35 photos that shed light on the darkest parts of our history (36 photos)

History is not only brilliant discoveries and triumphs. Within its pages are countless examples of human cruelty and other shameful truths. And while tragedies do not only exist in the past, it is important to understand history to protect yourself from repeating its darkest moments. These photos are hard to look at, but they capture important events that we cannot afford to forget.





1. Anne Frank's father Otto returned to the attic where they were hiding from the Nazis. He was the only surviving member of the family (1960)



Photographer Arnold Newman later recalled how he took this photo: “The mood was depressing, and I immediately began photographing him. A few moments later the bells from the Westertoren tower began to ring, and Frank turned to me and said: “Those were the same bells that Anna wrote about.” He suddenly completely broke down, sobbed uncontrollably, and so did I. We never saw each other again. To this day, when I give a lecture or tell this story to people, I choke on tears; I still can’t help it.”

2. Runaway slave Peter exposes his heavily scarred back from a spanking





Peter escaped in March 1863 from John and Bridget Lyons' 3,000-acre plantation. At the time of the 1960 census, in addition to St. Petersburg, they had 40 more people in slavery.

3. Human zoos. These photographs were taken in 1904 when the US government imported 1,300 native Filipinos from various tribes for display at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition



This photo shows a Filipino girl at the Coney Island Zoo in 1904. She was exhibited at the zoo among monkeys and lizards to demonstrate the new US possessions in the Philippines. She was tied with ropes. Visitors threw peanuts at her.

4. Patient undergoing treatment for mental illness, Germany, 1890



5. Dorothy Counts, the first black student at an all-white school in the United States. White classmates tease and ridicule her in this photo



6. Armenian militias during the Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Turks, 1915



7. Dog tags of 58,307 US soldiers killed during the Vietnam War, at the Harold Washington Library Center, Chicago.



8. Several thousand wedding rings confiscated by the Nazis from Holocaust victims



9. Meeting of a child Klansman and a black police officer at a Ku Klux Klan meeting in Gainesville, Georgia



10. Frenchwoman Blanche Monnier, who was secretly kept locked in a small room for 26 years by her aristocratic mother and brother.



11. Motel manager James Brock pours hydrochloric acid into the pool to drive blacks out of it. June 18, 1964



12. Croatian soldier in front of a wall on which is written: “God, if I die young, send me to heaven; I’ve already been to hell.”



13. George McLaurin, the first African-American student admitted to the University of Oklahoma, is forced to sit separately from white students. 1948



14. Photo of Zita Soos, one of the hundreds of thousands of children kidnapped by the Nazi regime. She was given new documents and given up for adoption, and after the war - to an orphanage. She never found her real family. 1942, Poland



15. A rescue dog is pulled from the rubble of the World Trade Center, destroyed as a result of the September 11 terrorist attack.



16. World War II infant gas masks



17. Magdalene Asylums, also known as Magdalene Laundries. Places of “correction” for women who did not live up to the idea of ​​a good citizen



The most famous of them were in Ireland. The orphanage staff, mostly consisting of nuns, mistreated the women and girls.

18. A Japanese family returns home (Seattle, Washington) from the internment camp in Hunt, Idaho, May 10, 1945.



19. Father Luis Manuel Padilla holds a wounded soldier shot on the streets of Puerto Cabello, Venezuela during the uprising against President Betancourt in June 1962



20. Prisoners of the Ebensee concentration camp. 1945



21. Between 1932 and 1972, the US Department of Public Health conducted a study in which 399 African Americans were deliberately infected with syphilis



22. With her brother on her back, an exhausted Korean woman wearily wanders past a stalled M-26 tank in Haengju, Korea. September 6, 1951



23. Miners in Belgium, huddled in a coal mine elevator, rise after a day's work, circa 1900.



24. Clock found in Hiroshima that stopped at 08:15. August 1945



25. Photos taken after the men were arrested for having sex with each other. Stockholm, Sweden, 1897



26. “Servants, obey your masters” - Bible written for Caribbean slaves. It has been edited to remove any mention of freedom



27. A nuclear explosion captured by Harold Edgerton's raptronic camera at one hundred-millionth of a second. Circa 1950s



28. There is a bomb in the red car. This photograph was taken shortly before the Omagh attack; the camera was subsequently found in the rubble. The man and child in the photo survived



29. The Nazis select Hungarian Jews to be sent to the gas chamber of the Auschwitz concentration camp. 1944



30. An Indian Army ambulance driver whose leg was almost completely blown off clenches his hands, trying to cope with the intense pain. Korean War, 1951



31. The earliest known photograph of the Chernobyl disaster, taken immediately after the meltdown and explosion of Unit 4 on April 26, 1986



32. Unknown during the Great Depression, 1932: "Urgently needed is a strong rope to hang myself, or an unfurnished place to live for my wife and I and the unborn child."



33. "Radium Girls": Women using radium paint without any protection, 1922



Misled by company management, whose representatives told them that radium was harmless, the workers received a lethal dose of radiation by licking the tips of radium paint brushes and, for fun, painting their nails and teeth with the glowing substance.

34. Nurses in the trenches between hospital departments. France 1918



35. Atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan