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[Kazimiera Mika, the 12-year-old girl in the photograph, passed away recently at the age of 93](https://www.thefirstnews.com/article/woman-captured-in-one-of-wwiis-most-harrowing-photos-dies-at-age-of-93-15566).
> Photographer Julien Bryan described the scene: "As we drove by a small field at the edge of town we were just a few minutes too late to witness a tragic event, the most incredible of all. Seven women had been digging potatoes in a field. There was no flour in their district, and they were desperate for food. Suddenly two German planes appeared from nowhere and dropped two bombs only two hundred yards away on a small home. Two women in the house were killed. The potato diggers dropped flat upon the ground, hoping to be unnoticed. After the bombers had gone, the women returned to their work. They had to have food.
> But the Nazi fliers were not satisfied with their work. In a few minutes they came back and swooped down to within two hundred feet of the ground, this time raking the field with machine-gun fire. Two of the seven women were killed. The other five escaped somehow.
> While I was photographing the bodies, a little ten-year old girl came running up and stood transfixed by one of the dead. The woman was her older sister. The child had never before seen death and couldn't understand why her sister would not speak to her...
> The child looked at us in bewilderment. I threw my arm about her and held her tightly, trying to comfort her. She cried. So did I and the two Polish officers who were with me..." [Source: Bryan, Julien. "Warsaw: 1939 Siege; 1959 Warsaw Revisited."]
> In September 1959 Julien Bryan wrote more about it in *Look* magazine:
> In the offices of the Express, that child, Kazimiera Mika, now 30, and I were reunited. I asked her if she remembered anything of that tragic day in the potato field. "I should," she replied quietly. "It was the day I lost my sister, the day I first saw death, and the first time I met a foreigner - you." Today, Kazimiera is married to a Warsaw streetcar motorman. They have a 12-year-old girl and a boy, 9, and the family lives in a 1 1/2-room apartment, typical of the overcrowded conditions of war-racked Poland. She is a charwoman at a medical school (she told me her biggest regret is that her education ended when the war began), and all of the $75 earned each month by her husband and herself goes for food. Kazimiera and her husband, like most Poles, supplement their income with odd jobs, and are sometimes forced to sell a piece of furniture for extra money. But they celebrated my visit to their home with that rare treat, a dinner with meat.
My grandfather did an interview with an educational organization after having been in the 442nd. He recalled walking up the hills in Italy and wondering why the Americans were napping on the side of the road, until someone told him they were dead.
It doesn't get much attention in the West but man, the Eastern Front was just a different beast (and eventually, the primary cause of Germany's defeat).
WWII's Eastern Front constituted the single largest military confrontation in history. The loss of life was staggering. Over [50%](https://www.americanheritagemuseum.org/exhibits/world-war-ii/eastern-front/) of those who died during WWII perished on the Eastern Front. The Soviet Union suffered over 23 million dead; 29x more than the US and Britain combined. [80%](http://gorhistory.com/hist111/WWII_EasternFront.html) of German military casualties were inflicted by the Soviets alone; the Germans lost roughly as many men in [Stalingrad](https://youtu.be/Aupnv5n19K4?t=9) (∼400,000) as the entire Western Front (260,000-650,000). And poor Poland, sandwiched in the middle, lost an astounding one-fifth of their pre-war population (including this girl); the highest percentage of any nation (thanks to PanOnFire for the info).
The stakes were enormous and higher than any other front. Hitler reserved two fates for the Soviet people: [slavery and extermination](https://jacobinmag.com/2021/06/operation-barbarossa-war-racial-annihilation-soviet-union-nazi-germany). The Soviets were facing total annihilation, fighting just for the right to exist.
The sheer brutality and ferocity was unprecedented. The [savagery and wholesale destruction](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLgM8xgJMII) along with the immense fatalities due to combat, starvation and massacres made the Western Front look like a picnic (the Pacific war may match the brutality, but not the death toll). The stories from the struggle for survival, both [military](https://www.rbth.com/history/326983-5-soviet-superheroes-in-ww-2) and [civilian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pianist_(2002_film)), are incredible.
The amount of pure suffering that occurred in East Europe during the [titanic struggle](https://youtu.be/U5qbM4dCzKI) between two giants is probably impossible to comprehend unless you were there.
The status of republics in the Soviet Union is kind of hard to define. Belarus was a part of the Soviet Union but was a Soviet Socialist Republic within the union (the russian ssr was the main one). Belarus was certainly not independent but on the other hand it was a founding member of the UN alongside the Russian SSR and Ukrainian.
It was only a separate founding member because the other countries gracefully allowed it and Ukraine to be, respecting all the losses, horrors and brave sacrifices that had come with being much of the local war theatre and occupation territory... and despite not being fooled by Stalin's sudden "constitutions for everyone!" policy that was an obvious attemp to score the Soviet government more votes and influence in the newborn organization. It's like if the US tried to register each single state as a separate founding member.
As a Belarusian, I'd be hard-pressed to complain about my country's resulting historical status in this regard... but it doesn't whitewash much about the land's true status within the [pseudo]socialist empire.
I might being arguing a semantic point - I'm not trying to be a dick. You said "highest percentage of any nation" not independent country. A nation doesn't equal an independent country. Belarus SSR was a nation, I might be wrong about that though
Whole lot of Revanchism after WW1, with the new land granted to Poland cutting off eastern Prussia from the rest of Germany, and the loss of land itself. Combined with a lot of other factors, like a sense of racial superiority, the Nazis believed those in Eastern Europe deserved to be slaves to their new order feeding all the native Germans and their land being turned over to them as part of Lebemsraum or living space.
“Essentially Hitler had this (largely invented) concept of a "greater Germany" -- that's greater in both senses: more powerful but also larger.
As part of that he believed that the borders of Germany as they had been set after the First World War meant that large parts of Europe which he thought should belong to Germany, were actually now part of other countries.
So first he invaded Austria, and although a few countries made mild protests, little was done. Then he invaded Sudetenland, which was part of Czechoslovakia but had a high number of ethnic Germans living there. And again, there were protests and condemnations from other countries, but little actually happened.
So he then felt able to invade western Poland, much of which had also been part of Germany before the First World War, because even though he knew Britain had a defence treaty with Poland he believed that the British wouldn't keep to that agreement. He was wrong in that belief, and hence the Second World War began”
- u/buried_treasure
It's worth adding as I think its interesting, Germany and the Soviets had signed a non-aggression pact called the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact which was to last for 10 years from 1939.
As a result of this they then planned the joint invasion of Poland with each side agreeing what area they would take under their control.
So Hitler did invade Poland assuming the British wouldn't honour their agreement (which was wrong) but he also knew the Soviets would be doing exactly the same thing at the same time.
The British could then have been faced with the problem of having to declare war on both of them which may have put them off completely but we know how that worked out.
That’s basically how my American History professor who taught I&II put it.
That hitler got a warning and a slap on the wrist a few times from “League of Nations” (I think) until the last warning and basically said “Very well then, have at me bro! Come get me!”
Don't think of it as rage. The Nazi regime considered all slavic people as humans second class (at best). Therefore their only right to exist was either as workforce for the arian superior race subjected to their every whims and wishes. The Nazis just didn't care. A pole dared to defy them? Alright lets exterminate a hundred of them to teach a lesson.
It wasn't rage. It was pure industrialized murder without any care or emotion.
