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Geek-Haven888 OP t1_j5r861q wrote

The museum's historians said that the value of Grzywaczewski's pictures lies in their being the only known images from the ghetto uprising that were not taken by the German forces, and which therefore were not shot with the intention of serving Nazi propaganda.

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Mjbishop327 t1_j5rfdhc wrote

TIL the uprising fighters held out for nearly a month

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Crusty_Shart t1_j5s3rwk wrote

So there is no way to see the other 17 photos unless we go to the museum exhibit?

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Amazing-Key-1575 t1_j5s5iji wrote

I am not asking this to discredit the images or challenge their veracity but looking at them after spending a few weeks playing around with AI image generators…how do we know nowadays if something is a real “historic” image?

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bobrobor t1_j5sbdj3 wrote

Not the same uprising. Blyskawica was created for the city-wide one. Both were ridiculously under-supplied in arms, but the ghetto one had almost no arms at all. Relatively speaking. If they actually had arms they would have had a chance.

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auxerrois t1_j5sbu6a wrote

Less than 100 years ago. Within living memory.

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Amazing-Key-1575 t1_j5sct8q wrote

Because the first photo I saw in the article without people looked similar to pictures I’ve autogenerated. I’ve mostly been generating prompts like “archival scanned military photograph 1942 Bavaria leaked photograph photorealistic [etc…convoluted phrases]” and it often generates black & white photographs that I imagine if done with more iterations and intentional keywords look like this. This also was what showed up on my feed. I literally say I am not challenging the photos in this post, I am curious. It could have been a picture of anything & I would’ve commented the same. Holy hell people read into things looking at the downvotes. Isn’t this a legitimate question we should be asking nowadays? You’ve seen all the UAP news. With as many fakes coming out about contemporary things now I wonder about how we will trust historical images.

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Amazing-Key-1575 t1_j5sd7wo wrote

Thank you for actually answering my question instead of downvoting me because you are reading between the lines. This is what I wanted to know.

Do you think AI will be able to do this soon though? Or a combo of AI & photoshop could trick most people right? How could one be sure? Is there any forensic photographic test that can be done?

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Amazing-Key-1575 t1_j5sdnxm wrote

Ya, I don’t mean the real physical negatives. I mean digital representations of them.

I haven’t done it yet, but now I will - copy a description of one of the images and put it in an ai image gen + “photographic negative 1940’s archival scan hyper-realistic aged military dust” or something along those lines. If the image doesn’t have people in it I bet one can make a pretty convincing digital image of a physical negative.

this is obviously going to be an issue in the future, so I dunno why people are so upset I’m asking

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phd2k1 t1_j5sffud wrote

There are a lot of Holocaust deniers in the world. It may not have been your intention, but you effectively came into a thread about the Holocaust, saying “how do we know these pictures are real?”. You shouldn’t be surprised that people were put off by your question.

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grixit t1_j5sknnc wrote

According to one source i read, Vichy actually saved a lot of jews by losing them in the bureaucracy. "Honest, Herr Kommisar, we put them on a train to Berlin, i just can't seem to find the paperwork at the moment".

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Picticious t1_j5sn1fe wrote

Well, they may not have wanted to, but they sure participated.

Around 80% of the Jews arrested and sent to their deaths in France weren’t arrested by Germans, they were arrested by the French.

But ask any French person and they were all la resistance.

Pfft.

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ATNinja t1_j5snfan wrote

Without any data on either side; that sounds like revisionist history to make France seem less complicit.

If there's a prevailing sentiment for many years and then you start seeing "maybe surrendering so quickly was smart" "maybe the Vichy were undermining the nazis from within" just seems like changing the narrative. Like what we started seeing with the confederates 60 years after the Civil War.

Even if some Vichy officials helped some jews escape, i bet they still harmed many more jews than they helped.

