Luftwaffe Fotoalbum
June 19, 2015 4:49 AM   Subscribe

 
"As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me," Orwell sardonically observed during the Blitz. "They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are ‘only doing their duty’, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life."

These candid, nonchalant photos of the Nazi Wehrmacht's airborne forces could supply faces for his description. One wonders how many of them might have flown over Guernica.
posted by Doktor Zed at 5:41 AM on June 19, 2015 [6 favorites]


Or how many of them had family members in Dresden
posted by cacofonie at 6:21 AM on June 19, 2015


These young men, the banality of evil.
posted by dazed_one at 6:31 AM on June 19, 2015 [1 favorite]


I've always wondered, if you found yourself a young man in 1930s Germany (or Russia for that matter), knowing what you know now, what was you best chance of getting out of the WWII (and the post-war) alive? Subs are bad bet, but so are planes and tanks. The surface navy, maybe?
posted by leotrotsky at 6:37 AM on June 19, 2015


Well, if you were Russian and a skilled factory worker you'd have a chance of getting sent east when they moved the factories away from the encroaching front and setting up well behind the lines. If I were a German and knew what I know now I'd want as little to do with the Nazi war machine as possible and I'd get to Switzerland as fast as I could.
posted by dazed_one at 6:52 AM on June 19, 2015 [1 favorite]


Join the Coast Guard.
posted by notyou at 6:53 AM on June 19, 2015


Join the Coast Guard.

Does Cool Papa Bell have a sockpuppet?
posted by leotrotsky at 7:00 AM on June 19, 2015 [2 favorites]


Das schreckliche Gesicht des Krieges”, indeed.
posted by scruss at 7:01 AM on June 19, 2015 [1 favorite]


Amazing photos. So many of the Germans could perfectly well be Americans; one reminded me of my own father (who was lucky enough to spend the war in the Yukon). The photos of Soviet prisoners of war were chilling: very few of those men would survive. Thanks for the post; much food for thought.
posted by languagehat at 7:36 AM on June 19, 2015


My friend did a series of paintings based on found, candid wartime photos of soldiers and sailors and airmen enjoying non-wartime together.

I've shared this album with him; maybe he'll make some more!
posted by notyou at 7:45 AM on June 19, 2015 [1 favorite]


What is the context for these? Where did the albums come from?
posted by latkes at 7:49 AM on June 19, 2015


The guy with sunglasses on the left here looks familiar.
posted by exogenous at 8:22 AM on June 19, 2015 [1 favorite]


Saw this photo by Walter Frentz just yesterday "Luftwaffe aces meet Hitler after an awards ceremony at the Berghof, April 4, 1944". More info here
posted by growabrain at 9:13 AM on June 19, 2015 [1 favorite]


Candid pictures that seem so innocent until the pictures of the dead bodies start showing up.
posted by e1c at 9:22 AM on June 19, 2015 [2 favorites]


I've always wondered, if you found yourself a young man in 1930s Germany (or Russia for that matter), knowing what you know now, what was you best chance of getting out of the WWII (and the post-war) alive? Subs are bad bet, but so are planes and tanks. The surface navy, maybe?

What happens is you die.

I'm sure there are plenty of German members who has direct family members who fought on the German side of the war, I can only claim it by marriage. My wife's grandfather died in the German army in the Russian front. He was a radio operator. My father-in-law never knew his own father. He only has photos a lot like these ones.

Candid pictures that seem so innocent until the pictures of the dead bodies start showing up.

All of these people are dead now, some were probably dead shortly after the pictures were taken.
posted by GuyZero at 9:30 AM on June 19, 2015 [1 favorite]


Saw this photo by Walter Frentz just yesterday "Luftwaffe aces meet Hitler after an awards ceremony at the Berghof, April 4, 1944". More info here

Good grief. The Germans sure shot down a lot of allied airplanes.
posted by notyou at 12:05 PM on June 19, 2015


Subs are bad bet, but so are planes and tanks. The surface navy, maybe?

Subs were the worst. "The Germans lost 783 U-boats and approximately 30,000 sailors killed, three-quarters of Germany's 40,000-man U-boat fleet." The Luftwaffe had 3.4 million people in service 1939-1945, with 485,000 casualties (I assume the typical military meaning of killed and wounded together). The Kriegsmarine had 1.5 million people in service during the war, with 191,287 casualties (may overlap with U-boat casualties).
posted by kirkaracha at 2:15 PM on June 19, 2015


I'd guess the Waffen SS had the lowest casualty rate.
posted by clavdivs at 5:28 PM on June 19, 2015


Killing Jews was probably pretty safe, if you were up for that sort of thing.
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:20 AM on June 20, 2015 [1 favorite]


I'm German, my father was one of the last teenagers who became Wehrmacht soldiers (late '44, Eastern front, barely 18 years old, he eventually deserted and had quite a lot of stories to tell), my mother was the daughter of a mid-level Nazi functionary (who never changed his views, neither did my grandmother, who was still gushing about being on social terms with the family of the commander of Bergen-Belsen KZ), so the question what I would have done if I'd been young when the Nazis came to power is one I have asked myself quite a lot (with varying answers over the years).
So what could one have done? Short answer: Joining the Nazi Party, rising up in the ranks, and then suicide-bombing Hitler and as many of the inner circle as possible (Stauffenberg would have succeeded if he had been a suicide bomber and not "forgotten" the bomb under the heavy oak table which saved Hitler's life - although he was much too late anyway, his motive being that they were losing the war, not the atrocities which had been committed; Elser too, if he had been there to detonate the bomb manually).
In light of how quickly the Nazis, after taking (being handed the) power in '33 established a system of terror (they didn't wait a month to start murdering communists and other potential insurgents, no real other resistance was feasible imo - you got executed for putting out leaflets or listening to enemy radio stations or even telling jokes about Hitler, after all.
If I would have had the courage to do so, I don't know.