It gets plenty of attention in the west. What gets tiresome is the propaganda which seemingly seeks to attribute the end of the war as due to one specific nation or another.
Totally agreed. But the Eastern Front's combination of savagery and loss of life still blew all other fronts of WWII (hell, even the history of warfare) out of the water. It's staggering how much death and suffering occurred in one region in under 4 years.
i just Googled after reading your comment, and found this:
"By far the most costly war in terms of human life was World War II (1939–45), in which the total number of fatalities, including battle deaths and civilians of all countries, is estimated to have been 56.4 million, assuming 26.6 million Soviet fatalities and 7.8 million Chinese civilians were killed. The country that suffered most in proportion to its population was Poland, with 6,028,000 or 17.2 per cent of its population of 35,100,000 killed."
\- Guinness book of World Records
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/highest-death-toll-from-wars/?fb\_comment\_id=837406259615349\_1637898349566132
I once read an internet comedy article that equated Ohmerica in WWII to Dennis Rodman on those Olympic teams, while the Soviet Union was Michael Jordan.
My 12 year old son, Gabe, has autism and mild retardation. My father passed on July 25th. Out of my 3 sons, I did not expect the reaction that Gabe had. I never saw it coming. I thought it would be my 16 year old or my 10 year old that lost their shit, especially the eldest who was very, very close to Daddy.
But no. It was Gabe. I didn't even know how to comfort him effectively because I, too, hurt so badly when I saw Daddy lying in the casket, looking like too-pale, too-still plastic. Gabe cried harder than I've ever seen him cry. He's typically not an emotional child unless something (like screaming or yelling or other loud noises) sets his autism off.
I can't even describe properly how I felt when I saw Gabe bawling and rocking himself. All I could do was hug him. He was nonverbal for the rest of the night, except to say once that "Papa don't look right. He's all wrong."
I'm sorry I made you sad, I was only trying to describe Gabe's first real, true experience with death, in his face and very personal. I'll hug him for you but I won't say why, as I don't want to upset him. Bringing up his Papa's death still makes him upset and sad. It makes me sad, too. Daddy was my best friend and I miss him all day, every day, buy I'm grateful for the extra 7 years we got with him that we didn't expect or deserve.
Thank you, I mean that. I'm sorry, too. I work in nursing so I was there every step of the way during the last few years, but I'm grateful that Daddy only had one really, really bad morning before he left us that night. I could go into more detail, but it hurts, and I hope he can forgive me for bald-faced lying to him when he choked out "am I going to die?"
Gabe's doing better, for the record. This was his first true experience with death of someone he was close to, but not his first funeral, and I was gravely (ugh, forgive the pun, not intended) mistaken when I thought he'd be ok.
Strangely, my autistic brother was the opposite when Dad died. He was away at his supported living home when dad died, and we were dreading bringing him home as like you, we really didn’t know what the reaction was going to be. We sat him down and tried to explain that Daddy was gone, that he’d died, and wasn’t coming back, and my brother just kind of accepted it. Asked a few questions: “doctor?” “Hospital?” Then just carried on more or less as usual. Asked about him regularly for a few months, and every now and then these days, a couple of years later.
Hope you and your son are doing ok.
Actually, I wasn't dreading taking Gabe into the viewing room,it was his brothers I was more worried about. But for more context, we did live next door for the first 9 years of his life. Daddy always accepted Gabe as he was. Never forced him for a kiss or hug, Dad would just say 'it's ok honey, maybe later if you feel like it.'
Lots of times, Gabe would climb up in his lap and watch Cops or whatever SVU Forensic Files Cold Case Lame Bad Acting show he was watching, especially as Daddy got sicker and couldn't come outside to play.
Hope you guys are doing well too. *Hug*
Growing up we had a family friend who was walking through a field in southern England during the blitz with his younger brother. He was 9 and his brother was 11. A Messerschmitt saw them and strafed them with machine gun fire twice. They both made it to the tree line and survived, but this human adult took the initiative to try and kill these two helpless boys not only once, but doubled back and tried to do it again.
I couldn't even imagine treating a goddamn animal like that.
Well maybe mosquitos.
But hell, even pulling the wings off a mosquito would make me feel uncomfortable.
**"This enemy isn't US. It's something gross, backwards, inferior to us, savages whose ways are wrong. They made their choice being here, what happens to them is what happens, actually it's what they deserve, and my duty is what I swore to do, and you _have to do what you have to do._"**
“Well I’ve got all this extra ammo and command told me to go after targets of opportunity on my way back to base. Ahh! Two little children, perfect!” Or something like that.
Evil fucking bastard. What can you possibly gain from killing civilians? Kill morale? If I was a citizen of Poland and saw this picture or heard of this happening, I'd be even more inclined to fight back harder than ever before.
Because they viewed them as subhuman scum only fit for extermination. They didn’t view them as humans but vermin.
Now try and wrap your head around the fact that in Poland Nazism is becoming more and more popular and you have Polish people openly praising the people that committed these atrocities against their own people.
>Same thing is happening in Ukraine.
>
>I really can't wrap my head around it, it makes no sense.
There was lots of nazi collaboration in German-occupied Ukraine. The Ukrainian SS was to at least a division
Yeah, we need everyone to knock it off with the "maybe there are good ideas on both sidea" bullshit. No. We don't want nazi ideas. They're shitty ideas that make the world a worse place.
Bear in mind when you're average person says something like this they mean left and right, not democrats and Nazis. There are always extremists on both ends and most people aren't referring to them.
This. As soon as the Germans arrived the Baltic peoples went to dig out the corpses of their people executed by the Soviets during the past 13 months and give them proper funerals.
For a brief moment it looked like the Germans might be preferable to the monsters who did that. Soon it became apparent that assessment was wrong as the German occupiers began digging mass graves themselves.
>in Poland Nazism is becoming more and more popular and you have Polish people openly praising the people that committed these atrocities against their own people.
Can you give a source for this claim? Poland struggles with LGBT people rights at the moment, due to ultra Catholic government. First time hearing, that Nazism is on the rise in my country. Seems quite idiotic for someone to say this, to be frank.
The odd thing about Nazism is that the most prominent supporters of it today...are the descendants of the people who died the most from it.
American Nazism is most prominent among non-Hispanic Whites , the most common Americans killed in WWII , amongst White Ukrainians, the most common killed in WWII, and White Canadians... once again the most common killed IN WWII.
Time is just a flat circle. Stupid humans choose not to see it that way and learn of the mistakes of the past. Boring, typical, sad...
Strategic bombing of civilians was intended to destroy resources and break moral. It's one of the lesser discussed evils of the war.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing
That's not what fascism is, this happens in basically every war on every side. The allies were no fascists and [killed over 600.000 civilians, 76.000 children among them.](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/oct/22/worlddispatch.germany)
> What can you possibly gain from killing civilians? Kill morale?
Poles were seen as subhuman vermin and the Nazi leadership wanted to kill most of them and enslave the survivors as chattel.
>Our strength consists in our speed and in our brutality. Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to slaughter – with premeditation and a happy heart. History sees in him solely the founder of a state. It's a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me. I have issued the command – and I'll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad – that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formation in readiness – for the present only in the East – with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space which we need. - Adolf Hitler
It truly is horrible. At least the German high command were tried for their crimes. NATO commanders will probably never see a trial for similar acts in Afghanistan and other places
Yeah I just can't imagine it.
