Harry Truman wouldn't have approved of post-mortem photos of Hitler (if they existed)*

[no_hypocrisy]

or Josef and Magda Goebbels and/or their children to be published to prove the Third Reich was ultimately finished.

* Hitler instructed that his body and the body of Eva Braun be burned so they would be spared the potential desecretation by the Russian Army or the masses like Mussolini and his mistress in Italy.

[ZombieHorde]

1. How do you know Truman wouldn't have approved of the photos? nt

[no_hypocrisy]

3. Don't know but extrapolating because Mussolini's mutilated body hanging upside down

was not published in daily papers, though one could make an argument that publishing had different standards in 1945 and the grisly nature of them would lose readership.

[Renew Deal]

10. What did the editorial decisions of newspapers have to do with Truman?

:shrug:

[MadHound]

2. Actually there was a decades long search for Hitler's body,

And the US had no compunction in publishing the bodies of the dead hanged as a result of the Nuremberg trials.

[KharmaTrain]

4. It Wasn't Truman's Call, It Was Stalin...

It was the Soviet troops that invaded Berlin and the Reichstag. In Soviet archives (that we in the "west" didn't see until the 90s) they had fragments of Hitler's skull with a bullet hole that supposedly tests out to be Hitlers and could have been used as propaganda to prove Hitler's death. Instead Stalin spread his own rumors about Hitler still being alive after the war.

That said...just as in this case those who want to believe he is alive will do so. All the pictures and DNA evidence will not convince a deather and I'm sure we'll start hearing about bin Laden sightings having donuts with Elvis and Tupac.

[RainDog]

5. there are pictures of dead Nazis

that were taken and shown to the public - Goring killed himself before he could be executed and his body was photographed and shown to the world, for instance.

Hitler's remains were taken and hidden and reburied many times to keep neo-nazis from having a shrine to visit, as well.

Just saying that there are precedents for various actions.

When the partisans hung Mussolini, our troops were told to march around the body and spit on it - I know this b/c one of my family members was there. There is a lot of footage of Mussolini's dead body hanging upside down, too.

[JoePhilly]

6. And this matters why?

[no_hypocrisy]

7. Searching for precedent and/or lack of it.

[JoePhilly]

9. Seem to be "stating" not so much "searching".

The period of time during which Truman was President, and the type of warfare, and the nature of "official communications" were very different then as compared to now.

So the notion that one might know how Truman would handle such photos in today's world doesn't make much sense to me.

[lynne]

8. Did Harry tell you that?

- or can you link to evidence that he stated such? Just wondering where this comes from.