u/LookIntoTheHorizon

>Concentration Camp, Mauthasen, Austria, May 7-8, 1945. Sound interview with Lt Jack H Taylor, US Navy, who tells of his work in the German-occupied countries of Europe, his capture, and his treatment as a prisoner.

>Jack H. Taylor U.S. Navy, CA. "Interview with American Officer in Austria, October 44. Captured in December by Gestapo in prison for four months. Lived on potatoes, seen and heard terrible stories, condemned to death. Naval officer executed here. Huge pit to bury dead, killed in six different ways. Naked in the snow, conditions too extreme to mention."

>When Russians neared Vienna, I was taken to Mauthausen Concentration an extermination camp, where we have been starving and beaten and killed. Fortunately, my turn hadn't come. Two American officers, at least, have been executed here. Here is insignia and dog tags. Executed by gas."

>Question: "How many ways executed them?" "By gas, shooting, beating with clubs, exposure, that is: standing out in snow, naked, 38 hours and having cold water thrown on them in mid-winter, starvation, dogs, and pushing over 100 foot cliff. This is all true and has been seen and is now being recorded. I came in uniform [which was] taken away. This was substituted (points to striped inmate uniform.) I was condemned to death, like another American here, but fortunately 11th Army Division has come through and saved us in time.

source : American officers/POWs in Mauthausen. You can listen his full interview there.

• The cliff was called 'Fallschirmspringerwand' (Parachutist wall).
• Two US and one British PoWs were confirmed to be executed by gunshot in the neck. (USA v. Hans Altfuldisch, et al. - Case No. 000.50.5)

>The Mauthausen concentration camp was one of the places where an ultra-brutal form of capitalism, peculiar to the Nazis, took shape. All of the previous history of workers’ struggles for dignity, fair wages, a shorter working day, and the right to form unions and to strike were viciously repudiated by the curses of the Kapos, the crack of whips, and the shots of pistols. Days of excruciating toil frequently lasted eleven hours in the summer months and nine hours in the winter. Once they extracted blocks of stone from the cliff, the prisoners next had to break them into smaller fragments. Then they were forced to bear them up the 186 steps of the 'Todesstiege', the horrid Stairway of Death.

>The SS eagerly dispensed punishment to anyone exhibiting fatigue. During my trip, once I reached the bottom of the Stairway, I went to a pond underneath a very steep rock wall. Sharp rocks shot up through the water. A monument erected there described how the SS delighted in hurling these Jewish men off the top of this wall to their deaths. With their inimitable sense of humor, the guards nicknamed their victims Fallschirmspringer—parachutists.

>These men died unspeakably painful deaths far from their homes in 1941-42. “In other camps,” writes Nikolaus Wachsmann, “inmates began to dread a transfer to Mauthausen, after returning prisoners described the huge quarries as hell on earth.” Its name rightly incited terror.

>Mauthausen surpassed its own earlier precedents for barbarity in the winter and early spring of 1945. Even with the Nazi regime’s days numbered, business as usual did not halt for Commandant Franz Ziereis. In late February, hundreds of escaped Soviet prisoners were rounded up, with help from local citizens—and executed during the Hasenjagd (Hare Hunt), as the Nazis called it. On April 20, Hitler’s final birthday, the SS made a “selection”—the hideous euphemism for killing—of 3,000 ill inmates from the infirmary. Then on April 28 they carried out a final gassing operation, killing more than 30 Austrian socialists and communists. Murder was a way of life for these sadists.

source : Where Murder Was a Way of Life: The Mauthausen Concentration Camp

>9: United States v Johann Haider et al (Case 000-50-5-13)
The case of United States v Johann Haider was a follow-up to the case of United States of America v Hans Altfuldisch et al, in which 60 defendants who had worked at Mauthausen concentration camp were tried and found guilty of acting in pursuance of a common design that resulted in the mistreatment and death of many thousands of prisoners.

