War is the Hell Where Youth and Laughter Go
“In peace, sons bury their fathers. In war, fathers bury their sons” – Herodotus
The video by Crocodile Tears Productions is a record of the exhumation of WWII German soldiers buried in unmarked graves, near what was likely a wartime field hospital.
The war is long over, and whether they were Nazi sympathizers or not, it’s over. We do not have to forget what happened. We do have to remember what caused it and not let it happen again. Some were buried with ID tags, some were not and may never be identified. If they were on the Eastern Front, they were in the Soviet Army trying to take over Stalingrad, Leningrad, Moscow and Kiev (Ukraine), among other places.
Titled “The Hell Where Youth and Laughter Go”, this is a video of the exhumation of a mass grave of 200 German soldiers, buried at the end of WWII. Some have identification medallions, others do not.
Summary: A large number of German soldiers killed in 1945 on the Eastern Front are exhumed from a village cemetery where they had been lying in unmarked and forgotten graves. Of note were two bodies with amputations, some bodies with splints and tourniquets, bodies with severe war wounds and numerous ID tags as well as a few rings. The bodies were exhumed in order to be reburied in a large centralised military cemetery.
Exhumation de soldats allemands afin de transférer leur corps dans un cimetière militaire.
Pour plus d’informations: http://findthemia.blogspot.com/ A Crocodile Tears production documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ym8GN0NUXCo
Category: Disposable Warriors, Historical
Many of the German boys didn’t have much of a choice.
It is not wrong to grieve for their lives.
Half of German military deaths in World War II happened after Allied troops reached German territory in late-1944. It wasn’t exactly the Führer for which they fought (especially versus the Russians) at that point.
You can pay Honors to the Warrior without paying Honor to the War. Or the Cause that his/her political master sent them to die for. In that game, we are all pawns.
The unspoken deep fear of every Soldier. Unknown and unmarked resting place. No way of telling how many others are out there.
Amen!
Every soldier just wants to go home.
As I’ve said before, a lot of German military personnel were legitimately less aware of the Holocaust than their families and neighbors back home, especially if they first enlisted/were drafted early in the war. Some of these guys, sent to France, Italy, or North Africa, or crewing a U-boat, or cranking a Messerschmitt, really didn’t know what was going on in the fatherland. They were in no position to witness the gestapo and einsatzgruppen doing their thing, and letters describing it to them would usually be censored. Hell, even the SS had some conscripts who either kept their hands clean or even tried to help the victims of nazi bloodthirst. They were certainly the exception, not the rule, but they did exist.
Now, on the Eastern Front, it was a bit different. War crimes were a daily occurrence on both sides, which may have desensitized the young men involved to some degree, but there were numerous instances of heer personnel massacring people declared “untermensch,” sometimes on orders from above, sometimes on their own volition. It wasn’t a universal thing, but it was common enough that most kraut grunts in that theater probably at least heard about it. In fairness, the reds did the same thing, only they called their victims “traitors” instead of “subhumans,” and it’s rather indicative of what life was like under communism that many Soviet civilians initially welcomed Hitler’s armies as liberators—at least until the massacres started.
They are still soldiers….R.I.P.
Always respect a uniformed and practiced enemy.
My father was drafted in Vietnam (11B). He hated the VC and NVA but he always respected the NVA and their toughness.
And now they may come home, be at rest and truly know peace
Fuck no.
Everyone has an obligation to rebel against evil socialist policies, regardless whether they are national or international socialists.
If you decide to fight for an unjust cause, it is on you.
Not a particularly rational view point there dude. In that time in the German army, you didn’t say no. Nor in the Soviet army. If you tried it, you got killed. period. They fought for their countries, not their governments. And many had no idea of the evils their leaders were perpetrating in their nations’ names.
I disagree.
The evil of the socialist policies were clear to everyone, and there is a moral duty to resists those, whether you were in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia or Mao’s China.
People at the time *might* not have been aware of how evil the Great Leader ™ was, but they were aware of their evil policies, and that they were dictators, regardless of how they got to power.
It is a very bad precedent to take away responsibility from the people that support dictators.
Joe, you serve in an all-volunteer Army, in a country where serving is a privilege. These men did not volunteer, nor did they have the means to say no. I expect better from you.
Some evil is so vast, it must be opposed body and soul. One cannot escape culpability by saying “I was ordered” or “too big to oppose”, even if disobedience means death. We settled the legalities at Nuremberg.
Yup. That has consequences. Yup, sucks. Yup, that is the -only way- to stop such evil before it metastases into a holocaust or holdomor.