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FlipaFlapa t1_j5so78o wrote

Poland is historically one of the least anti-semitic nations in Europe. They’ve had a sizable integrated population of Polish-Jewish people for many hundreds of years straight

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ATNinja t1_j5somyw wrote

Poland was extremely anti semitic in the 40s and refused to allow their deported jews back to their homes from Siberia and the camps after ww2.

According to wikipedia, there were 3000 jews in Poland in 2010, hardly a sizeable population.

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ATNinja t1_j5spgtx wrote

And the ones that survived were not welcome back, because Poland didn't like their jews either.

There are more jews today in Germany, Austria, Italy, Denmark, Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, hungary...

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Breadloafs t1_j5sq18f wrote

>did the right thing

some French people did the right thing. France turned over more Jews per capita than Germany ever did. The overwhelming majority of the French police, military, and government took to the Vichy regime without much complaint.

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QikPlays t1_j5sqb8t wrote

Poland had a population of around 3.5 million Jews before WW2, of those around 90% were wiped out by the Nazis. If it was as antisemitic as you seem to think it was, that population would have never grown so large.

Now unfortunately, right after one antisemitic regime was toppled, a second replaced it. The cult of Stalin, the Soviets. Communist Poland was a puppet state that was forced into carrying out Stalin’s policies, a lot of which were incredibly anti semitic. However that regime also eventually fell, leaving modern Poland to govern itself.

There isn’t a huge population of Jews anymore because of the tragedies during the 20th century, a lot of people don’t immigrate to Poland Jewish or not, so it’s not surprising the population hasn’t risen. People are far more likely to leave Poland instead

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frenchchevalierblanc t1_j5sqwvf wrote

It was not Vichy as a whole but more people working in the administration etc..

Pétain didn't care about jews, he just not want to be seen deporting french people. So foreign jews were given without a blink from Pétain.

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frenchchevalierblanc t1_j5sr7yb wrote

70,000 children from jewish families were hidden by french people, you can imagine how many people needs to be kept in secret and not tell anything to the authorities.

There were 350,000 jewish people on French territory in 1940, 100,000 of them were "foreign" jews that were not born French. France deported 75,000 of them (2,000 survived), mostly "foreign jews".

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frenchchevalierblanc t1_j5src8d wrote

75% of jews in France survived though, including 70,000 hidden children.

It's true that France before 1943 was still struggling to act as if the French Police (essentially in the northern part of France officially "occupied" area where Vichy didn't have much control) was still in control, so they were responsible to arrest jews (they literally asked for it to the germans). There was no really way to know what would become of them though, jews didn't really know either. Quota asked by the germans were never fulfilled though. Lots of french policemen could help some families still pretending to arrest, some policemen just did as asked. Even in places like the Vel d'Hiv were jews where regrouped some people just "walk away" while policemen were looking the other way.

Things like "also arresting the children" was seen as they would go to work camps with families, people thought that if you keep families together with children it would mean they wouldn't kill everyone, why bother? That's all those subtle decisions and the dilution of responsibilities that makes things like shoah possible in the end.

Some people though understood exactly what the horror mean and did everything they can to hide / go out of camps.

1 million french soldiers were emprisonned in Germany and the germans used them as bargaining chips.

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Picticious t1_j5srfcf wrote

Numerous witness accounts of the poles hunting down Jews for the Germans though, even polish people who hid Jews never revealed it because they didn’t want the wrath from their own countrymen.

No one could go against the Germans!

Albania and Denmark and Sweden showed it could be done.

Interestingly Albania was the only European country to have more jews at the end of the war than when it began, how amazing is that!

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Picticious t1_j5srytu wrote

Sweden, Denmark and Albania managed to save their Jews.

Your numbers sound good like this but they don’t account for the 72,000 rounded up and slaughtered.

Shall we talk about the political prisoners now? Resistance fighters that were murdered?

I wouldn’t care as much if France didn’t try and whitewash what they were involved with.

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frenchchevalierblanc t1_j5ssoxk wrote

French didn't slaughtered those jews though nor asked to.

Vichy France was a racist dictatorial regime, that became a fascist one after 1943, people were bad.