>Mauthausen was a concentration camp of considerable scale; at the time of its liberation, some 75,000 prisoners were clinging to life. Over the course of its seven-year operation, more than 50,000 people had been put to death within its confines. This industrial scale slaughter demanded the participation of considerably more than 60 people.

>In Haider, a clutch of people were tried for their participation in atrocities committed in and around the main Mauthausen camp. Most were SS men; a member of the Gestapo (the secret police) and a kapo joined them in the dock. The men were tried at Dachau between 3 September and 12 September 1947. In addition to showing that the defendants were participants in the Mauthausen system, and therefore liable for the atrocities committed there, the prosecution also led evidence on the defendants’ participation in specific crimes.

>A considerable amount of focus was placed on the operation of the Vienna Ditch stone quarry, where British and Dutch officers, all prisoners of war, were murdered. At the end of the trial, one defendant was acquitted, and the others were all found guilty. One convicted man was sentenced to death and executed, whereas the others were imprisoned for varying lengths of time, though the review board reduced some of the sentences considerably.

source : VIRTUAL TRIBUNALS, A GUIDE TO THE WORLD WAR II U.S. ARMY COURTS, EUROPE by Michael Eastman

The Mauthasen Camp is such a horrible place where the depravity of humanity was displayed to an extreme degree. I believe God only knows the true number of PoW died there, especially the Soviet ones. A Soviet Lieutenant General, Dmitry Karbyshev, died there as well.

On another day, a Reddit user questioned if any of the Western ally's airmen was brought to justice for the killing of German civilians. I'd add that the airmen were often treated differently.

EDIT) Additional Sources

• Mauthausen Death Book - Vol. 3 : The book lists each prisoner’s name, national or ethnic origin, birthdate, birthplace, and cause and time of death between March 27, 1942 and November 8, 1943.

Mauthasen Legal Cases

• USA v. Hans Altfuldisch, et al.
• USA v. Franz Kofler, et al.
• USA v. Eduard Erb, 2 April 1947
• USA v. Gustav Bloy, 19 May 1947
• USA v. Arnold Damaschke, 22 April 1947
• USA v. Kurt Otto, 13 Mar. 1947
• USA v. Eduard Curten, 4 April 1947
• USA v. Rudolf Brust, 6 May 1947
• USA v. Wilhelm Kauffeld, 24 April 1947
• USA v. Karl Kania, 1 April 1947
• USA v. Karl Albrecht, 25 April 1947
• USA v. Fritz Schallenberg, 22 April 1947
• USA v. Rudolf Lamm, 28 May 1947
• USA v. Joaquin Espinoza, 12 May 1947
• USA v. Eugen Hermann Noky, 24 April 1947
• USA v. Hermann Tuntke, 21 May 1947
• USA v. Ernst Walter Dura, 23 June 1947

On the road west of Berlin, hundreds of French PoW released from captivity and forced labor are returning home.

Date : May 1945
Author: Frederick Ramage (1900 – 1981) was a British photographer who took many iconic WW2 photos.

>On April 19, 1943 the SS and German police force returned with the intention of liquidating the entire Warsaw Ghetto and transporting the remaining population to forced labor camps in the Lublin district. The resistors undertook armed conflict against the Nazis to stop the deportation order and were able to inflict causalities on the well-armed SS and police forces. Approximately 750 Jewish fighters continued to launch attacks against the SS and police units in the first days of the uprising.

>On May 16, the uprising was finally halted by the Nazi SS and German police forces. An estimated 7,000 Jews died and another 7,000 were captured during the conflict. The captured Jews were taken to Treblinka where they were murdered. Around 42,000 Jews were sent to forced labor camps at Poniatowa and Trawniki and the Majdanek concentration camp, but many of them would be murdered in November 1943 during Erntesfest (Operation Harvest Festival).

(source)

EDIT) The women on the first photo had more story (thanks to the courtesy of u/AdRealistic4984)

>One of the women, Bluma Wyszogrodzka (center), was shot. The other two, Małka Zdrojewicz (right) and Rachela Wyszogrodzka (left) were deported to Majdanek Concentration Camp, where Wyszogrodzka (left) was murdered.

