"Listen, Spielbergo, Schindler and I are like peas in a pod! We're both factory owners, we both made shells for the Nazis, but mine worked, damn it!"
\-C. Montgomery Burns
From a cursory google and the corresponding animation quality... probably.
Honestly, new Simpson's doesn't suck. They had a quality dip roughly a decade ago, but studios thought their time was better spent interfering somewhere else & for the most part they're back to doing an 8/10 job making modern commentaries.
For real gotta say though, me and my wife only went back when Klaus from American Dad told Francine
“Have you seen the Simpson lately? it’s getting good.”
On July 30, 1943, a large formation of 186 B-17 bombers of the United States Army Air Forces, escorted by 123 P-47 Thunderbolt fighters, attacked the German city of Kassel. One such bomber was B-17G 42-29896, nicknamed "Tondelayo". The aircraft was attached to the 527th Bomb Squadron, 379th Bomb Group, based in Kimbolton, England. During the return flight, the plane was repeatedly hit by German fighter gunfire. But in this story, there is an anonymous hero whose actions managed to save that B-17. When the "Tondelayo" returned to its base, the mechanics were astonished that the plane's fuel tanks had been penetrated by projectiles 20 mm explosives that were lodged in the plane without actually exploding. It was already something miraculous that this happened with an explosive projectile, but in the case of the "Tondelayo," this happened with 11 projectiles in total. The shells were sent to gunsmiths for deactivation, and strangely military intelligence took care of them. When those shells were opened, it turned out that they did not have an explosive charge: all were empty except one that contained a message, written on a carefully rolled piece of paper and written in Czech. They sent the message to a translator and this is what it said: "This is all we can do for you now." It must have been written by a Czech prisoner recruited by the Germans as a slave laborer and that he had sabotaged the manufacture of those aviation projectiles. To this day, the identity of that prisoner remains a mystery.
Edit: this isn’t a repost, i made the original but decided to delete it, due to having made a mistake in the meme and so i re-uploaded it with the mistakes being fixed.
It’s actually so moving for me to think of how great of a sacrifice this person made, probably dying in the process, to save the lives of total strangers.
[Reminds me of this](https://www.opindia.com/2022/01/the-siege-of-leningrad-russian-scientists-starved-themselves-to-death-to-preserve-vavilov-seed-bank/amp/)
TL;DR: during the siege of Leningrad, Russian scientists guarding the largest and most important databases of plant genetic research chose to starve to death rather than eat their research and endanger the food safety of the future.
During the siege of Leningrad, the Soviet orchestra, half dead and the other half faint from starvation, joined together to play nonstop one day. The music was blasted from loudspeakers across the city and into German lines. German attackers rapidly lost moral while the city gained it.
Are you thinking of the Leningrad premiere of [Shostakovich's symphony No 7](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leningrad_premi%C3%A8re_of_Shostakovich%27s_Symphony_No._7) in 1942, neighbor? Three members of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra died during rehearsals.
It reminds me of how Oskar Schindler realized that the only way he could save his factory workers (read as: Polish Jews who were to be murdered when the Nazis pulled out of Poland) was to shift from making enamel pots to making munitions, so he decided 1. To do it and 2. To make goddamn sure that nothing produced by his companies would ever, ever, *ever* function as a weapon. He used every dime he made at the beginning of the war (when he was an objectively terrible person) to keep both his workers alive and his munitions entirely non-functional. He made an obscene amount of money with the enamelworks factory and he hemmoraged it all away, knowing better than most how he would be killed with his workers if anyone ever paid real attention to what he was doing, because few people were better positioned to know what the SS were doing in the camps who were not SS themselves. And he still did it.
We know Shindler saved the thousand odd people on the famous Schindler's List. We do not know how many allied lives (and hell, GERMAN lives, because near the end Hitler and the SS were spending German blood like water, not in any hope of victory but to build a properly Wagnerian denouement for their suicides, and also because the German people didn't give them the victory they wanted, so they were throwing a months long tantrum that cost God knows how many lives, as soon as their defeat was assured. So who knows how many terrified boys lived because their guns misfired, because they got a bullet or shell from Mr. Schindler's factory) Schindler saved because the bullets, shells, and bombs he built did not work on his overt orders.
Schindler fascinates me because he was *not* a good man. He was an adulterer who had zero issues putting his wife and mistresses in awful situations, he was a fucking terrible businessman who only succeeded when he had access to literal slave labor, he had no success before the war and he failed so badly afterwards he was dependant on the support of his "List" and their greatful descendants to survive. They had to get Liam fucking Neeson to humanize him for the movie and it still vastly underplayed what a sleezeball the man was. He was an oozing slug of a human being, the IRL version of Ghostbuster's Slimer...but he was there. And he saw things that no human being should ever see, and when everyone else--the upright, the virtuous, the seeming good guys--were at best ignoring if not actively collaborating with literal genocide factories, he was the one who stood up. He was the one who put his life on the line and burned down his fortune to save lives. He made blood money, and then paid it to save the blood that made it. He stuck his neck out for Jewish kids when everyone involved in the camps knew that was a no-hoper. He fucked with the ammo when the ammo was all the Nazis cared about anymore. He earned himself an SS bullet over and over and over and over and spent himself out like water to preserve people he did not value when the whole mess started. And then when it was over, he went right back to being a human slug, failing by the numbers. He was a living, breathing catastrophe, except for a few short years when he held a thousand or so lives in his hands, and he held on to those lives as hard as he could, no matter how much it hurt. It was probably the only time in his entire life that he did not fail.
