The morning of the next day, when the Germans entered [Bibrka], I took a camera from my neighbors, which they had been hiding for me, and went off to the prison. There I saw a terrible scene.

Translated from Volodymyr Hrytsyn, ‘Vkarbovane u pam’iat′,’ Shkil′nyi dzvinok 1 (2003)

Photographs documenting the Great West Ukrainian Prison Massacre of 1941 were viewed with circumspection by Western reporters, not knowing whether they were evidence of atrocities committed by the retreating NKVD or the advancing German army, and whether the victims were Poles, Ukrainians, or Russians. The images were largely taken and disseminated by Joseph Goebbels's Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, although some were also taken by journalists as guests of the German High Command (such as Associated Press correspondent Alvin J. Steinkopf) or by inhabitants of the towns in which the massacres took place (some of whose images were confiscated). They were printed in numerous newspapers across Europe, North America, and Australia, some with headlines such as ‘Germans Claim Russian Purge’ (New York Post, 7 July 1941); ‘Camera War Begins: Here's the Russian War's First “Atrocity”’ (Daily News (New York City), 7 July 1941); or ‘An Eye for an Eye’ (PM (New York City), 7 July 1941). Other newspapers reported on the massacres more emphatically, using the photographs as supporting evidence of the role the NKVD played in the mass killings.

The photographs continue to generate controversy as a number of them show in the backgrounds groups of Jews whom the Germans forced to dig up, collect, and clean the corpses, and then place them outside for identification and burial. Within days, many of these Jews probably became victims of the widespread anti-Jewish pogroms that followed the discovery of the prison massacres. Recent research undertaken by historian Harriet Scharnberg reveals how the Associated Press was the only western news agency able to remain open in Nazi Germany from the mid-1930s until the United States entered the war in December 1941. Under the Schriftleitergesetz (editor's law), AP agreed not to publish any material ‘calculated to weaken the strength of the Reich abroad or at home.’ Among the photographs distributed to and published by the North American press via AP were those by Franz Roth, a member of the SS paramilitary unit's propaganda division, of the dead bodies inside L′viv prisons.