Must. Not. Obey. Monsters.
For those criticizing Joe, are you saying you would dutifully obey the Nazi or Soviet monstrosities? Because some evil is just too huge it just cannot be disobeyed?
I say no to that. Some things are more important than life. If I only take out one of the bastards on the way out, he is going first and I will toboggan his corpse to hell.
Some chose service over firing squad. Some were probably, possibly willfully, ignorant of the atrocities committed. I do not fault the Soldier who fell for his country, no matter how repugnant the cause. I blame the leaders of the nation that sent him to die for their cause.
Many of those followers did, in fact, support Hitler and the Nazis. Particularly the officer corps. And it wasn’t just SS who rounded up Jews for “resettlement” or executed hostages in retaliation for the killing of German occupation troops.
“War has its own laws” says one of the smiling veterans, referring to the unprovoked, illegal Nazi invasion of the Netherlands.
Silent enim lēgēs inter arma.
-Cicero
You may make a civil society after a war, but you won’t have much of one during it.
Which is another reason endless war, foreign or civil, is a bad idea.
That is a partly incorrect statement. Officers in the Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe, and Kreigsmarine were banned from membership in the Nazi party. Some may have agreed with Hitler, but by no means all The SS was a different story.
They weren’t “banned from membership” but as long as they were serving actively in the military they could not be “active” in the party. And only after 20 July 1944 were they permitted to wear NSDAP Party pins with their military uniforms.
So? You don’t have to join a political party to support it and/or its policies.
” Some may have agreed with Hitler but by no means all”
They *all* swore an oath of “unconditional obedience” to Hitler starting in 1934. The previous oath was, “I swear loyalty to the Constitution and vow that I will protect the German nation and its lawful establishments…”. Evidently the Wehrmacht officer corps had its fingers crossed when they took that one.
https://www.facinghistory.org/holocaust-and-human-behavior/chapter-5/pledging-allegiance
An interesting video review of a book about the mindset of German soldiers using the infamous British eavesdropping tapes of German POWs.
Tim, thanks for posting these two videos. I was fascinated by the Wehrmacht vet who claimed German soldiers were forbidden to rape anyone and would be punished for it; but then the secret tapes, discussed in the second video, of POW’s who freely admitted to their comrades that they could rape and pillage at will.
We tend to forget history and how young men are socialized; and how they are a product of the system that is controlled by those with the levers of power. That total control is what the crypto-commies seek. Few realize the extent to which our children and young adults are having socialist ideals and hatred of this country inculcated into them. (Exhibit “A” is the mug shots of the arrested Portland rioters; over half of them are public school teachers.)
Thankfully, some of us won’t be alive to see the atrocities they will commit in fifteen or twenty years, if we can’t take back our country.
The left won’t have a monopoly on atrocity. Nay. Not at all.
Combatants eventually resemble each other. At the moment, only one side it embracing violence, and amateurishly.
It is only a matter of time, perhaps very little, before someone says “sauce for the gander”. Things will escalate quickly, one side saying ” Finally” and the other “you wished for war, you got it”.
Then it is endless escalation and reprisal, unless overwhelming and decisive force is used quickly and ruthlessly.
The Left seems to think noise equals numbers. That is a poor calculus. The free seem to think the left are inherently incompetent or tepid. The bloodbath 20th century of Marxist mass murder says otherwise.
We win. They lose. It’s just a question of how.
This is probably the best post I have read in years.
Sadly, because if you are right, and I greatly fear you are right, then the we are condemned to diminish as a nation, since no nation can stand divided.
We have maintain and enhance our freedoms. A free market system pushes up into the political sphere and keep us free by letting natural selection run its course.
When I look at socialism/collectivism, it only succeeds by taking control of the political sphere and from there distorting the market with their policies.
As long as we keep the market as free as possible, and I understand it will never be realistically hundred percent free, we will be able to keep collectivists at bay.
Because collectivism feeds from poverty, and poverty is a consequence of distorting the market.
*We have TO maintain and enhance our freedoms.
We will persevere.
Don’t mistake noise for numbers. These numb-nuts could not exist in a non-permissive environment. They are currently letting everyone get a good long look at what they are and what they mean to do. Most folks do not want chaos and mayhem. Even some of their supporters are realizing what they were coddling, and saying “waitaminute!”
Last noisy stand of the desperate dipshits. Model is the 68 Tet Offensive. Only they don’t have an NVA waiting in the wings. (They have reserves and plans. They -aint- NVA.) This is an effort to buffalo free folks into submission.
Note is is only working, somewhat, in the most hardcore reliably lefty enclaves, during a “dem-panic”.
