Three hostages kneel in front of a camera, their hands tied behind their backs and their heads covered with black plastic bags that obscure their faces. Looming behind them is a group of bearded, glowering militants, dressed in tunics and turbans, some holding assault rifles. "We have one message for America," the man standing in the middle says, with one hand resting on the shoulder of the kneeling figure in front of him, the other hand jabbing the air to emphasize his speech.
In 1980, Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, an unrepentant former leader of the Nazi women's bureau in Berlin from 1934 to 1945, described her former job to historian Claudia Koonz as influencing women in their daily lives. To her audience approximately 4 million girls in the Nazi youth movement, 8 million women in Nazi associations under her jurisdiction, and 1.9 million subscribers to her women's magazine, Frauen Warte, according to Koonz Scholtz-Klink promoted what she called the cradle and the ladle, or reproductive and household duties as essential to national strength.
The manipulation of photographs for propaganda dates back to the earliest days of photography, revealing a longstanding human tendency to distort reality for various motives.