Not a three-year-old chimney sweep (2022) | Hacker News Reader

Not a three-year-old chimney sweep (2022)

fakehistoryhunter.net

125 pointsnixass69 comments

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.

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]

[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...

> Interestingly the fakeness of it was never acknowledged.

Perhaps it was implicitly understood?

The boy would be the right age to be a soldier in WW2. So there's a good chance he died then.

At most 18 in 1945, a higher chance than now for sure but not hugely probable, a lot lower than having been 18 in 1839 even for example.

It looks like he was born in 1924 (if the picture at the bottom has him being 2 years old in 1926).

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...

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?

Even during wars, people die of natural causes.

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".

That, and there is a big incentive to just sell content. Sensational, eye-catching, controversial content will grab more readers.

Great article, thanks for sharing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Actually, I take back what I said. The article doesn't even conclusively demonstrate that this is a reenactment.

Well a law was passed 30 years earlier making it illegal.

It wasn't common practice for 3-year-olds to do it. The article says usually 6 was the youngest.

> 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!

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...

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!

> 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.

2000(ish) years of dust and leaf litter adds up!

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.

Lack of JCBs.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell_(archaeology)

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.

Barcelona has a distinctive paving style; it has become a symbol of the city.

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

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.

> 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?

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.

People like flashlights. It's a thing. Just like we like computers.

No shade meant towards odd collections nor truck nuts.

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.

I’d say the medium is the message in this case.

As someone who avoids making threats in public, those stickers and whatnot do leave me concerned about the person's mental health.

You find your neighbours torch collection more worrying than aggressive messages left by someone who went on to kill?

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:

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

Elijah McCain wasn't allegedly shooting an air rifle at a motel, so I'd reckon they should be the face.

Right?

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.

what, why?

> 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.

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...

Thanks for reminding me of CGP Grey's "This Video Will Make You Angry": https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc

Now I feel I should rewatch this video annually as a reminder to myself, or maybe monthly.

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.

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.

this is an incredibly overlooked angle, I think I never actually thought of this. thanks a lot, this makes a lot of sense

Conceptually similar to disaster capitalism, perhaps? "Never let a good crisis go to waste."

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

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.

> 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.

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.

So it is a re-enactment but nevertheless, it is depicting real world practices prevalent at the time.

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).

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?

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.

What's the point of getting angry about something that happened so long ago that the angry people's grandparents weren't born yet?

> 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.

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.

> 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I doubt that they used 3 years old.

Not strong enough to do anything useful.

It's amazing how many military drills preceed actual engagement.

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.

Yes.

And educating your children is what economists call a 'normal good'. Ie, richer people consumer more of it.

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