Fact Check

Is Facebook Taking Down a Photograph Showing the Burial of Korean War Remains?

Facebook is not taking down a picture of the interment of Korean War dead in order to minimize an achievement of President Trump's.

Published Aug 3, 2018

Claim:
Facebook is taking down a photograph showing the interment of the remains of U.S. war dead returned by North Korea.

In mid-2018 the United States accepted 55 boxes turned over by North Korea, which were said to contain the remains of U.S. troops who died in Korea during or after the 1950-53 Korean War. Pentagon officials said it will likely take months or years to determine how many individuals those remains represent and identify them all.

Around that news story, the Facebook page for the "America's Last Line of Defense" website posted a meme with a photograph of what looked like remains being interred in a military cemetery, along with text claiming that "Facebook is taking down this picture" in order to "hide Trump's feat of returning Korean War dead!":

This meme was completely false. Facebook isn't trying to remove the displayed picture, which has nothing to do with President Trump or the recent return of remains of Americans killed in the Korean War. It's a 2016 photograph from the Alamy stock photo service which shows a German-Russian military ceremony associated with the interment of the discovered remains of 38 Soviet soldiers who were killed fighting in Germany in the closing months of World War II:

The mortal remains of 38 Russian soldiers have been buried in the Lebuser military cemetery near the border with Poland. Over 70 years after the end of the Second World War, they have finally received a last worthy resting place, said a spokesman for the Volksbund Deutscher Kriegsgräberfürsorg. The ceremony was also attended by Russian Ambassador Vladimir Grinin.

The bones of the fallen were found last year and salvaged by the Volksbund. The Red Army soldiers died in the Oderbruch during the heavy fighting in the spring of 1945. The funeral utilized German and Russian soldiers in a joint work assignment.

This meme was a fiction invented by America's Last Line of Defense, which is part of a network of fake news sites dedicated to spreading political misinformation under the guise of proffering “satire."

David Mikkelson founded the site now known as snopes.com back in 1994.

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