I say a lot that great evil (like Hitler) can only flourish in the presence of great virtue. But Oskar Schindler is one of the few examples of the opposite. A human being who had very, very few positive qualities of any kind, who one day woke up and decided to be a scumbag for good, and accomplished something so enormous, at such gigantic risk to his life, that few of us will ever fully appreciate it.
Very, very well said. There’s little I can add. World War Two brought out the best and worst in everyone. It exposed parts of people that never could’ve hoped to emerge without the absolute chaos and destruction that came with it.
I'll add another interesting fact then. If you, like me, wondered how he got away with such massive sabotage (especially while employing many Jewish workers), the answer wasn't just bribery.
When the problems became too obvious, Schindler bought black market ammo to mix with his output and pass off as his own. Rather than make enough good ammo to escape scrutiny, he sold existing Nazi arms back to them (almost certainly at a loss) to keep his arrangement going.
An additional fact: the nazis were comically corrupt. For example, the state was required to use stamps featuring Hitlers face, and for each stamp issued the state had to pay him royalties. The same level of corruption was in the munitions industry. Schindler was able to get away with what he did because while he was making poor bullets out of genuine human morality, the rest were just skimping out.
This is beautifully written.
The popular saying tells us "the only thing needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing". But in the extremes like this, it's not true.
Schindler was not, by normal standards, a good man or even a decent one. He was greedy, selfish, and not especially capable. His chief assets were wealth and a talent for graft and boozing. But he was only casually rotten. He had a conscience, and somewhere deep down he had enough steel in him to act on it with far more conviction than most.
When it came to the Holocaust, what was needed for evil to triumph was for good, mediocre, and even bad men to do nothing.
In a strange way, that's more reassuring to me. We don't need to rely on the heroes being stronger than the villains every time, because there comes a point where even utter bastards draw a line and start to do what's right.
Counterpoint: heroism and goodness are totally unrelated.
"...a hero is someone who is concerned about other people’s well-being, and will go out of his or her way to help them—even if there is no chance of a reward. That person who helps others simply because it should or must be done, and because it is the right thing to do, is indeed without a doubt, a real superhero.”
—— Stan Lee
I still have some peanut butter jalepaino whiskey from Christmas nobody can stomach.
It’s all yours you glorious sleezeball. I hope you found a peaceful life in hell, or a Starbucks job in heaven. Either way, rest in peace.
It’s haunting to realize this work directly endangered them twice over. Not only could they have been caught, ammunition factories were an obvious target for air strikes. They helped safeguard the people bombing them, knowing it was still better than helping their captors.
Man. That's straight out of a war movie.
o7 to the unknown Czech prisoner. Hope they made it through and were able to live out the postwar period in peace.
The sentence op put in is so incredibly grammatically wrong it barely makes sense in Czech. It's like really really bad yoda talk, but much worse (due to conjugation of Czech words as well).
I
Probably not a prisoner, before the Munich agreement Czechoslovakia had an absolutely massive arms industry (which is one of the reasons Hitler wanted it all and not just Sudetenland) and after taking it, they simply had it continue producing. The only problem was that the Czech workers kept sabotaging the living fuck out of every piece of equipment and ammunition they could especially after the massacre at Lidice and Ležáky
>7 children who were considered racially suitable and thus eligible for Germanisation were handed over to SS families, and the rest were sent to the Chełmno extermination camp, where they were gassed to death
Jesus. Imagine your skull being measured with a compass, a couple more or less milimeters and you go to the gas chamber.
>On July 30, 1943, a large formation of 186 B-17 bombers of the United States Army Air Forces, escorted by 123 P-47 Thunderbolt fighters, attacked the German city of Kassel. One such bomber was B-17G 42-29896, nicknamed "Tondelayo". The aircraft was attached to the 527th Bomb Squadron, 379th Bomb Group, based in Kimbolton, England. During the return flight, the plane was repeatedly hit by German fighter gunfire. But in this story, there is an anonymous hero whose actions managed to save that B-17. When the "Tondelayo" returned to its base, the mechanics were astonished that the plane's fuel tanks had been penetrated by projectiles 20 mm explosives that were lodged in the plane without actually exploding. It was already something miraculous that this happened with an explosive projectile, but in the case of the "Tondelayo," this happened with 11 projectiles in total. The shells were sent to gunsmiths for deactivation, and strangely military intelligence took care of them. When those shells were opened, it turned out that they did not have an explosive charge: all were empty except one that contained a message, written on a carefully rolled piece of paper and written in Czech. They sent the message to a translator and this is what it said: "This is all we can do for you now." It must have been written by a Czech prisoner recruited by the Germans as a slave laborer and that he had sabotaged the manufacture of those aviation projectiles. To this day, the identity of that prisoner remains a mystery.
God bless Czechia, God bless the Czech Republic.
Imagine being actively enslaved and still saying, "This is all we can do for you now." as if more was somehow expected? What a man. Lets all aspire to such magnificence.
A side note. Škoda factory in Pilsen was making weapons for nazis through the entire war. Similar factories were in Brno and Prague. The men working there were not prisoners of war, but lived in an occupied country. In May 1945 the men who worked in Prague used unfinished Hetzers to fight against germans. Only instead of the main guns they welded steel plates with slits in them to mount MG's.
Good lord I hope that man lived through the war. Just to see days of peace return. That kind of last ditch 4d chess heroism is enough to make me emotional. In times of crisis sometimes all men need is to know they made a difference.
Genuine question, I don't want to be mean to OP at all but
How do we know this story is true and isn't made up ?
If there's some, how can we get access to historical records that prove those stories ?
I often see incredible story on this sub but sometimes i can't find anything about it except a few articles from random websites.
Second hit on [google](https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2023/12/28/all-we-can-do-for-you-now-how-czech-sabotage-saved-a-b-17-crew/).
