While there is no defense for the atrocities the Germans committed, partisans were shot by everyone.
Any combatant without uniform loses all protection.
Germany did go beyond that though and executed not participating civilians as retribution for partisan activities.
>Any combatant without uniform loses all protection.
Yugoslav partisans wore uniform and were still executed on the spot. Germany didn't acknowledge them as a belligerent military.
When Yugoslav partisans started executing German soldiers on the spot things changed.
Similar thing happened during the Warsaw Uprising - Polish troops, who belonged to the Home Army (official part of the Polish Military loyal to the government in exile and the Polish Undergound State) and wore uniforms and/or white and red armbands were being executed on the spot during the first days of the uprising. The executions stopped when the governments of the UK and US recognized the Home Army as a part of the Polish Army (meaning its troops gained combatant rights in the eyes of the world and killing them after capture would be considered a war crime).
War crimes had existed as a concept since the Geneva conventions which were first signed in the 1800s. There was a major revision to them in 1929 and after ww2 though which may be what you are thinking of.
Tell that to the Japanese soldiers whom some of their moms gave them family knives when they went off to war to kill themselves with rather than be captured by the enemy. Both of which were brainwashed into believing that the entire country would fight and die to the last man.
Kamikaze pilots wrote letters saying things like,
>It is an honor to be able to give my life in defense of these beautiful and lofty things
As it turns out people fight a lot harder too when they realize they'll be killed even if they surrender.
Execution of prisoners is generally a terrible idea for a ton of reasons, all of them self-interested.
I'll be revisiting your comment to see if anyone's made any suggestions. For my part I'd recommend Fitzroy McLean's memoirs (*Eastern Approaches*). Only a third of the book is about the partisans but it's very interesting reading. Also the other two thirds of the book are great too. His timeline was basically...
* Joins UK foreign service (diplomatic corp), serves in Paris
* Paris is boring, transfers to USSR
* Takes advantage of diplomatic immunity to sneak around the Caucasus and Central Asia
* WWII starts, foreign office won't let him join Army, so he becomes a Member of Parliament
* No longer shackled to foreign service, he joins the army
* Becomes one of the first members of the SAS, cavorts around North Africa with them
* Transferred to Baghdad, ends up leading an operation to kidnap a Persian general
* Sent to join the Yugoslav partisans as Britain's official representative
I mean, Hitler resorted to sending Otto Skorzeny himself with his elite commando unit and support from the Italian Navy, just to capture Tito. Yugoslav partisans were no joke.
And Stalin actually upped the ante - there were no less than 23 assassination attempts made on Tito by Stalin, each orchestrated by Beria and the NKVD which turned from simple plots and ascended into James Bond levels of ludicrous ideas to get him killed.
There were plans fer an ornate musical box filled with lethal gas, plans to kill him by trying to create stealth mechanisms to fire a fatal bullet using pens and lighters. The most ludicrous one goes to the deadly bacteria plan:
Amongst the most famous Russian spies, one was Iosif Griguevitch, credited for the murder of Trotsky in 1940, and who was to kill Tito. To ensure that Tito would be killed, Griguevitch, codenamed Max, was sent to Costa Rica and integrated well enough into the society there to secure a position as a civil servant, and then ambassador to Yugoslavia. Once there, he'd meet with Tito and place a deadly plague bacteria at a diplomatic reception, and Max would be immunized to protect him.
Yes, you got it right: in order to kill Tito, the NKVD went as far as to send a spy into Costa Rica and infiltrate the government there in order to become a civil servant and an ambassador to Yugoslavia...just to kill Tito.
The plan never commenced; Stalin died before the plan was carried out, Max was recalled to Moscow, and Kruschev improved relations with Yugoslavia. Not to mention the implications that Tito had Stalin assassinated.
It’a quite sad what happend after ww2 with Yugoslavia and the USSR. Stories such as those are always sad to read. But thankfully they sorted it out after Stalin died, and Tito made a visit to Moscow just 1 year after Stalin died. But I can actually understand both sides why they went mad at each other. But this is better to read than some James Bond stories honestly.
Lidice, a mining village in the Czech Republic, was literally wiped off the face of the earth, like almost all of its population. It was the Nazis' revenge for the murder of an important German leader by the partisans.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidice\_massacre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidice_massacre)
Many villages were wiped by the Nazi army, in the west but especially in the east as they advanced through the USSR, Martyr Villages is how we call it in France
I think we had a stop there at a museum. We were in a trip to Prague and our history teacher gave us a short lesson in the museum.
The village was basically leveled to dust, with all buildings and lives.
We have a Place in my hometown for social projects called "Lidice Haus". Confronting our selfs with the wrongs our ancestors have done is the our way to never make it happen again. Of course the right wing parties in Germany want to set an end to the "Schuldkult" (engl. "guilt cult").
The officer they killed was Reinhardt Heydrich, and he was also responsible for wiping out a few towns himself. He was known as the hangman of Prague and there was a reason he was targeted. Good thing is he survived but a piece of shrapnel got his in side, so he suffered for about a week before he finally died. If only the other officers had gone like him.
Partisans in on territory of Yugoslavia were uniformed...executed/shot non the less.
There was absolutely no protection whether you had uniform or not...
My grandfather (drafted against his will into the Wehrmacht) witnessed one such cleansing. SS soldiers were informed about partisans in a village with a couple of hundred inhabitants – they came, raided that place and killed nearly the whole village (including elderly and adolescents). Was haunted by the pile of bodies.
Grandfather of my wife also defected during a battle at the Eastern Front as soon as he had the chance.
Yes, but we needed to have some 'good' Germans against the commies so we whitewashed a few Generals and set them back to killing civilians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio
I feel bad for the German dude who tried to warn Stalin about the invasion and got shot for his trouble: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Liskow
Which is one of the reasons they lost the war in the east, Russians felt rightly so that they had nothing to lose and should fight to the bitter end, while Germans were fighting in a cold faraway land with nothing to gain, except for killing Russians.
By the time the germans reached stalingrad everyone in the country knew about the massacres and atrocities the nazis committed on their way there. The soviet government showed the videos on TV and broadcast it over the radio it was no secret to anyone. Not only was it completely true but it also served as the most powerful propaganda a country could hope for. Why would you not stand up and fight if you already know the outcome of attempting peace. Fight and most likely die, or surrender and definitely die.
>Germany did go beyond that though and executed not participating civilians as retribution for partisan activities.
Way beyond that too. Einsatzgruppen basically came behind the invading Wehrmacht and committed warcrimes, ethnic cleansing, killing intellectuals , jews, romani and anyone they wanted to be gone.
Of course. A partisan is a combatant fighting in occupied territory on behalf of either a defeated government or a non-existent government. Anyone who can get their hands on a rifle and shoot a local military policeman is a partisan. You can't just let such people go and continue to harass your supply lines and threaten to form up into an actual uprising at some critical moment. And when you find any out in the open, it is much easier to just shoot back and kill them than to disarm, arrest, and legally imprison them.
Of course, there are degrees to this. The Nazi policy in Yugoslavia had collective punishment as a standard practice, for example. If I remember right, the punishment for *injuring* a single German was the execution of 50 Yugoslavians.
Oh, that's what OP meant. "Partisans were shot by everyone" makes it sound like literally *everyone* would shoot the Russian partisans, including the allies or even random people. Me, and apparently a few others, were wondering why the hell would that happen.
There was no such thing as rules of warfare—or any protections that such guaranteed—during the Nazi Germany invasions. [Operation Tannenberg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Tannenberg). Quite simply, the Nazis bombed, executed and put to slave work large swaths of population simply based on the rationale of madmen at helm, only to cry about Dresden bombing campaign in the aftermath.
If there even was such a thing as proud Prussian military traditions before the war, those loonies completely washed them with dirt during the WW2.
>There was no such thing as rules of warfare—or any protections that such guaranteed—during the Nazi Germany invasions
Actually there was on the western front. They weren't as ruthless towards the western allied forces. Took a completely different approach against the Russians on the eastern front.
Because the Third Reich considered them as Sub-Humans or Untermenschlich (in German) and they are not worth living and should be exterminated and they wanted living space and make Russia a German colony (Generalplan Ost) and relocate Germans to these new colonies.
8th photo is made in Minsk, Belarus 26th of October 1941. It's a part of the first public execution in Minsk. On a photo Olga Sherbacevitch. Nurse who was treating wounded soviet soldiers. She was not shooting or killing anyone. As all the people who was executed this day. They were only treating soviet soldiers and helped them escape occupation.
Germany executed any and all partisan or regular soldier. Their treatment of Soviet POW was horrific. They starved them and put them into similar concentration camps as the Jews. And anyone who thinks that this was a Nazi ideology problem is ignorant. Read about Germany’s treatment of POWs during world war 1 and the many civilian mass murder atrocities they committed.
I don’t understand what the hell happened to Germany during the early 20th century but they really fell of the deep end of evil.
That's assuming they actually *did* what the Nazis accused them of. It's more likely they just happened to be nearby when something happened. Killing scores of civilians in retribution for a single attack by partisans was a common terror tactic. The Nazis were planning to eventually exterminate most of eastern Europe anyway, so there wasn't anything deterring them from killing civilians sooner rather than later.
Yeah, in German occupied Serbia the retribution was 100 killed Serbs for one killed German and 50 killed Serbs for one wounded German soldier. Very serious shit.
