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What I assume you are referring to is the [NSFW and Content Warning] 1942 Iwangorod/Ivangorod/Ivanhorod Photograph.

The allegation that this is a fake photo has been around since it first publication in the late 1950s and have recently resurfaced in meme-form on the internet – I assume reddit too – with people doing a sort of sleigh of hand trick that points to several details in what is usually a cropped and low-res version of the photograph and insisting that what is shown is not a German rifle and not a Waffen-SS uniform. The problem with these allegations and memes is that the history of this photograph can be traced much better than in case of other historical photographs and there is irrefutable contextual evidence that it is genuine.

Let me first start with saying that when historians work with visual history, meaning using photographs as a serious source for history, it is absolutely imperative that a.) photos are more than illustrations for history and b.) that as with every other source, they are not used singularly. What I mean by the latter point is that historians will not ever only rely on one document and one document alone. Documents, whether textual or visual, are usually part of a collection and often contain information in some form that immediately helps in finding out more and verifying them.

For a good example of how this works with a textual source, take these details from the invitation to the Wannsee Conference. These are what is called the "Geschäftsverfügungen" (business directions) and the Paraphen (German bureaucracy speak for signatures), showing who handled the invitation and what they decided to to with it. Reviewing this, it lets historians trace who has seen the document and thereby helps us reconstruct who had knowledge of what, where and when. In this case, what you see here are the signatures by the secretary of Martin Luther of the Foreign Office, Ursula Marx and the man responsible for keeping the entry journal, Müller, that show that the invitation was send to Luther and subsequently seen also by Rademacher, the head of the office for the Jewish Question in the German foreign office. Such details allow us to trace the document further, find it entered in the journal books and establish circles of knowledge about who knew what and when.

While these might be rather obvious details with textual documents, they are lessons often overlooked when reviewing visual sources because people tend to look at what photographs are depicting and deciding to go from there without trying to dig deeper into the contextual connections that they reveal as well as in the history of their provenance and their "chain of evidence", if you will. Take f.ex. this photograph. What you can see is a seemingly artful photograph of a woman in rural dress walking through a body of water. When the context however reveals what it shows, it becomes a testament to the cruelty of the Germans in the Soviet Union. This photo comes from the official photo album of the Wehrmacht's 97. Jäger Division from their campaign in Ukraine in 1941 and is entitled "Die Minenprobe. Vom Donez zum Don‘ 1942" [The Mine Test, From the Donez to Don 1942] and what it shows is a Soviet woman being used as a human mine probe, meaning the soldiers send this women ahead of their troops to test if there were any mines – a practice attested to by various other documents in the division's records.

Doing that with the Iwangorod (I'm just going to use the German transliteration of Ивангород/Іванго́род going forward) photograph can be invaluable in establishing that picture as genuine. So, the history of that photo is that it was together with another photo showing a group of five men, four in German uniforms, one in civilian clothing standing in front of a heap of dead people smiling, intercepted in the main German post office in Warsaw on Napoleon Plaza in the year 1942 by Jerzy Tomaszewski. Tomaszewski was a photographer serving with the Polish Home Army, one of Europe's largest resistance organizations and the troops of the Polish Government in Exile in London during WWII. Joining the resistance as a 16-year-old photographers' apprentice in 1940, Tomaszewski's job was to intercept and/or copy photographs German soldiers made of massacres and atrocities and send home in the mail. In 1942 he came across this particular photograph and the other one mentioned above. He kept the original, which has a handwritten inscription on the back saying "Urkaine 1942, Judenaktion, Iwangorod" meaning "Ukraine 1942, Jew Action [German speak for mass executions of Jews], Ivangorod". At the same time, he made a copy, which – as part of his job in the resistance – was send to the Polish Government in Exile to be used as evidence for German atrocities in Eastern Europe and added to their collection.