>Jürgen Stroop, the SS officer who commanded the suppression of the uprising, admired the bravery of female combatants and included the photograph in one of the copies of his official report.

>"Agile as acrobats, shooting with a pistol in each hand ... dangerous in hand-to-hand contact ... when a woman like this was caught, she appeared scared as a rabbit, thoroughly despairing, and suddenly, when a group of our men was nearby, she pulled out a grenade hidden in her skirt or in her pants and threw it at them with a string of curses on her lips ... In these instances we suffered losses, so that I ordered that these women not be held nor allowed to approach, but to finish them off with submachine guns."

>The only woman in the photograph who survived was the one at right, Małka Zdrojewicz.

(source)

EDIT2) In the 2nd photo, you can see kids in the middle of the line.

Members of the French Forces of the Interior with captured weapons took the fight to the Germans in Paris prior to the Liberation on August, 25, 1944. You can see the Stahlhelm on her and two stick grenades.

Date : August, 1944
(source)

"The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II" is a collection of wartime memoirs by a Belarusian writer, Svetlana Alexievich. It contains interviews from the Soviet women who fought in the Eastern front of the WW2.

Alexievich chronicled the experiences of the Soviet women who were nurses and doctors, pilots, tank drivers, machine-gunners, and snipers. She visited more than a hundred towns to record these women's stories. The memoirs reveal everyday details of life in wartime left out of the official versions.

The interviews were firstly posted to a soviet magazine in early 1984. Some of the interviews were censored or deleted by the author herself due to accusations of pacifism, naturalism, or destruction of the heroic image of Soviet women. I suspect the accusations were aroused due to unfiltered, brutal wartime atrocities accounted from very personal prospective.

Many of these omissions were restored and the book was published as a separate edition with a title "War does not have a woman's face". The English version was translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, and published in 2017.

Once you pick up the book, it would be hard to put down until you finish it up. The book will give you gut-wrenching moments from time to time, and a rare view-panel into the Eastern front from the receiving end of the Nazi onslaught. By no means, I am denying the wartime atrocities by the Soviets, nor victimizing them. Rather, I am pointing a chance to draw a more completed version of the whole picture despite the fact that the memoirs being individual anecdotes. Personally, I don't believe at all the depth of the WW2 Eastern front is fully accounted especially when the Soviet archives have been closed off since the mid 1990's.

TLDR: neither an academic book, nor an easy read. Yet a very powerful one nonetheless.

>My father was in Stalingrad, as a Captain in the Transportation Corps; I have many photos of him there, including the photos of the poor locals — one is using an empty artillery shell to make butter, and another is living in a hole in the ground. Other photos show the wreck of what was once the giant Train Station South.

>He used this as a lesson to me to never trust one-way communications. Dad had gotten nervous about the situation, sensing that a major offensive was coming. The situation in Stalingrad was horrible, with artillery guns limited to 10 shells a day, and almost no food (dad started smoking cigarettes to kill hunger at that point). The wounded were triaged, and the bottom third was essentially left to die.

>He called my mom, who was a secretary to a 3-star general in the Transportation Corps, to get him out of there. The general agreed to send a telex. My dad called my mom back to ask the Lt. Gen. (Obergruppenfuehrer of Transportation Corps, NSKK) to make a personal call instead, to make sure it was received. The general grumbled but did so, as a favor to mom. It was a big deal, since Hitler had ordered that no one should leave.

>The phone call came in to my dad’s HQ in Stalingrad at 10:00 on 19 November, 1942. By noon, dad departed with his 100 truck battalion (he also had 2 captured T34 tanks to pull his trucks out of the mud). Later that day, he crossed a bridge over the Don, which took several hours, as the bridge was damaged. By the next morning, Soviet troops took the bridge, as part of Operation Uranus, which had just begun. At 1000 hours on November 22, the telex arrived at his former HQ in Stalingrad, telling him to relocate. Had he waited for the telex, similar to a one-way email or text, he would likely have been dead, as almost 95 percent of German POWs from Stalingrad wound up, and I would never have been born. A lesson I’ve never forgotten.

