Some rivetting pictures from WW2

It is early days into Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia. The Germans ruthlessly executed partisans.

If Hitler had not been so ruthless against ordinary Russian people, the communist state would have collapsed. Most Russians hated Stalin and the communists. Stalin had purged the Russian army of its best officers and replaced them communists in 1937. The Russian army had not recovered from that in 1941.

It was when ordinary Russians understood that Hitler was attacking Russia as a whole and not merely the communist state, that they turned against Germany with a fury. Russians are a proud and very patriotic people. Attack on Mother Russia could not be tolerated.

Hitler's "commissar order" called for the instant shooting down of Communist party agents in the army. He sent Einsatzgruppen or extermination detachments to come behind the army and rout out and murder Jews. He resolved to deport or allow millions of Slavs to starve in order to empty the land for future German settlers.

If the Germans had done things differently, the Soviet Union would have collapsed. Most Russians hated Stalin and would have co-operated with the advancing Germans. Hitler's ruthless policy turned all Russians against the Germans.

German soldiers tend to their wounded comrade in Russia, November, 1941.

German soldiers watch as a Russian village burns. 1941.

SCORCHED EARTH POLICY
Both Hitler and Stalin ordered the 'scorched earth policy'. Burning of all villages and towns by the retreating armies so that the advancing enemy forces' advance got slowed down.

German planes pound Stalingrad 1942. But it lost the battle.

QUOTES
"The disaster of Stalingrad profoundly shocked the German people and armed forces alike...Never before in Germany's history had so large a body of troops come to so dreadful an end."
General Siegfried von Westphal - 1943

The Soviet flag flies in Stalingrad as Paulus surrendered. February 1943

QUOTES

"The troops of the Don Front at 4pm on the 2nd February 1943 completed the rout and destruction of the encircled group of enemy forces in Stalingrad. Twenty two division have been destroyed or taken prisoner."
Lieutenant General Rokossovski - February 1943

A German troop carrier moves into the fight. Operation Citadel. 1943

WHAT WAS OPERATION CITADEL?

Hitler understood that the trap was closing on Nazi Germany; loss in Africa and the Sicily landings by the Allies meant that something decisive was needed to be done against the main enemy - The Soviet Union.

Battle for Kursk was the result which the Germans lost. It marked the beginning of the end of Nazi Germany.

German soldiers examine their defences at the Atlantic Wall on the French coast.

ATLANTIC WALL

In 1943 Rommel was the given the responsibility of bringing the Atlantic Wall out of “Hitler’s cloud cuckoo land” and into reality. Hitler had “ordered that the western coast of Europe be turned into an impenetrable fortress [with] 15,000 permanent defensive positions [arranged with at least] 30 per mile”

Rommel did much but the reason the Wall was not ready and did not stop D-Day was not Rommel's fault alone; the real cause was lack of resources and the inefficiencies of the Nazi administrative system.

A defeated demoralised German army withdraws from Russia. 1944.

WHAT IF GERMANY HAD DEFEATED RUSSIA?

History would have been written very differently. Britain alone would not have been able to withstand the German onslaught. A victorious Germany in Russia would then have hit at Britain with many more Luftwaffe fighters and bombers. Churchill would have been kicked out of office and Britain would have surrendered. The fact that Germany got bogged down in Russia gave the Americans and British time to get together and crank up their war production.

A dead German soldier in France. 1944.

Russian guns booms on the outskirts of Berlin. The end for Hitler was near.

HITLER'S LAST ORDER
On 14 April, Hitler issued his order of the day. He believed that the recent death of the American President, Franklin Roosevelt on April 12th was a sign that all was not lost and that the war would turn in favor of Germany.

"Soldiers on the German Eastern Front:

The Jewish Bolshevik arch-enemy has gone over to the attack with his masses for the last time. He attempts to smash Germany and to eradicate our nation. You soldiers from the east today already know yourselves to a large extent what fate is threatening, above all, German women, girls, and children. While old men and children are being murdered, women and girls are humiliated to the status of barracks prostitutes. Others are marched off to Siberia.