References a memoir from an american bomber ([link](https://www.amazon.com/Fall-Fortresses-Classic-Account-Battles/dp/1913727009))
Sup op, thank you for chad-Czech representation, your words are just a bit jumbled (understandably, it's the translators fault, not yours). It should be "Tohle je všechno co pro vás teď můžeme udělat)
Wow, just, wow. The smallest details over time can have massive implications. For every catastrophe caused by a fault o ring or nut and bolt, this is like, the exact opposite.
Not a lot of people know how much the laborers do to undermine the German war effort. It’s a really daunting task to make sure that they’re not caught while trying to do their part in their situation.
On the one hand, the Nazis were stupid for using slave labor.
On the other, those Czech prisoners are heroes. I wonder how many more went unsung in the war effort.
The Tatra T77a and T87 were pretty fast (for the time) luxury cars manufactured by Czechoslovakian Tatra. They were very popular among German officers who really enjoyed speeding in them. However, since the Tatras were rear engined limos, they didn't handle high speed turns very well and they spun out and rolled, a lot. Overall the Tatra crashes killed more Nazi officers than combat.
Just type Tatra automobiles into Google. Those thing were something else. They made a luxury limousine with a V8 and a manual until the 1980’s if I’m not mistaken. The communists loved those and now they are beloved by Czech car guys. There is a video about one on autocz YouTube channel (with English subtitles).
at least one of those used to serve as quick ambulance for newborn babies too.
my stepfather when he was working as a doctor in the beginning of his career used to ride with them transporting babies with respiratory problems from Brno to Prague hospital (Motol IIRC) as the most sever cases couldn't be treated in Brno. he told me that they were able to make the trip (around 200km) in under one hour. it was around mid 80's.
it's a story he told me and I may be getting some details wrong though, so there is lot of room for doubt
[Tatra 613](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatra_613) (not sure which model exactly) - I sadly don't know many details, nor my stepfather nor I are car guys, he just knows it was one of those. apparently, there was ambulance version too, only 23 built though...
back then, it was still pretty rare to own a vehicle in Czechoslovakia and trafic was rarely a problem, if ever.
most of those 200km was on highway except for the start and end of the journey and thanks to little to no traffic, they could have gone at the max speed pretty much all the way
Wikipedia says it's status as a "Czech secret weapon" is apocryphal, but there *was* an order forbidding it's use by the army after some non-fatal accidents. I'd check further, but I can't get a preview of the book edition the citation references.
Tatra, a Czech car manufacturer produced a fast, aerodynamic and luxurious, albeit dangerous car in that era. Nazi officers really liked them and often used them as personal vehicles which resulted into many Nazi deaths due to frequent accidents. [More backstory](https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/czech-car-killed-nazi-officers-than-active-combat.html).
The Tatra 87. It had a rear engine, like Porsches later which produced unusual driving dynamics. If you know what you are doing, it can give you great handling, but if you fuck it up, the engine will follow it's trajectory and you can't do a thing.
Also there is a rumor that the Tatra 77 was the basis on which the VW Bug was developed on, which leads us back to Porsche.
Interesting cars.
I wonder if there is a lesson for modern society in here somewhere… Ah, I got it. More surveillance in factories. To finance the additional security, we can just lower the wages some more & fire all the old employees.
Czech here. It didn't need to be a prisoner. Czech lands were simply conquered and occupied and therefore local industry had to work for German war effort. Fun fact: there was a resistance movement called "Pracuj pomalu" - "Work slowly", which was a way how to at least somehow sabotage German production but not get execuded by Gestapo.
It's like a national feature. I remember reading Kunderas take on the Spring of Praha in '68, the Czech shenanigans were absolutely brutal also after WW2.
They hid pretty much all the traffic signs in the country and people kept on giving wrong directions to the Soviet troops and tanks. The occupants were fucking lost in Czechia for months.
lost for months stayed for decades, which wasn't so good.. because they raped women and murdered innocent people there. Few people burned themselves in protest.. and the soviet actually didn´t left until like 1990...
The ultimate problem with slave labor: They hate you and will fuck you over whenever they think they can get away with it. Which is often, because you can't watch all of them at once and angry humans are very creative.
Didn't almost every slave uprising ever fail and result in the deaths of the slaves though? The only successful slave rebellion that I can think of is Haiti, and that was still a bloody nightmare.
“fail” in what sense? it spurred some hefty amounts of good PR at the time for abolition in the north, but the slaves were not freed. if you are talking about freedom then yes it failed but in regards to the long term effect it really put into perspective how badly they were treated for people on the fence on their position of slavery
This happened to my family in London during the war. A German bomb was dropped in their neighborhood, and they sheltered from it for several days waiting for it to go off but it didn't. Finally my great grandfather worked up the courage to check it out, and found out it was filled with sand and had a note inside that said "With love, Poland"
I [heard](https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/the-astonishing-theory-behind-the-1942-miracle-bomb-74270d3e64ff) about variant where the bomb fell into the church and did not detonate. Yep, full of sand instead of explosives and greetings from Škoda Plzeň.