And they cant control the narrative. So folks see the naked face of leftist reality, and are revolt d by it.
And not in the way the noisy nincompoops want.
We win. They lose.
-Freedom- wins.
“Because collectivism feeds from poverty,”
Nope, envy. Plenty of poor people world wide have no interest in taking someone else’s property. Envious people, however, and there are a lot of rich ones, have no trouble justifying their taking; it is, as you say, for the poor. Amazing, though, how much of the loot sticks to their hands.
Those were just the two videos on youtube I could find in five minutes or so. I have seen others. There is also a History Channel(?) series dramatizing some of the recordings of German officer prisoners held by GB.
Frankly, I was surprised by the confession of rape and pillage. Somehow I guess I had accepted the myth that although the Germans would kill men, women, and children without a qualm they were somehow too honorable to rape and pillage. Seems a bit weird, now.
I would be careful about laying the entire blame on the system, though; My Lai ring a bell? The Calley court-martial was before the internet but there were quite a few staunch defenders of Calley, including a lot of veterans. Long Binh Jail (LBJ) and Ft. Leavenworth also did not lack for customers from RVN.
When does the cause of the leaders become the cause of the nation? There is an old saying, “People get the government they deserve”.
When the NAZIS engaged in armed conflict in the streets did the German nation disavow them (ANTIFA, anyone?)? When Hitler and his SS engaged in the mass murder of the SA did the German nation not vote for him? When the Nazis “euthanized” undesirables did the German nation repudiate them? When the Nazis destroyed and stole Jewish property, abused and mistreated them, did the German nation object? And that is just the atrocities the Germans committed against their own people.
I can have some sympathy for individual Germans, but as a nation they deserved everything they got. And more.
I wonder if anyone has ever compared the number of East Germans who risked their lives to escape Communism with the number of Germans who attempted to escape Naziism. Or the relative popularity of the two regimes with their citizens.
One in three “ostlanders” were Stazi informers, as was found when the files were taken intact at the fall of the DDR.
One in three.
But if you did a survey I will bet the number was much, much, smaller. Just like the number of Nazis after WWII, or the number of German veterans who fought against the Amis.
Germans actually did protest the first round of “euthanasia.” That’s why Hitler establishments the primary murder factories (Auschwitz, et al) in Poland. The German populace wanted the “final solution” to be out-of-sight-out-of-mind.
On the other hand, since most of the really nasty stuff didn’t start until the war was already going, there was a substantial number of German troops & sailors who were more ignorant of what was going on than their families at home. It depended on where they were and when they enlisted/got drafted. Some were genuinely innocent, others most definitely weren’t.
Okay, I typed “established,” not “establishments.” Damn autocorrupt…
In Hanau, the Degusa plant had an ammo holding area for finished product built to look like a slave-labor prisoner enclosure from the air so we wouldn’t bomb the factory. (They underestimated the USAAF and Norden bombsite and we bomb the factory without hitting the nearby AHA.) Tell me the Germans didn’t know.
My point is that they were willfully ignorant. They knew that their Jewish neighbors and the kid down the street with palsy didn’t “go live on a farm,” but were willing to go along with it as long as it was out-of-sight-out-of-mind. They “didn’t know” because they didn’t want to know.
Much like many non-slave owners (poor, white country boys) would have had to fight for the Confederacy.
No choice. Go to war or face a firing squad.
A running man can slit a thousand throats in one night.
-Klingon Proverb
Corny, but it conveys essential truth about resistance.
There is an alternative other than submission or surrender. -fight-. It has costs, but those costs accrue to -both- sides, unlike the other two options.
If every Jew had taken one Nazi to the grave before dying, the Third Reich dies in its infancy. If not then, well just a little while longer as folks get the hang of saying “no” and the costs mount.
Fight. Even if it is doomed. Fight anyway. The good guys can win, but only if you don’t quit.
Yef (“Slow Joe”)
You never pass up a chance to show your ass and again prove to everyone at TAH just how ignorant you really are.
Do you know anyone who served in the German Army during World War Two? No, you don’t. But I did.
One of them lived in Berlin and he was a member of the compulsory Deutsches Jungvolk. He ended up being forced to serve as an assistant gunner on an MG-42 on the eastern side of Berlin during the defense of the city against the Russians in 1945. He stayed at his position until they were overrun, and then, not knowing what else to do, he ran home to where his mother and little sister were still living in their cellar. He hid there until the end of the war.
He was 11 years old.
He was an unwilling child who was forced to fight for an unjust cause, but it was never “on him”.
Stop being such a jackass here at TAH.