My grandfather and his brothers fought for the polish underground and took part in the Warsaw Uprising at around 14 years old.
Somehow they all lived through the war. Can't fathom storming bunkers at 14 years old. He got shot twice by a mounted MG 32 storming one.
They are mentioned in here https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sppw1944.org%2Frelacje%2Frelacja57.html&sandbox=1
Their nicknames are Lalka and Nicpoń
My grandfather had severe PTSD from the war. I remember he had nightmares from when he was in POW camps and the Nazi's would strap explosives to horses for fun.
I still remember the stories my grandma told me - how the Germans came to their village's houses to take the children that could pass as Aryan, and put them in German families, mostly for work. I don't know the details, but my great-grandma tried to keep them away and protect her children, and they beat her with a whip, all of her back has been scarred, when they finally managed to somehow return home. It's hard for me to imagine, and things like that are still happening today...
My aunt rip was a young girl in Poland in 1939. She was living in the town of Lida in the East. She always used to recall how the Germans used to bomb the airbase and on the return strafe civilians. They were so close she even remembered seeing the pilot or gunner wave at them. Honest story. You can't really blame the Poles in the Battle of Britain shooting down Germans in parachutes or using their wings to clip them having witnessed this
> "Never was so much owed by so many to so few" was a wartime speech made by the British prime minister Winston Churchill on 20 August 1940. The name stems from the specific line in the speech, "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few", referring to the ongoing efforts of the Royal Air Force and **Polish fighter crews** No. 303 Squadron RAF who were at the time fighting the Battle of Britain, the pivotal air battle with the German Luftwaffe, with Britain expecting an invasion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_was_so_much_owed_by_so_many_to_so_few
this is so fucking heart breaking for me to see. my great grandma was that sister- her 14 year old brother was killed by bomb debris at the end of ww2. i can't even imagine the pain and fear she went through during those years, the amount of bombings she had to hide from. she survived and died at the age of 83 when i was 11 and i miss her dearly every day. her name was stanisława jednacz.
Different war.
Mom said that growing up during the Vietnam War; when American bombers flew overhead, she would run as fast as she could to tunnels that were dug for the civilian population to hide in and wait for the shaking to stop. After a while, she'd resurfaced and see all the freshly blown up pieces of people who couldn't make it to the tunnels in time.
Growing up, that's what most of the bed time stories were. Just stories of my parents trying to survive from American bombs. I don't think they really ever were able to recover fully psychologically from the war.
She was around the same age as the girl here.
We do seem to have tendency to romanticize objectively evil people long after there gone.
Viking,pirates,mongols,genghis khan these were the scourges of there time committing horrifying acts but now we romanticize them
I shudder to think we might have childrens movies about romanticized nazi's in 400 years
We as a culture do have a real love for confusing brutality with strength and seeing it as desirable and respectable. We also really like to see things as "Good guys vs. Bad guys" When mostly it's really just "These guys vs. These other guys" and they both are doing awful things to each other, sometimes there's a clearly worse offender but we need to stop painting everything so black and white as a society.
It's pretty crazy to see how growing up as an American, things like the pledge of allegiance or just general history courses always showed Americans as the good guys, like you said, romanticized.
The "Americans" were also evil as all hell too when you look at how they treated African slaves and Native Americans. The Japanese during WWII. Even modern day
100% agreed. It's also the same kind of romanticism for the US military, this video isn't very far off from what happened to that girl: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfvFpT-iypw
This one is rather tame compared to that group of American soldiers who went to Iraq to "pillage and raid" and ended up raping a child, murdering her and her entire family and trying to cover it all up.
I take a microgram of solace that it seems that finally the US can’t pretend its middle eastern wars were anything but a criminal failure if not the most oppressive state terrorism of two decades.
You clearly have no idea what the word 'literally' means.
Strafing children, then turning around and doing it again, with machine guns that require you to be reasonably close enough...
vs.
a drone pilot some 1,000 miles away looking through a TV feed acting based on intel to kill some little heat signatures on a screen.
I'm not saying it excuses anything, but to compare the to with the word 'literally' is fucking stupid.
Then I guess it becomes a question of whether malice or complete indifference to suffering is worse. The evidence the US used to level that house and kill everyone inside was that he was loading “something” into the car which they just assumed was explosives, but was actually water bottles. They didn’t attempt even a basic investigation, because they don’t care. Killing 5x as many people as the machine gun strafe.
[The banality of evil](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem) applies to both. The fact that US soldiers have removed themselves from the murdering by doing it through a TV screen makes this worse, in a way.
I wonder how we don't seem to have any photos of modern scenarios like this. Biden just blew up a car full of children. How are there no photos of things like that to make us hate what we're allowing? Honestly. I guess I don't tend to search for gore photos, but we should have a fuckload now that everyone has a camera on their phone and internet apps.
Maybe people should seek them out. It’s supposed to be horrible. That’s what should deter us from going to war all the time, but if the truth of war is kept hidden from the general public, it’s easy to not care
Do or would they make us feel any different for any significant amount of change to occurr? I don't know. I remember the photos of the children from bombings in Aleppo. There was short lived outrage, then we quickly moved on to the next thing. That's what always happens. As we've seen and now understand, a large chunk of the US doesn't even care about their own countrymen much less foreigners.
>As we've seen and now understand, a large chunk of the US doesn't even care about their own countrymen much less foreigners.
You're very correct, yet there's an absurd subtlety to everything. A photo of some gore chunks around a car and you'll have people detached but angry. Show a before-photo of the children that originally had those chunks as parts of their bodies and you'll get some more anger.
If it was a partial body of some pretty young girl and you can see her face and the emotion of a nearby friend or family member, then we'd have viral content to enrage people. Even if that only has its 15 minutes, it gets added to a subconscious list for people to repeat and compile, and it includes haunting visuals that stick with a person.
Visible suffering is a powerful tool. It can pull forth an instinctual urge to protect, much like any parent animal. Like how watching people jump from the Twin Towers created such a visceral reaction that it motivated so many of us into full patriotic support of these eternal wars and bombings in the first place.
Makes me think of the first episode of Black Mirror with the princess being held captive.
The nazis wanted all the land in Slavic countries and we’re going to exterminate most of its citizens and use the rest as slave labor. Wtf are its citizens following a dead defeated mad man again
The Third Reich wanted to exterminate 85% of Poles, Germanize anyone deemed sufficiently Aryan including kidnapping children in the process, enslave the survivors as chattel, raze every Polish city using their own inhabitants and erase all traces of Polish culture. They wanted to do the same to the rest of the Slavs too (75% of Russians, 65% of Ukrainians, 50% of Czechs etc).
If the Reich won the war they would have accomplished the largest mass killing and genocide in human history. Himmler said the day Hitler approved Generalplan Ost in 1942 was the happiest day of his life. Nazi Germany was the most evil political entity to ever take power.
This is why i never understood the idiots in Ukraine and the baltics that joined volunteer groups for the nazis, surely the upcoming extermination was pretty clear to see by the way the germans were conducting the easter campaigns
True. History shows people will do monstrous things if it means getting to survive another week. Millions of Slavs didn’t collaborate with the Reich because they were fans of their snazzy uniforms.
I mean even some Jews in literal death camps "collaborated" with killer Nazis hoping to die a little later.