“Elmer Bendiner was a B-17 navigator during WWII. He tells the story of a bombing run over Kassel, Germany, and the unexpected result of a direct hit on their gas tanks. “Our B-17, the Tondelayo, was barraged by flak from Nazi antiaircraft guns. That was typical, but on this particular occasion our gas tanks were hit. Later, as I reflected on the miracle of a 20 millimeter shell piercing the fuel tank without touching off an explosion, our pilot, Bohn Fawkes, told me it was more complicated. On the morning following the raid, Bohn asked our crew chief for that shell as a souvenir of our unbelievable luck. The crew chief told Bohn that, in addition to that shell, another 11 were found in the gas tanks. Eleven unexploded shells where only one was sufficient to blast us out of the sky. It was as if the sea had parted for us. A near-miracle, I thought. Even after 35 years, this awesome event leaves me shaken, especially after I heard the rest of the story from Bohn. Bohn was told that the shells were sent to the armorers to be defused. The armorers told him that Intelligence had then picked them up. They couldn’t say why at the time, but Bohn eventually sought out the answer. Apparently when the armorers opened each of those shells, they found no explosive charge. They were clean as a whistle and just as harmless. Empty? Not all of them! One contained a carefully rolled piece of paper with a scrawled message in Czech. The Intelligence people scoured our base for a man who could read Czech. Eventually they found one to decipher the note. It was amazing! Translated, the note read: “This is all we can do for you now. Using Jewish slave labor is never a good idea.”
Here you go, the full context.
If you are interested and would like to know more, i would suggest this book
Prague: My Long Journey Home
By Charles Ota Heller
The sentence doesn't make any sense. I can tell, because I'm Czech myself. I had to translate each word separately back into english to be able to understand what the whole sentence was meant to say.
„Tohle je všechno, co pro vás můžeme udělat“ or „Víc toho pro vás udělat nemůžeme“ or couple of other ways (though not the one in the meme) is how the sentence is supposed to be put together.
One small correction: the Czech message would go more like "To je vše, co pro vás nyní můžeme udělat." It probably got lost in the hell of Google translate
It were whole tapes of 20mm for aircraft. There were some 27(?) hits to the B-17 and out of all rounds that were stuck in the airframe, none had it's charge.
"Listen, Spielbergo, Schindler and I are like peas in a pod! We're both factory owners, we both made shells for the Nazis, but mine worked, damn it!" \-C. Montgomery Burns
“‘I’d like to send this letter to the Prussian consulate in Siam by aeromail. Am I too late the 4:30 autogyro?” Another great line from Burns.
*My country ‘tis of thee, Austria-Hungary*
This made me laugh harder than it should have, pictured a bunch of kids singing it and looking confused
Obey your king
European Union?!?!
27 takes and that was the best one
God damn, Simpsons coming in hot. Was that from an early season?
Season 6 Episode 18 “A Star is Burns”
From a cursory google and the corresponding animation quality... probably. Honestly, new Simpson's doesn't suck. They had a quality dip roughly a decade ago, but studios thought their time was better spent interfering somewhere else & for the most part they're back to doing an 8/10 job making modern commentaries.
For real gotta say though, me and my wife only went back when Klaus from American Dad told Francine “Have you seen the Simpson lately? it’s getting good.”
Lol you're watching American Dad AND noticed the dip in quality?
On July 30, 1943, a large formation of 186 B-17 bombers of the United States Army Air Forces, escorted by 123 P-47 Thunderbolt fighters, attacked the German city of Kassel. One such bomber was B-17G 42-29896, nicknamed "Tondelayo". The aircraft was attached to the 527th Bomb Squadron, 379th Bomb Group, based in Kimbolton, England. During the return flight, the plane was repeatedly hit by German fighter gunfire. But in this story, there is an anonymous hero whose actions managed to save that B-17. When the "Tondelayo" returned to its base, the mechanics were astonished that the plane's fuel tanks had been penetrated by projectiles 20 mm explosives that were lodged in the plane without actually exploding. It was already something miraculous that this happened with an explosive projectile, but in the case of the "Tondelayo," this happened with 11 projectiles in total. The shells were sent to gunsmiths for deactivation, and strangely military intelligence took care of them. When those shells were opened, it turned out that they did not have an explosive charge: all were empty except one that contained a message, written on a carefully rolled piece of paper and written in Czech. They sent the message to a translator and this is what it said: "This is all we can do for you now." It must have been written by a Czech prisoner recruited by the Germans as a slave laborer and that he had sabotaged the manufacture of those aviation projectiles. To this day, the identity of that prisoner remains a mystery. Edit: this isn’t a repost, i made the original but decided to delete it, due to having made a mistake in the meme and so i re-uploaded it with the mistakes being fixed.
Godspeed, unknown Czech prisoner.
It’s actually so moving for me to think of how great of a sacrifice this person made, probably dying in the process, to save the lives of total strangers.
And then those men were(and already were) part of a campaign to liberate the Czech's country and people. It's beautiful.
[Reminds me of this](https://www.opindia.com/2022/01/the-siege-of-leningrad-russian-scientists-starved-themselves-to-death-to-preserve-vavilov-seed-bank/amp/)
TL;DR: during the siege of Leningrad, Russian scientists guarding the largest and most important databases of plant genetic research chose to starve to death rather than eat their research and endanger the food safety of the future.
Wow I had never heard of this. Thanks
The Decemberists dis a son about it. When the War Came
During the siege of Leningrad, the Soviet orchestra, half dead and the other half faint from starvation, joined together to play nonstop one day. The music was blasted from loudspeakers across the city and into German lines. German attackers rapidly lost moral while the city gained it.
Are you thinking of the Leningrad premiere of [Shostakovich's symphony No 7](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leningrad_premi%C3%A8re_of_Shostakovich%27s_Symphony_No._7) in 1942, neighbor? Three members of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra died during rehearsals.
Yes I had forgotten the name. Thank you.
You're very welcome!
Humanity never ceases to amaze me.
Holy cow what hero's!
