dispute brought a second document into print.

The second print also bears the words “Ukraine, 1942,” but names a different place: “Gr. Sewastjanowka,” or Greater Sevastyanovka. The rest of the inscription means “shooting of Jews.” This photograph therefore cannot be presented as the next stage of the Ivanhorod scene. Reproductions of the two reverses preserve both place names; the documents’ connection through their owner does not establish a shared date or the identities of the people depicted.

Auschwitz-Birkenau and Yad Vashem publish the Ivanhorod photograph as evidence of the murder of Jews. Yad Vashem credits the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Jerzy Tomaszewski, who supplied the image. Tomaszewski preserved another person’s photograph; he did not take it. The museum captions name neither the woman and child nor the other victims. Their deaths entered the public record while their individual histories remained unknown.

The Armenian inhabitants of Sheykhalan, in the Mush region, were burned alive. That is how a Russian inscription on the back of the surviving print describes their deaths. Russian servicemen stand among the remains. The Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute dates the photograph to 1915 and attributes it to Russian soldiers on the Caucasus front. The individual photographer is unknown.

During the First World War, the Young Turk government accused Armenians of supporting Russia. On 24 April 1915, hundreds of Armenian public and cultural figures were arrested in Constantinople. That date became the day of remembrance for the genocide. In May, deportations spread to districts far from the front: belonging to a people declared disloyal was enough to be driven from home.

Armenians were driven from their homes and sent south towards the empire’s desert regions. Deportation columns came under attack; people died from murder, starvation, disease and exhaustion. Massacres in towns and villages were another part of the destruction. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that between 664,000 and 1.2 million Armenians died from spring 1915 to autumn 1916. Tens of thousands of children were taken from their families and forcibly converted to Islam.

Some refugees reached the Caucasus. Charitable societies, doctors and the Armenian Central Committee in Tiflis organised relief. The committee supported sixteen orphanages in Tiflis, Dilijan and Alexandropol. The Caucasian Armenian Charitable Society maintained another twenty-eight. During the war these organisations worked together, raising funds for medical care, food and shelter for refugees.

Relief also meant everyday work. There was a temporary shelter in Igdir, a food warehouse in Elisavetpol, and workshops in Tiflis where refugees wove cloth and worked as jewellers. In 1917, the Armenian Central Committee included these places in the Album of Armenian Refugees, issued by the Progress publishing house in Tiflis. Its 62 photographs brought evidence of massacres together with orphanages and workshops. They concerned people who, having escaped death, still had to rebuild their lives.

The Sheykhalan photograph also appeared in that publication. The museum acquired a separate original print in 2008. A Russian inscription describing the villagers’ deaths by burning survived on the back, with the number 74 on the photograph. The museum’s account names neither the victims nor the photographer. What remains identifiable is the place, the year and the testimony written on the print itself about the villagers’ deaths.

Nikola Tesla spent the last ten years of his life living and working at the New Yorker Hotel. He could no longer afford a laboratory but continued his experiments at the hotel. His Wardenclyffe tower on Long Island, intended as the first station in a worldwide network for wireless communication and power transmission, had been demolished for scrap to pay his debts in 1917. The project remained unfinished.

His earlier work had changed the electrical grid. Tesla developed a polyphase alternating-current system and an induction motor, receiving US patents for its basic elements in 1888. His work helped shape the systems still used to generate, transmit and use electricity. He later studied high-frequency currents and tried to build a station at Wardenclyffe to send power and messages without wires.

By the early 1940s, Tesla no longer had his old laboratory and had limited means. A photo album issued by the University Library of Niš captions this late portrait as “probably the last photograph”, without naming a date or photographer. Online captions date it to 1 January 1943. That date has not been verified. The Nikola Tesla Museum says the last photograph Tesla kept was taken in 1942, without explicitly identifying it as this portrait. Its exposure date and status as the final lifetime image remain open.

Tesla died at the New Yorker Hotel on 7 January 1943. The museum gives coronary thrombosis as the cause of death. After his death, his papers and property were sealed and transferred to the US Office of Alien Property Custodian; his nephew Sava Kosanović became his heir. At Kosanović’s initiative, the estate was shipped to Yugoslavia in 1951. The Nikola Tesla Museum was founded there in 1952 and now holds Tesla’s manuscripts, devices and photographs. His ashes were brought to Belgrade in 1957 and are kept in the museum.

On 1 October 1940, Albert Einstein raised his right hand in a Trenton courtroom. His stepdaughter Margot and secretary Helen Dukas took the oath beside him; other prospective US citizens stood behind them. The surviving photograph places the three in the front row.

Einstein was abroad when the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933. He decided not to return and began work that autumn at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Margot and Dukas lived with him and his wife Elsa; after Elsa died in 1936, they remained in the house on Mercer Street.

Einstein filed his declaration of intention to become a US citizen in January 1936. In his petition, signed in June 1940, he gave his Princeton address and his occupation as professor of theoretical physics. More than four years passed between that first filing and the oath. He also retained the Swiss citizenship he had acquired long before moving to the United States.

War was already underway in Europe when he took the oath in October 1940. Einstein continued his work in Princeton and helped refugees from Nazi Germany reach the United States. Dukas remained his secretary until his death in 1955. After his death, she worked to preserve his archive, collecting and organising his papers. These documents became part of the Albert Einstein Archives in Jerusalem.

Keshia Thomas shielded a man being beaten by demonstrators protesting against the Ku Klux Klan. The 18-year-old Black high-school student had herself joined the protest. The Klan rally took place outside City Hall in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on 22 June 1996. Police had erected a barrier between the two groups.

The crowd noticed a man in clothing bearing Confederate symbols, with an SS tattoo. They took him for a Klan supporter, though his membership has not been established. When he tried to leave, people chased him. They knocked him down and kicked him and struck him with the wooden poles of their signs.

Thomas lowered herself over the man and demanded that the beating stop. Photographer Mark Brunner recorded the attack and several moments of her intervention. The photographs are presented in an editorial order; their exact sequence has not been established.

Thomas later said that she had herself experienced violence and remembered wishing someone had stood up for her. In a 2013 BBC interview, she said the man she protected had not contacted her. Months after the protest, a young man approached her in a cafe and thanked her: he was the man’s son. Brunner published his series, and a photograph of Thomas appeared in LIFE’s 1996 pictures-of-the-year selection.

In 2017, as Hurricane Harvey flooded Houston, Thomas helped carry people to safety in a truck. Floodwater had disabled her own car; she found a truck after putting out a call on Facebook. After the storm, she helped organise relief at Green House International Church, where volunteers distributed food, clothing and essential supplies.

Frieda Seibt was forty-three. After the February air raids, her body was brought to the Altmarkt, Dresden's central square, where the dead were registered and prepared for cremation. A tag attached to her body gave her name and address: Friedel Seibt, 12 Amalienstrasse.

Between 13 and 15 February, British and American aircraft struck Dresden in four raids. Fire spread through its streets and much of the historic centre was destroyed. The dead were found in the streets and the cellars of houses.

At first, bodies were taken to the cemeteries. By 24 February, some 7,500 had been brought there. City officials feared that the prepared burial grounds would not hold them all.

The municipal emergency staff ordered the dead to be taken to the Altmarkt. There they were registered and cremated on grates made from railway rails. Horse-drawn carts, papers in the workers' hands, rows of bodies on the paving stones: all appear in the photographs.

When photographer Walter Hahn reached the square on 25 February, this work had already been under way for several days. The city archive holds twenty-three colour transparencies he made that day. Black-and-white photographs survive too: they show people, carts, rows of the dead and smoke above the pyres.

Frieda's tag can be read in one of Hahn's colour transparencies. The historical commission matched the words to the police record of Frieda Hulda Seibt, which named suffocation as the cause of death. The photograph bearing her identification tag is not included here.

The remains of 6,865 people were cremated at the Altmarkt. Dresden's historical commission concluded that up to 25,000 people died in the raids of 13–15 February. Its research did not support the far greater figures repeated for decades.

From 6 March, bodies recovered in the city were once again taken to the cemeteries. A lorry carried the ashes from the Altmarkt to Heidefriedhof in several journeys. Frieda Seibt's burial record bore the words 'ashes from the Altmarkt'.

On 9 April, her father-in-law, Hermann Seibt, received written confirmation of her death.

The pale-blue leather of the rear seat still bore the marks of 22 November. The open Lincoln was brought from Dallas to Washington. FBI agents examined it early on 23 November 1963. The colour photograph of the interior, often labelled 'right after the assassination', was taken in Washington on 23 November, the day after the shooting in Dallas.

The day before, President John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy had ridden through Dallas in the open limousine. Texas governor John Connally and his wife Nellie sat ahead of them on the folding jump seats. The limousine, based on a 1961 Lincoln Continental, was unarmoured.

Shots rang out on Elm Street. Kennedy and Connally were wounded, and the driver took them to Parkland Hospital. Kennedy died that day; Connally survived. Outside the hospital, White House photographer Cecil Stoughton photographed the limousine surrounded by police officers and other people.

Once the car returned to Washington, investigators documented its condition from more than one angle. Two colour views of the back seat entered the Warren Commission record as Exhibits CE 352 and CE 353. FBI examiner Robert Frazier later confirmed that the photographs reflected what he had seen in the early hours of 23 November. Frazier was looking for impact marks and bullet fragments. Three small particles of lead were found on the carpet beneath the left jump seat.