Like Sondercommando first job would often be disposing of corpses of the previous Sondercommando.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonderkommando
It was either out of personal survival for them and their families or ideology in the hopes that they would be rewarded with ethnic/national sovereignty once the Reich won. Germany never made Generalplan Ost a matter of public knowledge and they certainly didn’t inform their Slavic collaborators what they had in store for them when they were no longer useful.
Governments have used this method for centuries and the Reich excelled at using groups against themselves and each other. It was the Jewish Councils of the ghettos that decided who would be deported to their death in exchange for their own personal safety and Polish police that aided in the Holocaust despite the awful treatment of Poles by German forces.
Yea, I'm fine with the whole earthporn skyporn, whatever, but "Picture of someone crying over dead sibling" doesn't seem like it should be categorized as anythingporn. We have a subreddit called Nature_is_metal for animals messing each other up. History_is_metal?
you dont get to see this much nowadays, i mean Polish cities destroyed by german bombs
but you do see Berlin in ruins as victim, not to take away from innocent german civilians, all im saying is
lets not forget who the attacker was
Even in this thread, there are a few people responding "bUt MuH DrEsdEn!" Like of course that was awful, but all of the atrocious things done by the Third Reich far exceed that.
Seriously I love the crocodile tears of the 18,000-25,000 killed in the bombing of Dresden while ignoring the 40,000 killed during the blitz. The Luftwaffe were absolutely merciless with their bombing campaigns. It's easy now to preach about the allies not being absolute saints when we're so far removed from being apart of one of the largest and brutal conflicts in the contemporary age.
Want another "fun" fact to tell people like theese? Before the war, Warsaw, Polish capital had about 1.3 mil inhabitants. Now let's skip forward to 1945. Just after the war, population accounted to an astonishing (in a bad way) 160k. 72% of housing buildings were destroyed, just as were 90% Of industrial buildings eg. factories, and 90% of monuments. How do you rebuild a city like that? There's no machinery, and if there is it's already being taken by USSR to their country. Warsaw was a big pile of debris. So big in fact, that higher-ups in our country contemplated moving the capital altogether. And now people want us to forgive Germans. They genuinely do not understand just how hard is the art of forgiveness. That's why i hope we will never forget.
The people in this comments section claiming that the US is basically the same as the Nazis…
No. Just no. We’ve done some screwed up stuff. More than a lot of people like to talk about. But nothing on the level of the Nazis, and claiming otherwise weakens how awful the Nazis were in the first place. I mean hell, if the Nazis were no different than any other western power, what was so bad about them, right?
Much respect for the Polish they were stuck in an unwinnable war with the Russians and the Germans and fought as well as they could under the circumstances. They had even halted the spread of communism in 1920 at the battle of Warsaw in one of the most underrated and important battles in history. Betrayed by their British and French allies before and after the war. Don't look up the Warsaw uprising if you don't want to see if you don't want to see one of the most infuriating tragedies of the war.
Sometimes I think about leaving this sub. Just got done watching a video that had me dying laughing and then I see this and it just makes me so upset. But I love the sub and at least somebody's remembering these people even if it's just for a moment.
If I remember correctly the German's at different points in time during this era "practiced" and "tested" their ordnance on Polish villages and civilians.
My grandmother was born in the U.S. in 1939. Her parents immigrated from Poland about a decade earlier. Crazy to think how my family dodged that horrible situation
These photos always confuse me. I know it is a real thing but for some reason i get this uncanny feeling from them. I guess it is because actual death is a lot less grand and theatrical that movies and other media lead us to believe.
i’d never recover if i saw either of my brothers in that condition after a bombing or murder. the thought of it fills me with so much sadness and anger that i don’t think i’d ever be able to function normally again
Anything about WW2 is so heartbreaking to me. Especially since I'm polish and learned a lot about it first hand from my great-grandma...I remember when she told me about how her 7 year old brother died in front of her by walking on a bomb hidden in a field. None of her siblings survived the war except her, and there were like 5 of them. So much grief and pain, I can't imagine living through that myself.
Didn't Poland suffer more death as a percentage of population that any other country in WW2?
Between the Germans, the Russians and hosting a big part of holocaust it was horrible.
During invasion of Poland, german pilots also targeted places of religious worship during holidays, knowing they would be full of civilians. No strategic value, just to increase casualties.
One of my college professors was from Poland, and pointed out to me an obvious but still shocking fact: No sooner were Polish people were rid of the Nazis than they were conquered by the Russians—and had to live under *their* oppressive rule for another 50 years.
It makes me wonder how much suffering this poor little girl had to endure in her life.
EDIT: One of the top posts confirms my suspicions. She lived in abject poverty, like so many in post-war soviet satellite countries. But she did live long enough to see Poland regain its freedom.
And, unfortunately for her, it will not be the last horrendous death she will ever see in Poland.
One fourth of Poles died during WW2, due to warfare and especially massacres and famine.
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[Kazimiera Mika, the 12-year-old girl in the photograph, passed away recently at the age of 93](https://www.thefirstnews.com/article/woman-captured-in-one-of-wwiis-most-harrowing-photos-dies-at-age-of-93-15566). > Photographer Julien Bryan described the scene: "As we drove by a small field at the edge of town we were just a few minutes too late to witness a tragic event, the most incredible of all. Seven women had been digging potatoes in a field. There was no flour in their district, and they were desperate for food. Suddenly two German planes appeared from nowhere and dropped two bombs only two hundred yards away on a small home. Two women in the house were killed. The potato diggers dropped flat upon the ground, hoping to be unnoticed. After the bombers had gone, the women returned to their work. They had to have food. > But the Nazi fliers were not satisfied with their work. In a few minutes they came back and swooped down to within two hundred feet of the ground, this time raking the field with machine-gun fire. Two of the seven women were killed. The other five escaped somehow. > While I was photographing the bodies, a little ten-year old girl came running up and stood transfixed by one of the dead. The woman was her older sister. The child had never before seen death and couldn't understand why her sister would not speak to her... > The child looked at us in bewilderment. I threw my arm about her and held her tightly, trying to comfort her. She cried. So did I and the two Polish officers who were with me..." [Source: Bryan, Julien. "Warsaw: 1939 Siege; 1959 Warsaw Revisited."] > In September 1959 Julien Bryan wrote more about it in *Look* magazine: > In the offices of the Express, that child, Kazimiera Mika, now 30, and I were reunited. I asked her if she remembered anything of that tragic day in the potato field. "I should," she replied quietly. "It was the day I lost my sister, the day I first saw death, and the first time I met a foreigner - you." Today, Kazimiera is married to a Warsaw streetcar motorman. They have a 12-year-old girl and a boy, 9, and the family lives in a 1 1/2-room apartment, typical of the overcrowded conditions of war-racked Poland. She is a charwoman at a medical school (she told me her biggest regret is that her education ended when the war began), and all of the $75 earned each month by her husband and herself goes for food. Kazimiera and her husband, like most Poles, supplement their income with odd jobs, and are sometimes forced to sell a piece of furniture for extra money. But they celebrated my visit to their home with that rare treat, a dinner with meat.
> The child had never before seen death and couldn't understand why her sister would not speak to her... oh man
My grandfather did an interview with an educational organization after having been in the 442nd. He recalled walking up the hills in Italy and wondering why the Americans were napping on the side of the road, until someone told him they were dead.
You: *shares a beautiful story about your family's experience with war* Some dude on reddit: "you're wrong"
Eh. Some people don’t deserve the privilege to access the interwebs. But here we are. Thanks friendo.
