My great uncle was 16 when they basically loaded him up at his birthday on a troop transporter and told him "Congratulations! You may (must) fight (die) for the fatherland!
They brought him to the then eastern front when the russians were already on German territory.
5 hours at the front he was shot and also had grenade shrapnel explode into his lungs.
He survives and was brought to the Hanau (middleish in Germany) military hospital and was bound to a bed for one year.
So sad and evil. Volkssturm, the policy of conscripting all 16-60 year olds to fight battle-hardened Allied forces. Lacking equipment, training, even puberty. Some boys were 10 and 11 years old.
In the TV show MASH, Captain Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce says, "War isn't Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse". Hawkeye also says, "Hell has no innocent bystanders. But war is chock full of them".
A profoundly emotional and amazing piece of television. As challenging as it may be, you should still try to make it happen—especially if you’ve been watching these characters all through from the beginning; you just don’t get a catharsis from television like this everyday.
Yep, Hawkeye says some deep shit right before Klinger comes in dressed like someone's great grandmother on her way to church, and the laugh track rolls on.
There was a popular joke in Germany at the time that asked why the Volkssturm was Germany's most precious resource, as the puncline was that it was because, "They have silver in their hair, lead in their bones, and gold in their mouths."
Thank god I wasn’t around then, how could someone live with themselves after killing a child. I get the kill or be killed but I’d never be okay afterwards. So sad.
Soldiers are generally younger than people think. When I went to boot camp, most of us were 18/19, and one guy who was 24 was considered an old man. During WW2, it was a shitload of 18-20 year olds dying in great numbers. Don’t get me wrong - a lot of people of all ages served. But the military generally wants young idealistic men doing the killing and dying.
My dad was 19 when he was in the infantry in WWII. He was the only one in his unit that was still there at the end of the war. All the others were killed, captured or shipped off. When he came home he was still too young to drink. A bartender refused to serve him and my grandfather nearly killed the bartender.
Edit: To clarify who Grandpa wanted to kill.
Yeah he looks like a kid in a 8th or 9th grade. Should be out riding bikes with his buddies. At least the Americans got to him before the Soviet's did.
The dynamic between the Germans and the Soviets was a vicious one. The Germans saw Slavs as an unfavorable, less than human race and thus committed horrible atrocities to those people in the territories they gained. On their way back into Germany, the Soviets made sure to give the soldiers and people that very same treatment. This resulted in many Germans running to the American side as Berlin was closed in on from both fronts.
The Soviets treated the people in all the countries they occupied badly. It wasn't just retaliation against Germans. The Nazis were awful, but the Soviets were not much better.
I was listening to a YouTube war diary a while back, and the dominating sentiment by war's end was *Get to the Allies to surrender!* Those who made it were, by and large, sent home at war's end, while Soviet POWs were send to Siberia for many years.
I've read 30-40% of German POWs never returned from Russia. I remember an interview with one German POW who made it back to Germany. He said his capture was "the worst of all possible outcomes."
Partly Germany's own fault. A lot of it was eye-for-an-eye. While being a German in Soviet captivity was terrible, you had a much better chance of surviving it than a Soviet soldier in German captivity. 57% of all Soviet PoWs taken by the Germans were murdered in captivity.
>Partly Germany's own fault
hol up, you're telling me the viciously imperial and genocidal Third Reich was partially to blame for the sticky situation they found themselves in at war's end?
In total, out of 3.3 million German POWs in the Soviet Union, 1.3 million did not return. Which is roughly 35 percent.
For comparison: Only 0.2 percent of German POWs taken by the US, and only 0.03 percent of German POWs taken by the British did not return. Meaning a POW taken by the Soviets was 150 times more likely to die than one taken by the Americans, and more than *1000 times* more likely to die than one taken by the British.
Also, that 35 percent is in total. If you look at individual battles, the numbers can get much worse. Roughly 100,000 men were taken POW after the battle of Stalingrad. Only 6,000 of those returned. That means nearly 95 percent of those taken POW at that battle died as a POW.
However, it should not be omitted that the numbers for Soviet POW taken by the Germans were considererably worse than the other way around. More than 60 percent of all Soviets taken POW by the Germans did not survive. 3 million out of 5 million. (And of those 2 million that survived, roughly one third million was then penalized by Stalin when they returned, as Stalin considered getting captured as treason).
Edit: I took all those numbers from Wikipedia, but they seem to be correct
That is true but there was definitely an “I can treat your people even worse” mentality between these two. One story that comes to mind is the rape of 25 nuns in Poland, a country that got it particularly bad on bith sides. Benedectine nuns were raped as much as 50 times each by Soviet troops. Many of them were quite old, leading to the suspicion that it wasn’t for pleasure, but for humiliation and to force these people to go through equal or worse treatment than what was inflicted upon slavs. These were the kinds of stories coming out of the eastern front as the Soviets drew closer.
The story you tell has nothing to do with the "I can treat your people even worse" mentality you speak of. The Germans did not see *Polish* nuns as "their people".
>The Nazis were awful, but the Soviets were not much better.
The nazis were "at least" consistent: if you were considered part of a group to be killed, you'd know what to expect.
The soviets were just a bunch of savage that would steal, kill, rape, torture anything on sight. They notably raped a lot of women liberated from Auschwitz.
That's what my polish grandma told me too: the Germans gave their victims a clean kill while the Soviets loved to torture their victims before killing them
Most of my male friends enlisted post-9/11 and at the time, they all seemed so mature and fully grown. Looking back at photos of them from around that timeframe, I see teenage boys. It’s absolutely insane how that happens.