The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza also warns of a different misleading image: a black-and-white hospital photograph of a car interior strewn with roses is often mistaken for Kennedy's limousine. It shows Lyndon Johnson's car.

After the assassination, the limousine was rebuilt with a permanent roof, armour and bullet-resistant glass. Its midnight-blue body was repainted black. It returned to White House service and remained in use until 1977. The car is now at The Henry Ford in Dearborn.

Near the Albanian border, Mustafa Xaja held a wallet against his face, showing two small portraits. They were of his son Besim and his daughter Jehona. War had separated the family in 1999, and Mustafa did not know whether the children were alive. In a later documentary, the children recalled that Serb forces detained their father; after his release he found himself across the border.

American photographer Peter Turnley met him in Kukës. The portrait appeared on the cover of Newsweek International. One circulating caption calls the children “two missing sons.” In artist Alban Muja's film, they tell the story themselves: Besim and Jehona are brother and sister. Their testimony corrects the caption without asking us to read identities from the tiny pictures in their father's hand.

After the war, Mustafa returned to Kosovo and found his family alive. Turnley returned too and photographed him with the children in Pristina. Now Besim and Jehona were beside their father as he held up their small portraits.

The first portrait has circulated with another false caption, describing Mustafa as a victim of NATO bombing. Turnley's own publication, the children's account and the second photograph bring a particular family's history back into view. Mustafa survived the separation; Besim and Jehona survived, and their father saw them again.

On 5 June 1966, James Meredith set out from Memphis on the road to Jackson. He intended to cross Mississippi almost alone, showing Black residents that threats need not rob them of the vote. Four years earlier he had become the first Black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi. His arrival on campus had been met with violent riots.

On the second day, near Hernando, Aubrey James Norvell shot him with a shotgun. Meredith lay wounded on Highway 51. Associated Press photographer Jack Thornell recorded the scene from more than one angle: in one frame Meredith turns towards the brush, where the gunman is visible; in another he reaches towards the verge, facing the camera. The original photographs are black and white. A later colour version of the second frame cannot tell us what the scene looked like in colour.

Meredith was taken to a Memphis hospital, but the march did not end. On 7 June the comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory came to the hospital, intending to carry on the walk. The following day Meredith became unwell during a press conference and a doctor came to his aid. AP photographer Charles Kelly recorded both moments.

Civil rights leaders took up the march. Martin Luther King Jr., Floyd McKissick, Stokely Carmichael and local organisers turned a solitary walk into a drive to register voters. The route passed through Mississippi Delta towns where threats and official resistance still kept Black residents from the ballot. During the march, the call for Black Power, already heard among SNCC activists, entered the national political debate.

On 23 June in Canton, officials refused the marchers permission to camp in a schoolyard. Police used tear gas. Kelly photographed officers in gas masks and, in a separate scene, marchers released on bond. Meredith rejoined the procession on 25 June.

On 26 June he walked with King, Coretta Scott King, Carmichael and others at the head of the column bound for Jackson. The march ended in a rally at the state capitol. The SNCC Digital Gateway estimates that about 15,000 people took part by the final day. Meredith's journey was completed—though no longer by one man.

A small coffin bearing a doll was carried up the steps of the Louisiana State Capitol. The parents who had come from New Orleans on 23 November 1960 were staging a funeral for federal judge J. Skelly Wright. Nine days earlier, following his ruling, four Black first graders had entered two of the city’s previously all-white schools.

The confrontation had been years in the making. In 1952, Black families, supported by NAACP lawyers, sued the New Orleans school board. Two years later, the US Supreme Court ruled segregation in public schools unconstitutional. Wright ordered the city to begin desegregation in 1956, but the board stalled. In May 1960, with no workable plan forthcoming, he set one himself: start with the first grade, then open another grade to integrated schooling each year.

On 14 November, Ruby Bridges entered William Frantz. Gail Etienne, Tessie Prevost and Leona Tate went to McDonogh No. 19. All four girls were six years old. Federal marshals escorted them; opponents of integration gathered outside; white parents removed their children. Louisiana’s legislature endorsed the boycott, urging parents to keep their children away from the two schools.

The protesters travelled to Baton Rouge in three buses. They were given small black flags, and the procession with the coffin made its way into the Capitol, where the state legislature was holding a special session. The next day, the Times-Picayune described the doll representing Wright: a black suit, with a miniature judge’s gavel tucked into its pocket. According to the paper, members of the House of Representatives rose and applauded the procession.

Online, the photograph is often captioned as a threat aimed at Ruby Bridges outside her school. Ruby did recall protesters displaying a Black doll in a child-sized coffin. But the Associated Press caption places this procession in Baton Rouge and identifies Judge Wright as its target. There is no evidence that Ruby saw this particular doll or coffin. Her own account, along with photographs of her school days, appears in Six Years Old, Four Marshals.

The schools stayed open. Ruby continued to attend under the marshals’ protection, and the legal fight over desegregation continued beyond November 1960. In 1962, Wright joined the federal appeals court in Washington, DC. He served there for more than a quarter of a century, serving as chief judge from 1978 to 1981.

“We do not know whether she survived,” Tom Parfitt wrote a year after the assault on the Dubrovka theatre. The Sunday Telegraph’s Moscow correspondent was trying to find the woman taken from the theatre in a bus on the morning of 26 October 2002. Justin Sutcliffe’s photograph of her had already won a World Press Photo award. The journalists now asked Russian readers to help learn what had happened to her. No reliable account of her later fate has emerged from the sources examined here.

On the evening of 23 October, an armed group led by Movsar Barayev seized Moscow’s Dubrovka Theatre Centre during a performance of the musical Nord-Ost. The hostages included audience members, performers and theatre staff. The captors demanded the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya. The captors wired the building with explosives. Female members of the armed group carrying explosive devices were positioned among the hostages. Negotiations continued for more than two days. Some people were released, but hundreds remained inside until the morning of 26 October.

Before the assault, security forces sent an incapacitating substance through the ventilation system. The substance affected captors and hostages alike. All of the militants in the building were killed. Rescuers carried people out of the theatre, gave first aid and sent them to hospitals in ambulances and ordinary city buses. Through the bus windows, photographers saw passengers who had yet to regain consciousness.

Video later examined by the European Court of Human Rights shows city buses at 7:20 a.m.; by 8:03, they are lined up. One doctor said he dispatched two or three buses to hospitals. In each, he recalled, about twenty people were seated and another ten to twelve lay on the floor; some were already dead. Another doctor said some buses were accompanied by only one paramedic. These statements describe the evacuation as a whole. They cannot be tied with certainty to the particular buses in these photographs.

Doctors recognised signs of opioid poisoning and administered naloxone, but they had received no timely warning about the gas. The court also found that the mass evacuation was delayed: many hostages remained unconscious for more than an hour inside the building after the agent had been released. Outside, people were laid on their backs, increasing the risk of asphyxiation. They needed care at the theatre and on the journey; some died before reaching hospital or soon afterwards.

Russian authorities did not disclose the exact substance used in the theatre, even to investigators. In 2012, British researchers published an analysis of clothing from two survivors and a urine sample from a third. They identified carfentanil and remifentanil, two potent opioids, on a shirt, and a carfentanil metabolite in the urine. The study established the presence of those substances, but could not determine their proportions or the complete composition of the aerosol.

According to official figures, 130 people died during the hostage-taking and its aftermath. On 20 December 2011, the European Court of Human Rights delivered its judgment in Finogenov and Others v. Russia. It did not find the decision to use force and gas itself to be a violation of the right to life. It did find violations in the inadequate preparation and conduct of the rescue operation, and in the ineffective investigation. Failures it identified included poor coordination, delayed evacuation and insufficient medical help.

Freddie Mercury never recorded the final verse of Mother Love. During the last year of his life, he would come to the studio for an hour or two at a time, recording songs Queen would have to finish without him. That same year, his partner Jim Hutton took informal portraits in the garden at Garden Lodge. In Mercury and Me, Hutton recalled beginning with photographs of the flowers before Freddie came over. He agreed to pose, but wanted to stand well back from the lens: no close-up. Hutton said he made four exposures.

Mercury had worked with Queen on Innuendo in 1990. Released in 1991, the album topped the British chart, as did its title single. The band continued recording in Montreux that year. Listeners would hear some of those songs only after his death, on Made in Heaven.

Years later, engineer Justin Shirley-Smith found the dates 13–16 May 1991 on the tape boxes for Mother Love. The musicians stayed in Montreux, ready to gather when Mercury felt able to come in. Brian May remembered Freddie singing one verse after another, making three attempts at each. Standing for long was difficult, so he chose to record in the studio control room. They never reached the final verse.

On 30 May 1991, Mercury was filmed for his final Queen music video, These Are the Days of Our Lives. He barely moves in the finished film. His friend and personal assistant Peter Freestone later said that even walking caused him severe pain by then. Richard Gray, the band’s photographer and art director, was on set: one of the few people still permitted to photograph Mercury in those final months. His pictures also show what lay outside the finished video.

On 23 November 1991, Mercury publicly announced that he had AIDS. He died the following day, 24 November, at his London home, with family and friends nearby. He was forty-five. The cause of death was bronchopneumonia associated with AIDS. Only a day separated the two announcements.

After his death, Queen released Bohemian Rhapsody and These Are the Days of Our Lives as a double A-side single. The song from the final video stood alongside a recording from 1975. The single spent five weeks at the top of the British chart and raised more than £1 million for the Terence Higgins Trust, a charity supporting people with HIV.

