On April 20, a photograph was circulated online, allegedly showing schoolchildren from the Ukrainian city of Lvov. The authors of the publications claim that the children lined up in the shape of a swastika in honor of the birthday of Adolf Hitler. We checked whether this really happened.
On April 20, 2022, exactly 133 years have passed since the birth of the Fuhrer of Nazi Germany. And on the same day, a wave of posts with the following content appeared on social networks: “Just Lviv. Just schoolchildren. We just celebrated Hitler's birthday. In Ukraine, where, as we know, there is no Nazism.”
Apparently, the recording in Russian was most widely distributed on Telegram channels. One of the most common posts we found was published on the channel Zergulio (164,000 subscribers). It has already been deleted, but its saved copies can be found on services for tracking channel statistics. In addition, there are his reposts, for example on the channel "NOD Russia" (1000 views). There are also similar recordings on the channels "Operation Z" (3300 views), "ChBD News" (28,000) and "Boiling water" (11,000).
At the time of publication of this text on Twitter, posts about Lions and swastikas were distributed only by accounts with a small number of subscribers (examples here, here And here). A photo with a similar caption was also posted by the verified account of Alexander Bunin (almost 18,000 subscribers), but it was deleted there (there is a screenshot left). Also, a now deleted post from the TSEG account received several hundred likes and retweets (you can view the saved copy here or here).
On VKontakte, posts are mainly distributed through posts on users’ personal pages (examples here, here And here), but there are also publications in communities. For example, in the group “Overheard in Snezhny”, at the time of writing this text, the mentioned photo with the caption (spelling preserved) “In Lvov, the devils built a swastika from children in honor of Hitler’s birthday, they are also Bandera’s spawn of bitches!” collected 89 likes and 4000 views.
Firstly, the figure in which the supposed schoolchildren lined up only partially resembles the swastika from the flag of the National Socialist German Workers' Party. The symbol of Nazi Germany had a couple less right angles.
Secondly, in the middle of the construction you can notice the unevenness of the straight line. We can assume that this is not a bend, but a gap, then the figure will resemble the number 55. If we take into account that the Fuhrer was born in 1889, then he turned 55 years old on April 20, 1944, that is, several months before the Battle of Lvov in July 1944. The photo does not appear to have been taken during that period.
Thirdly, the photo can be run through the image search service in Google or Yandex. As a result, search engines will return a lot of old posts, news notes and articles stating that the photo you are looking for was actually taken on April 12, 2016. On it captured event in honor of the first human flight into space.
The event called “Conquest of Space” took place in the center of Penza. Students, representatives of youth organizations and student brigade fighters took part in the flash mob. Young Penza residents lined up in the shape of the number 55 - that’s how many years had passed since Yuri Gagarin’s space flight in 1961. After this, the guys simultaneously released balloons into the sky on command - all this was filmed from the roof of the Youth House. Then there were competitions and quizzes on knowledge of Russian space history. Here is a report from the YouTube channel “GTRK Penza”, as well as a screenshot in which the number is more clearly visible from a different angle.
It should be noted that the photo of the figure was from a flash mob for similarity to a Nazi symbol on social networks steel make fun of already on the same day when the action was held. And in 2019, the Kuzbass police amounted to Protocol under Part 1 of Art. 20.3 of the Administrative Code (“Demonstration of Nazi symbols”) against local activist and lawyer Dmitry Miropoltsev, who posted a screenshot from a report about the action on his VKontakte page. The case went to court, but the judge got up on the side of Miropoltsev - no offense was found in his publication.
Thus, in the photo it is not Ukrainian Lviv, but Russian Penza, not schoolchildren, but students. They lined up not in the form of a Nazi swastika, but in the form of the number 55, and this was not on Hitler’s birthday, but on Cosmonautics Day.
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