If every German had been an eleven years old child you might have had a point.
I had a childhood friend whose father was Dutch Resistance.
As a child.
You should ask the French… they were all in the Resistance even if they were newborns (somehow Vichy never happened).
Read about Father Gereon Goldmann and what he went through as a Catholic seminary student who was conscripted into the Wehrmacht and essentially conned into joining the SS from there. He and his fellow priests-in-training were purposely placed with fanatical nazis in both the regular army and the SS who tried daily to get them to break their vows. The means by which they tried ran the spectrum from “idiot bully” to “evil genius,” but Goldmann refused to give them what they wanted. He joined an anti-nazi resistance group in 1942, was captured by the Brits in ‘43, and was ordained as a Franciscan priest at a POW camp in Algeria in ‘44. Most of his seminary classmates weren’t so lucky; they were sent to Russia, where they were either KIA or executed by their own side for refusing to participate in massacres.
Sometimes, all you can do is head-butt the hangman.
Do it anyway, to make the point.
Goldmann was almost executed by the French on a false accusation that he had been the camp commandant of Dachau (pretty much impossible for his age and rank). His accusers? Die-hard nazis who tried to fuck him over for not drinking their white-supremacist koolaid.
For both an inspiring story and a frightening look at how insidious naziism was, read Goldman’s memoir, “The Shadow of His Wings.”
We had one of their Kool-Aid drinkers in my company. Whenever a war movie played in the dayroom, or Germany came up, Fuckhead would always riff on “greatest military ever…”
“They lost. We beat them. Not greatest.”
“Butbutbutbut…”
(History lesson from Mailclerk)
Pointing out that he looked Slav, not Aryan, also tended to set stupor-man off.
The fanboys are always funny.
“The Tiger and Panther were the greatest tanks ever!” Yeah, they were both overengineered, underpowered pieces of shit whose transmissions wouldn’t last for a single tank of gas.
“The G-43 was a better semiauto rifle than the M1 Garand!” The G-43 was a jam-o-matic piece of shit. Its scope mount wouldn’t hold zero for love or money. There’s not that many G-43s in existence today, yet there’s quite a few gunsmiths in existence who make their living doing nothing but unfuck G-43s. Oh, and they totally ripped it off from the Russians!
“Bismarck was the most powerful battleship ever!” Bismarck was an inefficient design that the Germans really couldn’t afford. USS South Dakota and her sisters packed bigger and better main battery guns (and one more of them), better fire control, vastly better antiaircraft armament, better armor, comparable torpedo protection, and comparable speed into a hull 110 feet shorter and 10,000 tons lighter. Put Bismarck/Tirpitz up against an Iowa-class (or HMS Vanguard, or HIMS Yamato/Musashi) 1-on-1, and it’s no contest, much less one kraut battleship with minimal support vs a US or Royal Navy task force.
“Kickass German jets!” Although impressive on paper, the Me-262’s engines were temperamental on the best of days. That’s before you get into the fact that those engines were built by slaves who had a vested interest in making sure they didn’t work.
“Wunderwaffen/Luft ‘46 designs!” They never even built prototypes, so who gives a shit? I can make up sketches of superplanes, too. Just because you draw it doesn’t mean it can work, and it makes no difference if you can’t build it anyway.
“Heinz Guderian!” Self-promoting buddy-fucker who made a living out of kissing Hitler’s ass. Plus he got his ass kicked by the Russians. Is that the best you got?
“Blitzkreig!” Patton did it better. Next.
“The MG-42 was awesome!” Okay, I’ll give you that one. Just make sure you have enough ammo on hand to keep the greedy bitch fed.
The quick-change barrel design was good. Didn’t even have to reposition the gun to swap it out.
I knew someone who owned one. (Papered and legal).
The 88 was a fine field piece, very versatile, and their submarine technology was cutting edge, plus the Wehrmacht was great tactically, but they never really groked the overwhelming importance of logistics. Quantity had a quality all its own and the Brits and us were clearly superior in almost every aspect there.
The 88 was a hell of a gun…and they don’t like to talk about the fact that most 88s were horse-drawn.
“they never really groked the overwhelming importance of logistics”
They understood logistics, they just didn’t have the material. Even an instantaneous line of supply is not much good if there is no supply to put in it.
During one of my collegiate episodes I joined the Wargaming club (pre-PC days, so boardgames with cardboard counters & paper maps). It was always fun watching the fanboys drool over their SS Panzer units. They would rub the printing off them if they weren’t watched.
Just like those being identified and buried from USS Oklahoma; these enemies should be identified and returned to their families
Agreed.