On 20 April 1992, May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon joined guest musicians onstage at Wembley for the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert. The members of Queen and their manager Jim Beach established the Mercury Phoenix Trust, which continued raising funds to fight HIV and AIDS and to support people affected by the epidemic.

Hutton’s garden portraits have often been called Mercury’s “last photographs” and dated 28 August 1991. Yet Sotheby’s places the image with Oscar the cat in the spring, mentioning it in the catalogue entry for Freddie’s floral silk shirt. The year is known; the season remains disputed. Neither an exact day nor the claim that these were definitively his final photographs can be established.

The band still had tapes bearing his voice. May, Taylor and Deacon returned to them and finished the songs. Made in Heaven appeared in November 1995, including vocals recorded in Montreux in 1991. Near the end of Mother Love, the voice changes. Brian May sings the verse Freddie did not live to record.

Five-year-old Lina’s abdomen was growing, and her father took her to hospital. Her family had come looking for help; Dr Gerardo Lozada discovered that she was pregnant. It was the spring of 1939, at San Juan de Dios Hospital in Pisco, Peru. Within weeks the child would give birth, and her name would appear in newspapers around the world.

Lina Medina was taken from Pisco to Lima. Doctors attributed the possibility of pregnancy to exceptionally early puberty; her age was checked against a baptismal record brought in by her father, Tiburcio. On 14 May 1939, Lina delivered by caesarean section at a Lima maternity hospital. She was five years, seven months and twenty-one days old. Her son was named Gerardo after Lozada. That year, the Peruvian doctor Edmundo Escomel described the case in a medical journal. Photographs of mother and child were already travelling beyond Peru.

Police investigated the sexual assault of the girl. Tiburcio Medina was arrested on suspicion of involvement, then released for lack of evidence. The perpetrator was never identified.

Soon there was another dispute: who would decide her future? Her father arranged a trip to the United States for medical examinations. Peruvian authorities prevented her departure and placed her in state custody on 7 June 1939. Tiburcio appealed to the Supreme Court and regained guardianship in 1940. While family and state fought in court, the child’s story continued to circulate in the world press.

In childhood photographs, Lina sits with Gerardo and a dog; in other pictures, her son is older. The Brazilian paper A Noite printed four images on 18 March 1941, including the one with the dog, now often captioned “Seven-year-old Lina with her two-year-old son, 1940.” That age does not fit the calendar: Gerardo did not turn two until May 1941. The day the pictures were taken is unknown, but the newspaper page proves that they existed by 18 March. Later portraits show Lina as an adult.

Lozada remained part of the family’s life. As she grew older, Lina learned shorthand and worked as his secretary; he also helped with Gerardo’s education. Lina married Raúl Jurado. In 1972 she gave birth to a second son, thirty-three years after the first. Gerardo had a family of his own and earned a living at various jobs, including demanding manual work.

Gerardo died of a bone-marrow illness in 1979. He was forty. Years later, gynaecologist José Sandoval found his medical records at Almenara Hospital. Sandoval read the newspapers of 1939, studied doctors’ notes and spoke with relatives, piecing together the lives of mother and son beyond the publicity that had surrounded them as children. Lina did not obstruct his research, but declined to speak about what had happened to her.

When Sandoval’s book appeared in 2002, people in Peru again asked about the support the state had promised Lina when she was a child. A Reuters correspondent spoke with Raúl Jurado; Lina herself refused an interview. The press rarely reported on her later life. In 2019, El Comercio wrote that she had been widowed since 2009. For decades her name remained in newspapers and medical books. She chose not to recount her experience.

Jenny-Wanda Barkmann returned in handcuffs to the camp where she had been a guard. In May 1946, she and other defendants were brought to Stutthof with the court and journalists. The first trial for crimes committed in the camp was already under way in Gdańsk. Mikołaj Sprudin photographed Barkmann beside a heap of prisoners’ shoes.

The first prisoners, brought from Gdańsk on 2 September 1939, built Stutthof themselves. They were Poles arrested at the beginning of the war, a day after Germany invaded Poland. Around 110,000 people passed through the camp and its satellite sites, including tens of thousands of Jews. Approximately 65,000 died: murdered, or lost to hunger, disease, exhausting labour and the evacuation. When the Red Army entered the camp on 9 May 1945, around 150 people remained.

Fifteen defendants appeared before the Special Criminal Court in Gdańsk on 25 April 1946. They included SS men, female guards and former prisoners given power over other inmates. They were tried for abuse and for the deaths of prisoners. The court called forty-two witnesses, mostly Stutthof survivors; other former inmates submitted written testimony. It also considered a sixty-page diary kept by the former Italian consul Aldo Coradello, describing daily life in the camp and the killings there.

During the inspection, defendants were led through the grounds in pairs, handcuffed. The next day a newspaper reported that Jan Breit had shown the camp hospital and Barkmann the gas chamber. According to the inspection record cited by a researcher of the trial, the visit took place on 29 May. The PAP photographs in the Alamy catalogue are dated 31 May. The two records disagree; this series is therefore dated simply May 1946.

Hearings ended on 31 May. The court delivered its verdict the following day: eleven people, five women and six men, were sentenced to death; two received prison terms; two were acquitted. Barkmann was among those condemned. Bolesław Bierut declined to grant clemency. The execution was set for early July.

All eleven were hanged on 4 July beside Pohulanka Street in Gdańsk. Tens of thousands came to the hill, including children. The city ran extra buses, and factories brought workers on lorries. The condemned arrived in trucks too; the truck beds served as platforms. When the vehicles pulled away, the sentences were carried out. Former prisoners and relatives of victims, dressed in striped camp uniforms, acted as executioners. Photographs survive of the preparations, the executions and the site afterwards.

The mass spectacle provoked debate. Jan Kott, Stanisław Ossowski and other writers and scholars spoke out against public executions. In September, Justice Minister Henryk Świątkowski condemned them as well. Poland’s last such execution had already taken place that summer: on 21 July 1946, seventeen days after Pohulanka, Arthur Greiser was hanged in Poznań.

The Stutthof proceedings continued. Three more trials were held in Gdańsk in 1947: sixty-nine defendants were sentenced, ten of them to death. By then public executions had been abandoned. Pohulanka remained part of the history of the first trial, together with the defendants’ return to the camp in May, the prisoners’ testimony and Sprudin’s photographs.

On a lawn at Balmoral, Elizabeth, about seven years old, imitates her mother’s Nazi salute. Beside them are her younger sister Margaret, about three, and their uncle Edward, the Prince of Wales. It is 1933 or 1934; the girls’ mother is still Duchess of York, and Elizabeth is not yet queen. Eight decades later, these seventeen seconds of home movie would become front-page news. The person behind the camera has never been identified with certainty.

The Sun published the clip in July 2015. Buckingham Palace expressed disappointment at the way the newspaper had obtained and used a film made eighty years earlier. A palace spokesperson said it apparently came from the Queen’s private family archive. The palace objected to the treatment of a private recording; it did not call the film a forgery.

ITV reported a further explanation from an unnamed palace source, who described a family game, an imitation of a gesture seen in newsreels of the day, and urged readers to consider the period. That was the account given by ITV’s palace source. The film itself cannot tell us what any of the people on the lawn thought or intended.

Stig Abell, The Sun’s managing editor, maintained that the footage had been obtained lawfully and was historically significant. The paper, he said, was not accusing the Queen or her mother; its principal interest was Edward. After abdicating, he visited Nazi Germany and met Hitler in 1937, several years after the Balmoral film was made.

On social media, the childhood gesture continued to be offered as a political charge against the adult Elizabeth. Full Fact confirmed the footage was genuine and recalled her wartime service: in 1945, the princess joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s branch of the British Army. Seventeen seconds of film cannot, on their own, establish her adult convictions.

A Hanukkah menorah stood on the rabbi’s windowsill. Across the street, a swastika flag hung from the Nazi Party building. In Kiel in December 1931, the two symbols faced one another more than a year before Hitler came to power. Rachel Posner, wife of Rabbi Akiva Baruch Posner, the head of the local Jewish community, photographed the menorah in her window. The flag entered the frame.

On the back of the print, Rachel gave a voice to both flag and candles. She wrote the lines in German; the word Juda stands for the Jewish people. Below are her original words, Yad Vashem’s Hebrew translation and a WITNESS translation into English.

German original

„Juda verrecke“
die Fahne spricht —
„Juda lebt ewig“
erwidert das Licht.

Hebrew · Yad Vashem translation

״יהודה התפגרי״
כך אומר הדגל
״יהודה תחיה לעד״
כך עונה האור.

English · WITNESS translation

“Death to the Jews,”
says the flag.
“The Jewish people live forever,”
replies the light.

The Posners left Germany in 1933, taking both the menorah and the photograph with them. In 1934, the family arrived in Mandatory Palestine.

The menorah was later placed on long-term loan with Yad Vashem. According to the museum and the Posners’ descendants, the menorah is returned to the family each Hanukkah so they can light its candles again.

Ten minutes: that was the length of Mao’s meeting with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Pakistan’s prime minister arrived in Beijing on 26 May 1976 and was received at Zhongnanhai the following evening. The official record gives the time exactly: 8:35 to 8:45 p.m.

Bhutto was accompanied by his wife Nusrat and minister Aziz Ahmed; Hua Guofeng attended on the Chinese side. A week later, Peking Review reported handshakes and a “cordial and friendly” conversation. The official record contains no later reception of a foreign guest by Mao.

