Thread by @fakehistoryhunt

This video has gone viral on tiktok, man finds album that he thinks may have extremely rare and unusual photos of the Nanjing (Nanking) massacre.
But things are not like they seem, I'll explain in the following tweets. 🧵
tiktok.com/@pawn.man/vide…

Now I'm not really into trigger warnings, but I do realise that as someone who has researched crime and war for a long time and has witnessed a few awful things, I'm no longer shocked to things normal people still are shocked to.
So, be aware, lots of horrors ahead.

Mind you, I will link to these things but try and avoid sharing pictures directly.
Follow the links on your own discretion, you know what you can handle.

Background; The Nanjing Massacre or the Rape of Nanjing
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_M…

The Pawn man thinks the album is extremely rare because of the photos in it.
The album itself is not rare, it is genuine though.
But this "My oriental" album was a souvenir album countless sailors bought when their tour of duty was about to begin.
From another copy;

There are lots of them out there.
Like here;
alexautographs.com/auction-lot/wo…

And here;
ukauctioneers.com/auction_catalo…

And you can buy an empty one, right now;
ebay.com/itm/1148313926…

So the album itself is not that unique, but of course it's all about the content.
The sailors who bought these albums filled them with their own photos, letters, postcards, all sorts of souvenirs, they're all different.
Here's one with innocent pictures;
boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/17867…

But even this chap mentions that photos depicting "public executions (beheadings, death of a thousand cuts, etc.)" were in the album but separately in an envelope.
That sounds suspiciously familiar doesn't it?

Here is another album online, it too shows photos of war and atrocities but different ones;
k-state.edu/history/instit…

The pawn man has been sharing some of the photos on Twitter, you can see them on his account here;
twitter.com/EvanKail

Again, they are horrific.

But they are also familiar, I wish they weren't.
But I've seen some of these before.
And it didn't take long for me and others to find some of the photos in the album elsewhere on the internet, like with stock companies.

This one for instance can also be found on stock image websites titled "Public execution of a communist in the streets of Nanking 1927".

Of course stock image companies are often wrong, but other photos can be found there as well and it seems most/none of them are not related to the 1937 massacre.

Another photo showing "the death of a 1000 cuts" very likely shows the execution of Fu Zhuli in 1905.

So what have we got here?
An album filled by sailors with photos they took and stuff they found during their tour, it's a souvenir album.
We know that the man who owned the pawn man's album served on the USS Augusta;
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Augus…

It seems this ship was not in Nanking during the massacre.
So what are these photos doing in that album?
I reckon the photos were being sold, which sounds weird to us, but it was news, there was no tv or internet, just magazines & newspapers.

I bet that some of these sailors had the photos offered to them at a market or in a shop, bought them, added them to their albums, it may illustrate what they witnessed, it did illustrate what was happening in the region at the time.

And whoever sold them may have added a few unrelated photos just to get an even number, to have more pictures to sell.
Those foreign sailors won't know one of the photos was made in 1905 and pay good money for them.

Something similar happened to me, I bought a Dutch photo album that contained photos of the bombing of Rotterdam, same size, same look, you could easily be fooled into thinking they were made by the owner of the album, photos on the left are real, on the right were bought;

Just after the bombing people were selling little sets of these photos everywhere, as a reminder, as news, to show people what happened, etc.
And some people put them in their albums.
Now and then someone tries to sell those albums as super rare because of the bombing photos.

So although the album is interesting, it is not an extremely rare album with even rarer photographs.

I'm sorry if this thread made you look up some things you didn't want to see, I did warn you.
But we can't ignore the Nanjing massacre, it should be remembered.

Addendum; thanks to @hoaxeye who was the one who asked me to look into this case, he's a 1st class debunker/hoax fighter/fact finder you might want to follow.

https://twitter.com/hoaxeye/status/1565308939075559425

This may get the word out a bit;

https://twitter.com/RollingStone/status/1565466290885632000