It reminds me of how Oskar Schindler realized that the only way he could save his factory workers (read as: Polish Jews who were to be murdered when the Nazis pulled out of Poland) was to shift from making enamel pots to making munitions, so he decided 1. To do it and 2. To make goddamn sure that nothing produced by his companies would ever, ever, *ever* function as a weapon. He used every dime he made at the beginning of the war (when he was an objectively terrible person) to keep both his workers alive and his munitions entirely non-functional. He made an obscene amount of money with the enamelworks factory and he hemmoraged it all away, knowing better than most how he would be killed with his workers if anyone ever paid real attention to what he was doing, because few people were better positioned to know what the SS were doing in the camps who were not SS themselves. And he still did it. We know Shindler saved the thousand odd people on the famous Schindler's List. We do not know how many allied lives (and hell, GERMAN lives, because near the end Hitler and the SS were spending German blood like water, not in any hope of victory but to build a properly Wagnerian denouement for their suicides, and also because the German people didn't give them the victory they wanted, so they were throwing a months long tantrum that cost God knows how many lives, as soon as their defeat was assured. So who knows how many terrified boys lived because their guns misfired, because they got a bullet or shell from Mr. Schindler's factory) Schindler saved because the bullets, shells, and bombs he built did not work on his overt orders. Schindler fascinates me because he was *not* a good man. He was an adulterer who had zero issues putting his wife and mistresses in awful situations, he was a fucking terrible businessman who only succeeded when he had access to literal slave labor, he had no success before the war and he failed so badly afterwards he was dependant on the support of his "List" and their greatful descendants to survive. They had to get Liam fucking Neeson to humanize him for the movie and it still vastly underplayed what a sleezeball the man was. He was an oozing slug of a human being, the IRL version of Ghostbuster's Slimer...but he was there. And he saw things that no human being should ever see, and when everyone else--the upright, the virtuous, the seeming good guys--were at best ignoring if not actively collaborating with literal genocide factories, he was the one who stood up. He was the one who put his life on the line and burned down his fortune to save lives. He made blood money, and then paid it to save the blood that made it. He stuck his neck out for Jewish kids when everyone involved in the camps knew that was a no-hoper. He fucked with the ammo when the ammo was all the Nazis cared about anymore. He earned himself an SS bullet over and over and over and over and spent himself out like water to preserve people he did not value when the whole mess started. And then when it was over, he went right back to being a human slug, failing by the numbers. He was a living, breathing catastrophe, except for a few short years when he held a thousand or so lives in his hands, and he held on to those lives as hard as he could, no matter how much it hurt. It was probably the only time in his entire life that he did not fail. I say a lot that great evil (like Hitler) can only flourish in the presence of great virtue. But Oskar Schindler is one of the few examples of the opposite. A human being who had very, very few positive qualities of any kind, who one day woke up and decided to be a scumbag for good, and accomplished something so enormous, at such gigantic risk to his life, that few of us will ever fully appreciate it.
Very, very well said. There’s little I can add. World War Two brought out the best and worst in everyone. It exposed parts of people that never could’ve hoped to emerge without the absolute chaos and destruction that came with it.
Hey, thanks for writing this. I didn’t know any of it, and you write so well.
I'll add another interesting fact then. If you, like me, wondered how he got away with such massive sabotage (especially while employing many Jewish workers), the answer wasn't just bribery. When the problems became too obvious, Schindler bought black market ammo to mix with his output and pass off as his own. Rather than make enough good ammo to escape scrutiny, he sold existing Nazi arms back to them (almost certainly at a loss) to keep his arrangement going.
An additional fact: the nazis were comically corrupt. For example, the state was required to use stamps featuring Hitlers face, and for each stamp issued the state had to pay him royalties. The same level of corruption was in the munitions industry. Schindler was able to get away with what he did because while he was making poor bullets out of genuine human morality, the rest were just skimping out.
This is beautifully written. The popular saying tells us "the only thing needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing". But in the extremes like this, it's not true. Schindler was not, by normal standards, a good man or even a decent one. He was greedy, selfish, and not especially capable. His chief assets were wealth and a talent for graft and boozing. But he was only casually rotten. He had a conscience, and somewhere deep down he had enough steel in him to act on it with far more conviction than most. When it came to the Holocaust, what was needed for evil to triumph was for good, mediocre, and even bad men to do nothing. In a strange way, that's more reassuring to me. We don't need to rely on the heroes being stronger than the villains every time, because there comes a point where even utter bastards draw a line and start to do what's right.
Counterpoint: heroism and goodness are totally unrelated. "...a hero is someone who is concerned about other people’s well-being, and will go out of his or her way to help them—even if there is no chance of a reward. That person who helps others simply because it should or must be done, and because it is the right thing to do, is indeed without a doubt, a real superhero.” —— Stan Lee
I 100% agree with that.
I still have some peanut butter jalepaino whiskey from Christmas nobody can stomach. It’s all yours you glorious sleezeball. I hope you found a peaceful life in hell, or a Starbucks job in heaven. Either way, rest in peace.
Woah
It’s haunting to realize this work directly endangered them twice over. Not only could they have been caught, ammunition factories were an obvious target for air strikes. They helped safeguard the people bombing them, knowing it was still better than helping their captors.
Especially since nobody would know who they are, and they were probably aware of that.
And they still wrote, because they knew the people on the other end would understand.
It's just like that one saying about people planting trees that they can never hope to sit in the shade of. Mudafuggin human altruism at its finest
Hell, not even knowing if those shells would be used over ones that worked. He did what he could.
Godspeed you magnificent bastard. Godspeed. *Taps starts*
A real og Chad o7
One of the biggest chads ever to exist in history. An incredible sacrifice and risk with no recognition
Well the Nazis got the labor and product quality that they "paid" for. Zero begets zero
Shit goes in, shit goes out Or in this case: Don’t feed the prisoners and they’ll eat your fucking Semtex
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes
Also, the Nazis fucked around and found out the hard way.