We have anticipated this thrust, and since January of this year everything has been done to build up a strong front. Mighty artillery is meeting the enemy. Our infantry's casualties were replenished by countless new units. Reserve units, new formations and the Volksturm reinforce our front. This time the Bolsheviks will experience Asia's old fate. That is, he must and will bleed to death in front of the capital of the German Reich.

Whosoever does not do his duty at this moment is a traitor to our nation. The regiment or division that leaves its position acts so disgracefully that it will have to be ashamed before the women and children who are withstanding the bombing terror in our towns.

Above all, look out for the treacherous few officers and soldiers who, to secure their own miserable lives, will fight against us in Russian pay, perhaps even in German uniforms. Whosoever gives you a command to retreat is, unless you know him well, to be arrested immediately, and if necessary to be executed immediately, irrespective of his rank.

If in these coming days and weeks every soldier on the Eastern Front fulfills his duty, Asia's last onslaught will collapse just as in the end our enemies' penetration in the west will despite everything, come to naught. Berlin remains German, Vienna will again be German and Europe will never be Russian.

From one community, sworn to defend not a vain conception of a fatherland, but to defend your homeland, your women, your children and thus your future.

In this hour the entire German nation looks to you, my soldiers in the east, and only hopes that by your fanaticism, by your arms and by your leadership, the Bolshevik onslaught is drowned in a blood bath.

At the moment when fate has taken the greatest war criminal of all times from this earth, the war will take a decisive turn.

Adolph Hitler

American soldiers are startled as a fuel cart explodes in an occupied German town. 1945.


American and Soviet soldiers bond in Germany

After Poland and before Barbarossa: A short history in pictures

After wrapping up Poland between themselves, the Russians and Germans meet at Lublin, 1939. Germany would attack Russia in less than two years.

Canadian Journal of History, 2007 by Ben Lombardi

Reviews the book "June 1941: Hitler and Stalin," by John Lukacs.

Excerpt from the review

Whereas Stalin lurched from one failure to the next in his relations with Hitler, the German leader displayed considerable dexterity. Ultimately, Lukacs argues that Stalin failed because his thinking was subordinated to an irrational faith in Hitler, an exaggerated distrust of Great Britain, and an adamantine refusal to see the growing threat Germany posed. In other words, Hitler outplayed Stalin — at least in the run-up to this titanic conflict.…

Source

All the while on the Rhine border the Germans were making threatening noises with sound trucks like this. The idea being to demoralise the neighbours.

Secrets of The Ghost Army - inflatable battle tanks, uniforms


In 1942 the U.S. Army recruited artists and designers to form a military unit that didn't exist - the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops. Between D-Day and the end of the war, The Ghost Army staged more than 20 battlefield deceptions from Normandy to the Rhine. They employed high-tech sound trucks and inflatable tanks, trucks, jeeps and planes; altered their uniforms and vehicle markings; and impersonated everyone from tight-lipped generals to garrulous drunks. With just over 1,000 men, they became adept at pretending to be divisions of 20,000, diverting German attention from real American units.

The French were feeling secure behind the West Wall at Bienfold. The Germans entered France through Belgium!

This lady in Amsterdam likes the Germans

HOW NETHERLANDS WAS WON BY THE GERMANS

At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, the Netherlands declared itself neutral once again as it had done during World War I. Even so, on May 10, 1940 Germany invaded the Netherlands.

One of the purposes of the German invasion of the Netherlands was to draw away attention from operations in the Ardennes and to lure British and French forces deeper into Belgium as well as to pre-empt a possible British invasion in North Holland. Also the Luftwaffe had insisted on seizing the Dutch soil for they were in strong need of the availability of airfields near the Northsea coast.