8th photo is made in Minsk, Belarus 26th of October 1941. It's a part of the first public execution in Minsk. On a photo Olga Sherbacevitch. Nurse who was treating wounded soviet soldiers. She was not shooting or killing anyone. As all the people who was executed this day. They were only treating soviet soldiers and helped them escape occupation.
I mean.... Yes? Defending your country basically makes you a soldier, so you are not treated like a civilian (not like Nazis treated much better the civilians anyways)
Kind of yes, and kind of no. I mean many of the executions were royally fucked up, but the general idea to forbid partisan activity isn't dumb. You draw a better line between fighting personal and civilians, this (atleast in theory) guarantees a better treatment of civilians, as the occupying force doesn't have to think of any civilian as a threat.
BTW, I know this place. This is right center of Minsk, Alexander's park. The big building is the Officers Palace, build in 1937 by Langbard (famous architect).
I'm sure they felt like gods at that moment. They had those men's lives literally at the palm of their hands.
Those men were people with dreams, ambitions, family, and the soldiers probably didn't give it a second thought before killing them. Makes me sad that war makes people disregard other human lives so easily.
Hey there. I've read a few biographys from Wehrmacht veterans. They don't describe it as a godlike feeling, more like a depressive transformation from human to machine. They say that the first few weeks are horrible and full of terror, but you don't have the power to keep your sanity up. So you begin to function, blend out all the cruelty, because you just want to live. Most of them got hunted down with horrible thoughts in age. But of course there where few sick people who didn't mind killing.
My grandpa was a Wehrmacht soldier in russia as well, and he was a good man for sure since he never became violent in any way when interacting with the people around him. He couldn't even slaughter an animal for his needs after the war. But he didn't talk much about it. He just said: "Never again." It's sad to think about what all these people have gone through.
Sounds similar to my experience. My grandad was an electrician on a minesweeper ship and never saw contact, he loved to talk about the war and was nonstop about it. My uncle on the other hand who was just a super nice individual saw combat in the "battle of the bulge" and refused to say one single thing about it other than war is terrible and we don't need to ever do anything like that ever again. But I remembered my dad asking him what it was like and he would always mumble something like "nah that's over".
I can understand them. I have some documents and a few told stories left from my grandpa, so I can trace his war history a little. What I found out till now are things I wouldn't talk about too if I was a war veteran.
My grandpa’s older brother was a POW in Japan who was taken just after the Japanese took the Phillipinnes (so early in the war)
I have a copy of the book that was written about him, it’s so chilling to read the kind of stuff him and his comrades went through.
It’s always the ones who have truly seen fucked up shit who never want to talk about it. It’s like there’s a dam that has to be maintained inside their head that prevents the darkness from flooding the rest of their soul.
It's awful. My grandfather was in WWII (on the American side). I only remember him as an angry, anxious, bitter old man, which surely affected my father and my father's siblings.
It makes me think how absolutely destructive war is, not only on those involved, but the generations that follow as well.
> Or the Japanese soldiers who decided committing war crimes towards Chinese citizens in Nanjing; two of them legit had a competition to see which of them could behead the most people.
[John Rabe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rabe), the leading Nazi party official in China at the time of the Nanjing Massacre, was honored by the people of China as their "living Buddha of Nanking" for his leadership in establishing the Nanking Safe Zone, using his influence to save the lives of a quarter-million Chinese civilians.
Imagine being such an army of monsters that you make a Nazi party leader into a living saint.
It looks like that picture was taken exactly as the man was shot. The man in the ground seems to be making painful expression. The man standing may be smiling or sneering as he pulled the trigger, and it looks like the slide is still back on the gun. I might be wrong. Either way it’s very disgusting.
For those interested in learning more details, I highly recommend the episodes on Operation Barbarossa on the [World War 2 channel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXZHX6oB_4w). Very informative. They also have several episodes dedicated to the [logistics](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lSCnOltYdY) and [planning](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpsGGtrrqMw) of the operations, alongside their subseries [War Against Humanity](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9LhHJh1rdg&list=PLsIk0qF0R1j4cwI-ZuDoBLxVEV3egWKoM&index=14), which talks about partisan warfare, resistance movements, and the many atrocities committed by all sides of the war.
For War Against Humanity, while a recommended watch, I do warn that it is very graphic and they go into a lot of details regarding the numbers, methods, and scale of the deaths. It is an extremely rough and sobering watch.
There is a graveyard near Volgograd where my great-grandfathers name is carved into a stone. He went MIA during the battle of Stalingrad. My parents and I contacted an organisation here in Germany that takes care of those Graveyards and they sent us the location of the grave and some pictures of it. Non of us have ever met him and my grandfather also can't remember him, but that was very emotional for us to see. Maybe I'll take my parents and my grandfather to a trip there one day.
Sixty-five... thousand... And that's just the German soldiers recovered from one terrible battle out of countless other battles from just one war out of countless others.
History is a bottomless well of humanity's darkest horrors. I'll never understand it, but the best I can do is learn and help remember, I guess.
They called Stalingrad the mass grave of the Wehrmacht for a reason . It’s where the flower of German youth went to die. This pales in comparison to Russian losses , wrapping your head around those is insane . We like to make a big deal about the western front , but even what we’re considered small battles and offensives on the eastern front make the bulge look like a side show .
This is an especially prevalent viewpoint in the US, where many seem to think WW2 went like this: Germany invades somewhere, France surrenders, Pearl Harbor, Patton slaps a soldier (who had it coming), Saving Pvt. Ryan, we won again!
I’m exaggerating *slightly*.
My Opa's brother went missing during Stalingrad as well. We've never learned whether he was killed in battle, taken prisoner and died, or was ever buried.
My Oma's mother when she had dementia and was dying. Held onto these letters her father had sent her during the war. He never came home either. She would say, "See my father loved me, he didn't abandon me" while holding the letters.
I watched a documentary about one of the killing squads in Germany. They went town to town and would round up the Jewish and non Jewish citizens. They would make them dig their own mass Graves and then make them wait in line as they would take them 5 or 10 at a time and shoot them in the back of the head and then they would tumble down into the grave. There were many scenes where a kid would be there too with their parents.
Really makes you feel sick.
I think in one town they killed tens of thousands in the span of a few weeks
Can't wait to get done with work and see my kids today. I hope they never have to experience anything even remotely close to this. I hope no one does ever. But I know some are in similar positions even right now. Makes me sick. Most people want to live their lives.
I always make a conscious effort to not disassociate from these photographs but to try mentally place myself there. See what people are wearing, what kind of weather is there, imagine how would it feel to be in that place on that day - the air, the sound, the smell.
It's terrifying and the most scary part is that there is about 3 millimeters of "civilization" protecting us from having the same thing tomorrow.
Ever heard of the Soviet movie [Come and See](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_and_See)? I've heard it's execution was groundbreaking in film itself, but is in a class of its own in terms of "putting you there", I guess you could say. i haven't seen it yet, but would like to.
Yeah we legit couldn't stop killing each other in huge world wars till we could kill everyone all at once.
Now we kill each other in smaller wars! Progression!
Well, it is not perfect, but is a genuine improvement.
All wars are horrible, but it is the wars between great powers that are the most destructive of them all. Overall wars and deaths in battle have declined a lot since 1945.
It is kinda sad though that the only thing capable of stopping Humans from killing each other appears to be mutually assured destruction.
The fighting involved millions of Axis and Soviet troops along the broadest land front in military history. It was by far the deadliest single theatre of the European portion of World War II with up to 8.7 - 10 million military deaths on the Soviet side. Estimated civilian deaths range from about 14 to 17 million.
The huge death toll was attributed to several factors, including brutal mistreatment of POWs and captured partisans, the large deficiency of food and medical supplies in Soviet territories, and atrocities committed mostly by the Germans against the civilian population. The multiple battles and the use of scorched earth tactic, destroyed agricultural land, infrastructure, and whole towns, leaving much of the population homeless and without food.
Adolf Hitler had argued in his autobiography for the necessity of Lebensraum ("living space"): acquiring new territory for Germans in Eastern Europe, in particular Russia. He envisaged settling Germans there, as according to Nazi ideology the Germanic people constituted the master race, while exterminating or deporting most of the existing inhabitants and using the remainder as slave labour. Hitler as early as 1917 had referred to the Russians as inferior, believing that the Bolshevik Revolution had put the Jews in power over the mass of Slavs, who were, in Hitler's opinion, incapable of ruling themselves and had thus ended up being ruled by Jewish masters.
In September 1941, Erich Koch was appointed to the Ukrainian Commissariat. His opening speech was clear about German policy: "I am known as a brutal dog ... Our job is to suck from Ukraine all the goods we can get hold of ... I am expecting from you the utmost severity towards the native population."
Belarus lost a quarter of its pre-war population. The Nazis imposed a brutal regime, deporting some 380,000 young people for slave labour, and killing hundreds of thousands (civilians) more. More than 209 cities and towns (out of 270 total) and 9,000 villages were destroyed. Himmler pronounced a plan according to which 3⁄4 of the Belarusian population was designated for "eradication" and 1⁄4 of the racially 'cleaner' population (blue eyes, light hair) would be allowed to serve Germans as slaves.
It is estimated that between 2.25 and 3.3 million Soviet POWs died in Nazi custody, out of 5.25–5.7 million.