Mao died on 9 September. The photograph of the May handshake has since been described as the last picture taken of him alive. What the documents establish is his last recorded reception of a foreign leader; they do not tell us whether anyone photographed him afterwards.

Wedding rings became gold by weight. The Nazis took them from their victims, alongside watches, gemstones, spectacle frames and dental fillings. In the spring of 1945, American soldiers found thousands of such rings near Buchenwald.

The camp was liberated on 11 April. Less than a month later, on 5 May, a military photographer named Roberts photographed a handful of rings held over a box full of them. The archival caption says they were only a small part of what had been stolen.

The seized gold made its way to the Reichsbank. After the war, its vice-president Emil Puhl spoke about valuables the SS had taken from Jews and other concentration-camp prisoners. From August 1942, the bank accepted jewellery, watches, spectacle frames and dental gold. Proceeds from their sale were to go into the Reich treasury.

The caption does not name the people who wore these rings. No individual ring in the photograph can be linked from this record to the name or fate of the person from whom it was taken.

Two thirteen-year-old boys caught smallpox on the same day from the same source. One had been vaccinated as an infant; the other had not. The first developed only one or two lesions, which quickly scabbed over. The second was covered in smallpox pustules. That is how Allan Warner, a doctor at an isolation hospital in Leicester, England, described his patients.

Warner observed the illness, recorded its symptoms and photographed the boys. In his picture, the vaccinated boy sits on the right, the unvaccinated boy on the left. Edward Jenner had developed the first successful smallpox vaccine in 1796. More than a century later, the disease was still bringing children into hospital.

The photograph appeared in a medical atlas in 1906, in a section on how vaccination affected the course of smallpox. The vaccinated child had become infected too, but experienced a far milder illness. The caption does not say precisely when Warner made the exposure or what became of either boy.

The end of smallpox was still decades away. In 1967, the World Health Organization intensified its international campaign, vaccinating people and identifying and tracing new cases. The last known naturally acquired case was recorded in Somalia in 1977. Three years later, WHO declared smallpox eradicated.

First the harvest failed. The drought of 1876 struck southern and southwestern India especially hard. Over the next two years famine spread across a wider region and took millions of lives. British colonial authorities opened relief camps. People came to them, but the catastrophe continued.

British officer Willoughby Wallace Hooper took photographs in those camps, later gathered in an album called Scenes of the Madras Famine. The Getty Museum describes the people in this print as a family at a relief camp. Its catalogue gives neither their names nor any account of their later lives.

Online, the image has acquired a story about a man supposedly protecting his family from cannibals. He is holding a stick, but we do not know why. Neither the inscription on the print nor the Getty description links the scene to cannibalism.

Beneath the photograph remain the words “Deserving Objects of Gratuitous Relief.” That was how people caught in the famine were labelled. Their faces have survived far more clearly than the facts of their lives.

For many Jews from the towns and villages of Carpathian Ruthenia, the journey led through the Berehove ghetto and ended at Birkenau. In May 1944, Jews from this region, then part of Hungary, were deported to Auschwitz. Trains took them from the ghetto to German-occupied Poland.

On the camp ramp, SS doctors and guards decided who would be sent to forced labour and who would be killed. The first group was registered and assigned to barracks; the others were led to gas chambers under the pretext of disinfection. The women and children in this photograph had already passed through that selection. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s caption, they were walking towards the gas chambers. The archive does not name them.

German and Hungarian authorities organised the mass deportation. Between 15 May and 9 July 1944, about 437,000 Jews were taken from Hungary in 147 trains. Approximately 420,000 were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The USHMM estimates that some 330,000 were murdered in the gas chambers soon after arrival.

Staff of the camp photography laboratory recorded the arrival of trains, the selection and the assignment of prisoners. From those exposures came the Auschwitz Album: 193 photographs on fifty-six pages, showing one or more transports from Carpathian Ruthenia. Its intended audience is uncertain. Yad Vashem suggests it may have been prepared as a reference volume for senior officers. The killings themselves do not appear in the pictures.

Lilly Jacob found the album after liberation. She had been deported from Bilke through Berehove and had survived Auschwitz, forced labour and imprisonment at Dora-Mittelbau. In an abandoned SS barrack, she discovered photographs of people arriving at Birkenau. Among them were relatives and acquaintances she would never see again.

Lilly kept the album she had found. In 1980, she donated it to Yad Vashem. The museum calls its pages the only surviving visual record of the path to mass murder at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The prisoner was ordered to stand on a box and told that if he fell, he would be electrocuted. A hood covered his head; wires were attached to his hands; his feet were bare. This was how American service members abused an Iraqi man at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad in November 2003. A later military investigation established that the wires were not live.

The people taking the photographs were among those responsible for the abuse: US Army Specialist Sabrina Harman and Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick. Captions from the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, or CID, say that both photographed the prisoner “as a joke.”

CID’s chronology dates these two exposures to 4 November, at about 11:01 and 11:04 p.m. A military investigation gives the same day and mentions six photographs of the man on the box; two appear here. The charge brought at Frederick’s trial gives a different date, “on or about” 8 November. The records disagree.

In January 2004, military policeman Joseph Darby handed photographs from the prison to investigators. CBS first broadcast them on 60 Minutes II on 28 April. Images the guards had made inside the prison were now seen outside it.

In October, Frederick pleaded guilty to several charges of abusing prisoners. He was sentenced to ten years, reduced to eight under a pre-trial agreement. He was also demoted to private, forfeited his pay and was dishonourably discharged from the Army.

After publication, the identity of the hooded prisoner also became contested. Ali Shallal al-Qaisi said the man was him. CID rejected that claim: its investigative files identify the prisoner as Abdou Hussain Saad Faleh. The guards had a nickname for him: “Gilligan.”

Safety was only a step from one ladder to another. On the fifth-floor fire escape stood nineteen-year-old Diana Bryant, her two-year-old niece and goddaughter Tiare Jones, and firefighter Robert O’Neill. He had come down to them from the roof; an aerial ladder was being raised from below. The apartment building on Marlborough Street in Boston was on fire. It was 22 July 1975.

Stanley Forman of the Boston Herald American arrived after hearing the call on a fire-service radio. He climbed onto a fire engine for a higher view. As he later recalled, it looked like a routine rescue: O’Neill would cross to the aerial ladder, take the child, pass her to another firefighter, then help Bryant.

As the ladder reached the platform, the fire escape gave way. O’Neill caught hold of the aerial ladder; the woman and child fell five storeys. Forman kept photographing, his camera’s motor drive set to three frames a second. Just before they hit the ground, he turned away. That evening he learned Bryant had died and Jones had survived. According to World Press Photo, the child landed on her godmother’s body, which cushioned her fall.

The next morning the photographs appeared on the first and third pages of the Boston Herald American, then were reproduced around the world. Some questioned whether a newspaper should show the moment of a person’s death. Others asked about the condition of fire escapes. Boston soon required them to be inspected every five years.

In 1976, the image of the fall was named World Press Photo of the Year, and the series won first prize in the Spot News category. Forman also received a Pulitzer Prize for the photographs.

Soldiers led a prisoner in a checked shirt along a Saigon street. His hands were tied behind his back. It was 1 February 1968, the second day of the Tet Offensive, and fighting continued across the city. Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams and NBC cameraman Võ Sửu noticed the procession.

The head of South Vietnam’s National Police, Brigadier General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, approached the prisoner. Adams later recalled expecting an interrogation at gunpoint when the general raised his revolver. Loan shot the man in the head. His name was Nguyễn Văn Lém; South Vietnamese authorities considered him a Viet Cong officer. He was executed without trial.

Adams released the shutter at the instant of the shot. Võ Sửu kept filming, so the execution also survives as moving images. Associated Press distributed the photograph. It appeared on newspaper front pages and later on anti-war posters. It won World Press Photo of the Year for 1968 and earned Adams a Pulitzer Prize in 1969.

Adams later defended Loan, believing the general had been judged unfairly. He said Viet Cong fighters had recently killed Loan’s aide and his family, a fact viewers did not know. This was Adams’s explanation for the shooting. His account, as quoted by Associated Press, does not establish Lém’s involvement in those killings. Nor do the available archival records for the series connect the prisoner to them.

On their eleventh day in the mountains, a small radio brought the news that the official search had ended. The survivors were living in the broken fuselage on a snowy slope. Their plane had crashed on 13 October 1972 while carrying members of Uruguay’s Old Christians rugby club, their relatives and friends to Chile. Forty-five people were aboard.

Over the Andes, the Uruguayan Air Force crew misjudged their position and began to descend too soon. The Fairchild FH-227D struck a ridge, losing its wings and tail. Those who survived sheltered in the remaining fuselage, blocking the open end with suitcases and wreckage and melting snow on sheets of metal. Searchers in the air failed to spot the white fuselage against the snow.

Their stores of chocolate, wine and other food ran out. To avoid starving, they began to eat the bodies of those who had died. Survivors later described the decision as an agreement to help one another stay alive.

On the night of 29 October, an avalanche buried the fuselage. Eight more people died; the others were trapped under snow. It took days to clear a way out.

On 12 December, Fernando Parrado, Roberto Canessa and Antonio Vizintín left the camp to seek help. Days later, Vizintín turned back, giving his food to the other two. Parrado and Canessa continued alone. On 20 December, across a river, they saw Chilean herdsman Sergio Catalán. They made contact with a note thrown over the water: “I have come from a plane that fell in the mountains… There are fourteen people left in the plane.”