The German forces faced little resistance at first, but their advance was eventually slowed by the Dutch army. At the Afsluitdijk, the Grebbeberg, Rotterdam and Dordrecht the Dutch army offered strong resistance. A German airborne landing at The Hague, intended to capture the Dutch royal family and the government, failed, and about 1,000 of the paratroopers and airlanding troops that had not been killed were captured and shipped to Britain. Queen Wilhelmina and her government stayed in Britain, but during the Battle of Britain her daughter Princess Juliana and her children proceeded to Ottawa, Canada.

On May 14 the Germans - surprised by the Dutch resistance - demanded the surrender of the city of Rotterdam, threatening to bomb the city. A surrender was agreed upon with Dutch and German forces, with the Dutch intention of protecting its own civilians. However, due to miscommunication between German negotiators on the ground and the Luftwaffe units assigned to carry out the bombings, the city was bombed by error.

After this bombardment, the German military command threatened to bomb the city of Utrecht as well if the Netherlands did not surrender. The Dutch army laid down arms at 1900 hrs on 14 May, and formally capitulated on May 15, with the exception of the forces in Zeeland. They resisted for a few more days, until the bombardment of Middelburg on May 17, which forced the Zeeland forces to surrender as well.

Germans ride into Brussels

The Battle of Belgium & The fall of Eben Emael



An easy walk into Denmark



Posing before the Triumph de Arch in Paris

Practising for Operation Sea Lion, the name for the invasion of Britain. It never came. Germany lost too may airplanes in the Battle for Britain.

QUOTES

"My Luftwaffe is invincible...And so now we turn to England. How long will this one last - two, three weeks?"
Hermann Goring - June 1940

German planes bombed London

QUOTES

"Like so many of our people, we have now had a personal experience of German barbarity which only strengthens the resolution of all of us to fight through to final victory."
King George VI - September 1940

PERSONAL NARRATIVE OF THE BOMBINGS (From Eyewitnesstohistory)

"They came just after dark... "

Ernie Pyle was one of World War Two's most popular correspondents. His journalism was characterized by a focus on the common soldier interspersed with sympathy, sensitivity and humor. He witnessed the war in Europe from the Battle of Britain through the invasion of France. In 1945 he accepted assignment to the Pacific Theater and was killed during the battle for Okinawa. Here, he describes a night raid on London in 1940:

"It was a night when London was ringed and stabbed with fire.

