Picture Story

Were the grisly pictures of Nuernberg's corpses fit to print? (The first announcement had been that they would never be published, that they would be shut away in the archives.) Last week in Berlin the Allied Control Council decided that the pictures should not be published in Germany. Outside of Germany, editors could decide for themselves. Eight days after the Nazi criminals died, their last portraits reached the world press. (First there was a 24-hour embargo, to give the Russians an even break. Their newsmen were not equipped to send pictures by radio.)

In Britain, whose Government was dead set against releasing the pictures at all, no daily newspaper proprietor broke ranks to print them. (But Goring's turned up in this week's Sunday Pictorial.) The

London Times reported that the "frightful" pictures had shocked many Americans; the Telegraph sniffed that they "can add nothing to the information, satisfaction or instruction of the public."

U.S. editors, many of whom had run more gruesome pictures during the war, could not agree on whether or not the pictures were fit to print. All Manhattan dailies ran them except the Times and Herald Tribune.* Hearst's Journal-American advertised the pictures in advance, urged readers to reserve their papers a day ahead.

Editor & Publisher polled the press, found that most editors intended to print the pictures on the basis that if they were not news, they were certainly history. The Atlanta Journal played it both ways. It did not publish the pictures, but told its readers: "However, the prints will be dis played . . . in a show window ... for the inspection of anyone interested."

-Both had felt differently about the lynched Mussolini. The Times scooped the world with a front-page picture of the Duce and his mistress, taken before their bodies were strung up. But there were then many who doubted whether Mussolini was really dead; nobody needed pic torial evidence of the end of Nuernberg's eleven.

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