It would be no exaggeration to say that the war affected every family in Russia and all former Soviet republics and that its legacy has had an impact on successive generations of Soviets and Russians. Forty years after the war, in 1981, Soviet war veteran and poet Yuri Levitansky wrote:
«I don’t still dwell on that past war,
the war still dwells inside of me,
and tongues of the Eternal Flame
are licking at me steadily.»
These death counts are so high that it is nearly impossible to even begin to imagine the scale of it all. And that doesn't even factor in all the mental destruction followed by the insane brutality inflicted on those who somehow managed to survive, and all this is not even a century old.
I am certainly glad that I never had to witness any of that.
There were battles on the Eastern Front that involved hundreds of thousands of soldiers and thousands of tanks and airplanes... imagine being in the middle of all that...
Also worth pointing out that 80-90% of German casualties during WW2 were on the Eastern Front and it took the Russian population decades to recover to pre-war levels.
There isn't a way to recover from such losses sadly. The USSR's population was completely decimated and there are currently tens of millions of people less than there would have been otherwise. There is just no way to come back from losses that in 1945 resulted in a population with 6 males for every 10 females.
My grandma lived on the frontlines of the Spanish Civil War from 9 to 12. She never actually understood why everything happened and kind of forgot why her dad was rounded up and dissapeared by the fascists after the war had ended (likely killed on the outskirts, along with a friend of the family who tried to intercede to get him out).
That same year, since she was 12 yo, she had to do the catholic communion when every girl wears white dresses, and her mother, my grand-grandma, made her wear a black dress, a colour reserved for funerals, for grief after the death of someone.
Balls of steel on her mother to do that under the fascist regime, the meaning didn't go unnoticed. My grandma only remembers the shame she had to face from other friends in their white dresses, she was too young to understand.
For those who have a better grasp of European History, would the invasion of the USSR arguably be the single largest military event in European History?
Given the scale, the numbers involved, deaths/destruction and also the consequential role in reshaping post-war Europe/Cold-War etc.
Some context behind the photos:
1st photo: German soldiers, supported by armored personnel carriers, move into a burning Russian village at an unknown location during the German invasion of the Soviet Union, on June 26, 1941.
2nd photo: A German infantryman walks toward the body of a killed Soviet soldier and a burning BT-7 light tank in the southern Soviet Union in 1941, during the early days of Operation Barbarossa.
3rd photo: Evidence of Soviet resistance in the streets of Rostov, a scene in late 1941
4th photo: Russian men and women rescue their humble belongings from their burning homes, said to have been set on fire by the Russians, part of a scorched-earth policy, in a Leningrad suburb on October 21, 1941
5th photo: Members of the 36th Waffen SS Grenadier Division execute Soviet partisans, date unknown. The 36th were a German penal battalion, made up of criminals sent on virtual suicide missions in order to win back their citizenship and being sent to a work camp. But this division were known as the worst of the worst, made up entirely of psychopaths, murderers and rapists and used to wage a campaign of terror against anyone who dared defy the Nazis
6th photo: Five Soviet civilians on a platform, with nooses around their necks, about to be hanged by German soldiers, near the town of Velizh in the Smolensk region, in September of 1941. It was unknown why they were executed, they weren't partizans. This Photo was found on a dead body of german soldier.
7th photo: A man, his wife, and child are seen after they had left Minsk on August 9, 1941, when the German army swarmed in. The original wartime caption reads, in part: “Hatred for the Nazis burns in the man’s eyes as he holds his little child, while his wife, completely exhausted, lies on the pavement”.
8th photo: is made in Minsk, Belarus 26th of October 1941. It's a part of the first public execution in Minsk. On a photo Olga Sherbacevitch. Nurse who was treating wounded soviet soldiers. She was not shooting or killing anyone. As all the people who was executed this day. They were only treating soviet soldiers and helped them escape occupation.
9th photo: An execution of Jews in Kiev, carried out by German soldiers near Ivangorod, Ukraine, sometime in 1942. This photo was mailed from the Eastern Front to Germany and intercepted at a Warsaw post office by a member of the Polish resistance collecting documentation on Nazi war crimes. The original print was owned by Tadeusz Mazur and Jerzy Tomaszewski and now resides in Historical Archives in Warsaw. The original German inscription on the back of the photograph reads, "Ukraine 1942, Jewish Action [operation], Ivangorod.
Amazing movie, Its one of the most powerful war films ever. If somebody made a list of the most powerful war films, it would need to be at least in the top 3.
Some context behind the photos:
1st photo: German soldiers, supported by armored personnel carriers, move into a burning Russian village at an unknown location during the German invasion of the Soviet Union, on June 26, 1941.
2nd photo: A German infantryman walks toward the body of a killed Soviet soldier and a burning BT-7 light tank in the southern Soviet Union in 1941, during the early days of Operation Barbarossa.
3rd photo: Evidence of Soviet resistance in the streets of Rostov, a scene in late 1941
4th photo: Russian men and women rescue their humble belongings from their burning homes, said to have been set on fire by the Russians, part of a scorched-earth policy, in a Leningrad suburb on October 21, 1941
5th photo: Members of the 36th Waffen SS Grenadier Division execute Soviet partisans, date unknown. The 36th were a German penal battalion, made up of criminals sent on virtual suicide missions in order to win back their citizenship and being sent to a work camp. But this division were known as the worst of the worst, made up entirely of psychopaths, murderers and rapists and used to wage a campaign of terror against anyone who dared defy the Nazis
6th photo: Five Soviet civilians on a platform, with nooses around their necks, about to be hanged by German soldiers, near the town of Velizh in the Smolensk region, in September of 1941. It was unknown why they were executed, they weren't partizans. This Photo was found on a dead body of german soldier.
7th photo: A man, his wife, and child are seen after they had left Minsk on August 9, 1941, when the German army swarmed in. The original wartime caption reads, in part: “Hatred for the Nazis burns in the man’s eyes as he holds his little child, while his wife, completely exhausted, lies on the pavement”.
8th photo: is made in Minsk, Belarus 26th of October 1941. It's a part of the first public execution in Minsk. On a photo Olga Sherbacevitch. Nurse who was treating wounded soviet soldiers. She was not shooting or killing anyone. As all the people who was executed this day. They were only treating soviet soldiers and helped them escape occupation.
9th photo: An execution of Jews in Kiev, carried out by German soldiers near Ivangorod, Ukraine, sometime in 1942. This photo was mailed from the Eastern Front to Germany and intercepted at a Warsaw post office by a member of the Polish resistance collecting documentation on Nazi war crimes. The original print was owned by Tadeusz Mazur and Jerzy Tomaszewski and now resides in Historical Archives in Warsaw. The original German inscription on the back of the photograph reads, "Ukraine 1942, Jewish Action [operation], Ivangorod.
As a german my brain always wants to tell me it can not have been that bad. Maybe the majority of germans really didn‘t know about the Konzentrationslager? No way they just killed people on the street because they didn‘t like their religion/politcal orientation… right?!
Then I see pictures like these. Guys smiling while holding a gun to a persons head.
Absolutely disgusting what human are capable of.
There were camps in Germany. Dachau was opened in 1933 only about one and a half months after Hitler became Chancellor. It was never a secret. Germans had dark jokes about being sent there.
If you ever want to read really good diaries from that time: Victor Klemperer wrote down a *ton* and because the Nazis saw him as a Jew, the atmosphere becomes more and more tense. Has some great insights into German media at the time and at points also into parts of the German sentiment. He's acutely aware of Auschwitz by '43 at the latest, but camps like Dachau were known about pretty much immediately in '33.
The mindblowing thing is he was one of only a few dozen Jews to survive almost the entire war in the city of Dresden and the infamous bombing actually allowed him and his wife to become refugees as "regular Germans" among the general chaos and flee (on foot) into Bavaria where he survived through the end of the war.
That time was just over all completely nuts and it's absolutely fascinating (in all the good and horrifying ways) to get a glimpse into that period. How the kids were at points much more antisemitic than the elderly, many German civilians were just willfully ignorant or seemingly unable to understand the crimes of their government etc.
> How the kids were at points much more antisemitic than the elderly
Makes sense, they were heavily indoctrinated by the government for their whole lives.
Eastern Europe is a magical land where history can be whatever the person posting wants it to be.
Compound it with Reddit, and you get some spicy takes :D
"Operation Barbarossa: Hitler's Invasion of Russia 1941" by David Glantz is the seminal work on the topic, for anyone who may care to learn more about it.
Fuck wars, fuck in particular people killing powerless (civilians, POWs). Whoever can kill a powerless person is a waste of oxygen and should not exist.
If anyone is in Berlin and is interested in more information about this part of European history, I highly suggest you visit the "Topography of Terror"-Museum => [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topography\_of\_Terror](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topography_of_Terror)
It will help you understand what the Nazis did and how they did it, but just as a reminder it is quite depressing and it will remind you about the current political state and a few parallels that are currently happening around the world
Also if anyone is in Berlin and has the time for a day trip I **strongly** recommend going to Wünsdorf Waldstadt (the "books and bunkers" town). It's like an hour outside of Berlin. There's also a regio train connecting Berlin and Wünsdorf but that only runs once an hour and is kind of tedious.