At 19 I was the most experienced guy in the squad having been in for a grand 2.5 years or whatever it was.
Platoon sergeant was super experienced, but all of the squad leaders were a mixed bag.
My father's unit rounded up about 50 'soldiers' in a German town in 1945. The oldest was 16 or 17. They had been sent out on bicycles with two panzerfaust strapped across the handlebars.
Some of the locals talked them into surrendering
My old boss was like that. Drafted when he was 14 by the Nazis. Spent his 16th birthday in a Russian POW camp. He managed to escape and get to West Germany and build a good life for himself in the end. But he was haunted by that for the rest of his life.
My wife's grandfather walked home from a Russian POW camp. It was a German POW camp until the Russians took it over. He wasn't an officer so he got out, but he wasn't in good shape. I knew him for a while before he died. Really sweet guy.
My dad flew bomber missions over Germany, so I have known veterans from both sides now.
My grandfather did the same in 1946. They released him together with 2 inmates from a Russian POW camp in Poland and they had to walk home. They were hiding during the day and walking during the dark to not get beaten up or killed by locals who wanted to take revenge. One of his comrades did not make it. My grandpa passed away as I was 10 yrs old. I remember him well, he never talked about the war and that time. When I insisted he always said that it is unimaginable horrendous and nothing for a young boy to talk about. I have spent for 3 yrs in a row 3 weeks of my summer school holidays at my grandparents home and he was every day out with me in nature independently of the weather teaching me fishing, building levees, carving sth out of wood, sleuthing traces of deers and boars, making camp fires etc. Every meal my grandma had to put a wooden stick looking like a spoon next to his plate and cutlery on the table. I was not allowed to play with it or use it. My grandma told me that it was his talisman, he carved it out of wooden board during his imprisonment and used it for more than 2 years as spoon for the meager soups at the pow camp, it was the only thing beside his clothes he was wearing during his long way home. He passed away with 66 years, 3 years after his retirement and a life full of hard work and two wars stealing him the best time of his life like so many others of this traumatized generation.
Thank you for sharing your grandad’s story. He obviously loved you a great deal to spare you those stories, although I’m sure as a child you wanted to hear about them. Both of my grandads were in the navy, neither of them told me anything about their wartime experiences, despite me asking them repeatedly. One just told me that he spent the war sunbathing (😂) which was obviously a complete lie. They’re long gone now, goodness knows the horrors they experienced.
I think that number comes from Stalingrad POWs which if you think about it makes sense that so many died since they were essentially already in a prison camp with no food, water or medical care by the end of the battle. Not saying that Russian prison camps were resorts but the percentage was lower overall.
Correct. At the end of the battle, Paulus’ 6th Army surrendered with ~95k men left and only about ~5k survived imprisonment. They started the battle with 600k+ men. Shoutout the team WW2 channel on YT for teaching me that
It's closer to 1/3rd. It was mostly down to incompetence, if you read the relevant documents, rather than malice. Not to say that abuse did not happen, but the Western mindset kind of pushes the idea that the Soviets were intentionally brutal on prisoners to get revenge.
A lot of Soviets, especially bureacrats, got into trouble for the poor conditions as the Soviet leadership relied heavily on the labour and realised quite early that the camps with better conditions resulted in higher productivity. The truth however, was they were ill equipped to handle 3 million prisoners.
The French, however, were extremely brutal to German PoW's after the war, to the extent some of their allies had to protest to get them to sort it out.
There's a scene in "We Were the Lucky Ones" (which js based on a true story) were one of the characters in a Siberian gulag is trying to get more rations for his pregnant wife but can't until a doctor declares her pregnant. The problem? There's no doctors at that camp. The bureaucracy feels cruel, even when that's not the intention.
A friend's father was a Russian POW in Germany. He worked on a farm (for free, no doubt). He never returned to Russia, but escaped and immigrated to the US. He knew what would happen to him in the Soviet Union if he went back.
She never even knew her real last name.
On Stalin's orders, anyone who had been captured was considered a traitor, and almost all were sent to the Gulag- Siberian prison- for years, many not released until after Stalin died in 1953. Ironically, the camps also housed German prisoners of war who were kept about as long before being allowed to return to Germany, the last in 1955.
Scene from Band of Brothers that always gets me is the assault on the crossroads during Operation Market Garden. Winters leads the assault and runs towards the German position. When he comes over the hill the first person he sees is a German soldier that looks like a kid playing in the dirt and looks at Winters almost curiously before he's shot.
Tbf in this scene they fought a SS company so the boy (although looking younger) was probably over 18. So not the kid-kids of the so called *Volkssturm*
Towards the end of the war the SS was just Himmler's personal army, and he was no longer being selective. Teenagers, non-Germans, even Muslims found themselves in SS uniforms.
And the older. Look at Ukraine now, their troops are like in their 50s.
Basically men in their 20s get killed off first, and then countries dig deeper into their demographic pool.
They actually started older there. They have a looming population crises and are trying to protect men of an age to start families. Not that your point isn't a good one.
Ukrainian mobilisation age up to recently was 27 years old. They just recently lowered it to 25. So anyone younger than relevant age would only serve if they volunteered for service. At the moment Ukrainian average age for soldier is 43. Before full scale invasion their average soldiers were around 30-35
For comparison, age of average allied soldier in ww2 was 26. So what would be your average soldier in that war wouldn’t be mobilised up until recently
There was an interesting case with WWII with the US in the 77th Infantry Division (Army) in that the US wanted to know if the more matured population could handle themselves if they needed to call them into service. The average age was 33. For infantry, that is pretty old; but those older mental aspects of patience, focus, maturity, and grit paid off as they made some of the most perfect beach landings and advances on enemy locations in the pacific theatre.