They came just after dark, and somehow you could sense from the quick, bitter firing of the guns that there was to he no monkey business this night.
Shortly after the sirens wailed you could hear the Germans grinding overhead. In my room, with its black curtains drawn across the windows, you could feel the shake from the guns. You could hear the boom, crump, crump, crump, of heavy bombs at their work of tearing buildings apart. They were not too far away.
Half an hour after the firing started I gathered a couple of friends and went to a high, darkened balcony that gave us a view of a third of the entire circle of London. As we stepped out onto the balcony a vast inner excitement came over all of us-an excitement that had neither fear nor horror in it, because it was too full of awe.
You have all seen big fires, but I doubt if you have ever seen the whole horizon of a city lined with great fires - scores of them, perhaps hundreds.
There was something inspiring just in the awful savagery of it.
The closest fires were near enough for us to hear the crackling flames and the yells of firemen. Little fires grew into big ones even as we watched. Big ones died down under the firemen's valor, only to break out again later.
About every two minutes a new wave of planes would be over. The motors seemed to grind rather than roar, and to have an angry pulsation, like a bee buzzing in blind fury.
The guns did not make a constant overwhelming din as in those terrible days of September. They were intermittent - sometimes a few seconds apart, sometimes a minute or more. Their sound was sharp, near by; and soft and muffled, far away. They were everywhere over London.
Into the dark shadowed spaces below us, while we watched, whole batches of incendiary bombs fell. We saw two dozen go off in two seconds. They flashed terrifically, then quickly simmered down to pin points of dazzling white, burning ferociously. These white pin points would go out one by one, as the unseen heroes of the moment smothered them with sand. But also, while we watched, other pin points would burn on, and soon a yellow flame would leap up from the white center. They had done their work - another building was on fire.
The greatest of all the fires was directly in front of us. Flames seemed to whip hundreds of feet into the air. Pinkish-white smoke ballooned upward in a great cloud, and out of this cloud there gradually took shape - so faintly at first that we weren't sure we saw correctly - the gigantic dome of St. Paul's Cathedral.
St. Paul's was surrounded by fire, but it came through. It stood there in its enormous proportions - growing slowly clearer and clearer, the way objects take shape at dawn. It was like a picture of some miraculous figure that appears before peace-hungry soldiers on a battlefield.
The streets below us were semi-illuminated from the glow. Immediately above the fires the sky was red and angry, and overhead, making a ceiling in the vast heavens, there was a cloud of smoke all in pink. Up in that pink shrouding there were tiny, brilliant specks of flashing light-antiaircraft shells bursting. After the flash you could hear the sound.
Up there, too, the barrage balloons were standing out as clearly as if it were daytime, but now they were pink instead of silver. And now and then through a hole in that pink shroud there twinkled incongruously a permanent, genuine star - the old - fashioned kind that has always been there.
Below us the Thames grew lighter, and all around below were the shadows - the dark shadows of buildings and bridges that formed the base of this dreadful masterpiece.
Later on I borrowed a tin hat and went out among the fires. That was exciting too; but the thing I shall always remember above all the other things in my life is the monstrous loveliness of that one single view of London on a holiday night - London stabbed with great fires, shaken by explosions, its dark regions along the Thames sparkling with the pin points of white-hot bombs, all of it roofed over with a ceiling of pink that held bursting shells, balloons, flares and the grind of vicious engines. And in yourself the excitement and anticipation and wonder in your soul that this could be happening at all.
These things all went together to make the most hateful, most beautiful single scene I have ever known."

References:
Johnson, David, The London Blitz : The City Ablaze, December 29, 1940 (1981); Pyle Ernie, Ernie Pyle in England (1941), Reprinted in Commager, Henry Steele, The Story of the Second World War (1945).

Destruction in Belgrade, Yugoslavia

YUGOSLAVIA AND BALKANS

Operation Punishment was the code name for the German bombing of Belgrade during the invasion of Yugoslavia. The Luftwaffe bombed the city on April 6, 1941 (Palm Sunday) without a declaration of war, continuing bombing until April 10. More than 500 bombing sorties were flown against Belgrade in three waves coming from Romania where German forces were assembled for the attack on the Soviet Union. Most of the government officials fled, and the Yugoslav army began to collapse.

The attack on Yugoslavia was one of the earliest terror bombings of World War II. In the following days Bulgaria, Hungary, and Italy joined Nazi Germany in partitioning Kingdom of Yugoslavia, with the support of the newly established Nazi-puppet Independent State of Croatia. The country was absorbed within 12 days, and Greece fell a week later, which made the Third Reich the master of most of continental Europe and ready for launching the attack against Soviet Union.

Germans in Greece

Dramatic pictures: D-Day: Second World War

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The enemy must be annihilated before he reaches our main battlefield...We must stop him in the water...destroying all his equipment while it is still afloat. 

-Field Marshall Erwin Rommel - 22nd April 1944

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Before D-Day, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower gives his "Nothing else, but complete victory" talk to American soldiers of 101st Airborne Division

QUOTES

"Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle hardened. He will fight savagely"
General Dwight Eisenhower - 6th June 1944

VIDEO: GERMAN NEWSREEL

American soldiers march through a British town to their embarkation vehicles

QUOTES

"At the present time, it is still too early to say whether this is a large-scale diversionary attack or the main effort"
German C-in-C West - Morning Report for the 6th June 1944

American paratroopers sit grimly on a plane to parachute into France

Others join a Protestant prayer service on D-Day

These guys are the first batch to disembark on Omaha beach. No wonder they are tensed up.