Chilean Air Force helicopters evacuated the fourteen people still at the fuselage on 22 and 23 December. Together with Parrado and Canessa, sixteen of the forty-five survived. The last were rescued on their seventy-second day in the mountains.

When investigators found photographs of Regina, she was still listed as missing. Fourteen-year-old Regina Kay Walters had left her home in Pasadena, Texas, with her boyfriend; she was last seen there on 3 February 1990. She later ended up in the truck of Robert Ben Rhoades. The long-haul driver abducted and murdered her. The pictures he made became evidence against him.

Rhoades was arrested in Arizona that April. A highway patrol officer stopped beside his truck on the shoulder of the road and discovered a naked woman chained in its sleeping compartment. She was alive.

Searching Rhoades’s house, investigators found women’s clothing, restraints and photographs of several women. Some showed Regina inside the truck and beside a wooden building. Items in the house resembled clothes seen in her photographs. At the time, she was still considered a missing person.

Her body was found on 29 September in an abandoned barn near Interstate 70 in Bond County, Illinois. She had been strangled with a wire ligature. It was the same building beside which Rhoades had photographed her. His employer’s travel logs showed him on that stretch of highway in February or March 1990.

Online, the barn photograph is often captioned “seconds before her death.” The court records do not say how much time passed between the photograph and the murder. They do establish the place: Rhoades photographed Regina beside the building where her body was later found.

On 11 September 1992, Rhoades pleaded guilty to first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. The photographs, clothing and route records formed part of the evidence set out in the court’s decision.

People hoping to leave the city gathered at Shanghai South Railway Station while fighting continued around them. Japanese aircraft bombed the station on 28 August 1937. A child was left among the wreckage. The cameraman was Wang Xiaoting, a Chinese-American photographer and newsreel operator for Hearst Metrotone News, also known as H. S. “Newsreel” Wong.

Wang carried both a motion-picture camera and a still camera. His footage was shown in cinemas, while newspapers printed the photograph of the child amid the ruins. LIFE devoted a page to it on 4 October 1937, noting that newspapers and newsreels had already brought the image to millions.

The picture acquired several names: “Shanghai Baby,” “Bloody Saturday,” “Chinese Orphan.” The child’s name was never learned; even the child’s sex is uncertain. There is no reliable account of the family’s fate that would justify calling the child an orphan.

Later, critics alleged the photograph was staged. They identified a man seen near the children in the newsreel as Wang’s assistant and claimed he arranged them for the camera. Archival descriptions do not establish that he worked with Wang or prepared the scene for a photograph.

Another surviving frame by Wang shows what happened next: the child on a stretcher, receiving treatment for injuries. The available pictures and records do not trace the child’s life beyond that moment.

The fare to Grandmother’s house was fifteen cents. The traveller was eight months old, a rural mail carrier accompanied him, and his parents insured the “parcel” for fifty dollars, just in case. In January 1913, an Ohio baby safely reached his grandmother by post.

The US Parcel Post service had begun only weeks earlier, on 1 January 1913. Its rules listed permitted goods and weight limits, but said nothing expressly about people. In the first years, several families made use of the omission, sending children to relatives in the care of postal workers.

On 19 February 1914, May Pierstorff, still not quite six, travelled from Grangeville to Lewiston, Idaho. Fifty-three cents in stamps were attached to her coat. She covered some seventy-three miles in a mail car, watched over by a relative who worked as a railway mail clerk. The journey cost her parents less than a passenger ticket.

The cases made the newspapers, and the Post Office had to clarify that people could not be accepted as mail. The ban did not end the practice at once: isolated journeys by children accompanied by postal employees were still reported in 1915.

A photograph of a child sitting in a mail carrier’s bag often illustrates these stories. But the National Postal Museum dates it to around 1900, before Parcel Post, and describes it as a playful staged picture. Real children travelled with postal workers their families trusted; delivery in a mailbag was a joke for the camera.

Omayra Sánchez was found alive where her house had stood. The thirteen-year-old was trapped by debris, her legs pinned beneath the water. On the night of 13 November 1985, a small eruption of Nevado del Ruiz melted part of its glacier. Lahars—flows of water, ash and rock—swept along Colombia’s river valleys, travelling as far as a hundred kilometres in roughly two hours. Around 23,000 people died beneath the mud in Armero. The disaster claimed more than 25,000 lives altogether.

Rescuers kept Omayra above the water, brought her drinks, talked with her and prayed alongside her. Freeing her legs required pumping the water away. The Red Cross repeatedly asked for a pump and other equipment. None arrived in time.

Photographer Frank Fournier reached Omayra at dawn on 16 November. Coming from New York, he had taken about five hours to drive from Bogotá and another two and a half to reach the site on foot. By then the girl had been trapped for more than two days.

Fournier later remembered Omayra slipping in and out of consciousness. She asked to be taken to school, afraid of being late. He photographed her and the rescue effort. About three hours after he arrived, Omayra died. She had spent some sixty hours in the water and debris.

Fournier passed his exposed film to colleagues heading to the airport. Paris Match published the photographs after Omayra’s death. Their appearance brought accusations that he had taken pictures instead of saving her.

He replied that the means at hand could not free Omayra. His aim, he said, was to show her courage and the failures of the rescue effort. In 1986, her portrait was named World Press Photo of the Year. The competition archive preserves a series of ten frames.

Keith Sapsford’s parents took him abroad, hoping to satisfy his longing to travel. That is how the Sydney Morning Herald later described the fourteen-year-old from Randwick in eastern Sydney. Yet he kept running away. In February 1970, he was sent to Boys’ Town, a Catholic home for teenagers in Engadine.

His father taught mechanics and industrial engineering. According to a newspaper account, shortly before Keith’s death he had warned his son what could happen inside an aircraft’s wheel well: the cold, the altitude, the moving landing gear. He mentioned another boy who had died that way in Spain.

Keith stayed at Boys’ Town for about two weeks, then ran away. Three days later, on 22 February, he entered Sydney Airport. A Japan Air Lines Douglas DC-8 was preparing to leave for Tokyo. Keith climbed into its wheel well.

As the aircraft gained height and the landing gear retracted, the compartment doors opened. Keith fell about forty-six metres and died.

Amateur photographer John Gilpin was photographing departing planes at the time. He did not notice the fall. Only after developing the film did he see what his picture had caught beside the DC-8. Associated Press distributed the image; LIFE printed it in its Parting Shots section on 6 March 1970.

What happened to the child? Readers of The New York Times called and wrote to the paper after its 26 March 1993 edition. It had printed Kevin Carter’s photograph of an emaciated child on the ground, a vulture behind. Carter had brought the image from Ayod in what was then southern Sudan, where he had been documenting famine with photojournalist João Silva and staff of Operation Lifeline Sudan.

The caption called the child a girl who had collapsed on the way to a feeding centre. Four days later, the paper explained, on Carter’s account, that he had chased off the bird and the child had moved on. The newspaper did not know whether the child reached the centre. The photograph travelled the world; the answer readers sought remained incomplete.

Carter was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in April 1994 and travelled to New York to receive it in May. Recognition came with reproach: why had he photographed the child rather than taking her to safety? A newspaper compared him to a second vulture. TIME reported that his friends, too, asked what he had done.

On 27 July 1994, Carter died by suicide. He was thirty-three. Afterwards, some said public attacks over the Sudan photograph had driven him to it. TIME journalist Scott MacLeod, who reconstructed Carter’s final months, also described depression, financial trouble and setbacks at work. In April, Carter’s close friend Ken Oosterbroek had been killed on assignment.

In his suicide note, Carter listed what he could not afford: housing, child support and debts. He also wrote that he was haunted by vivid memories of killings, corpses, anger and pain. The accusations surrounding the photograph formed part of his final months. Neither the note nor the accounts gathered by MacLeod support treating them as the sole cause of his death.

In 2011, El Mundo correspondent Alberto Rojas travelled to Ayod, now in South Sudan. He reported that a family recognised the child by a feeding-centre bracelet: a boy named Kong Nyong. His father said Kong had survived the famine, grown up and died of fever in 2007. This later account rests on the family’s statements as reported by El Mundo. The original newspaper caption had not even supplied a name.

In the summer of 1945, atomic bombs were being assembled on Tinian for attacks on Japanese cities. Among the Project Alberta specialists was twenty-four-year-old Harold Agnew. Weapons developed at Los Alamos were now being prepared for combat missions.

A photograph from that period shows Agnew outside a hut, holding a small metal container. It is often described as the core of Fat Man. Los Alamos National Laboratory is more precise: the container held plutonium for the bomb; the material itself is not visible. According to a US Government Accountability Office report, Fat Man’s plutonium component contained just over six kilograms of plutonium. The photograph’s exact date is unknown.

On 6 August, Agnew flew towards Hiroshima aboard The Great Artiste. As a scientific observer, he was to measure the blast wave; he also filmed the aftermath. Agnew did not take part in the Nagasaki mission.

Three days later, on 9 August 1945, Fat Man, assembled on Tinian, was aboard the B-29 Bockscar. The aircraft was bound for Kokura, but cloud and smoke forced the crew to turn to its secondary target, Nagasaki. The bomb exploded above the city at 11:02 a.m. local time.

By the end of 1945, approximately 74,000 people had died in Nagasaki and 75,000 had been injured, according to the Nagasaki National Peace Memorial Hall. Those figures end with that year; deaths from the later effects of the bombing are not included.

After the war, Agnew returned to Los Alamos and continued working on nuclear weapons. In 1970, he became director of the laboratory he had first joined as a young physicist.