France doesn't try to whitewash anything, French student learn everything about the collaboration, what Vichy France did, etc.. the horror in colonies, the racist state there, the racist state of Vichy.

No problem talking about resistance fighters murdered or political prisoners.

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frenchchevalierblanc t1_j5ssqyc wrote

yes no one is denying that but the dilution of responsibilies make things happen it's not that french policemen went and killed everyone, they were sent to camps in Germany as far as they knew (after 1943 Germans were in charge for everything )

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HiddenLordGhost t1_j5ssvx5 wrote

Okay, so lol - no. It was not.

We had this little thing that can amount to pretty much occupation by USSR called PRL, that next to no one will defend on the ground we "decided for ourselves".

Before war it had one of the biggest amount of Jewish citizenry in the world, and a lot of our bigger cities had pretty sizeable influence left behind by some. Łódź is one for example, lol.

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WhiskerTwitch t1_j5sw0kz wrote

"Some 750 young Jewish fighters armed with just pistols and other light
arms attacked a German force more than three times larger. In their last
testaments they said they knew they were doomed but wanted to die at a
time and place of their own choosing."
Incredible bravery and strength.
If anyone's unfamiliar with what happened, I'd encourage you to watch The Pianist. While it's not a documentary, it covers the early days before the war, through the war itself from the perspective of a young musician. It should really be required watching in schools these days.

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Seienchin88 t1_j5sxqyx wrote

No, not all. Many jews from other occupied territories and even Germany had been transferred to the Ghetto already after prior purges made room.

Its all freaking depressing but its nice to know at least some got away thanks to Polish help.

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GobiasCafe t1_j5sywie wrote

The pianist did a decent job portraying this in the movie.

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Aldirick1022 t1_j5tcgzm wrote

Believing that the Allies would come, that they would have supplies and assistance. It never came.

The Russians waited until they had beaten each other to death and then entered. Took their heroes and executed them for being an example.

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Spineynorman67 t1_j5td3vo wrote

Meanwhile, Stalin ordered his forces to wait just outside Warsaw, with the deliberate intention of having any Polish nationalists liquidated, so they could just take over. Which they did.

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bernan39 t1_j5tdpu3 wrote

You are talking about Warsaw Uprising from Operation Tempest - not Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Soviets behaved like this while 'liberating' the whole of Poland. In the east they allowed Polish fighters to fight alongside them only to arrest them after Germans were pushed out.

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hairsprayking t1_j5tf8y2 wrote

I'd love if any historians could answer this: How accurate was the portrayal of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in the Leon Uris novel Mila 18? I remember reading it in highschool and absolutely loving it.

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camwow13 t1_j5tlx0a wrote

Museums and archives can be hilariously stingy about releasing high res scans of what they've found. Though it's possible these are just buried in some very technical obscure web portal for the museums work that I haven't found yet.

To be fair, scanning things in is expensive, boring, and extremely time consuming. The margins for historical archive work is almost always in the negative.

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camwow13 t1_j5tmyqo wrote

True, but the photos are almost certainly out of copyright and it should be easy enough to access high res scans for remote projects if they exist.

Data ultimately doesn't exist if it's inaccessible.

I get raising the bar for accessing stuff, but it kills the casual research curiosity for a lot of people. When I scanned 17k pages of yearbooks and docs for a school with my book scanner, I could have charged for access like all those yearbook sites. Instead I just posted it all online for free in high res. I'm never going to recoup the time costs involved in digitizing it. Might as well make sure as many people can get to it as possible. To date nobody has ever done anything particularly research worthy with that content, but I've had dozens of curious old people contact me to say thanks for letting them explore their old long lost yearbooks from their home.

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CactusBoyScout t1_j5trzlr wrote

I love museums but they sometimes thrive on artificial scarcity. I often end up buying the book about an exhibit because that’s the only way I’ll be able to see the objects after it ends.

I think in a lot of cases they don’t have the rights to publish them online. But it’s still frustrating.

