This article comes from a series of posts at our Telegram channel “Beorn And The Shieldmaiden.
In April 2024, they were discussing in Germany the “children’s concentration camp” on the cover of a book about the GDR.
The Berlin satirical publishing house “Eulenspiegel” has released an illustrated book of stories about the GDR called «How We Lived, Who We Were». The cover features children dressed as «concentration camp prisoners».
The creators of the book, apparently, decided to also try to present the GDR as a large concentration camp. A number of booksellers have already expressed their dissatisfaction with this fact.
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The story behind the photo
«Children in prisoners’ clothes. A photo smuggled from a concentration camp located on the territory of the USSR. These children were born in the camp and will grow up there until their parents are released.»
This text accompanied a picture published in the June 1978 issue of magazine «Stimme der Märtyrer» (“The Voice of the Martyrs”).
In fact, it depicted children from a nursery in Torgau (GDR, Leipzig district), lined up after a daily swim in a swimming pool. After swimming, the children from the nursery were wrapped in terrycloth robes with a hood. The photo was taken in 1976
And yet, the photo, which depicts children allegedly from a Soviet concentration camp, was classified as the best at the «World-Press-Photo 77» world exhibition and awarded a prize.
The fashion of «prisoner robes»… must have changed from the horisontal to vertical stripes by the 1970’s in the Socialist camp.
👉 Here, in the first photo, we can observe several female inmates beachgoers at a seaside resort somewhere in Russia in 1910.
👉 In the second photo are the Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia in prison robes swimming gowns, in Finland.
The Heavy-handed Jailers
The total impudence and absurdity of the misuse of the photo with the East-German children was not lost on the Danish artist Herluf Bidstrup, whom we presented on our channel earlier. He drew this caricature in 1978, after the photograph “finally” appeared on the Danish TV.
The characters that you get to meet in the caricature are Ole Sippel, who was the editorial manager at DR, the Danish national TV, and Peter Dalhoff, a journalist at DR covering the USSR and Eastern Europe. Dalhoff had Russian parents.
Both media persons were ardent anti-Communists.
The page is from a Herluf Bidstrup book in The Shieldmaiden’s library.
Peter Dalhoff has served the grossest anti-Soviet fraud so far in television, in which he showed the GDR-kindergarten children like KZ prisoners in the USSR.
Editorial Manager Ole Sippel: — What are we going to do now with all your little KZ prisoners?
Peter Dalhoff: — I wouldn’t want to kill them. They have worked hard for us.
Sippel: — No, it’s probably best that we release them.The mass media spread false stories about horrors in the Soviet Union in order to cover up the EU-failure, the rise in prices and unemployment.