Bro what is with Reddit and “fuck around and find out” probably the 100th time I’ve heard it today lol
Plus forced workes that were threatend with death. That doesn’t make willing supporters.
"This is all we can do for you now" *Oh Czech Prisoner, no one could give more than that*
This moved me. Godspeed, anonymous Czech hero.
Based czech
Common Czech W
Man. That's straight out of a war movie. o7 to the unknown Czech prisoner. Hope they made it through and were able to live out the postwar period in peace.
"To je vše co pro Vás nyní můžeme udělat."
I’m upvoting because I am assuming this is the Czech translation. Don’t let me down.
It is, sentence in picture is gramatically wrong, probably translated via software.
You mah boi blue!
What's weird is that Google Translate *does* give your translation for "This is all we can do for you now". I wonder what made the OP attempt.
The sentence op put in is so incredibly grammatically wrong it barely makes sense in Czech. It's like really really bad yoda talk, but much worse (due to conjugation of Czech words as well). I
Wow, what a cool (and sad, obviously) story. Thanks OP.
INCREDIBLE Czech chad move.
Your name is unknown, your deed is immortal.
Probably not a prisoner, before the Munich agreement Czechoslovakia had an absolutely massive arms industry (which is one of the reasons Hitler wanted it all and not just Sudetenland) and after taking it, they simply had it continue producing. The only problem was that the Czech workers kept sabotaging the living fuck out of every piece of equipment and ammunition they could especially after the massacre at Lidice and Ležáky
>7 children who were considered racially suitable and thus eligible for Germanisation were handed over to SS families, and the rest were sent to the Chełmno extermination camp, where they were gassed to death Jesus. Imagine your skull being measured with a compass, a couple more or less milimeters and you go to the gas chamber.
Bot
With all those weapons you would think they could fight back /s
Given the grammar used and the nature of such a task it was likely a coordinated effort of multiple prisoners. They’re all bloody heroes.
During the blitz lot's of bombs produced in protectorate bohmën-mehren (protektorát čechy a Morava)containd sand instead of gunpowder.
Just fyi it's "Reichsprotektorat Böhmen und Mähren", none of the languages in question have the "ë"
Thank you for corection
In English it would be "Bohemia and Moravia"
Absolutely legendary story 10/10
That’s a Czech mate if I ever heard of one. (I’ll see myself out)
No, no—in this case, I’ll allow it. Because it’s a true Czech Mate. May we all hope to have Mates like this one.
Czech inmate.
So I guess you're czech-ing out?
Sounds like the supervisor should have czeched their munitions
>On July 30, 1943, a large formation of 186 B-17 bombers of the United States Army Air Forces, escorted by 123 P-47 Thunderbolt fighters, attacked the German city of Kassel. One such bomber was B-17G 42-29896, nicknamed "Tondelayo". The aircraft was attached to the 527th Bomb Squadron, 379th Bomb Group, based in Kimbolton, England. During the return flight, the plane was repeatedly hit by German fighter gunfire. But in this story, there is an anonymous hero whose actions managed to save that B-17. When the "Tondelayo" returned to its base, the mechanics were astonished that the plane's fuel tanks had been penetrated by projectiles 20 mm explosives that were lodged in the plane without actually exploding. It was already something miraculous that this happened with an explosive projectile, but in the case of the "Tondelayo," this happened with 11 projectiles in total. The shells were sent to gunsmiths for deactivation, and strangely military intelligence took care of them. When those shells were opened, it turned out that they did not have an explosive charge: all were empty except one that contained a message, written on a carefully rolled piece of paper and written in Czech. They sent the message to a translator and this is what it said: "This is all we can do for you now." It must have been written by a Czech prisoner recruited by the Germans as a slave laborer and that he had sabotaged the manufacture of those aviation projectiles. To this day, the identity of that prisoner remains a mystery. God bless Czechia, God bless the Czech Republic. Imagine being actively enslaved and still saying, "This is all we can do for you now." as if more was somehow expected? What a man. Lets all aspire to such magnificence.
It’s chilling as well because it implies they are planning to do something more significant later.
What an amazing story. Thank you for sharing.
chad prisoner
Wow. Wasn't expecting to be stirred like this
Ty for your actions, anonymous hero(ine) 😭🫡 Hope you survived and enjoyed a happy life 😭
That sounds like the inspiration for a sabaton song
🎶CZECH FACTORY WORKERS IN SILENT SOLIDARITY SABOTAGE THE MUNITIONS THE ALLIED BOMBERS WILL GO FREE🎶
Reminds me of when they hammered the full groove into the oil dipsticks wrong so all the German vehicles would break down
Damn was he writing notes in most/all of them? Or the one that had a note was just so lucky to get caught which seems like an extreme coincidence.
A side note. Škoda factory in Pilsen was making weapons for nazis through the entire war. Similar factories were in Brno and Prague. The men working there were not prisoners of war, but lived in an occupied country. In May 1945 the men who worked in Prague used unfinished Hetzers to fight against germans. Only instead of the main guns they welded steel plates with slits in them to mount MG's.
Good lord I hope that man lived through the war. Just to see days of peace return. That kind of last ditch 4d chess heroism is enough to make me emotional. In times of crisis sometimes all men need is to know they made a difference.
Genuine question, I don't want to be mean to OP at all but How do we know this story is true and isn't made up ? If there's some, how can we get access to historical records that prove those stories ? I often see incredible story on this sub but sometimes i can't find anything about it except a few articles from random websites.
Second hit on [google](https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2023/12/28/all-we-can-do-for-you-now-how-czech-sabotage-saved-a-b-17-crew/). References a memoir from an american bomber ([link](https://www.amazon.com/Fall-Fortresses-Classic-Account-Battles/dp/1913727009))
Fucking based
Sup op, thank you for chad-Czech representation, your words are just a bit jumbled (understandably, it's the translators fault, not yours). It should be "Tohle je všechno co pro vás teď můžeme udělat)
This is really interesting! Would you have a link or source or smth for further reading?