In November 1880, Norwegian Ole Tobias Olsen lost his daughter Milda Dorothea, born only the year before. He made a post-mortem portrait of her: Milda seated beside her mother, Bernardine. The National Library of Norway’s catalogue preserves the family’s names and the circumstances of the picture.

In the nineteenth century, a family sometimes called for a photographer after a loved one had died, wishing to retain an image of that person. A deceased child might be photographed in her mother’s arms or beside her relatives as part of a family portrait. Such pictures are called post mortem: “after death.”

Online collections also apply that label to group portraits whose history is unknown. Nine such photographs appear here. A woman supported on either side becomes, in the retelling, a dead daughter posed between her parents; a child’s closed eyes or a standing figure’s darkened hands are taken as signs of death. Claims about painted pupils pass from one post to another. The images alone cannot establish any of these accounts.

Another story concerns studio posing stands: supposedly they were used to hold dead bodies upright before the camera. In photographic studios, such supports helped living sitters remain still during long exposures. A stand is no proof of a post-mortem sitting, any more than closed eyes, the colour of a hand or a face that appears sharper than its neighbours.

For the other nine portraits, no archival records have yet been found to verify the sitters’ names, their relationships or that they were photographed after death. Their captions report online identifications with that reservation. Unlike the Olsen family photograph, these images do not even tell us with certainty whom we are seeing, much less whether anyone in them had died before the shutter opened.

To obtain a piece of the Elephant’s Foot for study in 1987, researchers had to shoot at the hardened mass. It had formed beneath the destroyed fourth unit of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant after the accident of 26 April 1986. Molten fuel mixed with concrete, sand and structural metal, flowed into rooms below and solidified. Through service penetrations, the melt moved from corridor 301/6 into room 217/2. One deposit became known as the Elephant’s Foot; others were called the “stalactite” and the “drop.”

The mixture is often called corium. Chernobyl researchers use the more specific term lava-like fuel-containing materials, or LFCM. At first the mass was black, glassy and very hard. It consisted chiefly of silica, with other constituents including uranium compounds. Samples emitted radiation with the same spectrum as irradiated reactor fuel. The Nuclear Safety Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences estimates that all the LFCM in room 217/2 contains 0.4 ± 0.2 tonnes of uranium. That is the uranium in all the deposits in the room, not the weight of one Elephant’s Foot.

According to the institute, the radiation field at the surface exceeded 800 roentgens per hour. Early samples were collected remotely. Five years after the researchers had fired at it to obtain fragments, an adhesive-coated gauze swab was enough: pieces several centimetres across stuck to it and broke away. The once-hard mass had begun to crumble.

About ten years after the accident, researchers confirmed that some of the material was turning into fine radioactive particles. A review by the Japan Atomic Energy Agency considers changes in temperature, air movement and the material’s own radiation. Its authors judge their contribution to the physical breakdown to be relatively small.

Moisture appears to matter more to the chemical changes: irradiation makes it more chemically reactive. Uranium-bearing deposits have been found on the surface. Researchers also discuss the possible role of microorganisms, although the detailed mechanism of biological ageing remains unknown.

In autumn 1996, Arthur Korneyev, deputy director of the Shelter facility, was photographed beside the Elephant’s Foot. His outline is blurred; his torch has left a streak of light. Atlas Obscura later suggested that he set a camera on a timer and stepped into the frame, and the picture became known as a “selfie.” The archive, however, does not say who positioned the camera or pressed the shutter. Korneyev is credited with another photograph of the Elephant’s Foot from the same autumn; the image showing him has no established author.

Some photographs in this collection have no known date, so they cannot be arranged as a strict visual history of the Elephant’s Foot’s deterioration. Even the picture in the “current condition” section of Chernobyl’s official Shelter site has no shooting date. PastVu dates it to 12 August 2000 and tentatively attributes it to Alexander Kupny, citing a later VKontakte post. No primary source confirms that dating. Nor is there evidence that it shows the Elephant’s Foot as it looks today.

On 6 March 1953, the day after Stalin died, Washington restaurateur Bob Seidel offered his customers free borscht. The sign stated the occasion plainly: the death of the Soviet leader. The restaurant was called 1203, after its street number on Pennsylvania Avenue NW.

Seidel telephoned newspaper editors himself to announce the offer. Press photographers captured the sign in the window and a customer served a bowl of borscht. A restaurant promotion entered the photographic record of Stalin’s death.

Seidel had used similar offers to draw customers before. During a dairy strike in 1950, he gave away milk. When coffee prices rose in 1954, he advertised inexpensive tea. In 1953, the death of the Soviet leader furnished the occasion.

Over time, the pictures acquired a different address: they were captioned as a free-borscht giveaway at a Ukrainian restaurant in New York. John Kelly of The Washington Post went back to contemporary newspapers and recovered the Washington story, including the restaurant’s name, address and owner. He found no evidence that either the restaurant or Seidel was Ukrainian.

How many bowls were served on 6 March, and how long the offer lasted, is unknown. The newspaper accounts located so far do not preserve those details.

Yakov Dzhugashvili entered German captivity as an artillery officer and Nazi propaganda leaflets as Stalin’s son. A senior lieutenant commanding an artillery battery, he was captured on 16 July 1941 after his unit was surrounded near Vitebsk. Leaflets carrying his portrait soon began to fall over Soviet positions.

They urged Soviet troops to stop resisting, using the captive son of their leader to give the appeal force. The photograph itself says nothing about whether Yakov approved the message. It was taken in July before an interrogation; German servicemen stand beside him.

Svetlana Alliluyeva later described how the family received the news. She recalled her father telling her of her brother’s capture in August 1941. Stalin suspected Yakov’s wife, Yulia Meltzer, of involvement; she was arrested that autumn and released in spring 1943. By then, Alliluyeva wrote, Yakov’s conduct in captivity had convinced his father that he had not surrendered voluntarily.

From 1941, Dzhugashvili was held at Oflag XIII D in Hammelburg. After an unsuccessful escape attempt in May 1942, he was transferred to Oflag X C in Lübeck. In 1943, he was moved to special camp A at Sachsenhausen, where prisoners of particular interest to the Nazi leadership were held.

Yakov died on 14 April 1943. German guards said he had entered the prohibited strip by the fence and been shot by a sentry. A photograph of his body beside the fence was included in the investigative file. Later American diplomatic correspondence described the event as an apparent attempt to escape over an electrified fence. These records do not establish whether Dzhugashvili was trying to flee, deliberately sought death or acted for another reason.

His captivity also gave rise to a story about an exchange for Friedrich Paulus: Stalin supposedly refused, saying he would not trade a soldier for a field marshal. Alliluyeva preserved a different account. She placed her conversation with her father in the winter of 1943–44: the Germans, he told her, had offered to exchange Yakov “for one of their own.” She recalled his answer as, “Am I to bargain with them? No. War is war.” Paulus is not named in her account. No primary document has been found offering an exchange specifically for him, and the soldier-and-field-marshal phrase is not verified as Stalin’s exact words.

After the war, British and American diplomats discussed whether to give Stalin the German material concerning his son’s death. Their correspondence described microfilmed documents: a letter from Himmler to Ribbentrop, photographs and pages from the investigation. They decided not to hand over the originals and did not tell the Soviet side of the discovery.

In summer 1945, Alliluyeva wrote, Stalin told her Yakov had been shot by the Germans. He mentioned a condolence letter from a former prisoner whom he described as a Belgian officer. To his daughter, speaking about his son seemed difficult for him.

A story about the Winter War attributes a particular tactic to Finnish soldiers: they supposedly stood frozen bodies beside roads to frighten advancing Red Army troops. This photograph is also associated with the war, fought from 30 November 1939 to 13 March 1940. It shows a body, usually identified online as a Soviet serviceman, set upright in the snow.

Rare Historical Photos repeats the intimidation story. The available digital copy traces back to an earlier Blogspot post and was later reproduced with the credit “Finnish Archives.” Neither a photographer nor an archival number was supplied. That credit has not made it possible to reconstruct the shooting; the exact place and date are unknown.

Pictures of frozen Red Army soldiers do survive in Finnish military collections. Among the thousands of Winter War images in the Military Museum’s catalogue are photographs with such captions. Similar scenes also appeared in newsreels: describing Taistelun tie, filmed from autumn 1939 to March 1940, Finland’s National Audiovisual Institute mentions an “enemy frozen in a sitting position.”

That description shows that military cameramen filmed the frozen dead. It does not connect the newsreel scene to the person in this photograph. No archival record for the frame has been found; the dead person’s name, unit and circumstances of death are unknown. Nor is it known how the body came to stand this way. The claim that Finnish soldiers deliberately displayed bodies to intimidate an enemy remains unverified.

On 5 November 1942, a Finnish serviceman shot an unarmed person near Rugozero. Military photographer V. Hollming photographed the execution. The Soviet-Finnish war of 1941–44—known in Finland as the Continuation War—was under way. Rugozero was then controlled by the Finnish army, far east of Finland’s pre-war border.

Five consecutive frames survive. Finland’s Military Museum lists them under the same date, place and caption: Ryssän desantti kohtaa loppunsa, or “The Russian paratrooper meets his end.” The first Finnish word is a slur for a Russian. The caption does not name the person being executed.

Popular accounts call him a Soviet scout or spy. The archival word desantti could mean a parachutist, saboteur or agent dropped behind the lines; it does not establish his actual assignment. The open catalogue record gives neither his unit nor an accusation against him. It contains no interrogation record, sentence or evidence of a trial.