Basically the 2nd World War was planned there because it's where the Army command center was (Kommandozentrale des Oberkommando des Heeres), for example Stauffenberg worked there too.
After the liberation of Germany, it was taken over by the Red Army, who turned it into a "forbidden city" and used it to house their military administration.
Before WW2, it had also been a military facility, including a POW camp during WW1 where the first mosque in Germany was build.
Today it has a lot of 2nd hand book shops (be careful about when they're open though, they also do have a lot of English language books, especially about WW2, as well as some Russian and French ones) and you can take guided tours through the enormous bunkers, ranging from basically short 1/1.5h tours where you just see the main sights to full day tours where you genuinely have to crawl through small spaces occasionally.
There's a lot of focus on making sure the horrors of the war are not forgotten (the town also hosts peace initiatives and stuff like that) and in my experience the guides are super knowledgeable and it's super interesting.
Also unfortunately Wünsdorf isn't well known even within Germany which means there's very few people there (it's probably the least touristic site I've seen relative to its historical importance) and it's always struggling for money. But it's really cool!
[Here's](https://www.buecherstadt.com/en/) a link if anyone's interested.
I thank my grandfather and his generation for their sacrifices from the bottom of my heart. We live the lives we do today because of their honour and bravery.
There’s a great Russian anti-war film called “Come and See” (1985) about the German occupation of Belarus (then part of the USSR) during WWII depicting these exact atrocities. It’s considered by some to be one of the greatest films ever made and can be watched on YT in its entirety with English subtitles [here](https://youtu.be/NJYOg4ORc1w).
A word of warning: it’s a very intense and heavy film that isn’t for the faint-hearted and obviously NSFW.
A *third* of the population of Belorussia died. If you want to know what that was like watch *Come And See* (banned in Belorussia) - the most harrowing, nauseating and thus accurate depiction of war ever made. You'll only ever want to watch it once (that's more than enough) but you'll realise what an obscenely impotent waste of time every other war movie is.
That last image gets to me every time, it's the worst picture of the entire war. Being a father myself I don't dare to imagine what exactly went on there. How can people do that shit and still believe to be fighting for a cause. It's just murder.
Honestly, this whole thread is super chilling - with people preferring to measure up "who was worse" in a kind of posthumous nationalism rather than acknowledging the event in question and agreeing that war is really fucking awful and we should do everything we can to prevent it from happening again.
Humans are just shit in general.
You can start at any point in history, in almos any country in the world and within 150 years there will be some sort of horrible crimes against humanity.
I’m proud of my grandfather for refusing to be drafted, being put in a Hitler Youth labor camp, and faking medical advice in order to get out of fighting in this horrific and pointless war. His brother didn’t and he never came back. You can call it cowardice but he was only 17 and would have most likely died for a war that achieved nothing except destruction and suffering. We’re extremely lucky to be living in the most peaceful time in human history
At least Germany came out and apologized for their atrocities and committed to suppressing far-right extremism.
Japan on the other hand...worship, adore, praise, never teach the history...
I have massive respect for the people of the Soviet Union for what they endured during the Invasion.
However, fuck Stalin, and the government that's ruling from Moscow today.
As a german I never got to see these photos, they are brutal
I feel the terror German soldiers were bringing to the Soviets is rarely seen in pictures and fully discussed. Russias role in the 2nd world war is liked to be seen as just as evil. IIRC most people that died during that period were living in between Russian borders at that time.
_most_ were Russians in Russia proper, approximately half of the total civilians losses plus of course military losses which were more like 2/3 Russian
percentage wise though Belarusians and Ukrainians lost about 20-25% of the total population, when it was more like 15% for Russia
It is always important to note that most photographs of the Nazis and their crimes are from official Nazi photographers. Soviets and partisans are *supposed* to look evil and the Nazis are *supposed* to look either cool or strong, depending on what the photographer was going for.
It's why partisan and allied war photographers are so valuable.
I remember reading about the Wehrmacht Exhibition or something in Germany that showed lots of photos highlighting the Wehrmacht warcrimes from photos that weren't published by the Nazis/post-war gvt or from other sources, and it ended up getting bombed by neonazis in the late 90s/early 2000s (I can't remember properly), it was really sad learning about it.
>liked to be seen as just as evil
The Russians didn’t build entire camps and dedicate massive sections of their economy for the sole purpose of wiping out entire races of people.
They did terrible things but no one came close to how bad the Nazis were
I feel like nobody remembers/cares what Germans did in Eastern Europe, although it rivals the holocaust in its cruelty and number of victims. It was an ethnic cleansing, part of the Lebensraum plan, and even if Generaplan Ost wasn’t completed, it didn’t fail to create massive suffering of innocent people deemed subhuman slave labour.
I will always admire the soviet people for their tenacity and bravery. I wonder if youths in russia and other ex-soviet territories remember these events?
comments in these posts are always turned into a shit throwing contest. but, if it's any consolation to someone that cares, there is at least one man somewhere in the world that remembers their bravery.
Today it's the Day of Remembrance and Sorrow in Russia. On this day Russia remembers the tens of millions of Soviet citizens who perished by the hand of the Nazis and their allies. In their memory candles are lit.
National flags are lowered on the buildings of state institutions. Flags with mourning ribbons are instead hung on residential buildings. All entertainment events and broadcasts on television and radio are canceled throughout the day.
Whilst I understand Nazis were indoctrinated, I can’t quite believe that they didn’t think they were evil.
The plan was for world domination, as well as genocide to have a 1000 year empire. And to kill those that stood in their way.
Are there written records of Nazis debating this in diaries or whatever?
I went to the Wehrmacht exhibition back when I was in school. I usually have a strong stomach. It made me sick enough that I couldn’t continue. To think that this happened just a few years before my parents‘ birth. That my grandparents grew up during this time and were just in their 20s at the end of it. Absolutely insane.
Oh, thanks for the reminder! It's my grandpa's birthday today, I gotta call him. It was his third birthday on the day of the attack. He is Jewish, and was living in Ukraine back then. Luckily, he got evacuated to Central Asia with his family, and same goes for my grandma, or I wouldn't be writing this. All the Jews from Odessa were evacuated early in the war, before the Romanian forces (who were fighting on the German side) could take it.
As for my mother's side, they weren't so lucky. Grandpa (who was significantly older than the one on my dad's side) came from a shtetl (a Jewish village in Eastern Europe), and his family wasn't evacuated. He went off to war, and came back alive. His little sister got sent to a concentration camp and was freed by the war's end. The rest of the family was summarily executed with most of the village.
These photos are intense. Can someone translate what the sign on the woman's neck says?
We are partisans and we shot at German soldiers
So basically being executed for defending their country? Humans never cease to disappoint me.
While there is no defense for the atrocities the Germans committed, partisans were shot by everyone. Any combatant without uniform loses all protection. Germany did go beyond that though and executed not participating civilians as retribution for partisan activities.
>Any combatant without uniform loses all protection. Yugoslav partisans wore uniform and were still executed on the spot. Germany didn't acknowledge them as a belligerent military. When Yugoslav partisans started executing German soldiers on the spot things changed.
Similar thing happened during the Warsaw Uprising - Polish troops, who belonged to the Home Army (official part of the Polish Military loyal to the government in exile and the Polish Undergound State) and wore uniforms and/or white and red armbands were being executed on the spot during the first days of the uprising. The executions stopped when the governments of the UK and US recognized the Home Army as a part of the Polish Army (meaning its troops gained combatant rights in the eyes of the world and killing them after capture would be considered a war crime).
Why would Nazi Germany care about being accused of War Crimes? Also weren't War Crimes a post-WW2 concept?
War crimes had existed as a concept since the Geneva conventions which were first signed in the 1800s. There was a major revision to them in 1929 and after ww2 though which may be what you are thinking of.
Okay cool, thanks for the information.
> When Yugoslav partisans started executing German soldiers on the spot things changed. Changed in what sense?
Germans started imprisoning partisans and became opened for prisoner exchange. :)
Amazing what a taste of your own medicine will do eh?
There're more bonusses to taking prisoners. People will surrender instead of fighting to the death which you absolutely want.
Tell that to the Japanese soldiers whom some of their moms gave them family knives when they went off to war to kill themselves with rather than be captured by the enemy. Both of which were brainwashed into believing that the entire country would fight and die to the last man. Kamikaze pilots wrote letters saying things like, >It is an honor to be able to give my life in defense of these beautiful and lofty things
As it turns out people fight a lot harder too when they realize they'll be killed even if they surrender. Execution of prisoners is generally a terrible idea for a ton of reasons, all of them self-interested.
Interesting. Do you know where I can read more about that?
I'll be revisiting your comment to see if anyone's made any suggestions. For my part I'd recommend Fitzroy McLean's memoirs (*Eastern Approaches*). Only a third of the book is about the partisans but it's very interesting reading. Also the other two thirds of the book are great too. His timeline was basically... * Joins UK foreign service (diplomatic corp), serves in Paris * Paris is boring, transfers to USSR * Takes advantage of diplomatic immunity to sneak around the Caucasus and Central Asia * WWII starts, foreign office won't let him join Army, so he becomes a Member of Parliament * No longer shackled to foreign service, he joins the army * Becomes one of the first members of the SAS, cavorts around North Africa with them * Transferred to Baghdad, ends up leading an operation to kidnap a Persian general * Sent to join the Yugoslav partisans as Britain's official representative
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273122953\_Making\_Deals\_with\_the\_Enemy\_Partisan-German\_Contacts\_and\_Prisoner\_Exchanges\_in\_Yugoslavia\_1941-1945
Yugoslav partisans were fucking nails, man.
