Editor’s note: The photograph to which Gray refers appears in Daniel Goldhagen‘s new book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (Knopf). Genya Markon, director of the photograph archive at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, reports that the archive received this image from a Polish collector named Jerzy Tomaszewski.

During the war, Tomaszewski was employed as a postal worker in a Warsaw post office where he served the aims of the Home Army (Armia Krajowa) — the central organ of the Polish (non-Jewish) underground — by intercepting mail written by German soldiers on the Eastern Front. This photograph was enclosed in a letter that he intercepted. The original German inscription on the back of the photograph reads, “Ukraine 1942, Jewish Aktion [operation], Ivangorod.”

Markon explains that the original, uncropped photograph shows a German soldier aiming a gun at a woman holding a child, while others (at the right) dig a grave with their hands. The full image has been published in The Nazis (Time-Life Books), on pages 152-3. The same photograph, usually cropped, has become a cliché in the neo-Nazi press (for example, in an article published in the Deutsche Soldaten Zeitung und National-Zeitung of September 6, 1963), where it is routinely described as a faked image.