>Over 40 years later, in the late 1980s, dad went on a Volga River trip to visit many of the places he had seen during the war, including Stalingrad, now called Volgagrad. He met many people who had fought in the war, and had tearful episodes with them, often accompanied by vodka, and very sincere wishes that such a thing should never happen again.

>Let us all hope that wish comes true.

(Source)

>From Dec 20-28th 1943, an Eastern Italian sea town, Ortona, witnessed a highly intensive combat so fierce that it became known as “Little Stalingrad”. The battle of Ortona, fought between a battalion of elite German paratroopers from the German 1st Parachute Division and the soldiers of the 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade of the 1st Canadian Infantry Division, was one of the bloodiest encounters of the Italian campaign.

>This scene was being swept with sniper fire when the photo was taken. In the foreground we see medics treating two wounded men. The wounded man on the left was a tank officer shot by a sniper while in the hatch of his tank. In the centre a medic sprints toward another casualty. The wounded man on the right is a second armoured soldier named Sgt Johnny Marchand of the Three Rivers Regiment who was also hit by a sniper, and in the background we see two Three Rivers Sherman tanks firing at the enemy.

Location : Piazza Vittoria, Ortona, Italy
Date : Christmas 1943

(Source)

If you're interested, you can listen this interview of the Canadian veterans who participated in the battle (from 1:26:25 mark). Although horrible images are blurred outright, you can hear their unfiltered accounts of how ferocious German paratroopers were, how savage & costly the battle was, and what memories the veterans sealed deep down in their heart. IMO, the Canadian soldiers have a long standing legacy that they can be your absolutely best ally

... or your worst possible foe.

Date: Feb/Mar 1945
Photographer : Arthur Grimm

The black dots are bodies, the water is stained with blood. This shot is well known, but it gives me a different vantage point everytime I look at it in color.

• The original post
• The black and white version

EDIT) Before making SPR, Steven Spielberg was shown films recorded by Hollywood directors embedded within the US military in the Western front such John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston, Frank Capra, and George Stevens. AFAIK, Spielberg greatly toned down the severity of the carnage in the films to meaningfully deliver what it was like to be at the beach on that day. And, this was only the beginning.

I believe you can extrapolate and visualize what the rest of the WW2 would have been like.

Date: Mar. 5, 1945

Photographer: Boris Pushkin

Source: "Das XX. Jahrhundert. Fotografien zur deutschen Geschichte aus der Sammlung des Deutschen Historischen Museums". Braus im Verlag Heidelberg, 2014

Location : Vyatskaya Street, Moscow

Photographer : Ivan Shagin

(Source)

In 1945, Arthur Ringwald and Dr. Lincoln Clark approached 22 American charitable organizations with the idea of creating a non-profit corporation to send food packages to Europe. Searching for a name that made a sensible acronym, Clark’s wife, Alice, suggested "Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe" — CARE.

Incorporated in November 1945, CARE first needed food to send. The leaders of CARE approached the Army and were able to acquire nearly 3 million surplus rations known as "10-in-1." Designed to feed 10 men one day of meals, these robust rations included a variety of items otherwise almost unavailable in some parts of Europe. With almost 3 million rations in their inventory, CARE began to package the items for shipment to Europe. What became known as CARE packages evolved over time, but the first packages included:

• One pound of beef in broth
• One pound of steak and kidneys
• Eight ounces of liver loaf
• Eight ounces of corned beef
• 12 ounces of luncheon loaf (like Spam)
• Eight ounces of bacon
• Two pounds of margarine
• One pound of lard
• One pound of fruit preserves
• One pound of honey
• One pound of raisins
• One pound of chocolate
• Two pounds of sugar
• Eight ounces of egg powder
• Two pounds of whole-milk powder
• Two pounds of coffee

The first CARE packages reached Le Havre, France, in May 1945, and the first aid deliveries arrived in Germany in August 1946. By the end of 1947, more than 200,000 CARE packages had been distributed in the city of Berlin alone.

