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In September 2023, a photo circulated on social media purporting to show a poster with a caption referencing a conservative German slogan. We checked whether such a billboard was actually placed in the Kherson region.
The poster contains the slogan “Children, kitchen, church! The meaning and greatness of the Russian woman" (the wording directly refers to the German idiom "Kinder, Küche, Kirche"), and also coat of arms with a double-headed eagle, which is used by the occupation authorities of the Ukrainian region. September 17 about this billboard on your website wrote “Television News Service” is one of the most popular news shows in Ukraine, broadcast on the “1 + 1” channel. The note says that the first photo of the poster shared Advisor to the Mayor of Mariupol Pyotr Andryushchenko, saying that it was filmed in the occupied part of the Kherson region.
Image sold out in Ukrainian and Russian-speaking segments Telegram, Facebook, on forums and in blogs With indicating that the slogan used was part of the Nazi ideology. In particular, an image with a similar comment posted on the social network X (formerly Twitter), Advisor to the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine Anton Gerashchenko, his tweet received 1.6 million views and more than 4,000 retweets. At the same time, some users claimthat the poster appeared not in the Kherson region, but in Crimea, others write about posters in the plural, while others express doubt about the authenticity of the photo. Authors of the Telegram channel “Two Majors” called his provocation; also wrote that the photo of the poster is fake in “LiveJournal" And Telegram channel clerk Andrey Kuraev.
The earliest “Verified” publication discovered, which contained a photo of this poster, was posted on the Telegram channel “Khuev@y Mariupol | Mariupol" September 17 at 10:06 Moscow time. At 10:19 photo start spread on VKontakte, and only at 13:55 Andryushchenko published it on his Telegram channel.
Traces detected “Verified” on an image using services InVid And Forensically, allow us to say with some probability that the inscription and coat of arms on the banner were added to the photo in a photo editor. These areas stand out sharply when the photo is analyzed through an algorithm Ghost (creates a number of copies of the file in different qualities, and then compares it with the original to find potentially mounted sections), and when analyzing the error level (Error Level Analysis) there is a noticeable difference in yellow areas, which should not normally be the case. The shadow under the word “Russian” also looks unnatural. However, this is not enough to provide 100% proof of technical interference.
The photo of the woman on the poster is regularly used to create thematic Orthodox web banners for various occasions (messages about fasting and church holidays, instructions about correct clothes for going to church, etc.). Thanks to subscribers "Verified" discovered original photograph, used to create the billboard, with the metadata preserved. Its author is Kiev photographer Sergei Ryzhkov, and the photograph itself was taken on April 28, 2013.
Image search results in Yandex
However, I was unable to find a similar physical banner with this photo using an image search. Reports about the poster do not specify the locality where it was placed, and the details in the photo do not allow us to confirm or deny that the photo was taken in the occupied territories of Ukraine. The version of a fake is supported by the fact that the circulated photo exists in a single version, taken from one angle. Judging by a search on blogs and social networks, ordinary Internet users have not seen such posters either in Ukraine or anywhere else.
Let us note that the statement by Anton Gerashchenko and the authors of other publications that “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” is a Nazi slogan is not entirely true. This is a stable expression appeared long before the National Socialist German Workers' Party came to power. The authorship of the phrase is attributed to Kaiser Wilhelm II (reigned 1888–1918); it came into widespread use in the last third of the 19th century. The concept of “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” was certainly close to the Nazis, but due to difficult relations with the church, the emphasis was on Kinder and Küche. In particular, in speeches Hitler dated September 8, 1934, to which Gerashchenko refers, the church is not mentioned in principle. How notes German historian Sylvia Paleczek, at the beginning of the 20th century, with the development of the women's rights movement, the phrase became a subject of irony, and after 1945, in English-language discourse, many began to mistakenly attribute its creation to the Nazis.
Thus, taken together, the discovered direct and indirect evidence allows us to assert with a high probability that the photo is falsified. However, it is impossible to completely exclude the possibility that the banner was made by someone in one copy, placed in the occupied part of the Kherson region and photographed.
Update September 27, 2023: Corrected the claim about the earliest post found to contain a viral photo. Added information about the photo that became the basis of the billboard. The version of the analysis before changes are made is available at link.
Cover photo: TSN.ua
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