Indeed, so the point stands. The longer the war, the younger the soldier. As this war drags on, we will see younger and younger people join it because those who went first and were older are getting killed
Average age went up very fast not due to casualties alone but because Ukraine has a bit of phenomenon that a lot of people in late 30s and their 40s volunteered in much larger numbers than in any other war in modern times and that significantly changed average statistics already in 2022
We can thank Trump and and his Republican friends for actively obstructing aid to Ukraine and helping Putin kill tens of thousands of these young Ukrainians. Anybody voting for these treasonous murderers in November can fucking burn in Hell.
Unfortunately he and republicans are just one part of the problem. Biden runs some fucked up and flawed policy where he is unwilling to allow UAF to strike targets in Russia either with donated equipment or Ukrainian own weapons. This policy is what allows massacres of civilians near border due to restrictions imposed by Biden’s administration and this has been one of bigger reasons why Russians were able to successfully open new front and can without any care in the world prepare to open one more further north from Kharkiv.
You'll get no argument from me that Biden, at best, is a lackluster president. He is a flaccid, do-nothing executive in the face of unprosecuted crimes by Republican seditionists and domestic terrorists. He is the better alternative to Trump, and I'll vote for him in November, but that's an extremely low goddamned bar. Its like saying eating one shit sandwich is better than having to eat two.
That's not true. Yes, the troops are older, but that's by design. Zalenski set the original minimum draft age at 27 to spare the younger generation. He just lowered it to 25.
So fun fact: the average GI in WW2 was 26. My grandfather didn't commission until he was 27. Theres exceptions to every rule, but the dude in the picture looks so bigger, more mature than the kid. It might be the uni and the helmet, but he's huge.
>the dude in the picture looks so bigger, more mature than the kid. It might be the uni and the helmet, but he's huge.
On average, Americans *were* bigger than Germans in the 1940s. Records do get spottier as the war went on, but based on issued gear, the average American infantryman was about two inches taller and just under 10 lbs heavier than the average German soldier. Not a massive difference, and the bulk of his gear adds to it, but it's definitely not a negligible difference.
The GI was a healthy, well-fed adult in his 20s. He was probably well-trained and well-supplied. The German lad was maybe in his mid- to late-teens, poorly fed, cold, dirty and very scared about his imminent future - he was probably dragged out of school a little while before and shoved into a uniform.
Fighting to save the world. There's a difference when it comes to World War 2. No war is righteous. But WW2 was the closest to clearly good vs. evil as it gets.
Dunkirk was held, in part, by Hitler Youth soldiers that fought so damn hard the US just by passed them. German occupied Dunkirk didn't surrender until Germany did. Well trained 16 year Olds are just as deadly and brave as well trained 26 year Olds
In many ways, we know from horrible experience especially from recent conflict in Africa that child soldiers are fanatical and even callous in ways soldiers who begin training as adults are not.
And all because they were likely indoctrinated at a very young age so they have grown up with little empathy for human life. If you are taught that from a young age, you care less about humans and can be more brutal.
It's really despicable how these children are raised to think this way.
Of course, adults have seen that life without war is possible, that normalcy could theoretically be resumed. For a child soldier, all they know is war, all they know is atrocity, they have no limits, because they do not envision a world after the war.
There's a reason we use young for war, it isn't just that their body is healthy but that their mind is very impressionable still. Child soldiers are incredibly susceptible to propaganda and do not know better, a few years of grooming by the state and they're literally ready to die. We see it in modern times and saw it in history.
Morals really are a liberty of peace time. As much as a child should never need to fight and you should never need to shoot at a child, survival forces it.
My uncle was an Army Ranger & scaled Pointe du Hoc on D-Day & fought his way thru German occupied villages. He rarely spoke of the war (his team started with 220 men & 180 were killed or wounded D-Day+) but he did talk about having to shoot & kill a teenaged German soldier. That death stayed with him, but he said it was “him or me”
Btw - my uncle turned 22 on D-Day so he was barely more than a kid himself
Wars are extremely expensive for countries, true. But they are extremely proffitable for the few people who orchestrate them, and who don't give a fuck about the wellbeing of regular civilians
He probably knew he was not going to be killed as the Americans overall had a good reputation for treating prisoners well, to the extent that many Germans were trying to race west to surrender to them late in the war rather than being taken by the Soviets.
He does however look like he is crying. Probably a traumatic response from having just seen people in his unit, some of whom were probably boys just like him, die in a variety of gruesome ways. Since he was wounded he was captured following combat, and it is unlikely he'd have been the only casualty. It is quite possible, despite the wound, that he is one of the luckier ones.
There's something so bittersweet about seeing one soldier care for another as if they were brothers. Knowing they had dreams and fears and all the same quirks and kindnesses as the rest of us. And for years their comrades waded through filth punching bullets through one another's bodies. War sucks and those that instigate it deserve to burn in hell. We all just want to be happy and safe don't we?
He's just a kid. And no, he's almost certainly not some Nazi devil. At the end, they threw kids into the meat grinder. I hope he got home ok and had a good life. Even more so, the nice American treating him. Just a fucking kid. Obscene. I've got a 15 yo son and this photo makes me so upset and mad that I can't look at it. The boy needs his mom, not a soldier's uniform.