These US soldiers are tense too.

The Canadians prepare to disembark


American soldiers land on Omaha Beach

These British troops are having a rough time. Many were injured. Or dead.

The Britishers are tensed up as they wait for further orders after landing on the Normandy beach.

QUOTES

"In spite of intense efforts, the moment has drawn near when this front, already so heavily strained, will break. I consider it my duty to bring these conclusions to your notice,...my fuhrer."
Field Marshal Gunther von Kluge - C-in-C West - July 1944

Germans who were captured.

VIDEO: GERMAN NEWSREEL: FIGHTING AMERICAN AND BRITISH SOLDIERS IN NORMANDY

When Berlin fell in 1945: Second World War

This image perhaps says it all. The proud young German soldier lies dead before the Brandenburg Gate

The Battle for Berlin saw some of the fiercest and desperate fighting during the Second World war. The Germans were fighting desperately to stave off avenging Russians. The Russians were desperate to get to Berlin first. Also to get hold of the nuclear weapons that the Nazis had invented.

QUOTES

"Hitler's large-scale demands for the Mediterranean meant that...the plans for...an 'Eastern Wall' were overtaken by the increasingly rapid advance of the Red Army"
Lieutenant General Warlimont - (Speaking after the war)

From the BBC

The human cost of the battle for Berlin had been enormous. Millions of shells were fired into a city that was already devastated after two years of relentless bombing raids by British and American warplanes. Nearly a quarter of a million people died during the last three weeks of World War Two, almost as many as the United States lost during the entire war.

The German armed forces, the Wehrmacht, was a shadow of its former self. But its 300,000 German troops were determined to hold out against the vastly superior Red Army. The German resolve to fight was largely due to fear of Russian retributions. Since 1941, Nazi forces had laid waste to large parts of the Soviet Union. More than 23 million Soviet soldiers and civilians had died. Fuelled by Nazi propaganda, the Germans were terrified of what would happen if Berlin fell into Soviet hands.

The not-so-handsome Soviet troops march on the streets of Berlin.

QUOTES

"The battle of Kursk... the forcing of the Dnieper... and the liberation of Kiev, left Hitlerite Germany facing catastrophe."
General Vasili I. Chuikov - Commander of the 8th Guards Army - (Speaking after the war)

BBC

'We started to fire at the masses,' says one former German machine gunner. 'They weren't human beings for us. It was a wall of attacking beasts who were trying to kill us. You yourself were no longer human.'

Russians soldiers wave their flag near the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin

BATTLE OF HALBE (BBC)

Amongst the rubble of the city centre, Hitler was holding out in his underground bunker, cut off from the reality of the fighting above. During a staff conference on 22 April, Hitler came close to admitting defeat. But then his deputy, Martin Borman, insisted that there was still hope. 'Suddenly they were all busy making plans again,' a former Wehrmacht staff officer remembers.

'It was decided to fight the battle for Berlin and that Hitler would direct it personally.' Hitler's hopes lay with the 70,000 troops of General Wenck's 12th Army south west of the city. He ordered them to unite with General Busse's 9th Army, retreating from the Oder. They were then to launch a counter attack against the Red Army.

But Hitler's final battle plan was pie in the sky. Advancing from the south, Marshall Konev's forces cut off and surrounded the Werhmacht's 9th Army in the forest south of Berlin, near the small town of Halbe. 'The massacre in that forest was appalling,' Beevor observed after a visit to the Halbe battlefield. 'There was absolutely no way of treating the wounded, they were just left screaming at the road side.'

Over 50,000 soldiers and civilians died. Most of the dead were German, many of them SS. It was the Nazi forces' desperate last stand. One local witness remembers how the narrow paths leading through the forest were piled high with corpses. It took the local population months to clear the site. Even today, a thousand corpses are found each year in and around Berlin. Many of them are detected in the now silent forests of Halbe.

