The Series of Aerial Reconnaissance Photographs of 25 August 1944 of Auschwitz-Birkenau

In the blog posting John Ball's Air Photo Evidence on Auschwitz, I had pointed out that there is a second set of aerial photographs from Auschwitz-Birkenau of 25 August 1944 other than those analyzed by John Ball. I had designated the former as "RAF photographs" and the latter as "USAF photographs" (later I changed this to from "British archives" and "US archives" respectively as the photographs were taken by the South African Air Force as pointed out by the Lesser Bunny). I claimed that both sets of photographs were made by different aeroplanes. This was an educated guess based on the fact that both series show approximately the same place taken at the same time and because the different set seemed to have been released by different countries. But there is actually an alternative explanation, it's possible and more likely that there was one aeroplane carrying two differently oriented cameras. Anyway, whether two planes with one cam each or one plane with two cams, the two series of photographs, thereof only one analysed and published by CIA aerial experts, both showing the same features at the Birkenau compound debunks Ball's claim that the photos have been tampered with by the CIA. 

Now, the Lesser Bunny spammed HC blog's comment section that he supposedly exposed my "nonsense about two different planes photographing Birkenau in tandem on August 25, 1944". However, he replaces my (as I noted above, arguably not most likely) explanation by a claim which is even worse.

He explains that the two series of photos were taken by the same plane on two different flights over the area. The photographs first analysed and partly published by the CIA (which he found were also released from an archive hold by the British National Collection of Aerial Photography, exposures 3184, 3185, 3186, 3187) were taken at the first pass of the Auschwitz area, while the other series of photographs only released by the National Collection of Aerial Photography (exposures 4185, 4186, 4187, 4188) was supposedly taken during the second overfly. He plugged in the coordinates provided at the NCAP site for each photograph using gpsvisualizer.com to illustrate the flight path. According to this, the supposed second pass over the Auschwitz complex is shifted about one mile north compared to the first one.

What should have made him sceptical of his interpretation is that both flight paths show pretty much the same deviations from a straight line as if the plane copied its manoeuvre when it passed over the area the second time. And it not only followed the same shifted route over the Auschwitz area, but during all its photographing missions in upper and lower Silesia (the red and blue dots indicate the coordinates of the plane when photographs were taken; the series with lower exposure number is marked in red, the higher in blue; for some missions of the "blue series", I've thinned out the number of photos used for the figure). According to his hypothesis, the air plane was flying precisely the same route twice on this day in the same direction, except that the second route was shifted by about one mile. 

Of course, it is way more likely that the route was flown and the targets photographed once with two cameras (either with two air planes in a formation or more likely, one air plane carrying two cameras). This is confirmed by the fact that the photographs of both series show precisely the same personnel movement on the ground in the Birkenau compound (see this animated gif from exposure 3185 and 4186; marked with circles), i.e. the photographs were clearly taken at the same time on a single pass over the area - and not on two different flights over the complex, as already pointed out in John Ball's Air Photo Evidence on Auschwitz (which also rebuts his claim that "we can be fairly certain that these blobs cannot be people in formation").

The second pass over the Birkenau compound is actually shown in yet another series of photographs at the USHMM (exposures 5017 and 5018), but which "is severely degraded by heavy haze, and smoke from the operating smoke generators protecting the targeted industrial facility" according to aerial photograph expert Carroll Lucas (Zimmerman, Holocaust Denial). The Lesser Bunny's misunderstanding of the exposures 4185 - 4188 as having been taking at the second overflight (while they were actually taken at the first overflight with a second camera) made him attack Lucas' explanation as "bizarre claim". Rather bizarre is actually the half-life of his memory, as he linked on 28 February 2015 to what seems like the photographs of the actual second flight over Birkenau.