Her photo is one of thousands snapped by Alphonse Bertillon, a police clerk in Paris who revolutionized detective work. Not only was Bertillon the first to photograph a crime scene, but he also streamlined the use of mugshots. By 1884, his groundbreaking new criminal codification method helped catch 241 repeat offenders in Paris. At first glance, the faded 1903 photograph of Mme Debeinche’s bedroom, bound in the yellowed pages of an early 20th-century album, shows what looks to be an unremarkable middle-class Parisian apartment of the time. The overstuffed room brims with floral decoration, from the wallpaper and heavy swag curtains to the carpeting, chair upholstery—even the chamber pot. A large reproduction of Alexandre Cabanel’s voluptuous 1863 painting, “Birth of Venus,” hangs on the wall. A sizeable unmade bed with a hefty carved-wood frame dominates the scene. But on closer look, there is something unnerving about the tableau. The Venus is crooked. A spindle chair lies on its si...
Woman in the foreground was identified after the war by her checked coat as Janina Skalska, age 38, miller's wife from Piaseczno. Palmiry, Poland, 1940. The Palmiry Massacres Palmiry has become, as Richard C. Lukas puts it, "one of the most notorious places of mass executions" in Poland. It is also one of the most famous sites of Nazi crimes in Poland. Along with the Katyn Forest, it became a symbol of the martyrdom of the Polish intelligentsia during the Second World War. In 2011 Polish president BronisÅ‚aw Komorowski said, "Palmiry is to some extent the Warsaw Katyn." Massacres of Poles had been taking place since the invasion of Poland. Poles were the first victims of the Germans in Poland from the start of the invasion on September 1, 1939. One of the best-documented cases of these massacres took place on 20–21 June 1940, when 358 members of the Polish political, cultural, and social elite were murdered in a single operation. Palmiry is one of the most in...
This image is titled "The last Jew in Vinnitsa", the text that was written on the back of the photograph, which was found in a photo album belonging to a German soldier The Vinnytsia massacre was a mass execution of (mostly ethnic Ukrainian) people in the Ukrainian town of Vinnytsia by the Soviet secret police NKVD during Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge in 1937–1938. Mass graves in Vinnytsia were discovered during the German occupation of Ukraine in 1943. The investigation of the site first conducted by the international Katyn Commission coincided with the discovery of a similar mass murder site of Polish prisoners of war in Katyn. Because the Germans utilized this evidence of Communist terror to discredit the Soviet Union internationally, it became one of the better researched sites of the politically motivated NKVD massacres among many in Ukraine. Much as in the case of other massacres of people considered enemies of the people by the communist regime of Russia, the victims bu...
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