There was an anecdote from Normandy from a Canadian medic who related attempted to assist an SS Lieutenant, when the badly wounded German, in perfect English, asked him if the blood transfusion- plasma- he was about to give him contained Jewish blood. "I wouldn't know, mac,", said the medic. The German said, "if it contains Jewish blood I would prefer to die." "Suit yourself", said the medic.
He died.
The Canadian medic likely didn't need too much convincing.
The SS committed a couple notorious massacres of Canadian PoWs during the Normandy campaign, to the extent that 1 out of every 7 Canadians who were killed in the Normandy campaign was murdered after being captured.
I googled the photo, it read "An American GI tending to a young wounded German soldier. Somewhere in France - 6 September 1944" pretty sure it's not A.I.
War is so stupid, we sacrifice so many young lives for the power trips of rich 'old politicians. These bastards should rather fight each other directly but the general populous is so stupid they get riled up in the name of nationalism, honor, religion etc etc
This goes to show that working class people shouldn’t be killing each other for stupid elitist pricks who never fight themselves.
We are more similar than different. We aren’t divided by skin color or nationality. We’re divided by social class. The wealthy parasites exploiting the working class for profit and gain.
This reminds me of my favorite poem. I like to share it when the opportunity arises. Here it is:
The Man He Killed
Thomas Hardy - 1840-1928
"Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!
"But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.
"I shot him dead because--
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That's clear enough; although
"He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,
Off-hand like--just as I--
Was out of work--had sold his traps--
No other reason why.
"Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown."
One thing i take great pride in as an American... When we "won" WW2, we didn't take the land. We actually helped rebuild those countries. I don't think Germany would have done the same.
Dafür stand Amerika früher! Wären die hier nicht rüber gekommen, hätte ich nicht in Freiheit und Demokratie aufwachsen und Leben können! Ich weiss das und bin sehr dankbar dafür!
That... looks like the medic is just about to pull a broken bone that has pierced the skin, back into place. You can see he is grimacing just before pulling because he knows it's going to hurt.
I want to know his backstory first before I feel any sympathy. Did he kill or capture any innocent people prior to this. How many allied soldiers did he kill.
That boy hasn’t even started shaving yet. Poor lad.
Must have been near the end. The Nazis were sending anyone who could shoot a gun by then.
My great uncle was 16 when they basically loaded him up at his birthday on a troop transporter and told him "Congratulations! You may (must) fight (die) for the fatherland! They brought him to the then eastern front when the russians were already on German territory. 5 hours at the front he was shot and also had grenade shrapnel explode into his lungs. He survives and was brought to the Hanau (middleish in Germany) military hospital and was bound to a bed for one year.
So sad and evil. Volkssturm, the policy of conscripting all 16-60 year olds to fight battle-hardened Allied forces. Lacking equipment, training, even puberty. Some boys were 10 and 11 years old.
In the TV show MASH, Captain Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce says, "War isn't Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse". Hawkeye also says, "Hell has no innocent bystanders. But war is chock full of them".
MASH was some deep dark shit.
Esp. that series finale. Just wow.
Chickens
That's the episode we haven't watched yet. Haven't committed the two hours to it yet. Am afraid also.
A profoundly emotional and amazing piece of television. As challenging as it may be, you should still try to make it happen—especially if you’ve been watching these characters all through from the beginning; you just don’t get a catharsis from television like this everyday.
It could be at times but mostly comedy if you can believe that from this quote.....
Yep, Hawkeye says some deep shit right before Klinger comes in dressed like someone's great grandmother on her way to church, and the laugh track rolls on.
The theme was "Suicide is painless" I feel like they have the viewer fair warning.
Tragic comedy
Fantastic quote. Fantastic show.
Yeah it was and yeah it is.....
Just started a rewatch not long ago. Holds up beautifully.
one of the greatest shows of all time
This literally gave me shivers...
My favorite war quote
Gotta watch it sometime
It's based on the America army M*A*S*H UNIT in the Korean war alot of comedy but touches serious subjects once in a while....
There was a popular joke in Germany at the time that asked why the Volkssturm was Germany's most precious resource, as the puncline was that it was because, "They have silver in their hair, lead in their bones, and gold in their mouths."
Thank god I wasn’t around then, how could someone live with themselves after killing a child. I get the kill or be killed but I’d never be okay afterwards. So sad.
They couldn't. Why do you think heroin and other drug use became so prevalent after WWII
Soldiers are generally younger than people think. When I went to boot camp, most of us were 18/19, and one guy who was 24 was considered an old man. During WW2, it was a shitload of 18-20 year olds dying in great numbers. Don’t get me wrong - a lot of people of all ages served. But the military generally wants young idealistic men doing the killing and dying.
My dad was 19 when he was in the infantry in WWII. He was the only one in his unit that was still there at the end of the war. All the others were killed, captured or shipped off. When he came home he was still too young to drink. A bartender refused to serve him and my grandfather nearly killed the bartender. Edit: To clarify who Grandpa wanted to kill.
Wasn’t the legal drinking age 18 back then?
The drinking age was 18 till the 70s
In the 90s is when every state finally raised the drinking age to 21. A guy coming home from ww11, I don't think anywhere, had a 22-year age limit.
> Burgermeister! > Is he the one hanging kids? >...Ja. >Hey, shoot that guy.
Yeah he looks like a kid in a 8th or 9th grade. Should be out riding bikes with his buddies. At least the Americans got to him before the Soviet's did.