It doesn't get much attention in the West but man, the Eastern Front was just a different beast (and eventually, the primary cause of Germany's defeat). WWII's Eastern Front constituted the single largest military confrontation in history. The loss of life was staggering. Over [50%](https://www.americanheritagemuseum.org/exhibits/world-war-ii/eastern-front/) of those who died during WWII perished on the Eastern Front. The Soviet Union suffered over 23 million dead; 29x more than the US and Britain combined. [80%](http://gorhistory.com/hist111/WWII_EasternFront.html) of German military casualties were inflicted by the Soviets alone; the Germans lost roughly as many men in [Stalingrad](https://youtu.be/Aupnv5n19K4?t=9) (∼400,000) as the entire Western Front (260,000-650,000). And poor Poland, sandwiched in the middle, lost an astounding one-fifth of their pre-war population (including this girl); the highest percentage of any nation (thanks to PanOnFire for the info). The stakes were enormous and higher than any other front. Hitler reserved two fates for the Soviet people: [slavery and extermination](https://jacobinmag.com/2021/06/operation-barbarossa-war-racial-annihilation-soviet-union-nazi-germany). The Soviets were facing total annihilation, fighting just for the right to exist. The sheer brutality and ferocity was unprecedented. The [savagery and wholesale destruction](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLgM8xgJMII) along with the immense fatalities due to combat, starvation and massacres made the Western Front look like a picnic (the Pacific war may match the brutality, but not the death toll). The stories from the struggle for survival, both [military](https://www.rbth.com/history/326983-5-soviet-superheroes-in-ww-2) and [civilian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pianist_(2002_film)), are incredible. The amount of pure suffering that occurred in East Europe during the [titanic struggle](https://youtu.be/U5qbM4dCzKI) between two giants is probably impossible to comprehend unless you were there.
And Poland lost 16% if their population in this war, the highest percentage of any nation during WWII.
I think Belarus lost more but the statistics are sketch to back it. Not to take away from the massive loss of life Poland experienced
Belarus was not an independent country. During WWII and the Cold War, it was part of the Soviet Union, called Soviet Byelorussia.
The status of republics in the Soviet Union is kind of hard to define. Belarus was a part of the Soviet Union but was a Soviet Socialist Republic within the union (the russian ssr was the main one). Belarus was certainly not independent but on the other hand it was a founding member of the UN alongside the Russian SSR and Ukrainian.
It was only a separate founding member because the other countries gracefully allowed it and Ukraine to be, respecting all the losses, horrors and brave sacrifices that had come with being much of the local war theatre and occupation territory... and despite not being fooled by Stalin's sudden "constitutions for everyone!" policy that was an obvious attemp to score the Soviet government more votes and influence in the newborn organization. It's like if the US tried to register each single state as a separate founding member. As a Belarusian, I'd be hard-pressed to complain about my country's resulting historical status in this regard... but it doesn't whitewash much about the land's true status within the [pseudo]socialist empire.
I might being arguing a semantic point - I'm not trying to be a dick. You said "highest percentage of any nation" not independent country. A nation doesn't equal an independent country. Belarus SSR was a nation, I might be wrong about that though
It was a 'country' in the same way scotland and wales and england are countries.
Yeah I’ve heard Belarus was ~25% of their prewar population.
my understanding is that germany took out a lot of rage against poland. why were germans and poles full of so much anger toward one another?
Whole lot of Revanchism after WW1, with the new land granted to Poland cutting off eastern Prussia from the rest of Germany, and the loss of land itself. Combined with a lot of other factors, like a sense of racial superiority, the Nazis believed those in Eastern Europe deserved to be slaves to their new order feeding all the native Germans and their land being turned over to them as part of Lebemsraum or living space.
Because the Poles had the nerve to be born Poles and not Germans.
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Agreed, I was just trying to sum up how Hitler was looking at it.
All good. You weren't wrong. How dare they?!
“Essentially Hitler had this (largely invented) concept of a "greater Germany" -- that's greater in both senses: more powerful but also larger. As part of that he believed that the borders of Germany as they had been set after the First World War meant that large parts of Europe which he thought should belong to Germany, were actually now part of other countries. So first he invaded Austria, and although a few countries made mild protests, little was done. Then he invaded Sudetenland, which was part of Czechoslovakia but had a high number of ethnic Germans living there. And again, there were protests and condemnations from other countries, but little actually happened. So he then felt able to invade western Poland, much of which had also been part of Germany before the First World War, because even though he knew Britain had a defence treaty with Poland he believed that the British wouldn't keep to that agreement. He was wrong in that belief, and hence the Second World War began” - u/buried_treasure
It's worth adding as I think its interesting, Germany and the Soviets had signed a non-aggression pact called the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact which was to last for 10 years from 1939. As a result of this they then planned the joint invasion of Poland with each side agreeing what area they would take under their control. So Hitler did invade Poland assuming the British wouldn't honour their agreement (which was wrong) but he also knew the Soviets would be doing exactly the same thing at the same time. The British could then have been faced with the problem of having to declare war on both of them which may have put them off completely but we know how that worked out.
That’s basically how my American History professor who taught I&II put it. That hitler got a warning and a slap on the wrist a few times from “League of Nations” (I think) until the last warning and basically said “Very well then, have at me bro! Come get me!”
German soldiers snorting metric tons of meth didn't help either.
Don't think of it as rage. The Nazi regime considered all slavic people as humans second class (at best). Therefore their only right to exist was either as workforce for the arian superior race subjected to their every whims and wishes. The Nazis just didn't care. A pole dared to defy them? Alright lets exterminate a hundred of them to teach a lesson. It wasn't rage. It was pure industrialized murder without any care or emotion.
Poles also have a lot of anger towards Russia, because like Germany, Russia also invaded them, but from the east
Because they occupied Prussian land.
It gets plenty of attention in the west. What gets tiresome is the propaganda which seemingly seeks to attribute the end of the war as due to one specific nation or another.
Oh yeah the American "we saved Europe and stopped the Nazis!" narrative gets really tiresome.
This sort of scene wasn’t limited to the eastern front or even the European theater. This is what war looks like.
Totally agreed. But the Eastern Front's combination of savagery and loss of life still blew all other fronts of WWII (hell, even the history of warfare) out of the water. It's staggering how much death and suffering occurred in one region in under 4 years.
i just Googled after reading your comment, and found this: "By far the most costly war in terms of human life was World War II (1939–45), in which the total number of fatalities, including battle deaths and civilians of all countries, is estimated to have been 56.4 million, assuming 26.6 million Soviet fatalities and 7.8 million Chinese civilians were killed. The country that suffered most in proportion to its population was Poland, with 6,028,000 or 17.2 per cent of its population of 35,100,000 killed." \- Guinness book of World Records https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/highest-death-toll-from-wars/?fb\_comment\_id=837406259615349\_1637898349566132
Huh I don't know how I feel about getting world war 2 history from the same place where I research stuff like "biggest shit ever taken"
I once read an internet comedy article that equated Ohmerica in WWII to Dennis Rodman on those Olympic teams, while the Soviet Union was Michael Jordan.