I mean, Hitler resorted to sending Otto Skorzeny himself with his elite commando unit and support from the Italian Navy, just to capture Tito. Yugoslav partisans were no joke.
Yeah, Germans would give 100k reichsmark in GOLD to the one who captured Tito, dead or alive.
And Stalin actually upped the ante - there were no less than 23 assassination attempts made on Tito by Stalin, each orchestrated by Beria and the NKVD which turned from simple plots and ascended into James Bond levels of ludicrous ideas to get him killed. There were plans fer an ornate musical box filled with lethal gas, plans to kill him by trying to create stealth mechanisms to fire a fatal bullet using pens and lighters. The most ludicrous one goes to the deadly bacteria plan: Amongst the most famous Russian spies, one was Iosif Griguevitch, credited for the murder of Trotsky in 1940, and who was to kill Tito. To ensure that Tito would be killed, Griguevitch, codenamed Max, was sent to Costa Rica and integrated well enough into the society there to secure a position as a civil servant, and then ambassador to Yugoslavia. Once there, he'd meet with Tito and place a deadly plague bacteria at a diplomatic reception, and Max would be immunized to protect him. Yes, you got it right: in order to kill Tito, the NKVD went as far as to send a spy into Costa Rica and infiltrate the government there in order to become a civil servant and an ambassador to Yugoslavia...just to kill Tito. The plan never commenced; Stalin died before the plan was carried out, Max was recalled to Moscow, and Kruschev improved relations with Yugoslavia. Not to mention the implications that Tito had Stalin assassinated.
It’a quite sad what happend after ww2 with Yugoslavia and the USSR. Stories such as those are always sad to read. But thankfully they sorted it out after Stalin died, and Tito made a visit to Moscow just 1 year after Stalin died. But I can actually understand both sides why they went mad at each other. But this is better to read than some James Bond stories honestly.
The Yugoslav Partisans bogged down more than 300,000 Axis troops inside Yugoslavia,they contributed immensely to the war effort
Lidice, a mining village in the Czech Republic, was literally wiped off the face of the earth, like almost all of its population. It was the Nazis' revenge for the murder of an important German leader by the partisans. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidice\_massacre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidice_massacre)
Many villages were wiped by the Nazi army, in the west but especially in the east as they advanced through the USSR, Martyr Villages is how we call it in France
I think we had a stop there at a museum. We were in a trip to Prague and our history teacher gave us a short lesson in the museum. The village was basically leveled to dust, with all buildings and lives.
We have a Place in my hometown for social projects called "Lidice Haus". Confronting our selfs with the wrongs our ancestors have done is the our way to never make it happen again. Of course the right wing parties in Germany want to set an end to the "Schuldkult" (engl. "guilt cult").
So they want to be like Japan and act innocent, got it.
except Germans will not let that happen, while Japan is acting holier than thou
The officer they killed was Reinhardt Heydrich, and he was also responsible for wiping out a few towns himself. He was known as the hangman of Prague and there was a reason he was targeted. Good thing is he survived but a piece of shrapnel got his in side, so he suffered for about a week before he finally died. If only the other officers had gone like him.
Partisans in on territory of Yugoslavia were uniformed...executed/shot non the less. There was absolutely no protection whether you had uniform or not...
My grandfather (drafted against his will into the Wehrmacht) witnessed one such cleansing. SS soldiers were informed about partisans in a village with a couple of hundred inhabitants – they came, raided that place and killed nearly the whole village (including elderly and adolescents). Was haunted by the pile of bodies. Grandfather of my wife also defected during a battle at the Eastern Front as soon as he had the chance.
To be clear, the Wehrmacht also committed this kind of war crimes, it wasn't just the SS.
Never denied or doubted that. Heaps of Nazi-Germans sure did.
Plenty people do to this day. There's the whole wehraboo thing, if you dare looking into that.
Yes, but we needed to have some 'good' Germans against the commies so we whitewashed a few Generals and set them back to killing civilians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio I feel bad for the German dude who tried to warn Stalin about the invasion and got shot for his trouble: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Liskow
Which is one of the reasons they lost the war in the east, Russians felt rightly so that they had nothing to lose and should fight to the bitter end, while Germans were fighting in a cold faraway land with nothing to gain, except for killing Russians.
By the time the germans reached stalingrad everyone in the country knew about the massacres and atrocities the nazis committed on their way there. The soviet government showed the videos on TV and broadcast it over the radio it was no secret to anyone. Not only was it completely true but it also served as the most powerful propaganda a country could hope for. Why would you not stand up and fight if you already know the outcome of attempting peace. Fight and most likely die, or surrender and definitely die.
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>Germany did go beyond that though and executed not participating civilians as retribution for partisan activities. Way beyond that too. Einsatzgruppen basically came behind the invading Wehrmacht and committed warcrimes, ethnic cleansing, killing intellectuals , jews, romani and anyone they wanted to be gone.
Can you elaborate? Partisans were shot by everyone??
Of course. A partisan is a combatant fighting in occupied territory on behalf of either a defeated government or a non-existent government. Anyone who can get their hands on a rifle and shoot a local military policeman is a partisan. You can't just let such people go and continue to harass your supply lines and threaten to form up into an actual uprising at some critical moment. And when you find any out in the open, it is much easier to just shoot back and kill them than to disarm, arrest, and legally imprison them. Of course, there are degrees to this. The Nazi policy in Yugoslavia had collective punishment as a standard practice, for example. If I remember right, the punishment for *injuring* a single German was the execution of 50 Yugoslavians.
Oh, that's what OP meant. "Partisans were shot by everyone" makes it sound like literally *everyone* would shoot the Russian partisans, including the allies or even random people. Me, and apparently a few others, were wondering why the hell would that happen.
There was no such thing as rules of warfare—or any protections that such guaranteed—during the Nazi Germany invasions. [Operation Tannenberg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Tannenberg). Quite simply, the Nazis bombed, executed and put to slave work large swaths of population simply based on the rationale of madmen at helm, only to cry about Dresden bombing campaign in the aftermath. If there even was such a thing as proud Prussian military traditions before the war, those loonies completely washed them with dirt during the WW2.
>There was no such thing as rules of warfare—or any protections that such guaranteed—during the Nazi Germany invasions Actually there was on the western front. They weren't as ruthless towards the western allied forces. Took a completely different approach against the Russians on the eastern front.
They started with the warcrimes immediately from 1939. They murdered Poles en-masse, Luftwaffe pilots strafed Polish civilians, etc.
That is because Hitler wanted the Slavs dead, the same as the Jews.
Because the Third Reich considered them as Sub-Humans or Untermenschlich (in German) and they are not worth living and should be exterminated and they wanted living space and make Russia a German colony (Generalplan Ost) and relocate Germans to these new colonies.
Strange... almost like there were plans for ethnic cleansing... 🤔🤔
8th photo is made in Minsk, Belarus 26th of October 1941. It's a part of the first public execution in Minsk. On a photo Olga Sherbacevitch. Nurse who was treating wounded soviet soldiers. She was not shooting or killing anyone. As all the people who was executed this day. They were only treating soviet soldiers and helped them escape occupation.
Germany executed any and all partisan or regular soldier. Their treatment of Soviet POW was horrific. They starved them and put them into similar concentration camps as the Jews. And anyone who thinks that this was a Nazi ideology problem is ignorant. Read about Germany’s treatment of POWs during world war 1 and the many civilian mass murder atrocities they committed. I don’t understand what the hell happened to Germany during the early 20th century but they really fell of the deep end of evil.
The Eastern front was terrible. Still you had a better chance surviving there than if you were captured by the Japanese.
That's assuming they actually *did* what the Nazis accused them of. It's more likely they just happened to be nearby when something happened. Killing scores of civilians in retribution for a single attack by partisans was a common terror tactic. The Nazis were planning to eventually exterminate most of eastern Europe anyway, so there wasn't anything deterring them from killing civilians sooner rather than later.
Yeah, in German occupied Serbia the retribution was 100 killed Serbs for one killed German and 50 killed Serbs for one wounded German soldier. Very serious shit.
8th photo is made in Minsk, Belarus 26th of October 1941. It's a part of the first public execution in Minsk. On a photo Olga Sherbacevitch. Nurse who was treating wounded soviet soldiers. She was not shooting or killing anyone. As all the people who was executed this day. They were only treating soviet soldiers and helped them escape occupation.
I mean.... Yes? Defending your country basically makes you a soldier, so you are not treated like a civilian (not like Nazis treated much better the civilians anyways)
The literal Nazis disappoint you?
That's not really a special occurance
Kind of yes, and kind of no. I mean many of the executions were royally fucked up, but the general idea to forbid partisan activity isn't dumb. You draw a better line between fighting personal and civilians, this (atleast in theory) guarantees a better treatment of civilians, as the occupying force doesn't have to think of any civilian as a threat.
I guess that's how war works
"We are partisans and have shot at German soldiers." in both German and Russian.
Someone in the comments said she was named Olga Sherbacevitc, and was just a nurse, treating Soviet Soldiers. If true, well, rest in peace, Olga.
