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Originally Posted by Wustenfuchs
Maybe I'm straying off topic but I thought it relevant to note the Soviets did have a history of altering photographs. Note the differences in these two images. The first is the original, the second one has had the smoke doctored to look more dramatic, and more interesting look at the man closest to the camera. I think it would be safe to say he's possibly been doing some looting.
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The smoke in that photo has been dodged to enhance its appearance. The wristwatch does appear to have been removed. The smoke is the same with the exception of technique. The smoke that appears to be enhanced in the second photo may in fact be a better representation of what things looked like. Unless you were there, you have no idea.
When printing a negative, the photographer has many decisions to make as to how to deal with highlights and shadows. A negative generally contains a lot more information than print paper is capable of displaying. Assuming that those are scans of prints, the prints were made using different exposures. Note the detail in the clothing of the flag holder in the top photo. Now look at him in the bottom photo and note that he is almost entirely in the shadows. Use of burning and dodging are common darkroom techniques.
See here what I can do in one minute with these images using those techniques:
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If I spent an hour on them they'd look better.
Ansel Adams, arguably the greatest photographers of all time did this all of the time. The idea is to bring as much of the information contained in the negative into the print. These pages are scanned from his book "The Print". I don't consider the resulting images "doctored", I consider them well done.
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All of the combatants had censors. All had professional photographers who set up shots. All had propaganda shoots. If this were an American GI, military censors would have removed the wristwatch also.
I have seen that image many times both with and without the second watch. One wonders though, which came first and which was the edited version. There were plenty of people who had incentive to make the Soviets look bad. Most likely the photo was hastily published and then touched up for East-bloc consumption but anything is possible.