The dynamic between the Germans and the Soviets was a vicious one. The Germans saw Slavs as an unfavorable, less than human race and thus committed horrible atrocities to those people in the territories they gained. On their way back into Germany, the Soviets made sure to give the soldiers and people that very same treatment. This resulted in many Germans running to the American side as Berlin was closed in on from both fronts.
The Soviets treated the people in all the countries they occupied badly. It wasn't just retaliation against Germans. The Nazis were awful, but the Soviets were not much better.
I was listening to a YouTube war diary a while back, and the dominating sentiment by war's end was *Get to the Allies to surrender!* Those who made it were, by and large, sent home at war's end, while Soviet POWs were send to Siberia for many years.
I've read 30-40% of German POWs never returned from Russia. I remember an interview with one German POW who made it back to Germany. He said his capture was "the worst of all possible outcomes."
Partly Germany's own fault. A lot of it was eye-for-an-eye. While being a German in Soviet captivity was terrible, you had a much better chance of surviving it than a Soviet soldier in German captivity. 57% of all Soviet PoWs taken by the Germans were murdered in captivity.
>Partly Germany's own fault hol up, you're telling me the viciously imperial and genocidal Third Reich was partially to blame for the sticky situation they found themselves in at war's end?
In total, out of 3.3 million German POWs in the Soviet Union, 1.3 million did not return. Which is roughly 35 percent. For comparison: Only 0.2 percent of German POWs taken by the US, and only 0.03 percent of German POWs taken by the British did not return. Meaning a POW taken by the Soviets was 150 times more likely to die than one taken by the Americans, and more than *1000 times* more likely to die than one taken by the British. Also, that 35 percent is in total. If you look at individual battles, the numbers can get much worse. Roughly 100,000 men were taken POW after the battle of Stalingrad. Only 6,000 of those returned. That means nearly 95 percent of those taken POW at that battle died as a POW. However, it should not be omitted that the numbers for Soviet POW taken by the Germans were considererably worse than the other way around. More than 60 percent of all Soviets taken POW by the Germans did not survive. 3 million out of 5 million. (And of those 2 million that survived, roughly one third million was then penalized by Stalin when they returned, as Stalin considered getting captured as treason). Edit: I took all those numbers from Wikipedia, but they seem to be correct
That is true but there was definitely an “I can treat your people even worse” mentality between these two. One story that comes to mind is the rape of 25 nuns in Poland, a country that got it particularly bad on bith sides. Benedectine nuns were raped as much as 50 times each by Soviet troops. Many of them were quite old, leading to the suspicion that it wasn’t for pleasure, but for humiliation and to force these people to go through equal or worse treatment than what was inflicted upon slavs. These were the kinds of stories coming out of the eastern front as the Soviets drew closer.
The story you tell has nothing to do with the "I can treat your people even worse" mentality you speak of. The Germans did not see *Polish* nuns as "their people".
>The Nazis were awful, but the Soviets were not much better. The nazis were "at least" consistent: if you were considered part of a group to be killed, you'd know what to expect. The soviets were just a bunch of savage that would steal, kill, rape, torture anything on sight. They notably raped a lot of women liberated from Auschwitz.
That's what my polish grandma told me too: the Germans gave their victims a clean kill while the Soviets loved to torture their victims before killing them
Man, I really regret coming to these comments.
Soviet 7th graders killing German 8th graders.
I was 19/20 in Iraq, and a squad leader. Turned 21 on my last day in combat.
Most of my male friends enlisted post-9/11 and at the time, they all seemed so mature and fully grown. Looking back at photos of them from around that timeframe, I see teenage boys. It’s absolutely insane how that happens.
I turned 21 while deployed there as well, no combat though we were in the far south
What’s even more baffling are platoon leaders from West Point. Some of them are 22 leading a group of 30-40 men
Holy shit man. I was a squad leader at 32, I could not imagine being a squad leader at 20.
At 19 I was the most experienced guy in the squad having been in for a grand 2.5 years or whatever it was. Platoon sergeant was super experienced, but all of the squad leaders were a mixed bag.
Some boys never start shaving :/
[удалено]
There’s a great scene of this in Masters of the Air. Really makes you realize how young and inexperienced they were. Crazy.
My father's unit rounded up about 50 'soldiers' in a German town in 1945. The oldest was 16 or 17. They had been sent out on bicycles with two panzerfaust strapped across the handlebars. Some of the locals talked them into surrendering
Yeah poor lad indeed.
The longer the war, the younger the soldier.
My old boss was like that. Drafted when he was 14 by the Nazis. Spent his 16th birthday in a Russian POW camp. He managed to escape and get to West Germany and build a good life for himself in the end. But he was haunted by that for the rest of his life.
Yeah millions died as POW’s in the eastern front
If I remember correctly, death rates for PoW in USSR were next to 95% ? He made the good choice.
Death rate for German POW’s in USSR in WW1 - 40% ; in WW2 around 33% ~1,1m POW out of 3.3m did not make it home. Source: Wikipedia
My wife's grandfather walked home from a Russian POW camp. It was a German POW camp until the Russians took it over. He wasn't an officer so he got out, but he wasn't in good shape. I knew him for a while before he died. Really sweet guy. My dad flew bomber missions over Germany, so I have known veterans from both sides now.
Wow that's incredible. One of my great uncles was captured by the Germans twice and escaped twice.