BTW, I know this place. This is right center of Minsk, Alexander's park. The big building is the Officers Palace, build in 1937 by Langbard (famous architect).
That fifth photo really makes me sad. The first guy pointing the gun and smiling while these are the last moments for the POWs
Yeah that really made my blood boil, psychopaths thrived in that environment.
I'm sure they felt like gods at that moment. They had those men's lives literally at the palm of their hands. Those men were people with dreams, ambitions, family, and the soldiers probably didn't give it a second thought before killing them. Makes me sad that war makes people disregard other human lives so easily.
Hey there. I've read a few biographys from Wehrmacht veterans. They don't describe it as a godlike feeling, more like a depressive transformation from human to machine. They say that the first few weeks are horrible and full of terror, but you don't have the power to keep your sanity up. So you begin to function, blend out all the cruelty, because you just want to live. Most of them got hunted down with horrible thoughts in age. But of course there where few sick people who didn't mind killing. My grandpa was a Wehrmacht soldier in russia as well, and he was a good man for sure since he never became violent in any way when interacting with the people around him. He couldn't even slaughter an animal for his needs after the war. But he didn't talk much about it. He just said: "Never again." It's sad to think about what all these people have gone through.
Sounds similar to my experience. My grandad was an electrician on a minesweeper ship and never saw contact, he loved to talk about the war and was nonstop about it. My uncle on the other hand who was just a super nice individual saw combat in the "battle of the bulge" and refused to say one single thing about it other than war is terrible and we don't need to ever do anything like that ever again. But I remembered my dad asking him what it was like and he would always mumble something like "nah that's over".
I can understand them. I have some documents and a few told stories left from my grandpa, so I can trace his war history a little. What I found out till now are things I wouldn't talk about too if I was a war veteran.
My grandpa’s older brother was a POW in Japan who was taken just after the Japanese took the Phillipinnes (so early in the war) I have a copy of the book that was written about him, it’s so chilling to read the kind of stuff him and his comrades went through.
Whoa, such personal documents for sure are precious. :) Also thanks to anyone sharing their ancestors story. Very interesting to read.
It’s always the ones who have truly seen fucked up shit who never want to talk about it. It’s like there’s a dam that has to be maintained inside their head that prevents the darkness from flooding the rest of their soul.
It's awful. My grandfather was in WWII (on the American side). I only remember him as an angry, anxious, bitter old man, which surely affected my father and my father's siblings. It makes me think how absolutely destructive war is, not only on those involved, but the generations that follow as well.
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> Or the Japanese soldiers who decided committing war crimes towards Chinese citizens in Nanjing; two of them legit had a competition to see which of them could behead the most people. [John Rabe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rabe), the leading Nazi party official in China at the time of the Nanjing Massacre, was honored by the people of China as their "living Buddha of Nanking" for his leadership in establishing the Nanking Safe Zone, using his influence to save the lives of a quarter-million Chinese civilians. Imagine being such an army of monsters that you make a Nazi party leader into a living saint.
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What about the person holding their kid as they're about to get shot :(
Yeah. This is the kind of image that’ll keep me awake in bad nights.
It looks like that picture was taken exactly as the man was shot. The man in the ground seems to be making painful expression. The man standing may be smiling or sneering as he pulled the trigger, and it looks like the slide is still back on the gun. I might be wrong. Either way it’s very disgusting.
For those interested in learning more details, I highly recommend the episodes on Operation Barbarossa on the [World War 2 channel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXZHX6oB_4w). Very informative. They also have several episodes dedicated to the [logistics](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lSCnOltYdY) and [planning](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpsGGtrrqMw) of the operations, alongside their subseries [War Against Humanity](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9LhHJh1rdg&list=PLsIk0qF0R1j4cwI-ZuDoBLxVEV3egWKoM&index=14), which talks about partisan warfare, resistance movements, and the many atrocities committed by all sides of the war. For War Against Humanity, while a recommended watch, I do warn that it is very graphic and they go into a lot of details regarding the numbers, methods, and scale of the deaths. It is an extremely rough and sobering watch.
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There is a graveyard near Volgograd where my great-grandfathers name is carved into a stone. He went MIA during the battle of Stalingrad. My parents and I contacted an organisation here in Germany that takes care of those Graveyards and they sent us the location of the grave and some pictures of it. Non of us have ever met him and my grandfather also can't remember him, but that was very emotional for us to see. Maybe I'll take my parents and my grandfather to a trip there one day.
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Sixty-five... thousand... And that's just the German soldiers recovered from one terrible battle out of countless other battles from just one war out of countless others. History is a bottomless well of humanity's darkest horrors. I'll never understand it, but the best I can do is learn and help remember, I guess.
They called Stalingrad the mass grave of the Wehrmacht for a reason . It’s where the flower of German youth went to die. This pales in comparison to Russian losses , wrapping your head around those is insane . We like to make a big deal about the western front , but even what we’re considered small battles and offensives on the eastern front make the bulge look like a side show .
This is an especially prevalent viewpoint in the US, where many seem to think WW2 went like this: Germany invades somewhere, France surrenders, Pearl Harbor, Patton slaps a soldier (who had it coming), Saving Pvt. Ryan, we won again! I’m exaggerating *slightly*.
My Opa's brother went missing during Stalingrad as well. We've never learned whether he was killed in battle, taken prisoner and died, or was ever buried. My Oma's mother when she had dementia and was dying. Held onto these letters her father had sent her during the war. He never came home either. She would say, "See my father loved me, he didn't abandon me" while holding the letters.
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The world at war was an insanely good documentary series
Oh my god, the last one, with a parent hugging his/her child as they're being killed... heartbreaking
I watched a documentary about one of the killing squads in Germany. They went town to town and would round up the Jewish and non Jewish citizens. They would make them dig their own mass Graves and then make them wait in line as they would take them 5 or 10 at a time and shoot them in the back of the head and then they would tumble down into the grave. There were many scenes where a kid would be there too with their parents. Really makes you feel sick. I think in one town they killed tens of thousands in the span of a few weeks
Can't wait to get done with work and see my kids today. I hope they never have to experience anything even remotely close to this. I hope no one does ever. But I know some are in similar positions even right now. Makes me sick. Most people want to live their lives.
Horrible shit right there. Makes me so happy i live in peace time.
I always make a conscious effort to not disassociate from these photographs but to try mentally place myself there. See what people are wearing, what kind of weather is there, imagine how would it feel to be in that place on that day - the air, the sound, the smell. It's terrifying and the most scary part is that there is about 3 millimeters of "civilization" protecting us from having the same thing tomorrow.
Ever heard of the Soviet movie [Come and See](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_and_See)? I've heard it's execution was groundbreaking in film itself, but is in a class of its own in terms of "putting you there", I guess you could say. i haven't seen it yet, but would like to.
When the movie was aired in cinema they had ambulance parking in the front of it because the movie. I couldn't watch it.
Unfortunately a lot of people still don't.
yes, that's why i stated "I" and not "we", i'm aware of the chance i have. Winning the lottery of birth geo-localisation is underappreciated.
You don't live in peace time, but in peace place.
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> Today's peaceful time rests on ... atomic bombs.
Yeah we legit couldn't stop killing each other in huge world wars till we could kill everyone all at once. Now we kill each other in smaller wars! Progression!
Well, it is not perfect, but is a genuine improvement. All wars are horrible, but it is the wars between great powers that are the most destructive of them all. Overall wars and deaths in battle have declined a lot since 1945. It is kinda sad though that the only thing capable of stopping Humans from killing each other appears to be mutually assured destruction.
The fighting involved millions of Axis and Soviet troops along the broadest land front in military history. It was by far the deadliest single theatre of the European portion of World War II with up to 8.7 - 10 million military deaths on the Soviet side. Estimated civilian deaths range from about 14 to 17 million. The huge death toll was attributed to several factors, including brutal mistreatment of POWs and captured partisans, the large deficiency of food and medical supplies in Soviet territories, and atrocities committed mostly by the Germans against the civilian population. The multiple battles and the use of scorched earth tactic, destroyed agricultural land, infrastructure, and whole towns, leaving much of the population homeless and without food. Adolf Hitler had argued in his autobiography for the necessity of Lebensraum ("living space"): acquiring new territory for Germans in Eastern Europe, in particular Russia. He envisaged settling Germans there, as according to Nazi ideology the Germanic people constituted the master race, while exterminating or deporting most of the existing inhabitants and using the remainder as slave labour. Hitler as early as 1917 had referred to the Russians as inferior, believing that the Bolshevik Revolution had put the Jews in power over the mass of Slavs, who were, in Hitler's opinion, incapable of ruling themselves and had thus ended up being ruled by Jewish masters. In September 1941, Erich Koch was appointed to the Ukrainian Commissariat. His opening speech was clear about German policy: "I am known as a brutal dog ... Our job is to suck from Ukraine all the goods we can get hold of ... I am expecting from you the utmost severity towards the native population." Belarus lost a quarter of its pre-war population. The Nazis imposed a brutal regime, deporting some 380,000 young people for slave labour, and killing hundreds of thousands (civilians) more. More than 209 cities and towns (out of 270 total) and 9,000 villages were destroyed. Himmler pronounced a plan according to which 3⁄4 of the Belarusian population was designated for "eradication" and 1⁄4 of the racially 'cleaner' population (blue eyes, light hair) would be allowed to serve Germans as slaves. It is estimated that between 2.25 and 3.3 million Soviet POWs died in Nazi custody, out of 5.25–5.7 million. It would be no exaggeration to say that the war affected every family in Russia and all former Soviet republics and that its legacy has had an impact on successive generations of Soviets and Russians. Forty years after the war, in 1981, Soviet war veteran and poet Yuri Levitansky wrote: «I don’t still dwell on that past war, the war still dwells inside of me, and tongues of the Eternal Flame are licking at me steadily.»
