"Ich frage euch: Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?"

May 6, 2015 10:27 AM

Colour footage of Berlin, July 1945. Aerial colour footage of the destruction of Berlin, 1945 (II, III.) Colour footage of Trümmerfrauen in front of the Reichstag.
posted by MartinWisse (14 comments total)

Nice find. Thanks for sharing.
posted by dazed_one at 10:32 AM on May 6, 2015

The soundtrack is so odd in that first one. But still: this is interesting, thank you.
posted by The corpse in the library at 10:51 AM on May 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

From the Youtube comments, the sound was added later (perhaps much later), but kudos to the sound engineer -- it's really quite unobtrusive.
posted by Mogur at 11:28 AM on May 6, 2015

Here is a set on vimeo. The soundtrack on the Trümmerfrauen link is really vile, why do people do that?
posted by epo at 12:48 PM on May 6, 2015

War is evidence that after thousands of years humankind still does not get it.
posted by notreally at 1:03 PM on May 6, 2015

I have a memory of an interview I heard years ago, I think with Vernon Walters who was in Berlin about this time as an aide to John J. McCloy. He recalled a brief visit with a family living in the basement of a bombed out apartment. On leaving, Walters commented that given the wreckage all around, he doubted that Germany would ever recover. McCloy disagreed. Asked for evidence, McCloy noted that on what passed for a dining table was a vase of fresh flowers. Any people, he said, who made the effort to put flowers on the table at that time clearly had some kind of optimism.

Well, I hope it's true.
posted by BWA at 2:31 PM on May 6, 2015

Thanks! I sent this to my father, who grew up in Berlin and was 5 years old in July 1945. He has vivid memories of spending nights in air raid bunkers with people crying at the muffled sounds of explosions outside. Thankfully, he didn't witness any fighting in the streets, but he remembers the red army marching through the street in front of his home, and once being given a working revolver as a present from a Russian soldier.
posted by tecg at 2:41 PM on May 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

That title is still giving me the chills. My parents bought a hugely overpriced encyclopedia when I was young, and one of the books had several plastic pages with little records in them (six per page), and a little box you could play them with. One of them was about the "Sportpalastrede", where Goebbels called for the total war. First time I ever heard that speech, as this was before the internet and cable channels seemingly dedicated to WW2 documentaries.

I mean, you heard a lot about how great the the Nazi leaders were at giving speeches, basically seducing ordinary Germans into megalomaniac dreams of conquest and greatness. After hearing that vile little man speak, that bubble burst for me. If you applauded that, you were already lost a long time ago. My grandfather's generation had to own that themselves, there were no nigh-superhuman powers of persuasion or other rubbish.
posted by pseudocode at 3:42 PM on May 6, 2015 [2 favorites]

You can always tube dub it with "The Time of My Life"
posted by Smedleyman at 4:35 PM on May 6, 2015

really interesting thanks.

I notice that there was no sign of starvation, all of the women there at least looked pretty well fed. Some areas were obviously much harder hit than others, but they must have been pouring work into critical restoration, as the tram system was up and running.
posted by wilful at 5:48 PM on May 6, 2015

Re the fresh flowers: I was an exchange student in Germany and both of my host parents were kids during this time period. They were both EXTREMELY thrifty and clean, to an extent that shocked American me. It made me believe that Germany's famous obsession with cleanliness and order, at least in this century, is partially tied to the total devastation of the war. If you had absolutely nothing, at least that nothing, those rags and that floor or whatever was left, was clean and ordentlich. Think Great Depression-level thrift times one million.
posted by mynameisluka at 5:50 PM on May 6, 2015 [3 favorites]

I don't know, wilful, there are some pretty gaunt kids at about 2:10 of the first video.
posted by mynameisluka at 5:52 PM on May 6, 2015

Check out the (staged) bucket-brigade woman thumbing her nose at the camera at 1:40 in the first link
posted by newmoistness at 7:23 PM on May 6, 2015

Good timing. This Friday is the 70th anniversary of VE (Victory in Europe) Day.
posted by bcarter3 at 10:38 PM on May 6, 2015