Ironically for me, the final photo of the boy on the roof (presented as evidence of staging) looks less obviously staged than the newsreel. It felt at odds with the preceding text.
dzdt · 52d ago
I more examples from when that kiddie chimney sweep photo/film session went viral in the late 1920's. Interestingly the fakeness of it was never acknowledged.
Here is Horst Bohnke in Spanish literary/art magazine Blanco y Negro in 1928. It includes one more photo not already in the original Fake History Hunter article. [1]
And here he is in American newspaper photo collages, in a syndicated 1927 Central Press spread "The Day's News in Pictures" : "Starting Early - Horst Bohnke, two and one-half years old, of Berlin, Germany, has just entered the chimney sweeping profession, proving that chimney sweeps are born and not made. He is working as an apprentice to his father" [2].
And in Knickerbocker Press Artgravure Picture Section, March 6, 1927 : "Infant member of an ancient trade. Horst Bohnke, two and a half years old, is apprentice to his father, a Berlin, Germany, chimneysweep" [3]
Update: the picture at the bottom is actually from 1927, not 1926 (it's the April 1927 issue of Moderne Welt.)
Going missing in Krakau on July 1, 1944 is weird, as the Red Army was still well to the east, where it was destroying Army Group Center in Operation Bagration. Minsk had not yet fallen. Maybe this guy deserted?
cafard · 49d ago
Even during wars, people die of natural causes.
Macuyiko · 51d ago
A bit of a rant, but this is the kind of fact checking I wish the media and all our EU "trusted sources" would have jumped on instead of going for the most trivial and idiotic cases only a toddler (or a journalist) would get stumped by. (Example: recent posts on Tiktok 'claiming to be images from Pakistan but taken from Battlefield 3...' again. Who is impressed or even surprised by this kind of investigation?)
Much more interesting, but also with more effort required, so of course it never happens.
It would have a more beneficial societal effect, because it is this kind of article, neutrally written, deep investigation, that truly would make people capable to self-discover "maybe I should question a bit more things".
NBJack · 50d ago
That, and there is a big incentive to just sell content. Sensational, eye-catching, controversial content will grab more readers.
AndrewSwift · 52d ago
Great article, thanks for sharing.
kubb · 52d ago
So it was a common practice a century before the photo was taken.
How is it surprising that people get upset? The photo is a record of a depiction of a practice that existed.
It’s the practice that people don’t like, not the depiction.
kubb · 52d ago
Actually, I take back what I said. The article doesn't even conclusively demonstrate that this is a reenactment.
Thorrez · 51d ago
Well a law was passed 30 years earlier making it illegal.
Thorrez · 51d ago
It wasn't common practice for 3-year-olds to do it. The article says usually 6 was the youngest.
gambiting · 52d ago
Well but it's posted as a real thing, not a re-enactment. It's dishonest at its core. Especially since it says it's as recent as 1930 which is just straight up not true.
It's like if we reenacted it in 2025 and said "look at this toddler chimney sweep in 2025!".
Obviously part of the outrage would be at the practice, part of it would be at the fact that it's in 2025.
fyrn_ · 52d ago
Part of why people are upsetis because they think this is a much more recent example of the thing they dislike than expected.
It's disingenuous to pretend it's only the practice not the context which influences people.
kubb · 52d ago
Sure, context matters. You could claim "there were no 3 year olds ACTUALLY working as chimney sweeps anywhere in the world in 1930", if you wanted to make this point. But, I suspect it's not so clear if that's even true, just as the author can only suspect this is a reenactment in this photo.
Jolter · 52d ago
I think you’ll find they the article makes some very good arguments for why this is indeed a reenactment.
I think the best argument is that three year olds would make extremely ineffective chimney sweeps. I don’t know if you’ve met any recently? They would require more effort in supervision than they save by way of their labor. Much more.
pavel_lishin · 52d ago
> But the pavement looked familiar to me, I’m specialised in Europe during the 1920s-40s and have worked on a project about daily life in Berlin in the 1920s and I’ve seen that pavement in other old footage and in countless photos.
I visited Jerusalem yesterday, and was struck by the fact that there are places in the world where people have been continuously walking for millennia, putting their feet on the same stones. I had a mental image of a historian who specializes in a single paving stone, putting a lifetime of effort into studying just this one large brick.