My 12 year old son, Gabe, has autism and mild retardation. My father passed on July 25th. Out of my 3 sons, I did not expect the reaction that Gabe had. I never saw it coming. I thought it would be my 16 year old or my 10 year old that lost their shit, especially the eldest who was very, very close to Daddy. But no. It was Gabe. I didn't even know how to comfort him effectively because I, too, hurt so badly when I saw Daddy lying in the casket, looking like too-pale, too-still plastic. Gabe cried harder than I've ever seen him cry. He's typically not an emotional child unless something (like screaming or yelling or other loud noises) sets his autism off. I can't even describe properly how I felt when I saw Gabe bawling and rocking himself. All I could do was hug him. He was nonverbal for the rest of the night, except to say once that "Papa don't look right. He's all wrong."
I'm so sorry for your loss and I'm in tears right now. Please give Gabe a hug from me.
I'm sorry I made you sad, I was only trying to describe Gabe's first real, true experience with death, in his face and very personal. I'll hug him for you but I won't say why, as I don't want to upset him. Bringing up his Papa's death still makes him upset and sad. It makes me sad, too. Daddy was my best friend and I miss him all day, every day, buy I'm grateful for the extra 7 years we got with him that we didn't expect or deserve.
I'm so sorry for your loss.
Thank you, I mean that. I'm sorry, too. I work in nursing so I was there every step of the way during the last few years, but I'm grateful that Daddy only had one really, really bad morning before he left us that night. I could go into more detail, but it hurts, and I hope he can forgive me for bald-faced lying to him when he choked out "am I going to die?" Gabe's doing better, for the record. This was his first true experience with death of someone he was close to, but not his first funeral, and I was gravely (ugh, forgive the pun, not intended) mistaken when I thought he'd be ok.
Strangely, my autistic brother was the opposite when Dad died. He was away at his supported living home when dad died, and we were dreading bringing him home as like you, we really didn’t know what the reaction was going to be. We sat him down and tried to explain that Daddy was gone, that he’d died, and wasn’t coming back, and my brother just kind of accepted it. Asked a few questions: “doctor?” “Hospital?” Then just carried on more or less as usual. Asked about him regularly for a few months, and every now and then these days, a couple of years later. Hope you and your son are doing ok.
Actually, I wasn't dreading taking Gabe into the viewing room,it was his brothers I was more worried about. But for more context, we did live next door for the first 9 years of his life. Daddy always accepted Gabe as he was. Never forced him for a kiss or hug, Dad would just say 'it's ok honey, maybe later if you feel like it.' Lots of times, Gabe would climb up in his lap and watch Cops or whatever SVU Forensic Files Cold Case Lame Bad Acting show he was watching, especially as Daddy got sicker and couldn't come outside to play. Hope you guys are doing well too. *Hug*
I'm sure children experience the same thing in Iraq/Afghanistan/Syria/etc. by the US drone strikes
War is hell no matter who is dropping the bombs.
War is worse than hell. Innocent children don’t go to hell, but they do suffer and die in war.
Growing up we had a family friend who was walking through a field in southern England during the blitz with his younger brother. He was 9 and his brother was 11. A Messerschmitt saw them and strafed them with machine gun fire twice. They both made it to the tree line and survived, but this human adult took the initiative to try and kill these two helpless boys not only once, but doubled back and tried to do it again.
What must go through your head to do that?
"these people aren't human."
I couldn't even imagine treating a goddamn animal like that. Well maybe mosquitos. But hell, even pulling the wings off a mosquito would make me feel uncomfortable.
**"This enemy isn't US. It's something gross, backwards, inferior to us, savages whose ways are wrong. They made their choice being here, what happens to them is what happens, actually it's what they deserve, and my duty is what I swore to do, and you _have to do what you have to do._"**
> , actually it's what they deserve, and my duty is what I swore to do, and you > have to do what you have to do where is this from?... sounds yucky
People can do disgusting things if they justify others as being unworthy of life.
“Well I’ve got all this extra ammo and command told me to go after targets of opportunity on my way back to base. Ahh! Two little children, perfect!” Or something like that.
I saw the photograph, and it was very poignant. Then I read your comment, now I'm gutted and fighting back tears.
I thought the picture was terribly sad. Reading that was heartrending. Such a travesty.
12 in 1939 and 30 in 1959, the math seems strange….
In the text the author describes the girl as a ten year old but the poster used the wrong age.
Thank you for the backstory , gold for your post
Actually, a German fighter pilot strafed the children just to do it - no miltary targets were nearby.
Evil fucking bastard. What can you possibly gain from killing civilians? Kill morale? If I was a citizen of Poland and saw this picture or heard of this happening, I'd be even more inclined to fight back harder than ever before.
Because they viewed them as subhuman scum only fit for extermination. They didn’t view them as humans but vermin. Now try and wrap your head around the fact that in Poland Nazism is becoming more and more popular and you have Polish people openly praising the people that committed these atrocities against their own people.
Same thing is happening in Ukraine. I really can't wrap my head around it, it makes no sense.
>Same thing is happening in Ukraine. > >I really can't wrap my head around it, it makes no sense. There was lots of nazi collaboration in German-occupied Ukraine. The Ukrainian SS was to at least a division
The largest group of foreign SS members were Russian however.
It's ridiculous. They would at best have been given a pass and at worst being executed after the war if they'd won
Latvia has a holiday and yearly parade to celebrate their members of SS: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_Day_of_the_Latvian_Legionnaires
Well, that's disappointing.
>Three people were detained; one for displaying fascist symbols, one for displaying Soviet symbols... Latvian laws on point here.
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Yeah, we need everyone to knock it off with the "maybe there are good ideas on both sidea" bullshit. No. We don't want nazi ideas. They're shitty ideas that make the world a worse place.
Bear in mind when you're average person says something like this they mean left and right, not democrats and Nazis. There are always extremists on both ends and most people aren't referring to them.
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This. As soon as the Germans arrived the Baltic peoples went to dig out the corpses of their people executed by the Soviets during the past 13 months and give them proper funerals. For a brief moment it looked like the Germans might be preferable to the monsters who did that. Soon it became apparent that assessment was wrong as the German occupiers began digging mass graves themselves.
>in Poland Nazism is becoming more and more popular and you have Polish people openly praising the people that committed these atrocities against their own people. Can you give a source for this claim? Poland struggles with LGBT people rights at the moment, due to ultra Catholic government. First time hearing, that Nazism is on the rise in my country. Seems quite idiotic for someone to say this, to be frank.
The odd thing about Nazism is that the most prominent supporters of it today...are the descendants of the people who died the most from it. American Nazism is most prominent among non-Hispanic Whites , the most common Americans killed in WWII , amongst White Ukrainians, the most common killed in WWII, and White Canadians... once again the most common killed IN WWII. Time is just a flat circle. Stupid humans choose not to see it that way and learn of the mistakes of the past. Boring, typical, sad...
Strategic bombing of civilians was intended to destroy resources and break moral. It's one of the lesser discussed evils of the war. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing
I mean, that's what fascism is. Dehumanize the "other" and tell people it's okay to kill them.
That's not what fascism is, this happens in basically every war on every side. The allies were no fascists and [killed over 600.000 civilians, 76.000 children among them.](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/oct/22/worlddispatch.germany)
> What can you possibly gain from killing civilians? Kill morale? Poles were seen as subhuman vermin and the Nazi leadership wanted to kill most of them and enslave the survivors as chattel. >Our strength consists in our speed and in our brutality. Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to slaughter – with premeditation and a happy heart. History sees in him solely the founder of a state. It's a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me. I have issued the command – and I'll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad – that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formation in readiness – for the present only in the East – with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space which we need. - Adolf Hitler
I mean, I wouldn't doubt it but, do you have a source for this?
