Photo shows Adolf Hitler, not a CIA agent

A recent Instagram post casts doubt on the history of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler by claiming a portrait of the dictator actually shows a CIA agent.

"Hollywood and CIA faked it all," reads the text above a video featuring the photo. 

"This man right here is a CIA agent, and he’s an MK-ULTRA patient" says someone in the video pointing at the image and referring to a Cold War-era CIA program to search for a mind control drug. "This man has split personalities which is an effect of a MK-ULTRA patient."

The person in the video compares Hitler’s ears in the image to his ears in other images, saying that "it looks completely different from the original one." 

This post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

Featured Fact-check

Instagram posts

stated on March 21, 2024 in an Instagram post

Video shows legislators “dancing in Congress” while the border is “overrun.”

The photo shows Hitler, who died in 1945. That’s about two years before the CIA was formed during the Truman administration, though it grew out of the World War II-era Office of Strategic Services.

We did a reverse image search for the photo and found it in the National Archives Catalog among other "foreign records seized." It’s described as a "portrait of Adolf Hitler." The National Archives has a collection of images taken by Hitler’s personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. The U.S. Army confiscated his negatives after World War II and they went into the National Archives in 1962, The Washington Post reported.

Other photos of Hitler that appear to be taken by Hoffman on the same day as the image in the Instagram post appear elsewhere online, such as on the website of the Getty Museum, which dates the photos to "about 1927-1928." 

We rate claims that this image doesn’t show Hitler but a CIA agent False.