Thomas Deichmann (born 1962) is a German journalist, author and communication expert. He was the founder and from November 1992 to May 2011 editor-in-chief and publisher of the German magazine . Since August 2011 he has been working as communication expert for banks and industries such as The Royal Bank of Scotland, BASF SE, and BRAIN AG.
Early life and career
Deichmann studied civil engineering at TU Darmstadt. In 1992, after earlier political activities, he began to work as an editor and journalist, writing first about international relations and then increasingly about issues to do with the natural sciences and their role in society.
Bosnia
Deichmann received international attention when his article on the civil war in the former Yugoslavia (first in German, then in English and other languages), "The picture that fooled the world", was published by British magazine LM, in February 1997, claiming that a frequently published image from August 1992 was faked. He claimed that the ITN footage, created in front of Trnopolje concentration camp, featuring prominently group of emaciated Bosnian Muslim men prisoners, and among them Fikret Alić, standing behind a barbed wire fence, was deliberately staged to portray a Nazi-style extermination camp, that the British reporters from ITN, Penny Marshall and Ian Williams, had actually stood inside a compound surrounded by a barbed wire fence and from there filmed their famous pictures, and went on to allege: "It was not a prison, and certainly not a 'concentration camp', but a collection center for refugees, many of whom went there seeking safety and could leave again if they wished". However, an examination of the substance of this case by a professor David Campbell of cultural and political geography at Durham University showed that the key claims made by Deichmann and LM are "erroneous and flawed".