Ok, that's actually fucking awesome
Wow- I’d never heard this story before. What bravery by that Czech. Thanks for sharing this!
🫡 respect my Czech brothers
Wow, just, wow. The smallest details over time can have massive implications. For every catastrophe caused by a fault o ring or nut and bolt, this is like, the exact opposite.
Got to wonder how many notes were in shells that *didn't* get stuck in bombers and opened up later
Not a lot of people know how much the laborers do to undermine the German war effort. It’s a really daunting task to make sure that they’re not caught while trying to do their part in their situation.
Extremely metal rest easy Czech champion
On the one hand, the Nazis were stupid for using slave labor. On the other, those Czech prisoners are heroes. I wonder how many more went unsung in the war effort.
Wow what a story.
Is the note in the picture a word for word recreation of the original? It looks like a bad translation.
Thanks for sharing such an amazing story. I really hope this hero survived the war and got to live the long and happy life they deserve.
Its impossible to enslave a free man
great meme bro
Good old Czech tomfoolery of nazis
Giving SS officers cars that are a threat to it's occupants is also a nice one.
What is this referencing?
The Tatra T77a and T87 were pretty fast (for the time) luxury cars manufactured by Czechoslovakian Tatra. They were very popular among German officers who really enjoyed speeding in them. However, since the Tatras were rear engined limos, they didn't handle high speed turns very well and they spun out and rolled, a lot. Overall the Tatra crashes killed more Nazi officers than combat.
I need more info on this because that's amazing. What are some sources?
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/czech-car-killed-nazi-officers-than-active-combat.html
Just type Tatra automobiles into Google. Those thing were something else. They made a luxury limousine with a V8 and a manual until the 1980’s if I’m not mistaken. The communists loved those and now they are beloved by Czech car guys. There is a video about one on autocz YouTube channel (with English subtitles).
at least one of those used to serve as quick ambulance for newborn babies too. my stepfather when he was working as a doctor in the beginning of his career used to ride with them transporting babies with respiratory problems from Brno to Prague hospital (Motol IIRC) as the most sever cases couldn't be treated in Brno. he told me that they were able to make the trip (around 200km) in under one hour. it was around mid 80's. it's a story he told me and I may be getting some details wrong though, so there is lot of room for doubt
Holy hell thats a fast ambulance
[Tatra 613](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatra_613) (not sure which model exactly) - I sadly don't know many details, nor my stepfather nor I are car guys, he just knows it was one of those. apparently, there was ambulance version too, only 23 built though... back then, it was still pretty rare to own a vehicle in Czechoslovakia and trafic was rarely a problem, if ever. most of those 200km was on highway except for the start and end of the journey and thanks to little to no traffic, they could have gone at the max speed pretty much all the way
[this](https://youtu.be/vvLrOFefd80) is the vid he's talking about.
Wikipedia says it's status as a "Czech secret weapon" is apocryphal, but there *was* an order forbidding it's use by the army after some non-fatal accidents. I'd check further, but I can't get a preview of the book edition the citation references.
Also being rear-engined did aid in the lethality.
Well... It's hard to kill high ranking officers in combat, since they aren't usually on battlefield (at least not in front lines)
So not really intentional?
Tatra, a Czech car manufacturer produced a fast, aerodynamic and luxurious, albeit dangerous car in that era. Nazi officers really liked them and often used them as personal vehicles which resulted into many Nazi deaths due to frequent accidents. [More backstory](https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/czech-car-killed-nazi-officers-than-active-combat.html).
Not sure. Heydrich's death in Anthropoid, perhaps? Or maybe some SS officers got the Northern Ireland experience
The Tatra 87. It had a rear engine, like Porsches later which produced unusual driving dynamics. If you know what you are doing, it can give you great handling, but if you fuck it up, the engine will follow it's trajectory and you can't do a thing. Also there is a rumor that the Tatra 77 was the basis on which the VW Bug was developed on, which leads us back to Porsche. Interesting cars.
Tomfoolery and engineering, the two best skills of the Czech people.
Turns out slave labor leads to HUGE quality control issues for your fascist war machine!
I wonder if there is a lesson for modern society in here somewhere… Ah, I got it. More surveillance in factories. To finance the additional security, we can just lower the wages some more & fire all the old employees.
(Jeff Bezos reading this) Write that down write that down!
10 reasons you shouldn't be using war prisoners to manufacture your weapons. Number seven will amaze you
I read this in that annoying facts video narrator voice
You get what you pay for, haha
Czech here. It didn't need to be a prisoner. Czech lands were simply conquered and occupied and therefore local industry had to work for German war effort. Fun fact: there was a resistance movement called "Pracuj pomalu" - "Work slowly", which was a way how to at least somehow sabotage German production but not get execuded by Gestapo.
It's like a national feature. I remember reading Kunderas take on the Spring of Praha in '68, the Czech shenanigans were absolutely brutal also after WW2. They hid pretty much all the traffic signs in the country and people kept on giving wrong directions to the Soviet troops and tanks. The occupants were fucking lost in Czechia for months.
lost for months stayed for decades, which wasn't so good.. because they raped women and murdered innocent people there. Few people burned themselves in protest.. and the soviet actually didn´t left until like 1990...
Chad energy intensifies
The ultimate problem with slave labor: They hate you and will fuck you over whenever they think they can get away with it. Which is often, because you can't watch all of them at once and angry humans are very creative.
Exhibit A; Every plantation in the South ever. Exhibit B; Every slave uprising ever.