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Ajira2 t1_j5tsubt wrote

Just seems like asking for “they’re making us watch this fake movie because there aren’t any real ones”. Then that’ll lead people to finding Anne Frank’s sister on Good Morning Britain saying that the Soviet photos are fake. Then who knows?

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ZooplanktonblameOver t1_j5tuvv5 wrote

I work in digitization at a major institution, specifically on film scanning (among other things). The position of literally everyone who works in this area (including curators especially) is that we should make everything freely available online. Like you say, data doesn't exist unless it's accessible. We feel great pride in making things freely available to the world.

The reason why in every case where we can't make something public is the copyright holder. Polish copyright law on photographs is similar to the US and elsewhere - retroactively applied to 70 years after the photographer's death (the copyright law previously would have put these in the public domain already, but the new law retroactively put these back in copyright).

The institution may own the negatives, but not the copyright - this is standard. So any use requires permission from the copyright holder. Many copyright holders (which often is the estate of the photographer who is no longer alive) are happy to have the images be digitized and available for the public to see, but others emphatically are not for a variety of reasons.

I have no particular knowledge of the situation here. It could very well be that it's the museum itself being stingy and wanting people to come see them in person. But it's not like institutions digitize things for you to see online because they don't want you to come in person. The number of people who are going to go to this museum specifically to see these images is extremely small - mainly niche researchers and historians. So I'm just speculating that it's likely or at least very possible the copyright holder (the son of the photographer it sounds like) is enforcing restrictions on it, because that is extremely common.

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pursued_by_bear t1_j5tyc15 wrote

While studying WWII in high school, there was a made-for-tv movie about the uprising which was the first time I had heard anything about it. I'm not sure who is all in it, but I know Hank Azaria is, and I know that it was really informative. I definitely recommend looking for it if anyone is interested.

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camwow13 t1_j5u0vtq wrote

That's super cool! I've digitized film as a hobby and for friends/family/small businesses, but not on that scale. I'm sure you love seeing all that old stuff come back to life in modern accessible formats too!

I (wrongly) assumed Poland wouldn't have as hardcore copyright laws as the US does, but yup, that's the case. That definitely makes sense though. You have to stay above board on who holds the rights even if it seems a little ridiculous at times.

It is extremely niche to researchers and historians. I know no museum is holding out with the hope that someone is going to come specifically for some random scanned images. People, even experts in the field, really don't care enough most of the time. Most archivists definitely would prefer to just throw it out (in an organized fashion of course haha) and let bygones be bygones.

Still, I've seen some places stay pretty overzealous on gatekeeping their archives. Random story, I worked for a university and their library had an enormously convoluted process to access their old, university specific, and mostly public domain photo archive. The people managing it are all in their 60s and 70s and would not budge that the super niche 120 year old photos MUST be protected. I worked in marketing and figured out which librarian to contact to have the lists of photo ID's sent over to me in high res when we needed some archival content. The rest of my coworkers just went to the index site, downloaded the low res preview with the watermark, and edited or cropped the watermark out. I couldn't convince them to just take the time to email the right person and get it in full quality, haha.

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raktoe t1_j5u6tiy wrote

That’s the number of resistance fighters that were killed. The German casualty number is 110, with 17 killed, 93 wounded officially, although there is a decent chance it is higher.

I don’t know how to check, but if the majority of their casualties came in the initial ambush, it’s still plausible they waited them out after that.

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Kris_n t1_j5ucl3i wrote

Thats indeed valuable! They show how the firemen and other first responders would see the uprising. We can’t know his stance towards jews and the ghetto, but as you state - they weren’t taken for propaganda reasons.

Amazing

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HephaestusHarper t1_j5up3h4 wrote

How - huh? How does historical fiction sensationalize an event? Well-written, well-researched HF can provide insight into the lives and experiences of those who didn't have a chance to tell their story. It shouldn't be used at the expense of factual and first-hand accounts, but it's a useful tool.