Over 50,000 soldiers and civilians died. Most of the dead were German, many of them SS. It was the Nazi forces' desperate last stand. One local witness remembers how the narrow paths leading through the forest were piled high with corpses. It took the local population months to clear the site. Even today, a thousand corpses are found each year in and around Berlin. Many of them are detected in the now silent forests of Halbe.

A Soviet tank trundles by the Gate

RUSSIANS IN BERLIN (BBC)

Zukhov's and Konev's troops were punching their way into the German capital, sometimes accidentally firing at each other in their bid to win the race for Berlin. Ironically, the Soviets' use of tanks in the street fighting was not dissimilar to the tactics used so disastrously by the Germans in Stalingrad. Soviet T-34s were highly vulnerable to the Panzerfaust, the German bazooka, fired by soldiers hiding in destroyed buildings. It meant further unnecessary losses for the Red Army. But the 90,000 German defenders - mainly old people or members of the Hitler Youth - stood little chance against more than a million Red Army troops.

Already, the civilian population was bearing the brunt of the Red Army's revenge. Though the first wave of Soviet troops was generally considered to be disciplined, it was the second that indulged in orgies of rape and violence, fuelled by large stocks of alcohol found in the city.

Based on contemporary hospital reports and on surging abortion rates in the following months, it is estimated that up to two million German women were raped during the last six months of World War Two, around 100,000 of them in Berlin. One woman remembered hiding in the loft of her apartment block, ready to jump out of the window if she was detected, whilst her best friend was being gang raped by Soviet soldiers in the apartment below.

The authorities in Moscow traditionally deny German allegations of mass rape at the end of the war. But during his research, Beevor discovered internal Red Army documents that prove that the Soviet High Command was well aware that some of their soldiers were running out of control. Even more shocking is Beevor's discovery in the Red Army files that Red Army troops also raped Russian women after their release from Nazi slave labour camps in Germany.

The once proud and beautiful city lies in ruins

QUOTES

"It is on this beautiful day that we celebrate the Fuhrers birthday and thank him for he is the only reason why Germany is still alive today"
Josef Goebbels - Ministry of Propaganda - 26th April 1945

WHY WAS STALIN IN A HURRY TO GET BERLIN?

Stalin was desperate to get his hands on the German nuclear research centre, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in the southwest of Berlin - before the Americans got there. The Soviets knew through their spies of the American atomic bomb programme. Stalin's own nuclear programme, Operation Borodino, was lagging behind and Soviet scientists wanted to find out exactly what the Germans had come up with during the war.
As it turned out, the special NKVD troops despatched to secure the German institute discovered three tons of uranium oxide, a material they were short of at the time. 'So the Soviets achieved their objective,' says Beevor, 'the uranium oxide they found in Berlin was enough to kick start Operation Borodino and allow them to start working on their first nuclear weapon.'

The entire generation of young German men was wiped out by the end of the war. Only old men and women remained in Berlin as the Soviet troops poured in. Out of a population of 27,00,000; 20,00,000 were women.

After the battle, more than a hundred thousand German prisoners of war were marched to labour camps in the Soviet Union. Only now did the totality of their defeat sink in on the German people. The country lay in ruins and the population was close to starvation. In addition, confirmation of the Nazis' mass extermination of the European Jews meant that Germany faced a complete moral catastrophe.

The battle for Berlin had brought to an end the bloodiest conflict in European history. 'There's no family in the Soviet Union, Poland or Germany where they didn't lose at least one close relative,' said Beevor in our final interview. 'In Britain, the suffering was real, but it simply cannot be compared to the scale of suffering in Central Europe.'

The French SS men confront the Soviet tanks on the streets of Berlin. There were no German soldiers left except for young boys so the 'Charlemagne battalion' of the French SS was sent to defend Berlin.

All the buildings in ruins with shell and bullet marks.