This part of the article felt like such a weird echo of that thought!
dcminter · 52d ago
The Guildhall in London is one of the old political centres of the city. If you go down into the basement there's the remains of a Roman ampitheatre!
Tucked away in an alcove on Cannon Street is an old block of stone. This is the famous London Stone. So old that nobody knows what it is originally famous for...
That sort of oddity and connection with history is one of the fun parts when living in an "old" city (London isn't even that old by global standards).
That ampitheatre shows that street level in ancient times and now might be quite different, so the historical feet might not really have been walking in the same place. London Stone does suggest that you could reasonably invest a lot of effort into the history of a single slab though!
cortesoft · 51d ago
I noticed this street level thing a ton when I visited Athens. You would be walking down the street, and suddenly there would be a very old cathedral of some kind 20 feet or so lower than the surrounding street. I found it fascinating.
normie3000 · 52d ago
> That ampitheatre shows that street level in ancient times
Why do street levels change like this? There seem to be a lot of "buried streets" in old cities.
lexicality · 52d ago
old cities are typically built on the flood planes of large rivers since you get easy access to clean(ish) water and flat ground. Large rivers tend to engage in sedimentation so everything around them either needs to slowly and constantly build upwards to avoid being underwater or will be razed and the ground raised by the next flood with its associated payload of mud.
wcoenen · 52d ago
Humans tend to accumulate building material in cities faster than it is lost to erosion. It can add up to many meters over the millennia.
There should be a name for the phenomenon where people upset about some injustice pick the least plausible example to use as the cause celebre of the injustice.
For a more modern take I can't understand why Daniel Shaver is not the face of police murder in the US. The video is on YouTube, you can find the unedited version with a Google search. There is no benefit of the doubt to give. It was straight up murder done on live cam. The more you read the worse it gets.
But it got buried in a week and no one remembers it.
clipsy · 52d ago
It's unfortunate that the shooter was not convicted, but the mere fact that there was an investigation and a trial differentiates it from a lot of police violence causes célèbres.
ralfd · 52d ago
what, why?
genewitch · 52d ago
Elijah McCain wasn't allegedly shooting an air rifle at a motel, so I'd reckon they should be the face.
Right?
No comments yet
cortesoft · 51d ago
It’s because there is no controversy. There isn’t anyone arguing that the cop who did it was actually justified. Everyone agrees.
A story lives on when people argue over things. If no one argues the other side of something, the story just kind of fades away.
jMyles · 52d ago
> no one remembers it.
That doesn't resonate with my experience. People know about the murder, but aren't sure what to do.
The murderer, who clearly had mental health issues (eg, having "you're fucked" on the dust cover of his personal AR-15, which he used to commit the act), was acquitted (in a trial of strange circumstances). It's baffling that none of his colleagues - who saw the message on his weapon - ever pulled him aside to ask if he was OK.
And anyway, what does this have to do with your point of holding up an unlikely / outlying example to demonstrate a phenomenon?
marssaxman · 51d ago
His colleagues likely didn't find the dust cover noteworthy. Within contemporary American gun culture, it would seem like a minor bit of braggadocio akin to a "Protected by Smith & Wesson" sticker or a "Warning: We Don't Dial 911" placard; tacky and unprofessional, but not something to take seriously. There's a whole little industry around AR-15 customization, offering thousands of options for engraved dust covers with all kinds of symbols and messages:
I am not remotely aware of this case. How does those words, or any words, on a gun case/cover relate to mental health issues? This isn't a manifesto; it is more like "guard dog? Beware of owner!" decal, or a Calvin pissing on a coexist sticker. Or truck nuts. These might be distasteful to some but is unrelated to mental health. I'd be more worried about my former neighbor who had an unhealthy love of maglite flashlights and owned like 50 of 'em. _That_ was strange.
silotis · 51d ago
The "you're fucked" was written on the inside of the ejection port dust cover so that it would become visible after the weapon was fired. The implication is that he was eager to shoot someone.
dullcrisp · 51d ago
I’d say the medium is the message in this case.
winrid · 52d ago
People like flashlights. It's a thing. Just like we like computers.
sethammons · 52d ago
No shade meant towards odd collections nor truck nuts.
failrate · 51d ago
As someone who avoids making threats in public, those stickers and whatnot do leave me concerned about the person's mental health.
lostlogin · 51d ago
You find your neighbours torch collection more worrying than aggressive messages left by someone who went on to kill?
eru · 52d ago
> There should be a name for the phenomenon where people upset about some injustice pick the least plausible example to use as the cause celebre of the injustice.