Edited to add: I also think historical fiction is extremely useful in elementary classroom settings. Depending on the era you're teaching, narrative nonfiction accounts might be scarce or nonexistent at that reading and maturity level. Telling the story of the event through the eyes of a character their age allows them to relate to the story and understand it. It's what made me fall in love with history as a child. Books like The Witch of Blackbird Pond and Steal Away Home and Fortune's Journey and all the diaries in the Dear America Series, the American Girl books, even my problematic-but-beloved Little House series - these are what introduced me to the specific realm of history I find most fascinating as an adult: the often mundane, day-to-day lives of ordinary girls and women who cooked and cleaned and taught school and got married and had relatable feelings and thoughts.

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singularineet t1_j5v51j9 wrote

The Poles did not, at the time, consider the Jews to be True Poles. Look at what happened to Jews who tried to return to their homes in Poland after the war to see an example. Plus, the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto were not all from Poland.

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HephaestusHarper t1_j5vkqkh wrote

So how is that different from a historical fiction book on the exact same subject? Obviously Maus is an allegory, but they're both telling the same story of people experiencing the same event, with aspects fictionalized or changed for the purpose of storytelling.

As long as historical fiction is well-researched and respectful and accurate to the events and real-life figures depicted, and as long as it's correctly labeled and not presented as nonfiction, I can't see it as sensationalizing anything.

A final question - what about narrative nonfiction, something like The Killer Angels, where the events of the battle are meticulously detailed and all characters are actual historical figures but the dialogue is fictionalized because obviously we don't know everything that was actually said?

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argross91 t1_j5vle9j wrote

I’m not against historical fiction when it is properly researched. But it is very problematic when it is not well researched because it often feeds into deniers’ narratives. But Maus is telling his parents’ actual story. Not a story he made up

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argross91 t1_j5vlyyg wrote

I’m not dismissing a whole genre. I read plenty of historical fiction that is researched. I am just saying that there is a difference between fiction and nonfiction, even if it is historical fiction

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CopprRegendt t1_j5vrt9q wrote

I fell down a wikihole on this uprising a few years ago. It's a fascinating and tragic story of hope and community. It was so close to working, but in the end, you can see how Nazi lies and manipulation, as well as polish antisemitism, prevented the uprising's success.

There's also a decently accurate movie with Schwimmer and Hank Azaria. Aside from combining a few real people into one character and merging a few events into one for the sake of storytelling, it's a good depiction of the events.

But do read the wiki and a few Jewish historical society entries first (just Google "Warsaw uprising" and pick a few Jewish community/history sites; the wiki is very good but it's important to get the history from the the horse's mouth too).

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CopprRegendt t1_j5vsrlr wrote

No, at the end of the war Germany started to "liquidize" their Jewish prisoners. Meaning kill everyone. At some camps and ghettos, they were killing 10-15,000 people a day.

They weren't even using gas anymore, they'd >!march them to massive graves in the woods and just shoot them with a single bullet. If they weren't dead, they'd still fall into the pit and die by suffocation as the next rounds of prisoners fell on top of them.!<

The parts I put behind a spoiler are nsfl

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xcomcmdr t1_j5vvur2 wrote

Actually that's not true at all. The Maginot line was designed to slow down the Germans long enough for mass conscription to take place.

It was a very formidable defense line, and the reason why the Germans opted for the Ardennes route instead. It did serve its purpose, and brave souls sacrified themselves in there. Their sacrifice was not in vain. What they did was not stupid.

They had a job to do. They held the line.

Germany had an overwhelming population advantage compared to France, and the French Republic reacted accordingly.

The Maginot line never was about stopping anything. The generals were not idiots.

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red_purple_red t1_j5vzh5u wrote

Will the photos be made publicly available on the Internet?

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joeitaliano24 t1_j5w0ws6 wrote

Was the ghetto uprising intentionally taking place on Hitler’s birthday, or was that just a coincidence?