QUOTES

"On 1 February 1943, an angry Soviet colonel collared a group of emaciated German prisoners in the rubble of Stalingrad. 'That's how Berlin is going to look!' he yelled, pointing to the ruined buildings all around.
From the preface of The Fall of Berlin 1945 by Anthony Beevor 

Before the war. Memory of the past. Hitler marches near the Kroll Theatre as the SS salute.

The grim reality in 1945. A plane had crashed into a five storeyed house. The last ditch fighting was desperate.

Back in April 1945, the battle was coming to a close. On 30 April, Hitler committed suicide - together with his mistress Eva Braun, only hours after they were married. Hitler had given strict orders for his body to be burned, so that his enemies wouldn't do what they had done to Mussolini, who was publicly displayed hanging upside down. 'And Hitler,' one former SS guard told us, 'could rely on the fact that the people he gave these orders to would carry them out.'

By 2 May, the Reichstag, the old German parliament, had fallen. Berlin surrendered to Marshall Zukhov, who received the honour of being the conqueror of Berlin. The battle for Berlin had cost the Soviets over 70,000 dead. Many of them had died because of the haste with which the campaign was conducted. 'Of our unit's 360 handsome young men who gathered at the Dnieper River, only 6 made it to Berlin,' says one Soviet veteran.

Berlin in 1945: First hand account: Notes from the diary of Charles Deutmann

This is a heart-rending account from a man who lived in Berlin after Nazism ended in 1945.


Today we went to Berlin, my wife and me. The streets are cleaned up as far as possible, to restore the traffic barely. It has freed the scattered stones from mortar and built from the ruins of houses. At times you go over a carpet of dust. Alexanderplatz a huge Russian tank was shot in the street. Not far away, a German, who fought his last fight here. The town is a desolate, scary-looking pile of rubble with ghostly shapes of former houses, streets, squares and neighborhoods. Like shattered by the hand of a giant debris field of the 4 ½ million city lies in the sun, surrounded by the green ring of suburbs, not so seriously damaged .

In Berlin, there is dysentery. Large strokes are calling on the people, not drink unboiled water, boil the meat, or roast. All the kitchen or other wastes buried deep.

But what good is all this? The dead lie under the rubble, the rats multiply alarmingly and there is a lack of drugs and alcohol. In front of a butcher's shop were invited from meat. There were large pieces, half, But even during transport, the parts of hundreds of thick black flies were covered. In a field of rubble, which was formerly a mill, grew rye and wheat. On other screes stood tall grass and probably also a flower.

Russian soldiers run through the rubble of the city, honking cars, gangs of Nazi women remove debris and clean the streets, children digging in the rubble stone to wood and painted in between a grizzled man in his makeshift basement shop. "Ladies and men's clothing." In a small bookstore, we were able to buy postcards, stationery and steel springs. In other shops hung signs like "not yet arrived potatoes" or "sold out of bread" or "Today, no more meat," etc.
One sees German police, the women wear colorful clothes, and again in so many tired eyes a spark glimmers of hope.


26 June 1945

A day of joy! After eight weeks we are now receiving 150 grams of margarine. It was evening, fried potatoes, pudding made from wheat grits and stewed rhubarb. In addition, today was the allocation of coffee and sugar. Beautiful!


9 July 1945

We are once again went to Berlin, my wife and me. We ended up following a road block on a small square of the completely destroyed the church in the Weberstrassenwirte.

We stood in front single and mass graves of German soldiers, in graves of unknown dead and dead children. At the burned-out church, surrounded by rubble and debris of destroyed houses is limited, they had found all the next bomb to the devastated place their final resting place. In the midst of the graves, but were parts of the body of a downed American fighter. A wing made of metal, riddled with machine-gun bullets and shrapnel, was leaning against a grave in the church wall.