My grandfather did the same in 1946. They released him together with 2 inmates from a Russian POW camp in Poland and they had to walk home. They were hiding during the day and walking during the dark to not get beaten up or killed by locals who wanted to take revenge. One of his comrades did not make it. My grandpa passed away as I was 10 yrs old. I remember him well, he never talked about the war and that time. When I insisted he always said that it is unimaginable horrendous and nothing for a young boy to talk about. I have spent for 3 yrs in a row 3 weeks of my summer school holidays at my grandparents home and he was every day out with me in nature independently of the weather teaching me fishing, building levees, carving sth out of wood, sleuthing traces of deers and boars, making camp fires etc. Every meal my grandma had to put a wooden stick looking like a spoon next to his plate and cutlery on the table. I was not allowed to play with it or use it. My grandma told me that it was his talisman, he carved it out of wooden board during his imprisonment and used it for more than 2 years as spoon for the meager soups at the pow camp, it was the only thing beside his clothes he was wearing during his long way home. He passed away with 66 years, 3 years after his retirement and a life full of hard work and two wars stealing him the best time of his life like so many others of this traumatized generation.
It's good you had that time with him doing outdoor stuff. That had to be a valuable experience for him after all the horror.
Thank you for sharing your grandad’s story. He obviously loved you a great deal to spare you those stories, although I’m sure as a child you wanted to hear about them. Both of my grandads were in the navy, neither of them told me anything about their wartime experiences, despite me asking them repeatedly. One just told me that he spent the war sunbathing (😂) which was obviously a complete lie. They’re long gone now, goodness knows the horrors they experienced.
I think that number comes from Stalingrad POWs which if you think about it makes sense that so many died since they were essentially already in a prison camp with no food, water or medical care by the end of the battle. Not saying that Russian prison camps were resorts but the percentage was lower overall.
Correct. At the end of the battle, Paulus’ 6th Army surrendered with ~95k men left and only about ~5k survived imprisonment. They started the battle with 600k+ men. Shoutout the team WW2 channel on YT for teaching me that
Yep, I'm not a native English speaker and forgot one important word, sorry.
It's closer to 1/3rd. It was mostly down to incompetence, if you read the relevant documents, rather than malice. Not to say that abuse did not happen, but the Western mindset kind of pushes the idea that the Soviets were intentionally brutal on prisoners to get revenge. A lot of Soviets, especially bureacrats, got into trouble for the poor conditions as the Soviet leadership relied heavily on the labour and realised quite early that the camps with better conditions resulted in higher productivity. The truth however, was they were ill equipped to handle 3 million prisoners. The French, however, were extremely brutal to German PoW's after the war, to the extent some of their allies had to protest to get them to sort it out.
There's a scene in "We Were the Lucky Ones" (which js based on a true story) were one of the characters in a Siberian gulag is trying to get more rations for his pregnant wife but can't until a doctor declares her pregnant. The problem? There's no doctors at that camp. The bureaucracy feels cruel, even when that's not the intention.
> The bureaucracy ~~feels~~ cruel, even when that's not the intention. is
Funny how some people excuse brutality because "that's the way it is". Mind boggling.
I think you might have gotten the 95% figure from PoWs captured at Stalingrad.
A friend's father was a Russian POW in Germany. He worked on a farm (for free, no doubt). He never returned to Russia, but escaped and immigrated to the US. He knew what would happen to him in the Soviet Union if he went back. She never even knew her real last name.
What would happen back in Russia?
On Stalin's orders, anyone who had been captured was considered a traitor, and almost all were sent to the Gulag- Siberian prison- for years, many not released until after Stalin died in 1953. Ironically, the camps also housed German prisoners of war who were kept about as long before being allowed to return to Germany, the last in 1955.
POWs were treated as potential collaborators by the Soviets, and had a pretty shitty life under the system upon return.
Thank for the information. Truly heartbreaking!
Scene from Band of Brothers that always gets me is the assault on the crossroads during Operation Market Garden. Winters leads the assault and runs towards the German position. When he comes over the hill the first person he sees is a German soldier that looks like a kid playing in the dirt and looks at Winters almost curiously before he's shot.
Tbf in this scene they fought a SS company so the boy (although looking younger) was probably over 18. So not the kid-kids of the so called *Volkssturm*
Towards the end of the war the SS was just Himmler's personal army, and he was no longer being selective. Teenagers, non-Germans, even Muslims found themselves in SS uniforms.
And the older. Look at Ukraine now, their troops are like in their 50s. Basically men in their 20s get killed off first, and then countries dig deeper into their demographic pool.
They actually started older there. They have a looming population crises and are trying to protect men of an age to start families. Not that your point isn't a good one.
I mean, it’s a war for survival. Unfortunately they have to use everyone available.
Ukrainian mobilisation age up to recently was 27 years old. They just recently lowered it to 25. So anyone younger than relevant age would only serve if they volunteered for service. At the moment Ukrainian average age for soldier is 43. Before full scale invasion their average soldiers were around 30-35 For comparison, age of average allied soldier in ww2 was 26. So what would be your average soldier in that war wouldn’t be mobilised up until recently
There was an interesting case with WWII with the US in the 77th Infantry Division (Army) in that the US wanted to know if the more matured population could handle themselves if they needed to call them into service. The average age was 33. For infantry, that is pretty old; but those older mental aspects of patience, focus, maturity, and grit paid off as they made some of the most perfect beach landings and advances on enemy locations in the pacific theatre.
That’s pretty interesting. Haven’t heard that one before, time to do some reading lol
Indeed, so the point stands. The longer the war, the younger the soldier. As this war drags on, we will see younger and younger people join it because those who went first and were older are getting killed
Average age went up very fast not due to casualties alone but because Ukraine has a bit of phenomenon that a lot of people in late 30s and their 40s volunteered in much larger numbers than in any other war in modern times and that significantly changed average statistics already in 2022
In WW2, American policy was that no one could fly combat missions above the age of 25. Rule was broken frequently, but was the rule.