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Cerebral-Parsley t1_j5w0z73 wrote

Yeah Sobibor and the other extermination camps (Belzec and Treblinka) aren't really talked about in main stream Holocaust history. It's where they just straight up unloaded them off the trains and straight into the gas chambers. Then the camps were torn up and hidden before the war ended. They were fairly unknown for many years. At the end the prisoner laborers revolted at Sobibor and Treblinka and some escaped. The wikis on them are a fascinating read.

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TheNext8thEmperor t1_j5w3gk9 wrote

Thank you for the post it helps put an end to the holicost deniers I Can't believe that some would even go there.

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Morbusgametheory t1_j5w83cn wrote

You're right they didn't build fortifications in the North because they didn't think the Reich couldn't get through as quick as they did, they also weren't expecting a big rail gun to be made and used against them.

Also the Minot Line wasn't staffed appropriately at the time, and I never called them idiots, over confident is the preferred inference.

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LogicalConstant t1_j5z2z0d wrote

It seems like you're lumping all the French people together as a big collective. Some individuals were good and hid jews while some helped murder them. Politicians, police, and citizens each played different parts. Hard to discuss it intelligently without specifying who you're talking about.

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LogicalConstant t1_j5z3xgf wrote

[Serious question, I know nothing about how museums operate]: Is it really that time-consuming to scan them? I understand that there can be restoration work necessary, but is it ALWAYS necessary? Why is it not possible (or wise) to quickly digitize them and release them in a crude form?

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LogicalConstant t1_j5z5ss8 wrote

Copyright laws need a massive overhaul. Patents are arguably more important to society and they only last 20 years. 70 years after the death of the author is ridiculous. If you can't make a profit off of your photographs after 20 years, you have a problem that can't be addressed through copyright law. The whole purpose of protecting copyright holders and patent holders is to benefit SOCIETY by encouraging the production of new ideas and works. It doesn't benefit society when a man in 2023 can stop the world from publishing photographs taken in 1943 by his father who died in 1993. That only benefits the photographer's son, not society.

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camwow13 t1_j605nqh wrote

There's a few answers to this because it can depend on a lot of things.

Basically there's a lot of ways to scan film. Some are very slow, some are very fast. Automated systems can be incredibly expensive. The best dedicated film scanners are no longer made and can be very expensive to obtain and maintain. The dedicated systems with automated scanning can be extremely expensive. Automated mechanisms also specialize on strip film or mounted slides.

Currently made systems mostly rely on camera scanning, which is pretty good these days. There's one that does slide carousels and I think they made a system for strip film. There's also an automated strip film system by Negative Supply.

If you don't have an automated system you have to manually mount each strip of film, scan all 3-5 frames, take it off, put it away, grab another, keep going. Or do that for each individual slide. Flatbed scanners are among the most common ways to scan film (though it's not nearly as good as camera scanning), and you can do a bunch of frames at once. But they're usually very slow and takes a few minutes per slide.

There's just a lot of ways to do it but it almost always involves a lot of manual intervention even with the fastest systems.

Besides the actual scanning you have to deal with the media you're digitizing too. Re-sleeve, remount, and re-sort anything that might be deteriorating and in poor condition. Clean major dust off the frames, decide if something isn't even worth scanning, wear gloves and handle the film carefully so you don't damage it, keep everything in the organization system so it isn't lost, organize it physically and digitally, tag the photos according to date and content (data doesn't exist if it isn't organized and/or searchable), decide how much editing you'll do to each frame, and adapt your procedures because of special circumstances.

You can scan everything and just toss it up there. People do that all the time, but it's still a very physical and manual process. And if you're after quality and organization, it can take even longer.

You get to see so many cool memories from the past vividly restored in very high resolution. Properly exposed, developed, high quality, and safely stored film can deliver some amazing digital results. Far better than a lot of people realize (though film doesn't have infinite bazillion K resolution like some redditors may say haha). It's very rewarding! But it's also very slow and very repetitive.

Bit of a random explanation but hope that makes sense!

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