The series became widely known in November 2006, when Finland released some three hundred previously closed photographs showing executions, bodies and other disturbing subjects.

Some publications describe the man’s expression before the shot as a smile, reading fearlessness in the face of death. No words of his survive in the available records. The five frames show the course of the execution; they do not explain his expression or tell us what he knew in his final moments.

A Nazi killed his family and then himself before the Red Army arrived: that is how agency captions explain the deaths of four people in a Vienna park near parliament. Yevgeny Khaldei photographed their bodies in 1945. A man lay on the path; three others were near the benches. Khaldei recorded the scene from several positions. The archive gives no exact date.

The TASS war correspondent accompanied the Red Army in Vienna. Street fighting there ended on 13 April; Khaldei photographed damaged neighbourhoods as well as the first days after the fighting. In one park picture, Soviet officers stand beside the dead. The archival caption identifies Dmitry Shepilov among them.

Original gelatin-silver prints titled “Suicide of a Nazi and His Family” are held by Colgate University Museums. Khaldei himself gave one of the prints to the university museum.

Another caption tells the story differently. A print from the photographer’s private archive was shown at a Moscow exhibition in the 1990s. Researcher Yelena Simens quotes the exhibition label: “Shepilov in the park by parliament: collective suicide of a Nazi family.” That describes a joint suicide, rather than one person murdering his relatives.

The circumstances of these deaths cannot be reconstructed from the available archival records. Museum and agency catalogues neither name the dead nor cite a police file, suicide note or witness statement. Their ages, relationships, party affiliation and order of death are unknown. The story of a Nazi family survives in captions, but those records provide no documents to substantiate it.

In the American South, a sign above a drinking fountain told people who could use it. “White” marked the fountain for white people; “Colored” marked the one for Black people. The same words divided restrooms and waiting rooms. Racial segregation reached into ordinary places where people came for water, a ticket or groceries.

In 1896, the US Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson established the doctrine of “separate but equal.” It allowed separation by race on the condition that services were equal. In practice, the facilities and the treatment people received were not.

Railway stations, courthouses, shops and workplaces provided separate entrances, rooms and restrooms. Some laws explicitly required employers to maintain separate toilets. The public bathhouses at Hot Springs were divided four ways: for white women, white men, Black women and Black men. Where a statute did not require separation, local rules, custom, policing and the threat of violence could sustain it.

Elliott Erwitt photographed two such fountains in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1950. Looking back, he spoke about the failure of the “separate but equal” formula. The signs demanded separation; the fountains themselves revealed the inequality.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited racial discrimination in hotels, restaurants and other public accommodations within its scope. Discrimination did not disappear, but people could now invoke federal law in demanding equal service.

When Dachau was liberated, thousands of prisoners were still ill and exhausted. American troops entered the camp on 29 April 1945. Two days later, on 1 May, Eric Schwab photographed a young man whom an AFP caption describes as an eighteen-year-old “Russian Jew” suffering from dysentery. It gives neither his name nor his prisoner number.

In the final months of the war, transports from other camps kept arriving at an already overcrowded Dachau. Hunger, filth and exhaustion helped epidemics spread. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia specifically notes typhus; the caption to the young man’s portrait names dysentery.

On 26 April 1945, Dachau and its many subcamps held 67,665 registered prisoners. The Nazis forced at least 25,000 people from the camp system to march south or took them away in freight trains. Units of the US Seventh Army’s 42nd and 45th Infantry Divisions and 20th Armored Division took part in the liberation on 29 April. Some 30,000 weakened people remained in the main camp. Nearby, the soldiers found more than thirty railcars filled with prisoners’ bodies.

While photographing the camps, Schwab was searching for his mother, Elsbeth, deported in 1943. He had come to Germany with American journalist Meyer Levin. One of the first photographers for the newly founded Agence France-Presse, Schwab recorded Buchenwald, Leipzig-Thekla, Dachau and Theresienstadt. At Theresienstadt in May 1945, he found his mother alive.

The Dachau portrait is sometimes accompanied by a story that the prisoner died shortly after it was made. That account belongs to another Schwab photograph, of a Buchenwald prisoner with dysentery taken around 12 April 1945. What happened to the young man photographed at Dachau on 1 May remains unknown.

A boy stood at a cremation ground in Nagasaki with the body of a younger child on his back. Joe O’Donnell saw him in September 1945, after the atomic bombing of the city on 9 August. The American photographer was recording the devastated country on assignment for the US Marine Corps. In his account, he called the children brothers; no documentary record confirms their relationship.

As O’Donnell remembered it, the boy waited silently for five or ten minutes. Then people in white masks took the body by its hands and feet and laid it in the fire. The boy did not move. He bit his lower lip so hard that it bled. When the flames began to die down, he turned and walked away.

O’Donnell wrote that he wanted to go to the child and comfort him, but feared breaking his composure. That explanation, like the details of the wait by the fire, comes from the photographer’s recollections. It is not recorded in a contemporary shooting log.

O’Donnell made some of his Japan photographs with his own camera. After returning home, he packed about three hundred negatives in a suitcase and did not show them for decades. In the 1980s, he returned to Japan and tried unsuccessfully to find the boy. He came back to the negatives themselves in the late 1980s. A Japanese edition of the series appeared in 1995; the English book Japan 1945 followed in 2005.

Over the decades, researchers have proposed different identities for the boy and different sites for the scene. None has gained general acceptance. The museum attribution gives Nagasaki and September 1945; the exact day and place, and both children’s names, remain unknown. The image alone cannot establish their ages or confirm that they were related.

Six-year-old Ruby Bridges spent her first day at William Frantz Elementary in the principal’s office. She arrived on 14 November 1960 with her mother and four federal marshals. Outside the New Orleans school, opponents of Black and white children learning together gathered. White parents removed their children; classes all but stopped.

Six years had passed since the US Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Racial segregation in public schools had been ruled unconstitutional, but New Orleans resisted change. Federal judge J. Skelly Wright pressed for the ruling to be enforced. On 14 November, four Black girls entered schools that had previously admitted only white children. Ruby was the only one of the four assigned to William Frantz. Accompanied by marshals, Gail Etienne, Tessie Prevost and Leona Tate entered McDonogh No. 19. They became known as the New Orleans Four.

Barbara Henry, newly arrived from Boston, agreed to teach Ruby. Lessons took place in a separate classroom with Ruby as its only pupil. Marshals escorted her to school and kept watch at the door while she learned. Herschel Garner and Charles Burks were among those involved in protecting school integration in New Orleans.

Outside school, Ruby faced threats. Remembering those days, she described protesters carrying a Black doll in a child-sized coffin. Online, her account is often linked to a photograph of a coffin procession at the Louisiana State Capitol. But that photograph was taken on 23 November in Baton Rouge: the participants were staging a “funeral” for Judge Wright. The sources do not establish that Ruby was shown the same doll.

The resistance reached her family as well. Ruby’s father lost his job; shops refused to sell food to her mother. Her grandparents in Mississippi were evicted from the farm where they had worked as sharecroppers for a quarter of a century. Supporters of integration also sent money and offered help. Ruby stayed in school; in her second year she joined a classroom with other children.

In January 1964, Look published Norman Rockwell’s painting The Problem We All Live With. He placed the girl between four marshals and cropped the composition so the adults’ faces could not be seen. It was a new work drawn from Ruby’s story, and became one of the best-known images of school desegregation.

Ruby graduated from an integrated high school, worked in the travel industry and married; she had four sons. Later, she wrote books about her experience. In 1999, she founded the Ruby Bridges Foundation, dedicated to education and overcoming racial prejudice. In Through My Eyes, she told the story of her school days in her own words.

On 10 August 2000, Ruby Bridges took the oath as an honorary deputy US marshal at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington. Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder administered it. A Rockwell exhibition was on view, and Ruby saw the original painting of the girl protected by four marshals for the first time.

Dorothy Geraldine Counts was fifteen when she became the only Black pupil at Harding High. On 4 September 1957, four formerly all-white schools in Charlotte admitted Black children for the first time. A crowd of white teenagers surrounded Dorothy on her way to the Harding building.

According to the Library of Congress, people threw rubbish, sticks and small stones at her. Walking beside her was a man whom World Press Photo tentatively identifies as Dr Edwin Tompkins, a family friend and teacher at Johnson C. Smith University. The harassment continued inside: pupils shoved Dorothy and spat in her food. When her brother came to collect her for lunch, the rear window of his car had been broken. After four school days, her parents withdrew her from Harding, fearing for her safety.

Douglas Martin photographed Dorothy’s walk to the school. His pictures appeared in American and foreign newspapers; one won World Press Photo of the Year for 1957. James Baldwin later remembered the image with anger and shame: “Someone of us should have been there with her.”

Dorothy completed her education and worked with children and families. Half a century later she met Woody Cooper, one of the teenagers caught in Martin’s photograph. Cooper apologised. Afterwards, they spoke together in public about the history of the image.

In 2007, Harding awarded Dorothy Counts an honorary diploma. That year the school board also voted to name its media centre after her, in the very school where four days of abuse had ended her attendance.

On 5 June 1989, an unidentified man carrying two bags stopped in front of a column of tanks on Beijing’s Chang’an Avenue. The lead tank tried to drive around him. He moved with it and blocked its path again. He climbed onto the vehicle and addressed its crew. Two people then led him away from the road.

During the night of 3–4 June, troops suppressing the protests in Beijing fired on people. The exact death toll remains unknown. The man with the bags stepped out before the tanks near the Beijing Hotel. Photographers watched from the hotel balconies.

