The Germans Are Coming! The Germans Are Coming!

I chose picture 16 because I find it both highly amusing and an interesting look at international relations during the lull between WWI and WWII. This picture is evidently from the April Fool's Day edition of Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung and I would guess involves the "flying man" either being dangled or dropped in order to create the illusion that he is propelling himself via only his lung power. As this was waaaaay before the advent of Photoshop, my only other guess would be that they set this up on a white background, took the picture, took the picture of the background with the men running, and exposed them both onto the same piece of photo paper.

I am fairly certain it was run predominately as an April Fool's joke; the real question is on whom was the joke played? The reading populace, or the paranoid and suspicious US and Britain? Probably just on their people- I don't think Cold War tensions had exactly started, but it is worth noting that Hitler and his Nazis were now in power, and the US military might have been worrying about German military advances.

I don't believe that the manipulation of this photograph, as it were, was harmful. I think it was clearly meant to be silly, and if anyone took it as otherwise for more than a few days (I want to say seconds, but to be fair we are talking about a relatively isolated Germany in the 1930s- it would be hard to check out information like this) would just be being panicky, and probably would be a conspiracty theorist.