Photo of Hitler posing like Trump after the assassination attempt is fake

Claim:

An image shared online in August 2024 shows Adolf Hitler in a nearly identical pose to Donald Trump in a separate, authentic photo taken after his assassination attempt.

Evaluation:

In August 2024, social media users shared a real photo of former U.S. President Donald Trump, taken after his assassination attempt in July 2024, next to an alleged picture of Adolf Hitler.

(X-User @SilenceDamned)

In the photos, Trump and Hitler appeared to strike similar poses, prompting one Threads user to share a post in early August 2024 saying, “I knew I’d seen this before, so weird.” In mid-July 2024, another user claimed that Trump had posed “like his idol,” the former Nazi chancellor, implying that both images were authentic.

Another example of the two images being shared together appeared on X in July 2024, along with an attached community note claiming that the photo of Hitler was created using AI.

(X-User @SandraHarney1)

In short, while the Trump image was authentic, the alleged Hitler photo was not. We concluded that it was not generated by an artificial intelligence, but was in fact a composite image created from elements of several different photos, including a mirrored and altered image of Hitler, a photo of the Nazi Party’s chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels, an unidentified woman, and a Nazi flag. For this reason, we classified the Hitler image as a “fake.”

In early August, Hany Farid – a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who specializes in digital forensics and image analysis – discussed the Hitler photo on LinkedIn.

Farid said he analyzed the image “with our GetReal Labs model, which is trained to distinguish real from AI-generated images, and found no evidence of AI generation or manipulation.” However, he concluded that the image showed telltale signs of photo manipulation and was “most likely” created using “some old-fashioned Photoshop manipulation”:

However, below is a visualization of the image/sensor noise in the historical photo. In an ideal imaging device, the pixel values ​​of the digital image would accurately reflect the amount of light recorded by each photodetector. However, real devices have imperfections, and these imperfections introduce noise into the image. The resulting noise pattern is usually random and varies from image to image, but is generally uniform across the entire image.

Below you can see a much larger noise pattern (brighter areas) for three main parts of the image (the two people and the flag). This would not happen naturally and is a telltale sign of photo manipulation. While I can’t say exactly how this image was created, it is most likely an old school Photoshop manipulation of stitching multiple photos together.

(Hany Farid LinkedIn user)

Snopes analyzed all the elements of the manipulated Hitler image and found that its most important component, the photo of Hitler, had been flipped horizontally. In addition, Hitler’s arm had been cut off and moved to the other side of his body. Below is a comparison between the manipulated image on the left and an authentic photo of Hitler on the right published by Getty Images (the latter of which has been flipped horizontally for ease of comparison).

(X user @JaneotN, Getty Images)

The original photo of Hitler was also available on Alamy, a stock photo website, with the caption:

Speech by Adolf Hitler, leader of the Nazi Party and Führer of Germany, delivering an impassioned speech with clenched fist and wearing a military uniform with the Iron Cross and swastika armband. The day he became Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces of Nazi Germany. Nazi Germany 1934

(Alarmy.com)

The second element of the doctored photo was Joseph Goebbels, one of Hitler’s closest confidants.

(X user @JaneotN, Getty Images)

Below you can see the original photo of Goebbels, which we also accessed via Getty Images:

(Getty Images)

The third figure in the composite image is a woman whose original photograph has not been identified.

Other rumors related to Trump and Hitler that Snopes has investigated include:

Sources