Now I feel I should rewatch this video annually as a reminder to myself, or maybe monthly.
bruce511 · 52d ago
It really doesn't take much to get people outraged. The last 20 years or so of social media, and cultural politics has taught us that.
And enraged people are easily manipulated. Americans were enraged after 9/11, and that engagement was quickly weaponized into the Patriot Act and the "War on Terror".
The flip side of all this enragement is a callous apathy. Things that really should concern me (like the eradication of due process) are hidden behind nonsense (like 1930 chimney sweeps) or the exhaustion of being enraged all the time.
yen223 · 52d ago
Were many people outraged by this photo?
This is the first I've heard of the photo or the outrage, so I genuinely don't know
bruce511 · 52d ago
Get enough people and you'll find someone outraged about everything.
If you want to modernize the analogy you might compare it to "school children identifying as cats and needing litterboxes" or any number of modern contemporary outrage over completely made up things.
OJFord · 51d ago
> Get enough people and you'll find someone outraged about everything.
Internet/modern culture in a nutshell, really.
We're capable of being upset by things that 20 years ago we'd have had no idea of. Ditto then, by things we wouldn't have known of 20y prior to that.
tap-snap-or-nap · 52d ago
How are we supposed to find balance between the two?
As soon as I thought of this question, I realized that I would need to practice it just like real life balancing.
xucian · 52d ago
this is an incredibly overlooked angle, I think I never actually thought of this. thanks a lot, this makes a lot of sense
normie3000 · 52d ago
Conceptually similar to disaster capitalism, perhaps? "Never let a good crisis go to waste."
giorgosts · 52d ago
So it is a re-enactment but nevertheless, it is depicting real world practices prevalent at the time.
snickerer · 52d ago
People and societies work a lot with re-enactment. I think of, for example, pirates. There was nothing fun about them, watching the Jolly Roger approaching you must be horrible, followed by a gruesome death.
But we, adults and children both, are enjoying to play pirates.
Maybe the re-enactment of something brutal can be a healthy way to get over it for humans.
dlkmp · 52d ago
Did you read the article? It was a real world practice, but long gone already at that time (in the mentioned parts of Europe at least).
irjustin · 52d ago
I'll play's devil's advocate - is there really a difference?
People were angry (rightfully so) at children chimney sweeps and they definitely existed, were abused and did die/have horrible problems/etc.
So the outrage is justified. Now, the specific picture isn't true/authentic, but the contents of the picture definitely existed did.
So is it wrong?
GuB-42 · 51d ago
> the contents of the picture definitely existed
No it didn't, according to the article, 3 year olds weren't chimney sweeps and the tools the child carries are not the appropriate size.
It is as much as a reenactment as a kid in a cow-boy costume today. Having a kid dress up like their daddy at work is cute, and I am sure that that's how people saw it.
But a long time have passed, and it is easy to imagine people of the past as some kind of barbarians. Sure, they did some things that are unacceptable now, but we are missing a lot of nuance.
croes · 52d ago
But they are targeting the wrong time period with their anger.
It’s like with the witch hunts which are associated with the middle ages but happened later.
Veen · 51d ago
What's the point of getting angry about something that happened so long ago that the angry people's grandparents weren't born yet?
giorgosts · 52d ago
Why would the filmmakers make the re-enactment though? For social media? For clicks over the interwebs?
For context, by the late '20 programs were running for the elimination of Gypsies and disabled children inside concentration camps. Pieces of burned clothing were found on rooftops. Even Britain had a eugenics program against inferior races.
Not likely therefore made to cause outrage over children's rights, rather to depict established practices.
prmoustache · 52d ago
To these days, there are kids dressed at chimney sweep in a lot of weddings in many german speaking countries. I know one of my daughter did dress that way in a friend's wedding when I was living in Switzerland.