As for the pictures: These are ghastly. These are the kind of photo albums you assemble of your last summer holiday. And actually almost all the photos we have of committing the Shoah (like this one, it was titled "The last Jew in Vinnitsa" in the album, afaik) are from private photo albums like these...
posted by ojemine at 3:48 AM on June 20, 2015 [3 favorites]


As for the pictures: These are ghastly.

No they are ordinary, and that's why they are interesting. They are just like those that any soldier would take- what sort of photographs do you expect a soldier to take? Spots Illustrated? They are photographs taken by a young man who went to war and was part of a zeitgeist. There is nothing political or sinister in them.

And those photographs of Russian prisoners? We know what happened to the vast number or Russian PoWs, but did the photographer? Probably not, did they care? Probably not. They were young men on the winning side who had be bought up in a system vastly different to ours.
posted by mattoxic at 4:10 AM on June 20, 2015


I should have phrased better: I perceive them as ghastly. For attempting to create an innocence and normalcy that was false (even propagandistic), and these young men were very well aware of it being untrue: they knew they were the aggressors in a war and, until the very end, not defending their country. And, from having conversations with people who lived through the war, everybody was aware of that, civilian or soldier. Nobody believed that Germany was attacked on Sept. 1st 1939, everybody knew there were KZs (because they were literally everywhere), everybody knew people who had been taken away in the night or even in plain daylight. Soldiers on home leave from the front had stories to tell. The basic gist of what happened in the extermination camps or behind the eastern front was common knowledge, too, because so many were involved in it - you don't kill 6,000,000 Jews and 20,000,000 Russians, for example, with just a handful of SS, obviously. All this is very well researched and documented.
And so, yes, these young men knew what would happen to the prisoners, basically, and they knew they weren't partaking in a just war, they were very well aware they were fighting for a murderous dictatorship, although many probably would have rationalised it in some way.
And that's why I find these photos disturbing and ghastly. But other interpretations are possible, YMMV.
posted by ojemine at 5:30 AM on June 20, 2015 [2 favorites]


> No they are ordinary

No, I agree with ojemine, they are ghastly if you know what they are. But I guess people differ on how far they can abstract an image from information that's not physically present in it.

> We know what happened to the vast number or Russian PoWs, but did the photographer? Probably not

Yes, they certainly did. The Germans knew perfectly well what was happening to the Jews and Slavs who fell under the wheels of their war machine. Every German soldier anywhere near the front saw Soviet POWs behind barbed wire, being given no shelter and little or no food. There were corpses aplenty. This was not a mystery.
posted by languagehat at 8:16 AM on June 20, 2015


Fact. In Stalag Luft 4, my uncle saw the treatment of russian prisoners. Even a polish flyer was subjected to the worst treatment. The "honey pot" detail assured diease and the logging crew assured exhaustion. The insidious aspect was propaganda, the Germans wanted to remind the allied prisoners what would happen to them if they revolted.
The pictures are ghastly if one knows what they are. My uncle was saved from civilian execution from the Luftwaffe search teams for downed pilots. But they received a bounty and were only vaguely humane to have a chit for after the war when it they would be judged.
Everyone knew what was going on. An Austrian guard told my uncle a camp was only miles away. He went to the camp after liberation (by the Russians)

Yeah.
posted by clavdivs at 10:38 AM on June 20, 2015 [2 favorites]


He never spoke of it. As if he would take you to the front gate and nothing, aversion. Completly understandable. I spent enough time at Kriegie reunions, did some editing. The one thing that stood out was thier sympathy for the guys from Japanese camps. (my father served with a guy who narrated his story in a book called "Laughter in Hell". Still have dads copy.) They also felt the same for the guys from Korea and Vietnam. During first Gulf War when our first pilot was downed and paraded he just turned off the TV and predicted a squalid end to that Saddam. He did not live to see 9/11.
The Austrian guard is the only person he forgave, they pitied him, he would leave his rifle behind, trade and fake a bellow then smile."Big Stumpf" was
the worst guards moniker. All sorts of stories circulated about his demise. Turns out he shot by someone.
Alot of SS were shot on the spot by GIs, more then one would want to admit.
There weren't many cameras around after liberation. I believe there is a picture of Marshal Rokossovsky at the liberation. The Russians got them a 1000 cows and offered to arm them.
I don't want to go into the Russian prisoners liberation. The Polish flyer, the Brits commandered him, and he survived until 1994. He traded my uncle some polish ciggerette papers and a pipe for k bars and soap.

I have a pack of those papers today.
I thought of this because of Father's Day. When you listen as these men paused, you could almost hear the war.
My father bracketed some passages from 'Laughter in Hell'

"Can you imagine what Laughter sounds like in hell? Anyone in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp can tell you. There are various forms. Sometimes it comes with defiance, sometimes with hysteria- and some times with the little things"
The story finishes with a guy who stole some saki and was beaten near death but could not be broken.

Just a few pictures the Luftwaffe helped create.
posted by clavdivs at 12:13 AM on June 22, 2015 [3 favorites]


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