And most of us, the moment we will never forget - (is there a bear found dead, "asked my wife quietly) - lay the charred Pelzkombination of a downed pilot. From the head, hands and feet of the corpse was nothing more to discover. But the legs and trunk were still required. And hundreds of flies were busy in the thick charred meat and fat around the charred remains of fur, which was once the back of a man. Had these terrible people in the charred remains of a fur coat that looked like a dead, burnt, wild animal is not born a mother, he had not loved anyone who was waiting for him? Why did these poorest of the poor is not buried? He died as an enemy, but with this sad remnant of a human being, we have probably felt deep compassion.

11 July 1945

Remains of cars with sheaves of fire in the cooler, the windows, the outer edges of the bodywork and smashed motorcycles, bomb craters, military equipment, rubble and heaps of stones - that was the Paris Square. Heavily damaged by the Brandenburg Gate, the sad rags hanging of the former wins the car. ZOn both sides of the Charlottenburg Chaussee (via triumphalis) shattered the old, magnificent trees stood with her scanty green and let the view through the vast ruins of the Reichstag building block. To right and left of the road wrecked cars that were skipped when she, the Garbe received fatal bullet, because the guiding man in the last battle with death, the bullets in the body, rearing up suddenly lost to the approaching night, about himself and the car domination.

In between, we always came back to graves, mostly German, one near the road, once removed. Once, with a cross and name, once with the helmet or the simple but the hill.

Scattered throughout the zoo were of German planes dropped bombs supply, which had provided the encircled German troops with ammunition, gasoline, food and bandages. Here also many Russians like to sleep in mass graves. Das Wasser des Landwehrkanals roch fürchterlich nach Leichen. The water of the Landwehr canal smelled terribly of corpses.

Before the big building of the Propaganda Ministry in the Emserstraße had been placed on a mound, the severed head of a black Hitler bust.'s Head wearing a helmet far too little of the SS in the sand, but Prior was crossed with the vagina a rusty SS officer's saber and then a black SS officer's cap with silver cord and skull lay.

Scorn and contempt for a public danger, irrational, silly fools, destroy the megalomaniac surrounded by heartless criminals without a soul and mind races to conquer a world and plunder everything wanted to destroy rational and righteous, and brought untold misery upon the world.

We saw cars with American, British and French officers, soldiers, accompanied by aides in the Army officer rank who wore very good and flattering uniforms.The German officer battered cars on the Leipziger Strasse were empty champagne bottles. At the Potsdam Bridge on Lutzow-shore, we had to wait a little while, get past a British convoy of cars. But it was unbearable, the water flowing below us of the Landwehr Canal brought a terrible stench.

The ruins of the desert Berlin, the largest necropolis in Europe, is impossible to describe in his harrowing uniqueness. All this must have seen a man with steady nerves, to understand at all what must have been committed here.

Rubble, hunger, poverty and broken glass - that is Berlin. We want to see it not for a long time.

Source

AMAZING: 2004 Tsunami washed ship 2 miles onshore!

The Tsunami in 2004 was a destructive one. Amazingly it carried a thousand tons ship two miles onshore!


This 100-foot fishing boat was swept inland by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which dumped it atop a house near the port of Banda Aceh, on Indonesia's island of Sumatra. Fifty-nine residents fleeing floodwaters took refuge aboard the vessel until waters receded more than seven hours later, giving the boat its name, Noah's Ark

A man gives the boat a lick of paint. It is a tourist attraction

The Apung, a 2,600-ton power-generating vessel that the tsunami deposited two miles inland in Banda Aceh, is now a major tourist attraction. It landed atop two houses, killing the inhabitants.

Resident Bustaman, 45, climbs atop the Apung, remembering the day nearly five years ago when the tsunami struck, taking his 5-year-old daughter. "We were all running in fear when the first wave came,” he recalled. "I was holding my 5-year-old as tightly as I could. But my head was hit by a piece of wood. I don’t remember what happened next. But when I came to my senses, my little girl was gone.”

LATimes