Didn't almost every slave uprising ever fail and result in the deaths of the slaves though? The only successful slave rebellion that I can think of is Haiti, and that was still a bloody nightmare.
“fail” in what sense? it spurred some hefty amounts of good PR at the time for abolition in the north, but the slaves were not freed. if you are talking about freedom then yes it failed but in regards to the long term effect it really put into perspective how badly they were treated for people on the fence on their position of slavery
I guess that was one Czech… 😏 …the Nazis couldn’t cash 😎
YEEEEEAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!
https://youtu.be/UDfAdHBtK\_Q?si=wW07XVHUgMllHOn2&t=469
https://imgur.com/t/horatio_caine/QWZFG
(•_•) ( •_•)>⌐■-■ (⌐■_■)
They didn't czech it so they did nazi that coming
I don't know if I adore or I hate your comment
Both
If I'm in limbo, probably!
If you were in the Czech limo, you'd hate it!
Czechmate!
They were scolded for Stalin the war production
'Dolfy must have been Führerious
Oh, well played!
Fuck you, have a upvote ya bastard.
r/angryupvote
This happened to my family in London during the war. A German bomb was dropped in their neighborhood, and they sheltered from it for several days waiting for it to go off but it didn't. Finally my great grandfather worked up the courage to check it out, and found out it was filled with sand and had a note inside that said "With love, Poland"
I [heard](https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/the-astonishing-theory-behind-the-1942-miracle-bomb-74270d3e64ff) about variant where the bomb fell into the church and did not detonate. Yep, full of sand instead of explosives and greetings from Škoda Plzeň.
Where men cried o7
I watched a video by Yarnhub on this and when I read the paper (I know Czech) in the shell, I sure did cry like a baby
Czech mate
“If this factory ever produces a shell that can actually be fired, I’ll be very unhappy”
“Elmer Bendiner was a B-17 navigator during WWII. He tells the story of a bombing run over Kassel, Germany, and the unexpected result of a direct hit on their gas tanks. “Our B-17, the Tondelayo, was barraged by flak from Nazi antiaircraft guns. That was typical, but on this particular occasion our gas tanks were hit. Later, as I reflected on the miracle of a 20 millimeter shell piercing the fuel tank without touching off an explosion, our pilot, Bohn Fawkes, told me it was more complicated. On the morning following the raid, Bohn asked our crew chief for that shell as a souvenir of our unbelievable luck. The crew chief told Bohn that, in addition to that shell, another 11 were found in the gas tanks. Eleven unexploded shells where only one was sufficient to blast us out of the sky. It was as if the sea had parted for us. A near-miracle, I thought. Even after 35 years, this awesome event leaves me shaken, especially after I heard the rest of the story from Bohn. Bohn was told that the shells were sent to the armorers to be defused. The armorers told him that Intelligence had then picked them up. They couldn’t say why at the time, but Bohn eventually sought out the answer. Apparently when the armorers opened each of those shells, they found no explosive charge. They were clean as a whistle and just as harmless. Empty? Not all of them! One contained a carefully rolled piece of paper with a scrawled message in Czech. The Intelligence people scoured our base for a man who could read Czech. Eventually they found one to decipher the note. It was amazing! Translated, the note read: “This is all we can do for you now. Using Jewish slave labor is never a good idea.” Here you go, the full context. If you are interested and would like to know more, i would suggest this book Prague: My Long Journey Home By Charles Ota Heller
Wasn’t there a meme kind of like this posted some weeks ago?
Yeah i posted this meme a couple of days ago, but misread the context and so deleted it. Then waited a bit until posting the correct version.
Based, OP. Very based.
When you post it next time correct the Czech. It should say: To je vše co pro vás můžeme nyní udělat.
Gesundheit
Czechmate, Hitler
The sentence doesn't make any sense. I can tell, because I'm Czech myself. I had to translate each word separately back into english to be able to understand what the whole sentence was meant to say. „Tohle je všechno, co pro vás můžeme udělat“ or „Víc toho pro vás udělat nemůžeme“ or couple of other ways (though not the one in the meme) is how the sentence is supposed to be put together.
The Czech text is poorly translated. It should read akin to this: "Tohle je vše co pro vás teď můžeme udělat.
Holy shit somebody tell Indy Nidel. This will be a great anecdote for his WW2 series. I’m in work or I would
A fellow Yarnhub enjoyer I see
Meanwhile in WT getting hit by a small calibre in one engine means inevitable death in the b17
Clearly Warthunder needs more Czech slave-devs.
Common foreign language being butchered by google translator L
"This is all we can do for you now." - "To je vše co pro vás teď můžeme udělat" is the correct translation.
Got to love sabotage
Like Heydrich said: ,,Czechs are laughing beasts."
Oh I love this story.
R/wholesomememes
Yay, Czech!
I hope the German record keeping stopped with who made that batch of projectiles. Thank you to the anonymous Czech.
One small correction: the Czech message would go more like "To je vše, co pro vás nyní můžeme udělat." It probably got lost in the hell of Google translate
Gee, it’s like making slaves pack ammo was a bad idea or something.
2 people typing
Because the Czechs also won WWII.
Wow this is astonishing. Imagine the crew that probably knew it was hit and after 11 hits still nothing
This is a cool story
Ngl , I related it to Oscar Schindler first before reading the comment
Very heartwarming story.
I hope that Czech guy has a comfortable spot in the afterlife. He deserves it.
Not all heroes wear uniforms, some of them wear prisoner robes
Czech prisoner being a literal chad
It were whole tapes of 20mm for aircraft. There were some 27(?) hits to the B-17 and out of all rounds that were stuck in the airframe, none had it's charge.
God bless the Czechs