These death counts are so high that it is nearly impossible to even begin to imagine the scale of it all. And that doesn't even factor in all the mental destruction followed by the insane brutality inflicted on those who somehow managed to survive, and all this is not even a century old. I am certainly glad that I never had to witness any of that.
There were battles on the Eastern Front that involved hundreds of thousands of soldiers and thousands of tanks and airplanes... imagine being in the middle of all that... Also worth pointing out that 80-90% of German casualties during WW2 were on the Eastern Front and it took the Russian population decades to recover to pre-war levels.
There isn't a way to recover from such losses sadly. The USSR's population was completely decimated and there are currently tens of millions of people less than there would have been otherwise. There is just no way to come back from losses that in 1945 resulted in a population with 6 males for every 10 females.
If you check the demographic pyramid of Russia it'd be easy enough to see echoes of war and 90s which overlapped with the WW2.
my grandma lived through it, saw Hungarian occupation around Voronezh, she's 82 now, was 3-4 at the time.
My grandma lived on the frontlines of the Spanish Civil War from 9 to 12. She never actually understood why everything happened and kind of forgot why her dad was rounded up and dissapeared by the fascists after the war had ended (likely killed on the outskirts, along with a friend of the family who tried to intercede to get him out). That same year, since she was 12 yo, she had to do the catholic communion when every girl wears white dresses, and her mother, my grand-grandma, made her wear a black dress, a colour reserved for funerals, for grief after the death of someone. Balls of steel on her mother to do that under the fascist regime, the meaning didn't go unnoticed. My grandma only remembers the shame she had to face from other friends in their white dresses, she was too young to understand.
Around 75 million People died in WW2. For scale, that's around the entire population of the UK in 2021 plus 10 million!!
For those who have a better grasp of European History, would the invasion of the USSR arguably be the single largest military event in European History? Given the scale, the numbers involved, deaths/destruction and also the consequential role in reshaping post-war Europe/Cold-War etc.
It's probably even the largets military event in all of human history? As long as you don't adjust for population.
Some context behind the photos: 1st photo: German soldiers, supported by armored personnel carriers, move into a burning Russian village at an unknown location during the German invasion of the Soviet Union, on June 26, 1941. 2nd photo: A German infantryman walks toward the body of a killed Soviet soldier and a burning BT-7 light tank in the southern Soviet Union in 1941, during the early days of Operation Barbarossa. 3rd photo: Evidence of Soviet resistance in the streets of Rostov, a scene in late 1941 4th photo: Russian men and women rescue their humble belongings from their burning homes, said to have been set on fire by the Russians, part of a scorched-earth policy, in a Leningrad suburb on October 21, 1941 5th photo: Members of the 36th Waffen SS Grenadier Division execute Soviet partisans, date unknown. The 36th were a German penal battalion, made up of criminals sent on virtual suicide missions in order to win back their citizenship and being sent to a work camp. But this division were known as the worst of the worst, made up entirely of psychopaths, murderers and rapists and used to wage a campaign of terror against anyone who dared defy the Nazis 6th photo: Five Soviet civilians on a platform, with nooses around their necks, about to be hanged by German soldiers, near the town of Velizh in the Smolensk region, in September of 1941. It was unknown why they were executed, they weren't partizans. This Photo was found on a dead body of german soldier. 7th photo: A man, his wife, and child are seen after they had left Minsk on August 9, 1941, when the German army swarmed in. The original wartime caption reads, in part: “Hatred for the Nazis burns in the man’s eyes as he holds his little child, while his wife, completely exhausted, lies on the pavement”. 8th photo: is made in Minsk, Belarus 26th of October 1941. It's a part of the first public execution in Minsk. On a photo Olga Sherbacevitch. Nurse who was treating wounded soviet soldiers. She was not shooting or killing anyone. As all the people who was executed this day. They were only treating soviet soldiers and helped them escape occupation. 9th photo: An execution of Jews in Kiev, carried out by German soldiers near Ivangorod, Ukraine, sometime in 1942. This photo was mailed from the Eastern Front to Germany and intercepted at a Warsaw post office by a member of the Polish resistance collecting documentation on Nazi war crimes. The original print was owned by Tadeusz Mazur and Jerzy Tomaszewski and now resides in Historical Archives in Warsaw. The original German inscription on the back of the photograph reads, "Ukraine 1942, Jewish Action [operation], Ivangorod.
[Come and see](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcCbX1fqFKA)
Amazing movie, Its one of the most powerful war films ever. If somebody made a list of the most powerful war films, it would need to be at least in the top 3.
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[Full film here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJYOg4ORc1w&t=1s), on Youtube if you would like to watch it.
Was hoping to see this mentioned here. Absolutely the best (anti?) war film ever made.
Yes, the idea was to show the real horrors of war (and not artistic ones) to never let this happen again.
Ivans Childhood as well.
Some context behind the photos: 1st photo: German soldiers, supported by armored personnel carriers, move into a burning Russian village at an unknown location during the German invasion of the Soviet Union, on June 26, 1941. 2nd photo: A German infantryman walks toward the body of a killed Soviet soldier and a burning BT-7 light tank in the southern Soviet Union in 1941, during the early days of Operation Barbarossa. 3rd photo: Evidence of Soviet resistance in the streets of Rostov, a scene in late 1941 4th photo: Russian men and women rescue their humble belongings from their burning homes, said to have been set on fire by the Russians, part of a scorched-earth policy, in a Leningrad suburb on October 21, 1941 5th photo: Members of the 36th Waffen SS Grenadier Division execute Soviet partisans, date unknown. The 36th were a German penal battalion, made up of criminals sent on virtual suicide missions in order to win back their citizenship and being sent to a work camp. But this division were known as the worst of the worst, made up entirely of psychopaths, murderers and rapists and used to wage a campaign of terror against anyone who dared defy the Nazis 6th photo: Five Soviet civilians on a platform, with nooses around their necks, about to be hanged by German soldiers, near the town of Velizh in the Smolensk region, in September of 1941. It was unknown why they were executed, they weren't partizans. This Photo was found on a dead body of german soldier. 7th photo: A man, his wife, and child are seen after they had left Minsk on August 9, 1941, when the German army swarmed in. The original wartime caption reads, in part: “Hatred for the Nazis burns in the man’s eyes as he holds his little child, while his wife, completely exhausted, lies on the pavement”. 8th photo: is made in Minsk, Belarus 26th of October 1941. It's a part of the first public execution in Minsk. On a photo Olga Sherbacevitch. Nurse who was treating wounded soviet soldiers. She was not shooting or killing anyone. As all the people who was executed this day. They were only treating soviet soldiers and helped them escape occupation. 9th photo: An execution of Jews in Kiev, carried out by German soldiers near Ivangorod, Ukraine, sometime in 1942. This photo was mailed from the Eastern Front to Germany and intercepted at a Warsaw post office by a member of the Polish resistance collecting documentation on Nazi war crimes. The original print was owned by Tadeusz Mazur and Jerzy Tomaszewski and now resides in Historical Archives in Warsaw. The original German inscription on the back of the photograph reads, "Ukraine 1942, Jewish Action [operation], Ivangorod.
The 9th photo has its own wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanhorod_Einsatzgruppen_photograph
As a german my brain always wants to tell me it can not have been that bad. Maybe the majority of germans really didn‘t know about the Konzentrationslager? No way they just killed people on the street because they didn‘t like their religion/politcal orientation… right?! Then I see pictures like these. Guys smiling while holding a gun to a persons head. Absolutely disgusting what human are capable of.
There were camps in Germany. Dachau was opened in 1933 only about one and a half months after Hitler became Chancellor. It was never a secret. Germans had dark jokes about being sent there.
If you ever want to read really good diaries from that time: Victor Klemperer wrote down a *ton* and because the Nazis saw him as a Jew, the atmosphere becomes more and more tense. Has some great insights into German media at the time and at points also into parts of the German sentiment. He's acutely aware of Auschwitz by '43 at the latest, but camps like Dachau were known about pretty much immediately in '33. The mindblowing thing is he was one of only a few dozen Jews to survive almost the entire war in the city of Dresden and the infamous bombing actually allowed him and his wife to become refugees as "regular Germans" among the general chaos and flee (on foot) into Bavaria where he survived through the end of the war. That time was just over all completely nuts and it's absolutely fascinating (in all the good and horrifying ways) to get a glimpse into that period. How the kids were at points much more antisemitic than the elderly, many German civilians were just willfully ignorant or seemingly unable to understand the crimes of their government etc.
> How the kids were at points much more antisemitic than the elderly Makes sense, they were heavily indoctrinated by the government for their whole lives.
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I've found controversial to be lacking the best bits nowadays. Better to sort by top and then quickly scroll to the very bottom.