Jeff Widener, working for Associated Press, photographed from the sixth floor, some eight hundred metres from the column. He had smuggled his long-lens camera past security. At the hotel he discovered that he had run out of film. An American student, Kirk Martsen, found a single roll of colour Fuji; Widener made three exposures with it. Only one, he later said, was sharp.

Martsen helped get the film out, hiding it in his clothes, cycling away and delivering it to the AP bureau in Beijing’s diplomatic quarter. Within hours the picture reached newsrooms; on 6 June it appeared on newspaper front pages around the world. Widener’s agency image travelled especially widely. Stuart Franklin, Charlie Cole and Arthur Tsang photographed from neighbouring rooms. Together with television footage, their pictures preserve successive moments of the scene and what followed.

The English-language press named the stranger “Tank Man.” Stories supplied a name, Wang Weilin, reported an execution or proposed lives he might have led after June 1989. Open records confirm neither the name nor those accounts of his fate. The identities of the two people who led him away are also unknown: they might have been passers-by, protesters or officials. His actions before the tanks are on film. His biography has not been recovered.

In the summer of 1948, the Chalifoux family in Chicago faced eviction. Ray had lost his job driving a coal truck, and his wife Lucille was expecting another baby. Lana was six, Rae-Ann five, Milton four and Sue-Ellen two.

On 4 August, Lucille and the four children were photographed beside a sign: “4 CHILDREN FOR SALE. INQUIRE WITHIN.” The Vidette-Messenger printed the photograph on its front page the next day. It spread across the country, and offers of money, work and shelter reached the parents. By 1950 the children were living in different homes.

Rae-Ann and Milton went to the Indiana farm of John and Ruth Zoeteman. The siblings were given new names there—Beverly and Kenneth—which remained on their school photographs and in the Zoeteman family obituaries. Both later described beatings and hard labour on the farm. Rae-Ann said her mother received two dollars for her. No document of such a transaction has been published; the amount comes solely from her recollection.

Sue-Ellen grew up in another family in East Chicago, near the family’s former home. Less is known of Lana’s life. She died of cancer in 1998. Rae-Ann and her son searched for relatives, rebuilding connections through letters, records, pictures and names found online. Milton sent his sister the old newspaper photograph. She recognised herself in it.

In May 2013, Rae-Ann, now seventy, visited Sue-Ellen in Hessville. The sisters said they had met only once in all the years since their childhood separation. Sue-Ellen was gravely ill and could no longer speak. During an interview she wrote of the reunion: “This is wonderful. I love her.” Sue-Ellen died on 9 July 2013.

In autumn 1948, a teacher at a Warsaw school gave the children a prompt: “To jest dom”—“This is a home.” Seven- or eight-year-old Tereska drew a tangle of lines across the board. The school served children with physical and psychological injuries. David “Chim” Seymour photographed her at the blackboard.

Seymour arrived in Poland near the end of a journey through five European countries. Commissioned by UNICEF, he was photographing children who had lived through the war. His Warsaw series included lessons, the schoolyard, a therapeutic garden and children at work among the city’s ruins. LIFE published Tereska’s picture in December 1948 with a caption about the unseen wounds of war. Edward Steichen included it in The Family of Man; the girl at the board became widely known.

For years she was described as a concentration-camp survivor. In 2017, researchers tried to reconstruct her life. They compared Seymour’s contact sheets with the layout of buildings, a school film from 1948, class lists and family photographs. Of three pupils named Teresa, one matched the age and appearance: Teresa Adwentowska. It is a probable identification; the negative has no record bearing the girl’s surname.

During the Warsaw Uprising, the Adwentowski family home was destroyed and Teresa suffered a shrapnel wound to the head. Her father, Jan Klemens, who had links to the Polish Underground State, survived Gestapo torture. After the fighting, four-year-old Teresa and her fourteen-year-old sister walked to a village about sixty kilometres from Warsaw. The journey took three weeks.

A school record describes a talkative girl who liked learning and drawing flowers and animals. Adwentowska’s condition worsened over the years. From the mid-1960s she lived at Tworki psychiatric hospital, where she died in 1978 after choking on food. These facts concern Teresa Adwentowska; her identification as the girl at the board remains a hypothesis.

Czesława Kwoka outlived her mother by less than a month. Both were brought to Auschwitz from the camp at Zamość on 13 December 1942. Czesława was fourteen. She was assigned number 26947, her mother Katarzyna number 26949; both were sent to the women’s camp at Birkenau.

Czesława had been born on 15 August 1928 in the village of Wólka Złojecka in the Zamość region. She was Polish, Catholic and a schoolgirl. During the German occupation, authorities expelled Polish families from the area to clear land for colonisation. Czesława was among those displaced.

On registration, prisoners were photographed in the laboratory of Block 26 at Auschwitz I. Three views were required: profile, full face and full face in a headscarf. The Erkennungsdienst laboratory answered to the Political Department, the camp Gestapo. Prisoners worked behind its cameras; Czesława’s portraits are attributed to one of them, Wilhelm Brasse.

Brasse recalled that a female guard struck Czesława before the sitting because she could not understand orders in German. Her split lip is visible in the frontal portrait. Katarzyna died in the camp on 18 February 1943. Czesława died on 12 March, still fourteen.

In January 1945, the SS ordered the camp’s photographic records destroyed. According to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, Brasse and another prisoner, Bronisław Jureczek, first put wet photographic paper into the stove, then many prints and negatives. The fire went out. When their supervisor left, they retrieved what had not burned. The saved collection, estimated by the museum at 38,916 photographs, included Czesława’s portraits.

“The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw Is No More!” proclaimed an SS report in the spring of 1943. It presented the destruction of the ghetto as a military success. Suppressing the uprising, German forces drove people out of hiding and towards the Umschlagplatz for deportation. Photographs made during the operation were intended for a report to the SS leadership.

SS General Jürgen Stroop prepared the report for Heinrich Himmler. Roughly 125 pages and fifty-three photographs recorded, in Stroop’s terms, the liquidation of the ghetto.

The picture of women and children with raised hands appeared in the report under the caption “Pulled from the bunkers by force.” At the right stands SS man Josef Blösche, whose identity has been established. The boy in the large cap at the centre remains unknown. Several names have been proposed over the decades, but none has sufficient archival support.

The photographer is unknown. Franz Konrad acknowledged making some pictures for the report; others have been associated with Propaganda Company 689. No surviving copy names the maker of the boy’s negative.

After the war, the report assembled for SS leaders became evidence at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. It was later used in trials in Poland. Stroop was sentenced to death and executed in Warsaw on 6 March 1952.

Archival copies of the report are held in Warsaw and the United States. Poland’s copy, belonging to the Institute of National Remembrance, is inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World register.

On 28 May 1963, Anne Moody, Memphis Norman and Pearlena Lewis sat down at the whites-only Woolworth’s lunch counter in Jackson, Mississippi. It was a sit-in. For months, activists had been boycotting stores on Capitol Street, demanding equal service and the hiring of Black employees.

NAACP youth activists organised the morning action. Police quickly arrested picketers outside. The first three protesters sat at the counter undisturbed for about an hour. Then white schoolchildren and adults entered. Memphis Norman was dragged from his stool and beaten unconscious; police arrested both him and one assailant. According to John Salter, nobody else inside the store was arrested that day.

Others joined the protest, including Joan Trumpauer and John Salter. Trumpauer and Moody studied at Tougaloo College, where Salter taught. People took turns at the counter, so the group differs between photographs made that day. The familiar picture of three seated protesters preserves only one moment.

The sit-in lasted more than two hours. White onlookers beat the participants, burned them with cigarettes, poured ketchup and mustard over them and threw sugar and salt. The store remained open throughout. When the crowd began wrecking it, the manager announced that it was closing and police ordered everyone out.

Fred Blackwell of the Jackson Daily News photographed three participants still seated at the counter, surrounded by laughing spectators. Papers across the country published the image. Anne Moody gave her own detailed account in Coming of Age in Mississippi.

The Jackson campaign continued after the sit-in, with marches and negotiations. On 12 June 1963, two weeks after the lunch-counter protest, NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers was murdered in the city.

At first, Joseph Goebbels was smiling at someone to the left of the camera. Then he saw the photographer, and his expression changed. That was how Alfred Eisenstaedt remembered meeting him in the garden of Geneva’s Hotel Carlton in September 1933.

Goebbels had come for the fourteenth session of the League of Nations Assembly. Since March 1933, he had headed Nazi Germany’s propaganda ministry. Eisenstaedt was working in Germany as an accredited photojournalist and photographing the delegations in Geneva. In the portrait, Goebbels grips the arms of his chair and looks straight into the lens.

In a 1985 book, Eisenstaedt called them “the eyes of hate.” In another account, he recalled moving closer and continuing to photograph. Eisenstaedt said Goebbels expected him to retreat. Other frames in this entry show the delegation passing, preparations for a radio address and the speech itself. TIME publishes them as one Geneva series; the order here is not presented as the exact shooting sequence.

Eisenstaedt came from a Jewish family. Retellings claim that Goebbels’s expression changed at the very moment he was told the photographer was Jewish. Eisenstaedt’s published recollections contain no such episode. He wrote only that Goebbels noticed him and his expression changed.

Eisenstaedt emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1935. The following year he became one of the first staff photographers of the new weekly LIFE. The Geneva series survives in the Time & Life Pictures editorial archive.