The story of Henek the violinist is terrible. The picture shows a man, emaciated to the bone, marching through the Auschwitz extermination camp with equally emaciated fellow prisoners while playing a violin. He had to accompany her to the gas chambers, according to the text under the picture that was posted on Facebook. After the war he never touched a violin again. The post has almost 9,000 likes.
Only: Henek never existed. The story is fictional, the photo and text were generated using artificial intelligence (AI). Thousands of such fake images and touching texts about alleged fates in the Nazi death camps can currently be found on social media, and there are apparently more and more of them. “The phenomenon is currently escalating,” says Paweł Sawicki, spokesman for the Auschwitz Memorial, in an interview with ZEIT. When asked, the Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Mauthausen, Neuengamme and Flossenbürg memorials also replied that they were observing an increase in such images.
The authors are obviously not interested in remembering the horrors of the Nazi era – but rather in their own wallets. The made-up memorial posts generate attention, and it should pay off. Although Meta, the company behind Facebook, classifies the posts as spam, it does little about it.
Without sources, but with a lot of emotions
This was first noticed in Auschwitz in May, reports Sawicki. At first, an account simply copied the memorial’s messages. Then he started changing the pictures. Or he copied images and changed the text in the process. “Without sources, but with a lot of emotions.” That brought clicks, and more and more accounts jumped on the same scam. For a few weeks there have also been AI-generated short video clips with supposed scenes from concentration camps, but also of grieving soldiers or abandoned children. A girl sings for her fellow prisoners in a concentration camp. An old man in concentration camp clothing clings to a book. A woman collapses and is supported by a fellow prisoner.
“When you know how few original photos we have from that time, it’s particularly painful,” says Sawicki. At least as a critically thinking person you can still clearly see that the images are AI-generated because they are too sharp and too well preserved. “But at some point that will no longer be possible.”
The memorial has contacted Meta with a request to delete such AI-generated images because it violates the dignity of the victims. However, without success. It is clear how dangerous this development is: “It should not be allowed to spread lies about history; that will ultimately harm us all,” says Sawicki.
In fact, after a quick search, you can find many active accounts that spread such fake images and stories. They have names like “German Nostalgia” or “The Old Germany” and supposedly come from Germany, but the name and imprint are fake. Anyone who calls will only reach a dead line. For example, one of these sites is hosted in Vietnam. They post four to five stories like this a day.
It quickly becomes clear that this is not about commemoration: the same accounts posted historical and fake military images a few weeks earlier. Tanks, submarines, old and new rockets, but also historical cityscapes, cars and toys. They are clearly looking for content that generates likes. The Holocaust seems to click best. An account called “Historic Voices” has 22,000 followers and now posts almost exclusively AI-generated images from concentration camps. The more recent posts have on average between 100 and 200 likes and dozens of comments.
ZEIT also reported some of these accounts to Meta. But they were only blocked for a few days. Although the company announced that it classifies these as spam according to its own guidelines, they are now posting fake images again at a high rate. One can only speculate about the reasons for this decision, as Meta does not answer questions in this context. The company allowed several ZEIT deadlines to pass and ignored questions about its own responsibility. It therefore remains unclear what thinking lies behind allowing such accounts to spread clearly AI-generated lies about German history.