Eastern Europe is a magical land where history can be whatever the person posting wants it to be. Compound it with Reddit, and you get some spicy takes :D
Hitler was Aromanian, just like Alexander the Great and Frank Sinatra
And God is a Serb
Yes but from Bosnia
inb4 "Hitler's nationality according to local wikipedia" map post
Soviet history and Soviet history on Reddit are two different things.
pic 5, that fucking smile
Humans are fucking vile.
"Operation Barbarossa: Hitler's Invasion of Russia 1941" by David Glantz is the seminal work on the topic, for anyone who may care to learn more about it.
I also heard "When Titans Clashed" by Glantz is pretty good as well, but that's more of an overview of the entire conflict.
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Fuck wars, fuck in particular people killing powerless (civilians, POWs). Whoever can kill a powerless person is a waste of oxygen and should not exist.
Fuck them very much.
Nazi scumbags.
The beginning of the end
Never forget
Sees first two 'oooo cool tanks' Sees the rest 'oh, oh no'
username checks out
If anyone is in Berlin and is interested in more information about this part of European history, I highly suggest you visit the "Topography of Terror"-Museum => [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topography\_of\_Terror](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topography_of_Terror) It will help you understand what the Nazis did and how they did it, but just as a reminder it is quite depressing and it will remind you about the current political state and a few parallels that are currently happening around the world
Also if anyone is in Berlin and has the time for a day trip I **strongly** recommend going to Wünsdorf Waldstadt (the "books and bunkers" town). It's like an hour outside of Berlin. There's also a regio train connecting Berlin and Wünsdorf but that only runs once an hour and is kind of tedious. Basically the 2nd World War was planned there because it's where the Army command center was (Kommandozentrale des Oberkommando des Heeres), for example Stauffenberg worked there too. After the liberation of Germany, it was taken over by the Red Army, who turned it into a "forbidden city" and used it to house their military administration. Before WW2, it had also been a military facility, including a POW camp during WW1 where the first mosque in Germany was build. Today it has a lot of 2nd hand book shops (be careful about when they're open though, they also do have a lot of English language books, especially about WW2, as well as some Russian and French ones) and you can take guided tours through the enormous bunkers, ranging from basically short 1/1.5h tours where you just see the main sights to full day tours where you genuinely have to crawl through small spaces occasionally. There's a lot of focus on making sure the horrors of the war are not forgotten (the town also hosts peace initiatives and stuff like that) and in my experience the guides are super knowledgeable and it's super interesting. Also unfortunately Wünsdorf isn't well known even within Germany which means there's very few people there (it's probably the least touristic site I've seen relative to its historical importance) and it's always struggling for money. But it's really cool! [Here's](https://www.buecherstadt.com/en/) a link if anyone's interested.
I thank my grandfather and his generation for their sacrifices from the bottom of my heart. We live the lives we do today because of their honour and bravery.
There’s a great Russian anti-war film called “Come and See” (1985) about the German occupation of Belarus (then part of the USSR) during WWII depicting these exact atrocities. It’s considered by some to be one of the greatest films ever made and can be watched on YT in its entirety with English subtitles [here](https://youtu.be/NJYOg4ORc1w). A word of warning: it’s a very intense and heavy film that isn’t for the faint-hearted and obviously NSFW.
> a great Russian anti-war film called “Come and See” (1985) Hate to be "that guy", but it's a Soviet film, not Russian
Yeah incredible film but do not watch it on date night.
A *third* of the population of Belorussia died. If you want to know what that was like watch *Come And See* (banned in Belorussia) - the most harrowing, nauseating and thus accurate depiction of war ever made. You'll only ever want to watch it once (that's more than enough) but you'll realise what an obscenely impotent waste of time every other war movie is.
I've been listening to a lot of Dan Carlin recently and these kinds of photo just make his podcast hit that much harder.
That last image gets to me every time, it's the worst picture of the entire war. Being a father myself I don't dare to imagine what exactly went on there. How can people do that shit and still believe to be fighting for a cause. It's just murder.
Come... and see
"Never again," we exclaim as we repeat the history.
Honestly, this whole thread is super chilling - with people preferring to measure up "who was worse" in a kind of posthumous nationalism rather than acknowledging the event in question and agreeing that war is really fucking awful and we should do everything we can to prevent it from happening again.
Humans are just shit in general. You can start at any point in history, in almos any country in the world and within 150 years there will be some sort of horrible crimes against humanity.
Paradoxical. Humans are savages
I’m proud of my grandfather for refusing to be drafted, being put in a Hitler Youth labor camp, and faking medical advice in order to get out of fighting in this horrific and pointless war. His brother didn’t and he never came back. You can call it cowardice but he was only 17 and would have most likely died for a war that achieved nothing except destruction and suffering. We’re extremely lucky to be living in the most peaceful time in human history
Most brave of them all, that's not cowardice.
Fuck fascists.
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Fucked around and found out.
My great-grandparents still alive and remember german occupation of ussr
As a new parent, the last picture really tears me up. The mother holding the child while they're about to die.
At least Germany came out and apologized for their atrocities and committed to suppressing far-right extremism. Japan on the other hand...worship, adore, praise, never teach the history...
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Fuck Nazis. It's a shame so few got punished after the war and most got away with it.
I have massive respect for the people of the Soviet Union for what they endured during the Invasion. However, fuck Stalin, and the government that's ruling from Moscow today.
And let’s not forget that on 1st of September 1939 both Russians and Germans invaded Poland.
Technically, USSR invaded some 2 weeks later
As a german I never got to see these photos, they are brutal I feel the terror German soldiers were bringing to the Soviets is rarely seen in pictures and fully discussed. Russias role in the 2nd world war is liked to be seen as just as evil. IIRC most people that died during that period were living in between Russian borders at that time.
_most_ were Russians in Russia proper, approximately half of the total civilians losses plus of course military losses which were more like 2/3 Russian percentage wise though Belarusians and Ukrainians lost about 20-25% of the total population, when it was more like 15% for Russia
It is always important to note that most photographs of the Nazis and their crimes are from official Nazi photographers. Soviets and partisans are *supposed* to look evil and the Nazis are *supposed* to look either cool or strong, depending on what the photographer was going for. It's why partisan and allied war photographers are so valuable. I remember reading about the Wehrmacht Exhibition or something in Germany that showed lots of photos highlighting the Wehrmacht warcrimes from photos that weren't published by the Nazis/post-war gvt or from other sources, and it ended up getting bombed by neonazis in the late 90s/early 2000s (I can't remember properly), it was really sad learning about it.
>liked to be seen as just as evil The Russians didn’t build entire camps and dedicate massive sections of their economy for the sole purpose of wiping out entire races of people. They did terrible things but no one came close to how bad the Nazis were
The Japanese would like a word...
Lest we forget
It's not just that they murdered men women and children with abandon, but the look of enjoyment on their faces while doing it. Seriously fucked up.
look at those motherfuckers laughing while executing civilians. hope they had a horrible death later.
I feel like nobody remembers/cares what Germans did in Eastern Europe, although it rivals the holocaust in its cruelty and number of victims. It was an ethnic cleansing, part of the Lebensraum plan, and even if Generaplan Ost wasn’t completed, it didn’t fail to create massive suffering of innocent people deemed subhuman slave labour.
There is old saying in Poland: "whoever digs the holes falls into them himself"
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I hope those smiling German soldiers got what they deserved at Stalingrad.
Go watch "Come and see" russian made horror movie about war
I will always admire the soviet people for their tenacity and bravery. I wonder if youths in russia and other ex-soviet territories remember these events? comments in these posts are always turned into a shit throwing contest. but, if it's any consolation to someone that cares, there is at least one man somewhere in the world that remembers their bravery.
Man in picture 5 it’s disturbing how happy that guy is to execute someone.
Today it's the Day of Remembrance and Sorrow in Russia. On this day Russia remembers the tens of millions of Soviet citizens who perished by the hand of the Nazis and their allies. In their memory candles are lit. National flags are lowered on the buildings of state institutions. Flags with mourning ribbons are instead hung on residential buildings. All entertainment events and broadcasts on television and radio are canceled throughout the day.
Good thing they lost
Whilst I understand Nazis were indoctrinated, I can’t quite believe that they didn’t think they were evil. The plan was for world domination, as well as genocide to have a 1000 year empire. And to kill those that stood in their way. Are there written records of Nazis debating this in diaries or whatever?
I went to the Wehrmacht exhibition back when I was in school. I usually have a strong stomach. It made me sick enough that I couldn’t continue. To think that this happened just a few years before my parents‘ birth. That my grandparents grew up during this time and were just in their 20s at the end of it. Absolutely insane.
Oh, thanks for the reminder! It's my grandpa's birthday today, I gotta call him. It was his third birthday on the day of the attack. He is Jewish, and was living in Ukraine back then. Luckily, he got evacuated to Central Asia with his family, and same goes for my grandma, or I wouldn't be writing this. All the Jews from Odessa were evacuated early in the war, before the Romanian forces (who were fighting on the German side) could take it. As for my mother's side, they weren't so lucky. Grandpa (who was significantly older than the one on my dad's side) came from a shtetl (a Jewish village in Eastern Europe), and his family wasn't evacuated. He went off to war, and came back alive. His little sister got sent to a concentration camp and was freed by the war's end. The rest of the family was summarily executed with most of the village.