Source : Sending Hope to Europe: The First CARE Packages Arrive in 1946

>A large group of smiling school children wave for the camera as they receive plates of bacon and eggs, imported from America as part of the Lend-Lease scheme. The headmistress of the school is in the centre. The photograph was taken in the playground of the school and was probably taken in late August or early September 1941.

source : Imperial War Museum Item # D4324

After the October Revolution of 1917, Vladimir Lenin came to power in Russia, and the country plunged into a civil war between the communists ("Reds") and nationalists ("Whites"). For the Allied Powers, Moscow’s withdrawal was a potentially fatal blow: the Central Powers no longer had to worry about the Russian front and could converge their effort on an offensive towards Paris. Desperate, in the summer of 1918, the U.K., France, and other Allies sent troops into northern Russia and Siberia to influence the outcome of the Russian civil war and recreate the Eastern Front.

The 339th Regiment was given orders to go to England and from there to France. It was only on July 17, 1918, when the regiment was embarking a transatlantic convoy in New York, that President Woodrow Wilson reluctantly ("sweating blood," as he wrote to his closest advisor) yielded to French and British pressure and officially decided to intervene in Russia. "The Allies had tried to convince Wilson to intervene against the Bolsheviks for months," says Carl Richard, professor of history at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. "When the German shells started falling on Paris, he finally agreed." When the troops arrived in England, they were issued heavy winter clothes and finally discovered they were going to Russia.

The famous explorer Ernest Shackleton was assigned to training the 339th, who would eventually become known as the "Polar Bears". Shackleton also designed special boots which later became infamous among the soldiers. "The Shackleton boots worked very well in the compact snow of Antarctica, but performed very poorly in the Northern Russia quagmires", explains Mike Grobbel, president of the Polar Bear Memorial Association, a Polar Bear decorated with the Distinguished Service Cross and the French Croix de Guerre. "Many soldiers ended up throwing them away and buying local footwear."

On September 5, 1918, the Bears landed on Russian soil at the White Sea port of Arkhangelsk after a cruise plagued by the Spanish flu that killed dozens on board. At the same time, around 8,000 more U.S. troops were sent to support the Whites in Siberia. Arkhangelsk was in British hands at the time, and the 339th Regiment was put under orders of the occupying force to start an offensive against the Bolsheviks, driving the Reds some 200 miles south of the city.

The Allied front reached its maximum extension near the village of Ust Padenga, 450 miles (724 km) from Moscow on January 1919. Three weeks before, the parish priest had been captured by the Red Army and killed by locals loyal to the Soviets. According to a newspaper of the time, the priest was beheaded, disemboweled, and his body stuffed with straw and frozen.

[...]

On January 19, with temperatures around -49 F (-45 C), the Red Army attacked with 1,300 men. (according to wikipeida, it was 800) "At 05.30 am I was awakened by artillery fire," writes Lieutenant Harry Mead. "I ran out to see what was up and was greeted by a burst of shrapnel right over my headquarters." Of the 47 "doughboys" defending the outpost, 25 died, and 15 were wounded.

The life condition of the Allied troops must have looked desirable to the Russians observing from the church's bell tower on the other side of the front. In his memoir, Red Army soldier Alexander Bykov lists the luxuries of his American counterparts. "The Americans (…) erected strong dugouts, blockhouses, and trench communications. It was considered an impregnable fortress for the Red Army soldiers and their commanders, writes Bykov sarcastically. "They were dressed in overcoats (…) fur mittens with ribbons up to the elbows; each soldier had five woolen blankets (…) chocolate bars in the pockets of their khaki jackets, and smugly smoked fragrant cigarettes."