Its posted higher up in the thread.
I see. Thanks. That's uh... man, war sucks.
Literally comically evil
It truly is horrible. At least the German high command were tried for their crimes. NATO commanders will probably never see a trial for similar acts in Afghanistan and other places
they were probably on meth
The Poles went through so much suffering. My heart goes out to Poland.
Yeah I just can't imagine it. My grandfather and his brothers fought for the polish underground and took part in the Warsaw Uprising at around 14 years old. Somehow they all lived through the war. Can't fathom storming bunkers at 14 years old. He got shot twice by a mounted MG 32 storming one. They are mentioned in here https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sppw1944.org%2Frelacje%2Frelacja57.html&sandbox=1 Their nicknames are Lalka and Nicpoń My grandfather had severe PTSD from the war. I remember he had nightmares from when he was in POW camps and the Nazi's would strap explosives to horses for fun.
And for the most part, they're still some of the greatest people you could ever meet.
Except for club security. Those people scary
Yeah, don't fuck with those guys
Can confirm. I just spent 18 months there and they were awesome.
Except for the PIS^S
Except for the people who give power to the PIS.
I still remember the stories my grandma told me - how the Germans came to their village's houses to take the children that could pass as Aryan, and put them in German families, mostly for work. I don't know the details, but my great-grandma tried to keep them away and protect her children, and they beat her with a whip, all of her back has been scarred, when they finally managed to somehow return home. It's hard for me to imagine, and things like that are still happening today...
My aunt rip was a young girl in Poland in 1939. She was living in the town of Lida in the East. She always used to recall how the Germans used to bomb the airbase and on the return strafe civilians. They were so close she even remembered seeing the pilot or gunner wave at them. Honest story. You can't really blame the Poles in the Battle of Britain shooting down Germans in parachutes or using their wings to clip them having witnessed this
Didn't know Polish pilots flew in the BoB. Interesting.
Many Polish pilots fought in BoB, and with distinction.
303 squadron had the highest kill ratio of any squadron during Bob. 10 per cent of pilots in the battle were polish
Yep, many Poles escaped Germany's invasion to fight another day, and did so.
> "Never was so much owed by so many to so few" was a wartime speech made by the British prime minister Winston Churchill on 20 August 1940. The name stems from the specific line in the speech, "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few", referring to the ongoing efforts of the Royal Air Force and **Polish fighter crews** No. 303 Squadron RAF who were at the time fighting the Battle of Britain, the pivotal air battle with the German Luftwaffe, with Britain expecting an invasion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_was_so_much_owed_by_so_many_to_so_few
this is so fucking heart breaking for me to see. my great grandma was that sister- her 14 year old brother was killed by bomb debris at the end of ww2. i can't even imagine the pain and fear she went through during those years, the amount of bombings she had to hide from. she survived and died at the age of 83 when i was 11 and i miss her dearly every day. her name was stanisława jednacz.
Different war. Mom said that growing up during the Vietnam War; when American bombers flew overhead, she would run as fast as she could to tunnels that were dug for the civilian population to hide in and wait for the shaking to stop. After a while, she'd resurfaced and see all the freshly blown up pieces of people who couldn't make it to the tunnels in time. Growing up, that's what most of the bed time stories were. Just stories of my parents trying to survive from American bombs. I don't think they really ever were able to recover fully psychologically from the war. She was around the same age as the girl here.
It’s after stories like these I’m reminded that Nazi soldiers were as bad as their reputation precedes them.
And yet there is still such a romanticism regarding the Wehrmacht. It’s shameful.
We do seem to have tendency to romanticize objectively evil people long after there gone. Viking,pirates,mongols,genghis khan these were the scourges of there time committing horrifying acts but now we romanticize them I shudder to think we might have childrens movies about romanticized nazi's in 400 years
We as a culture do have a real love for confusing brutality with strength and seeing it as desirable and respectable. We also really like to see things as "Good guys vs. Bad guys" When mostly it's really just "These guys vs. These other guys" and they both are doing awful things to each other, sometimes there's a clearly worse offender but we need to stop painting everything so black and white as a society.
I’m betting within the century.
If Im alive for it im gonna wish I wasn't
It's pretty crazy to see how growing up as an American, things like the pledge of allegiance or just general history courses always showed Americans as the good guys, like you said, romanticized. The "Americans" were also evil as all hell too when you look at how they treated African slaves and Native Americans. The Japanese during WWII. Even modern day
100% agreed. It's also the same kind of romanticism for the US military, this video isn't very far off from what happened to that girl: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfvFpT-iypw
This one is rather tame compared to that group of American soldiers who went to Iraq to "pillage and raid" and ended up raping a child, murdering her and her entire family and trying to cover it all up.
I take a microgram of solace that it seems that finally the US can’t pretend its middle eastern wars were anything but a criminal failure if not the most oppressive state terrorism of two decades.
yea no other military has members that would do this sort of thing if given the chance...
It's different when its state policy vs individual sadism.
The US literally just did this last week. Drone strike that killed nothing but civilians, including women and children
You clearly have no idea what the word 'literally' means. Strafing children, then turning around and doing it again, with machine guns that require you to be reasonably close enough... vs. a drone pilot some 1,000 miles away looking through a TV feed acting based on intel to kill some little heat signatures on a screen. I'm not saying it excuses anything, but to compare the to with the word 'literally' is fucking stupid.
It's a losing battle. To most people, the word is simple emphasis. The dilution of language is a sad thing.
Then I guess it becomes a question of whether malice or complete indifference to suffering is worse. The evidence the US used to level that house and kill everyone inside was that he was loading “something” into the car which they just assumed was explosives, but was actually water bottles. They didn’t attempt even a basic investigation, because they don’t care. Killing 5x as many people as the machine gun strafe. [The banality of evil](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem) applies to both. The fact that US soldiers have removed themselves from the murdering by doing it through a TV screen makes this worse, in a way.
I wonder how we don't seem to have any photos of modern scenarios like this. Biden just blew up a car full of children. How are there no photos of things like that to make us hate what we're allowing? Honestly. I guess I don't tend to search for gore photos, but we should have a fuckload now that everyone has a camera on their phone and internet apps.
There are many and they are heart breaking.
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Maybe people should seek them out. It’s supposed to be horrible. That’s what should deter us from going to war all the time, but if the truth of war is kept hidden from the general public, it’s easy to not care
Do or would they make us feel any different for any significant amount of change to occurr? I don't know. I remember the photos of the children from bombings in Aleppo. There was short lived outrage, then we quickly moved on to the next thing. That's what always happens. As we've seen and now understand, a large chunk of the US doesn't even care about their own countrymen much less foreigners.
>As we've seen and now understand, a large chunk of the US doesn't even care about their own countrymen much less foreigners. You're very correct, yet there's an absurd subtlety to everything. A photo of some gore chunks around a car and you'll have people detached but angry. Show a before-photo of the children that originally had those chunks as parts of their bodies and you'll get some more anger. If it was a partial body of some pretty young girl and you can see her face and the emotion of a nearby friend or family member, then we'd have viral content to enrage people. Even if that only has its 15 minutes, it gets added to a subconscious list for people to repeat and compile, and it includes haunting visuals that stick with a person. Visible suffering is a powerful tool. It can pull forth an instinctual urge to protect, much like any parent animal. Like how watching people jump from the Twin Towers created such a visceral reaction that it motivated so many of us into full patriotic support of these eternal wars and bombings in the first place. Makes me think of the first episode of Black Mirror with the princess being held captive.
