A particularly unpleasant grimace
A strapping, freckled schoolboy of eight years, who looks nothing like Hitler.
John May Warren died at age eight. It was a shocking, unexpected, horrible thing. He lost control of his bicycle, riding home in late-July. The bottle of milk in his hand shattered, piercing his chest as he fell — a tragic end to a short, strange life.
Months prior, an image of the boy circulated in newspapers across the world. His blonde hair is brushed to the side, a large curl hanging on his forehead. He smiles, eyes squinted, a big pair of buck teeth emerging from behind his lips.
He holds aloft an enlarged photo. It’s unmistakably him, taken years prior. A goofy baby picture, his face frozen in an almost pained expression. He’s wearing a onesie with a single, large button below a protruding collar. He’s seated on his hands and knees, his thick blonde hair emerging from beneath a bonnet.
The photo in the eight-year-old’s hands had circulated across the globe a year prior, albeit in a dramatically altered form. Its presence in global newspapers had caused a kind of minor international incident, with a thin-skinned and irate Adolf Hitler at its center. It was, apparently, the picture’s appearance in The Chicago Tribune that first drew his attention – and subsequent rage.
The image had been received precisely as intended.
The American paper ran the black and white image under the headline, Hitler When a Baby. The story featured two images. The first was a recognizable shot of the fuhrer giving a speech to a massive crowd. The other was the alleged image of baby Hitler
The Tribune opined,
This is a picture of a man who controls the destiny of a mighty nation, as he appeared when he was not quite one year old. Do you think this photo is prophetic of the figure he has become? The picture is one of Adolf Hitler, who was born in 1889.
When Hitler first laid eyes on Warren, the blonde hair and bonnet were gone. In their place, a mat of greasy hair hung down over his left eye. The result was a strangely menacing image of the toddler. This, the paper erroneously claimed, was a picture of the dictator as a baby. An unflattering photo, coupled with some trickery, had effectively convinced the world’s media that the failed Austrian artist was born with an angry scowl.
The German consulate sprang into action with a sternly worded letter and an “authentic” photo of the baby Hitler. It read, in part,
The alleged 'baby picture' [...] was sent to the Foreign Office in Berlin and the Consulate General was recently advised that the photograph stated to be a 'baby picture' of the Reichs-Chancellor is a falsification. The Foreign Office in Berlin transmitted at the same time a copy of an authentic photograph of Reichs-Chancellor Adolf Hitler before he attained the age of one year with the request to bring the matter to your attention.
The image from Germany shows a chubby baby seated upright on a chair. One hand touches its arm, and the other sits balled in a fist on his leg. A full head of black hair is styled into a jagged Beatles cut. He stares into the camera with a look resembling shock, his pale cheeks heavily blushed.
By May of that year, Acme Newswire, which had spread the image around the globe, was forced to offer its own retraction. In Lakewood, Ohio, Harriet Downs spotted a grotesquely altered shot of her now eight-year-old as a baby. Acme noted,
Downs noticed the false picture reprinted in a magazine and recognized it as a photo of her son by a former marriage, John May Warren, now grown into a strapping, freckled schoolboy of eight years, who looks nothing like Hitler. The original snapshot had been retouched so that a bay cap was painted out and the features distorted so that what had been a babyish squint in the true picture appeared as a particularly unpleasant grimace.
Acme promised to launch an investigation into the origin of the doctored photo, but the source was never revealed.
Sources:
The True Story of Hitler’s Fake Baby Photo https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hitler-baby-photo-fake
'Fake news,' unfortunately, is nothing new: Fake baby Hitler, anyone? https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-fake-news-hitler-kogan-sidewalks-ae-0402-20170330-column.html
Baby Adolf https://hoaxes.org/photo_database/image/baby_adolf/