Keeping the photograph together with several hundred others, either originals or copies, he had copied for the Polish Government in exile throughout the war, the Iwangorod photo was first published in a 1959 multilingual book Tomaszewski worked on as an editor called "1939-1945. We have not forgotten" published by the Polish League of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy. In 1962 a German newspaper called "Deutsche National-Zeitung und Soldaten-Zeitung" [German National Newspaper and Soldiers' Newspaper], a Neo-Nazi leaning publication known for their staunch defense of the Clean Wehrmacht Myth and where several former Wehrmacht members were involved, published an article claiming the photograph was fake. The author of the article is identified in the byline as a certain "Professor Otto Croy" and here the first problem beings to appear. There is no record of a Professor Otto Croy. What is there, is photo credits in the German national library identifying a certain Otto Croy as the author of several pictures taking for the Wehrmacht propaganda newspaper Signal. Fake professor Cory decries the photo as "anti-German Atrocity lies", leading to the conclusion that his article was a politically motivated piece of pro-Clean Wehrmacht and pro-Neo-Nazi revisionism rather than a serious inquiry into the history of that picture.

The seed of doubt was however sown (as was the interest of the paper and Croy) and so the legend that this photo is somehow fake was started and is apparently proliferated by people to this day, knowingly or unknowingly taking part in revisionist propaganda.

However, all indications show this photo to be genuine: First of all, both the original Tomaszewski kept and the copy send to the Polish government in exile exist in archives: Tomaszewski's copy in the Jewish historical Archive in Warsaw, the government's copy in the Polish Government in Exile's archive in London. There they can both be traced back to 1942. The Polish government in exile mentions the photograph in a variety of their reports to the United Nations War Crimes Commission, the bulk of which have recently become available.

Furthermore, the photo is consistent with the timeline of the Einsatzgruppen killings. The Einsatzgruppen Situational reports clearly show that the Einsatzkommando 5 of Einsatzgruppe C operated in "Shitomir, Rowno und Winniza" (Shitomir, Rovno and Vinnitsa) between 5.11.1941 and 7.1.1942. Iwangorod lies pretty much right in the middle between Rovno and Vinnitsa right on the road between the two cities. During that time period several massacres of Jews are attested to by the records of the Einsatzgruppen to have occured in that area, among them a large one lasting in the beginning of April 1942 in what is described "the vicinity of Vinnitsa" and where the total number of murdered Jews is given as 15.000. Also taking part in these actions were Wehrmacht units as the reports of the Infantry Regiment 727 (Part of Wehrmacht Division 707) show. IR 727 reported shooting 133 Jews in the Cherkas'ka oblast to which Iwangorod belongs on April 2 1942 ("no weapons found") and 47 Jews and 651 Partisans shot on April 4 ("3 Radios and 21 Rifles found").

This is imminently consistent with the photograph. It is also imminently consistent that a German soldier would have taken such a photograph to send home. Uncovered through archival research and research in private collections in the course of the German Wehrmacht exhibition, literally thousands such photos taken by German soldiers and Einsatzgruppen members were discovered in the early 90s. That the Wehrmacht leadership itself issued instructions in early 1942 forbidding soldiers from taking photographs of such atrocities shows on the one hand how common this occurrence was and on the other hand how frequently these orders were ignored. Petra Bopp, an art historian has written a book – Fremde im Visier with several of these photographs printed and examined and the phenomenon of soldiers photographing atrocities as a larger one taken into account. A similar effort has been made by Anton Holzer for the first world war with his book Das Lächeln der Henker and for the second WWII by Gerhard Paul in his book Bilder des Krieges – Krieg der Bilder. They all show supported by meticulous research that the practice of soldiers photographing atrocities they take part in was a widespread and common phenomenon in both WWI and WWII that is attested by literally thousands of these photographs send home to loved ones and family where they ended up in various photoalbums of Opa Hans' time in the war.

Hi OP, you can provide a link to the photo in your post text (click "edit") or in a comment