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

Ironically for me, the final photo of the boy on the roof (presented as evidence of staging) looks <i>less</i> obviously staged than the newsreel. It felt at odds with the preceding text.

I more examples from when that kiddie chimney sweep photo&#x2F;film session went viral in the late 1920&#x27;s. Interestingly the fakeness of it was never acknowledged.<p>Here is Horst Bohnke in Spanish literary&#x2F;art magazine Blanco y Negro in 1928. It includes one more photo not already in the original Fake History Hunter article. [1]<p>And here he is in American newspaper photo collages, in a syndicated 1927 Central Press spread &quot;The Day&#x27;s News in Pictures&quot; : &quot;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&quot; [2].<p>And in Knickerbocker Press Artgravure Picture Section, March 6, 1927 : &quot;Infant member of an ancient trade. Horst Bohnke, two and a half years old, is apprentice to his father, a Berlin, Germany, chimneysweep&quot; [3]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;edition&#x2F;Blanco_y_negro&#x2F;NujrMJPr1hEC?hl=en&amp;gbpv=1&amp;dq=%22Horst%20Bohnke%22&amp;pg=PP286&amp;printsec=frontcover" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;edition&#x2F;Blanco_y_negro&#x2F;NujrMJPr...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fultonhistory.com&#x2F;highlighter&#x2F;highlight-for-xml?altUrl=https%3A%2F%2Ffultonhistory.com%2FNewspaper%252024%2FWatertown%2520NY%2520Daily%2520Standard%2FWatertown%2520NY%2520Daily%2520Standard%25201927%2FWatertown%2520NY%2520Daily%2520Standard%25201927%252001221_1.pdf%23xml%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Ffultonhistory.com%2FdtSearch%2Fdtisapi6.dll%3Fcmd%3Dgetpdfhits%26u%3Dfffffffff0cbb160%26DocId%3D7017682%26Index%3DZ%253a%255cDISK%2520X%26HitCount%3D2%26hits%3D146%2B147%2B%26SearchForm%3D%252fFulton%255fform%252ehtml%26.pdf&amp;uri=https%3A%2F%2Ffultonhistory.com%2FNewspaper%252024%2FWatertown%2520NY%2520Daily%2520Standard%2FWatertown%2520NY%2520Daily%2520Standard%25201927%2FWatertown%2520NY%2520Daily%2520Standard%25201927%252001221_1.pdf&amp;xml=https%3A%2F%2Ffultonhistory.com%2FdtSearch%2Fdtisapi6.dll%3Fcmd%3Dgetpdfhits%26u%3Dfffffffff0cbb160%26DocId%3D7017682%26Index%3DZ%253a%255cDISK%2520X%26HitCount%3D2%26hits%3D146%2B147%2B%26SearchForm%3D%252fFulton%255fform%252ehtml%26.pdf&amp;openFirstHlPage=false" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fultonhistory.com&#x2F;highlighter&#x2F;highlight-for-xml?altU...</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fultonhistory.com&#x2F;highlighter&#x2F;highlight-for-xml?altUrl=https%3A%2F%2Ffultonhistory.com%2FNewspaper%25205%2FAlbany%2520NY%2520Knickerbocker%2520Press%2FAlbany%2520NY%2520Knickerbocker%2520Press%25201927%2FAlbany%2520NY%2520Knickerbocker%2520Press%25201927%252001148.pdf%23xml%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Ffultonhistory.com%2FdtSearch%2Fdtisapi6.dll%3Fcmd%3Dgetpdfhits%26u%3D1dc71be6%26DocId%3D3548296%26Index%3DZ%253a%255cDISK%2520O%26HitCount%3D2%26hits%3D12%2B13%2B%26SearchForm%3D%252fFulton%255fform%252ehtml%26.pdf&amp;uri=https%3A%2F%2Ffultonhistory.com%2FNewspaper%25205%2FAlbany%2520NY%2520Knickerbocker%2520Press%2FAlbany%2520NY%2520Knickerbocker%2520Press%25201927%2FAlbany%2520NY%2520Knickerbocker%2520Press%25201927%252001148.pdf&amp;xml=https%3A%2F%2Ffultonhistory.com%2FdtSearch%2Fdtisapi6.dll%3Fcmd%3Dgetpdfhits%26u%3D1dc71be6%26DocId%3D3548296%26Index%3DZ%253a%255cDISK%2520O%26HitCount%3D2%26hits%3D12%2B13%2B%26SearchForm%3D%252fFulton%255fform%252ehtml%26.pdf&amp;openFirstHlPage=false" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fultonhistory.com&#x2F;highlighter&#x2F;highlight-for-xml?altU...</a>

A bit of a rant, but this is the kind of fact checking I wish the media and all our EU &quot;trusted sources&quot; 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 &#x27;claiming to be images from Pakistan but taken from Battlefield 3...&#x27; again. Who is impressed or even surprised by this kind of investigation?)<p>Much more interesting, but also with more effort required, so of course it never happens.<p>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 &quot;maybe I should question a bit more things&quot;.

Great article, thanks for sharing.

The boy would be the right age to be a soldier in WW2. So there&#x27;s a good chance he died then.

So it was a common practice a century before the photo was taken.<p>How is it surprising that people get upset? The photo is a record of a depiction of a practice that existed.<p>It’s the practice that people don’t like, not the depiction.

&gt; <i>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><p>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.<p>This part of the article felt like such a weird echo of that thought!

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.<p>For a more modern take I can&#x27;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.<p>But it got buried in a week and no one remembers it.

It really doesn&#x27;t take much to get people outraged. The last 20 years or so of social media, and cultural politics has taught us that.<p>And enraged people are easily manipulated. Americans were enraged after 9&#x2F;11, and that engagement was quickly weaponized into the Patriot Act and the &quot;War on Terror&quot;.<p>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.

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

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.