We can thank Trump and and his Republican friends for actively obstructing aid to Ukraine and helping Putin kill tens of thousands of these young Ukrainians. Anybody voting for these treasonous murderers in November can fucking burn in Hell.
Unfortunately he and republicans are just one part of the problem. Biden runs some fucked up and flawed policy where he is unwilling to allow UAF to strike targets in Russia either with donated equipment or Ukrainian own weapons. This policy is what allows massacres of civilians near border due to restrictions imposed by Biden’s administration and this has been one of bigger reasons why Russians were able to successfully open new front and can without any care in the world prepare to open one more further north from Kharkiv.
You'll get no argument from me that Biden, at best, is a lackluster president. He is a flaccid, do-nothing executive in the face of unprosecuted crimes by Republican seditionists and domestic terrorists. He is the better alternative to Trump, and I'll vote for him in November, but that's an extremely low goddamned bar. Its like saying eating one shit sandwich is better than having to eat two.
That's not true. Yes, the troops are older, but that's by design. Zalenski set the original minimum draft age at 27 to spare the younger generation. He just lowered it to 25.
Since last month it's 18-65. They are affraid to go out. Many videos of the infamous vans kidnapping men the streets.
"War... War never changes."
Sad to see. He looks so young. Like looking at my sons faces.
That GI was probably thinking "this poor kid..."
Shit the American probably wasn't a day over 20yo either.
So fun fact: the average GI in WW2 was 26. My grandfather didn't commission until he was 27. Theres exceptions to every rule, but the dude in the picture looks so bigger, more mature than the kid. It might be the uni and the helmet, but he's huge.
>the dude in the picture looks so bigger, more mature than the kid. It might be the uni and the helmet, but he's huge. On average, Americans *were* bigger than Germans in the 1940s. Records do get spottier as the war went on, but based on issued gear, the average American infantryman was about two inches taller and just under 10 lbs heavier than the average German soldier. Not a massive difference, and the bulk of his gear adds to it, but it's definitely not a negligible difference.
The GI was a healthy, well-fed adult in his 20s. He was probably well-trained and well-supplied. The German lad was maybe in his mid- to late-teens, poorly fed, cold, dirty and very scared about his imminent future - he was probably dragged out of school a little while before and shoved into a uniform.
Average age of air crew member is 19 or 20 years old.
A lot of people lied about their age to enlist, one example being my grandfather.
Certainly in his 20s.
Fighting the ideals of old men.
Fighting to save the world. There's a difference when it comes to World War 2. No war is righteous. But WW2 was the closest to clearly good vs. evil as it gets.
look at the crows feet around his eyes... I'd wager older than 25 for sure.
This is at the end of the war, German is just a frightened child, you can barely call him a solder
Dunkirk was held, in part, by Hitler Youth soldiers that fought so damn hard the US just by passed them. German occupied Dunkirk didn't surrender until Germany did. Well trained 16 year Olds are just as deadly and brave as well trained 26 year Olds
In many ways, we know from horrible experience especially from recent conflict in Africa that child soldiers are fanatical and even callous in ways soldiers who begin training as adults are not.
And all because they were likely indoctrinated at a very young age so they have grown up with little empathy for human life. If you are taught that from a young age, you care less about humans and can be more brutal. It's really despicable how these children are raised to think this way.
Of course, adults have seen that life without war is possible, that normalcy could theoretically be resumed. For a child soldier, all they know is war, all they know is atrocity, they have no limits, because they do not envision a world after the war.
True that, especially if poor indoctrinated bastards are full with Pervitin and alcohol
The real purpose of a rifle is to make all men tall
Have you seen the German movie "The Bridge (Die Brücke)?"
There's a reason we use young for war, it isn't just that their body is healthy but that their mind is very impressionable still. Child soldiers are incredibly susceptible to propaganda and do not know better, a few years of grooming by the state and they're literally ready to die. We see it in modern times and saw it in history. Morals really are a liberty of peace time. As much as a child should never need to fight and you should never need to shoot at a child, survival forces it.
That ain't no soldier. That's a fucking kid.
A reminder that not all German soldiers were Nazis. Some were young victims of a criminal government.
[удалено]
By the early-mid 40s? People definitely knew, or at least, had a pretty good idea what was going on even if they didn't know the exact details.
My uncle was an Army Ranger & scaled Pointe du Hoc on D-Day & fought his way thru German occupied villages. He rarely spoke of the war (his team started with 220 men & 180 were killed or wounded D-Day+) but he did talk about having to shoot & kill a teenaged German soldier. That death stayed with him, but he said it was “him or me” Btw - my uncle turned 22 on D-Day so he was barely more than a kid himself
Fuck the war!
If individuals can treat each other like this, why can’t countries?
There's no money in peace.
But there's loads of money in peace, war just costs money and disrupts trade.
Wars are extremely expensive for countries, true. But they are extremely proffitable for the few people who orchestrate them, and who don't give a fuck about the wellbeing of regular civilians
Because every country wants power? We have no world peace because peace was never the goal to begin with Everyone just wants more
Treating a child
I see a father tending to a hurt boy
Poor kid probably wasn’t 16
War isn't cool
Looks like he was crying. I am sure he was not only hurt but scared he would be killed.