When it finally became clear that trying to influence the destiny of the Russian civil war was futile, American troops withdrew from Arkhangelsk on June 15, 1919. A decade later, a recovery mission by the Veterans of Foreign Wars collected the remains of 86 U.S. troops left behind on Russian soil; 27 Polar Bears remain unaccounted for to this day.

Sources

1. Has the U.S. ever fought on Russian soil? You’d be surprised.
2. The Polar Bear Memorial Association
3. THE AMERICAN INTERVENTION IN NORTH RUSSIA, 1918-1919
4. American Expeditionary Force, North Russia
5. Battle of Ust Padenga

Ming soldiers (left) vs Japanese pirates (right) (Wōkòu Scorll, 倭寇圖卷, Institute of Historiography, University of Tokyo)

The Japanese piracy in East Asia had a long history, beginning from as early as 50 B.C. all the way up to as late as the 16th century. The atrocities the pirates perpetrated throughout 1,600 years were indescribable.

>賊掠得二三歲女兒，剃髮剖腹淨洗，兼奠米酒祭天。分左右，張樂羅拜。祭畢，掬分其米而食，飮酒三鍾，焚其兒，槍柄忽折。
Japanese pirates kidnapped a two or three year-old girl, shaved her head, split her stomach, washed her thoroughly in water, placed her on an altar with rice and alcohol, and held a rite to heaven. The pirates stood on the left and right sides, blew wind music, and bowed. After the rite, they grabbed the rice with hands, shared it, drank three cups of alcohol, and burned the child, and the javelin was broken.
- Japanese piracy in the 1370s, Goryeo History

>時賊勢蔓延, 江浙無不蹂躪. 新倭來益衆, 益肆毒. 每自焚其舟, 登岸劫掠. 自杭州 北新關西剽淳安, 突徽州 歙縣, 至績溪·旌德, 過涇縣, 趨南陵, 遂達蕪湖. 燒南岸, 奔太平府, 犯江寧鎭, 徑侵南京. 倭紅衣黃蓋, 率衆犯大安德門, 及夾岡, 乃趨秣陵關而去, 由溧水流劫溧陽·宜興. 聞官兵自太湖出, 遂越武進, 抵無錫, 駐惠山. 一晝夜奔百八十餘里, 抵滸墅. 爲官軍所圍, 追及於楊林橋, 殲之. 是役也, 賊不過六七十人, 而經行數千里, 殺戮戰傷者幾四千人, 歷八十餘日始滅, 此三十四年九月事也.
As the banditry spread, it ravaged the Jiangnan region. New Japanese pirates arrived in increasing numbers, their cruelty intensifying. They would burn their own boats before landing and looting.
From Hangzhou, they raided Chun'an west of Beixin Pass, then stormed Shexian in Huizhou, reaching Jixi and Jingde, passing Jingxian, heading towards Nanling, and finally reaching Wuhu. They burned the south bank, fled to Taiping Prefecture, attacked Jiangning Town, and then directly invaded Nanjing. Japanese pirates in red robes and yellow canopies led their troops to attack Da'ande Gate and Jiagang, then headed towards Moling Pass, plundering Liyang and Yixing along the Lishui River.
Hearing that government troops had emerged from Taihu Lake, they crossed Wujin, reached Wuxi, and camped at Huishan. They marched over 180 li in a day and night, reaching Hushu. They were surrounded by government troops, but were caught at Yanglin Bridge and annihilated.
In this battle, the bandits numbered only sixty or seventy, yet they traveled thousands of li, killing and wounding nearly four thousand. It took more than eighty days to be destroyed; this occurred in the ninth month of the thirty-fourth year.
- September. 1555, Ming History

These are only two accounts. Imagine what had happened all throughout the years. Of course, Mongols, Chinese, and even Koreans invaded Japan in retaliation. Some endeavors succeeded. Some completely botched, but brutal nonetheless.

That was how East Asia used to be when unstable.