People think about the tradition of them bringing good omen and how cute they look, not gruesome children labor.
OJFord · 51d ago
Haven't heard of children doing it, but similarly in the UK many working modern sweeps also do (paid) wedding appearances, kiss the bride for luck etc. Bit of a weird tradition! No idea how common it is, denominated by #weddings, not that, I'd guess.
biorach · 52d ago
> Why would the filmmakers make the re-enactment though?
because, as you'll see in the article, people thought it was cute and funny to dress up very small children as chimney sweeps
> by the late '20 programs were running for the elimination of Gypsies and disabled children inside concentration camps
You've got your timeline mixed up
Cordiali · 52d ago
From the article:
>Another important thing to mention is that the chimney sweep was a good luck symbol at that time, especially in Germany.
People dressed up as them and send each other postcards showing children as chimney sweeps.
croes · 52d ago
I doubt that they used 3 years old.
Not strong enough to do anything useful.
No comments yet
verisimi · 52d ago
It's amazing how many military drills preceed actual engagement.
nickdothutton · 52d ago
The picture is a staged and is a caricature not a depiction or reenactment of anything real. Yes, there was child labour in many industries and it was dangerous to them in both the long and the short term. No, 3 year olds were not used to sweep chimneys (but slightly older children were, 5, 6, 7). Yes, this was outlawed long before the picture was taken. In the UK an act was passed in 1788 restricting the minimum age to 8, although like many such laws it was not well enforced.
eru · 52d ago
Yes.
And educating your children is what economists call a 'normal good'. Ie, richer people consumer more of it.
Here is Horst Bohnke in Spanish literary/art magazine Blanco y Negro in 1928. It includes one more photo not already in the original Fake History Hunter article. [1]
And here he is in American newspaper photo collages, in a syndicated 1927 Central Press spread "The Day's News in Pictures" : "Starting Early - Horst Bohnke, two and one-half years old, of Berlin, Germany, has just entered the chimney sweeping profession, proving that chimney sweeps are born and not made. He is working as an apprentice to his father" [2].
And in Knickerbocker Press Artgravure Picture Section, March 6, 1927 : "Infant member of an ancient trade. Horst Bohnke, two and a half years old, is apprentice to his father, a Berlin, Germany, chimneysweep" [3]
[1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Blanco_y_negro/NujrMJPr...
[2] https://fultonhistory.com/highlighter/highlight-for-xml?altU...
[3] https://fultonhistory.com/highlighter/highlight-for-xml?altU...
Perhaps it was implicitly understood?
This was just within the age cohort of maximum risk, with 35% of German males born in 1924 dying in the war.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7668418/
I find a person with his name, born in 1925, died in the war in July 1944:
https://www.volksbund.de/en/erinnern-gedenken/gravesearch-on...
Going missing in Krakau on July 1, 1944 is weird, as the Red Army was still well to the east, where it was destroying Army Group Center in Operation Bagration. Minsk had not yet fallen. Maybe this guy deserted?
Much more interesting, but also with more effort required, so of course it never happens.
It would have a more beneficial societal effect, because it is this kind of article, neutrally written, deep investigation, that truly would make people capable to self-discover "maybe I should question a bit more things".
How is it surprising that people get upset? The photo is a record of a depiction of a practice that existed.
It’s the practice that people don’t like, not the depiction.
It's like if we reenacted it in 2025 and said "look at this toddler chimney sweep in 2025!".
Obviously part of the outrage would be at the practice, part of it would be at the fact that it's in 2025.
I think the best argument is that three year olds would make extremely ineffective chimney sweeps. I don’t know if you’ve met any recently? They would require more effort in supervision than they save by way of their labor. Much more.
I visited Jerusalem yesterday, and was struck by the fact that there are places in the world where people have been continuously walking for millennia, putting their feet on the same stones. I had a mental image of a historian who specializes in a single paving stone, putting a lifetime of effort into studying just this one large brick.
This part of the article felt like such a weird echo of that thought!