He probably knew he was not going to be killed as the Americans overall had a good reputation for treating prisoners well, to the extent that many Germans were trying to race west to surrender to them late in the war rather than being taken by the Soviets. He does however look like he is crying. Probably a traumatic response from having just seen people in his unit, some of whom were probably boys just like him, die in a variety of gruesome ways. Since he was wounded he was captured following combat, and it is unlikely he'd have been the only casualty. It is quite possible, despite the wound, that he is one of the luckier ones.
Young men dying for old men's wars.
He’s just a kid.
That kid is 14
Just a kid War is a nightmare, where men wearing suits in offices send young men to the mud to die
That guy looks like he’s 16
There's something so bittersweet about seeing one soldier care for another as if they were brothers. Knowing they had dreams and fears and all the same quirks and kindnesses as the rest of us. And for years their comrades waded through filth punching bullets through one another's bodies. War sucks and those that instigate it deserve to burn in hell. We all just want to be happy and safe don't we?
That poor boy.
He's just a kid. And no, he's almost certainly not some Nazi devil. At the end, they threw kids into the meat grinder. I hope he got home ok and had a good life. Even more so, the nice American treating him. Just a fucking kid. Obscene. I've got a 15 yo son and this photo makes me so upset and mad that I can't look at it. The boy needs his mom, not a soldier's uniform.
Well said
Oldschoolhorrific
There was an anecdote from Normandy from a Canadian medic who related attempted to assist an SS Lieutenant, when the badly wounded German, in perfect English, asked him if the blood transfusion- plasma- he was about to give him contained Jewish blood. "I wouldn't know, mac,", said the medic. The German said, "if it contains Jewish blood I would prefer to die." "Suit yourself", said the medic. He died.
The Canadian medic likely didn't need too much convincing. The SS committed a couple notorious massacres of Canadian PoWs during the Normandy campaign, to the extent that 1 out of every 7 Canadians who were killed in the Normandy campaign was murdered after being captured.
I googled the photo, it read "An American GI tending to a young wounded German soldier. Somewhere in France - 6 September 1944" pretty sure it's not A.I.
Why would you think it‘s ai?
It's colorized so looks a bit unrealistic
everything is... I don't trust any pictures anymore as well pictures are worthless now
Maybe film photography will make a comeback and "show us the negatives" will be standard.
That's literally a kid, not a soldier. The Nazis were real scum to do this to children.
Isn't russia sending kids to the front as well?
To my knowledge the russians send young men but not 15y old kids like the nazis did.
The old make war so the young can die.
Following leaders into war is always a game for young or stupid people :'(
Looks like a dad taking care of his kid that fell off a bike.
War is so stupid, we sacrifice so many young lives for the power trips of rich 'old politicians. These bastards should rather fight each other directly but the general populous is so stupid they get riled up in the name of nationalism, honor, religion etc etc
This goes to show that working class people shouldn’t be killing each other for stupid elitist pricks who never fight themselves. We are more similar than different. We aren’t divided by skin color or nationality. We’re divided by social class. The wealthy parasites exploiting the working class for profit and gain.
The tools to divide us now have never been stronger in history
So how the fuck does this relate to this?
This reminds me of my favorite poem. I like to share it when the opportunity arises. Here it is: The Man He Killed Thomas Hardy - 1840-1928 "Had he and I but met By some old ancient inn, We should have sat us down to wet Right many a nipperkin! "But ranged as infantry, And staring face to face, I shot at him as he at me, And killed him in his place. "I shot him dead because-- Because he was my foe, Just so: my foe of course he was; That's clear enough; although "He thought he'd 'list, perhaps, Off-hand like--just as I-- Was out of work--had sold his traps-- No other reason why. "Yes; quaint and curious war is! You shoot a fellow down You'd treat if met where any bar is, Or help to half-a-crown."
Honour amongst men!
That's just a kid
Kid looks terrified
kid hasnt even finished high school
Probably 1944 or 1945.
A child being cared for by a child…
That's just a kid. Damn.
Poor guy
One thing i take great pride in as an American... When we "won" WW2, we didn't take the land. We actually helped rebuild those countries. I don't think Germany would have done the same.
Correction: ***treating a friggin kid.***
The boy was lucky he was found by the Americans and not the Soviets.
This is wild
Quite a few 17yo british troops fought in the Falklands conflict
"An American GI treating a wounded German child in WW2 (1940s)" - I fixed the title!
They both look like teenagers. I think the Nazis just pulled every guy over 16, gave them a uniform and a gun and sent them into battle.
The German is just a boy maybe 15.
Yea he helped him, it’s a goddamned kid. Poor kid was stuffed full of propaganda and given a gun.
By that time, Germany was sending out 9 year olds to fight.
Zigarette?
Flesh wound
Dafür stand Amerika früher! Wären die hier nicht rüber gekommen, hätte ich nicht in Freiheit und Demokratie aufwachsen und Leben können! Ich weiss das und bin sehr dankbar dafür!
America didn't join the war until 1941 so it wasn't 1940 & as it ended in '45. That looks like a boy so it's probably late on 44 or 45.
The title says “1940s”, not “1940”, so it’s still technically correct
You are correct. I'm not sure why people think the 1940s is the same as 1940.
I assume in this thread it’s just people reading it wrong
The best kind of correct.
1940?? years later
That... looks like the medic is just about to pull a broken bone that has pierced the skin, back into place. You can see he is grimacing just before pulling because he knows it's going to hurt.
We have not learned much.
I want to know his backstory first before I feel any sympathy. Did he kill or capture any innocent people prior to this. How many allied soldiers did he kill.