Tucked away in an alcove on Cannon Street is an old block of stone. This is the famous London Stone. So old that nobody knows what it is originally famous for...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guildhall,_London
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Stone
That sort of oddity and connection with history is one of the fun parts when living in an "old" city (London isn't even that old by global standards).
That ampitheatre shows that street level in ancient times and now might be quite different, so the historical feet might not really have been walking in the same place. London Stone does suggest that you could reasonably invest a lot of effort into the history of a single slab though!
Why do street levels change like this? There seem to be a lot of "buried streets" in old cities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell_(archaeology)
If you live here and see it everyday, you spot it instantly when watching TV show or movie that was made here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panot
For a more modern take I can't understand why Daniel Shaver is not the face of police murder in the US. The video is on YouTube, you can find the unedited version with a Google search. There is no benefit of the doubt to give. It was straight up murder done on live cam. The more you read the worse it gets.
But it got buried in a week and no one remembers it.
Right?
No comments yet
A story lives on when people argue over things. If no one argues the other side of something, the story just kind of fades away.
That doesn't resonate with my experience. People know about the murder, but aren't sure what to do.
The murderer, who clearly had mental health issues (eg, having "you're fucked" on the dust cover of his personal AR-15, which he used to commit the act), was acquitted (in a trial of strange circumstances). It's baffling that none of his colleagues - who saw the message on his weapon - ever pulled him aside to ask if he was OK.
And anyway, what does this have to do with your point of holding up an unlikely / outlying example to demonstrate a phenomenon?
https://midstatefirearms.com/product/engraved-dust-cover-eje...
https://mcsgearup.com/ar-15-ejection-port-dust-cover-engravi...
https://www.wingtactical.com/firearm-parts/ar-15/upper-recei...
https://cordedarms.com/ExoticCovers1
Perhaps 'The Toxoplasma of Rage'? See https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...
Or you might like https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/12/clarification-to-sacre...
Now I feel I should rewatch this video annually as a reminder to myself, or maybe monthly.
And enraged people are easily manipulated. Americans were enraged after 9/11, and that engagement was quickly weaponized into the Patriot Act and the "War on Terror".
The flip side of all this enragement is a callous apathy. Things that really should concern me (like the eradication of due process) are hidden behind nonsense (like 1930 chimney sweeps) or the exhaustion of being enraged all the time.
This is the first I've heard of the photo or the outrage, so I genuinely don't know
If you want to modernize the analogy you might compare it to "school children identifying as cats and needing litterboxes" or any number of modern contemporary outrage over completely made up things.
Internet/modern culture in a nutshell, really.
We're capable of being upset by things that 20 years ago we'd have had no idea of. Ditto then, by things we wouldn't have known of 20y prior to that.
People were angry (rightfully so) at children chimney sweeps and they definitely existed, were abused and did die/have horrible problems/etc.
So the outrage is justified. Now, the specific picture isn't true/authentic, but the contents of the picture definitely existed did.
So is it wrong?
No it didn't, according to the article, 3 year olds weren't chimney sweeps and the tools the child carries are not the appropriate size.
It is as much as a reenactment as a kid in a cow-boy costume today. Having a kid dress up like their daddy at work is cute, and I am sure that that's how people saw it.
But a long time have passed, and it is easy to imagine people of the past as some kind of barbarians. Sure, they did some things that are unacceptable now, but we are missing a lot of nuance.
It’s like with the witch hunts which are associated with the middle ages but happened later.
For context, by the late '20 programs were running for the elimination of Gypsies and disabled children inside concentration camps. Pieces of burned clothing were found on rooftops. Even Britain had a eugenics program against inferior races.
Not likely therefore made to cause outrage over children's rights, rather to depict established practices.
People think about the tradition of them bringing good omen and how cute they look, not gruesome children labor.
because, as you'll see in the article, people thought it was cute and funny to dress up very small children as chimney sweeps
> by the late '20 programs were running for the elimination of Gypsies and disabled children inside concentration camps
You've got your timeline mixed up
>Another important thing to mention is that the chimney sweep was a good luck symbol at that time, especially in Germany. People dressed up as them and send each other postcards showing children as chimney sweeps.
Not strong enough to do anything useful.
No comments yet
And educating your children is what economists call a 'normal good'. Ie, richer people consumer more of it.