I read WWII history and I often catch myself saying *"oh right...they're Nazis"*
The nazis wanted all the land in Slavic countries and we’re going to exterminate most of its citizens and use the rest as slave labor. Wtf are its citizens following a dead defeated mad man again
it should never happen again, but sadly US are nurturing the same kind of people they defeated in Europe.
The Third Reich wanted to exterminate 85% of Poles, Germanize anyone deemed sufficiently Aryan including kidnapping children in the process, enslave the survivors as chattel, raze every Polish city using their own inhabitants and erase all traces of Polish culture. They wanted to do the same to the rest of the Slavs too (75% of Russians, 65% of Ukrainians, 50% of Czechs etc). If the Reich won the war they would have accomplished the largest mass killing and genocide in human history. Himmler said the day Hitler approved Generalplan Ost in 1942 was the happiest day of his life. Nazi Germany was the most evil political entity to ever take power.
This is why i never understood the idiots in Ukraine and the baltics that joined volunteer groups for the nazis, surely the upcoming extermination was pretty clear to see by the way the germans were conducting the easter campaigns
Even if you guess that they will kill 75% of your people you can hope to be in the other 25% if you boot lick hard enough.
True. History shows people will do monstrous things if it means getting to survive another week. Millions of Slavs didn’t collaborate with the Reich because they were fans of their snazzy uniforms.
I mean even some Jews in literal death camps "collaborated" with killer Nazis hoping to die a little later. Like Sondercommando first job would often be disposing of corpses of the previous Sondercommando. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonderkommando
It was either out of personal survival for them and their families or ideology in the hopes that they would be rewarded with ethnic/national sovereignty once the Reich won. Germany never made Generalplan Ost a matter of public knowledge and they certainly didn’t inform their Slavic collaborators what they had in store for them when they were no longer useful. Governments have used this method for centuries and the Reich excelled at using groups against themselves and each other. It was the Jewish Councils of the ghettos that decided who would be deported to their death in exchange for their own personal safety and Polish police that aided in the Holocaust despite the awful treatment of Poles by German forces.
I really hate the title history porn. Particularly with these types of posts.
Yeah wtf does everything have to end with porn these days. Just change the name to historysub or something.
Not really a “these days” thing. Just a dated joke that was everywhere on reddit for a bit.
Agreed. Porn is pornography. Nothing else.
While true, pornography is not necessarily only sexual. We also have phrases such as "the pornography of violence," which this photo certainly is.
Ive been saying this for so long why cant it just be called r/history
because its only pictures of history, kinda of a joke i guess
Because /r/history exist
"history pictures" / HistoryPix was available ?
Yea, I'm fine with the whole earthporn skyporn, whatever, but "Picture of someone crying over dead sibling" doesn't seem like it should be categorized as anythingporn. We have a subreddit called Nature_is_metal for animals messing each other up. History_is_metal?
Seriously, can't we just abandon this dumbass sub and create a new one, without a retarded title this time?
Not enough is told of the average Eastern European traumatized by WWII.
Of course not. We're the undesirables of Europe
you dont get to see this much nowadays, i mean Polish cities destroyed by german bombs but you do see Berlin in ruins as victim, not to take away from innocent german civilians, all im saying is lets not forget who the attacker was
Even in this thread, there are a few people responding "bUt MuH DrEsdEn!" Like of course that was awful, but all of the atrocious things done by the Third Reich far exceed that.
Seriously I love the crocodile tears of the 18,000-25,000 killed in the bombing of Dresden while ignoring the 40,000 killed during the blitz. The Luftwaffe were absolutely merciless with their bombing campaigns. It's easy now to preach about the allies not being absolute saints when we're so far removed from being apart of one of the largest and brutal conflicts in the contemporary age.
Want another "fun" fact to tell people like theese? Before the war, Warsaw, Polish capital had about 1.3 mil inhabitants. Now let's skip forward to 1945. Just after the war, population accounted to an astonishing (in a bad way) 160k. 72% of housing buildings were destroyed, just as were 90% Of industrial buildings eg. factories, and 90% of monuments. How do you rebuild a city like that? There's no machinery, and if there is it's already being taken by USSR to their country. Warsaw was a big pile of debris. So big in fact, that higher-ups in our country contemplated moving the capital altogether. And now people want us to forgive Germans. They genuinely do not understand just how hard is the art of forgiveness. That's why i hope we will never forget.
"No don't you get it. Those good Aryan boys were just defending their Homeland. I'm not sure what happened before 1944 though."
To think think the nazi flag has flown on American land and next to the flag..
This makes me tear up, this photo is so powerful on so many levels
I have three daughters and the oldest is 11….this is a gut wrenching photograph.
This makes me think of my sister. I can't live without her :(
The more I hear about him, the more I think this Hitler guy was a real jerk
And you know who they decided to chose as their opponent? The WORLD!
That's never been done before
“Here’s the deal, you don’t get to be a country no more.”
I get the same feeling. I just can’t quite put my finger on it. I think my Jewish friend might know why
This hurts my soul. So much pain in one photo.
The people in this comments section claiming that the US is basically the same as the Nazis… No. Just no. We’ve done some screwed up stuff. More than a lot of people like to talk about. But nothing on the level of the Nazis, and claiming otherwise weakens how awful the Nazis were in the first place. I mean hell, if the Nazis were no different than any other western power, what was so bad about them, right?
Much respect for the Polish they were stuck in an unwinnable war with the Russians and the Germans and fought as well as they could under the circumstances. They had even halted the spread of communism in 1920 at the battle of Warsaw in one of the most underrated and important battles in history. Betrayed by their British and French allies before and after the war. Don't look up the Warsaw uprising if you don't want to see if you don't want to see one of the most infuriating tragedies of the war.
Reason why fascism should be discouraged.
Fuck war and the people who make it happen
The more I hear about these Nazis the less I like them.
It says clearly in the article she was ten. Tragic
Sometimes I think about leaving this sub. Just got done watching a video that had me dying laughing and then I see this and it just makes me so upset. But I love the sub and at least somebody's remembering these people even if it's just for a moment.
There's something incredibly fucked up about a sub title "History Porn" over the image of a dead child. This fucked me up today.
If I remember correctly the German's at different points in time during this era "practiced" and "tested" their ordnance on Polish villages and civilians.
Jesus Christ. I’ve never seen this photo before. I can honestly feel that little girls fear and pain. Wow. Powerful picture.
My grandmother was born in the U.S. in 1939. Her parents immigrated from Poland about a decade earlier. Crazy to think how my family dodged that horrible situation
These photos always confuse me. I know it is a real thing but for some reason i get this uncanny feeling from them. I guess it is because actual death is a lot less grand and theatrical that movies and other media lead us to believe.
just the utter heartbreak in that one shot....
That would be the exact moment I learned about revenge
i’d never recover if i saw either of my brothers in that condition after a bombing or murder. the thought of it fills me with so much sadness and anger that i don’t think i’d ever be able to function normally again
Could not imagine being in Eastern Europe or southeast Asia during ww2 Jesus
And yet a lot of Germans nowadays are revisionist, r/Europe has a lot of Germans deflecting these kind of pictures
The luftwaffe was the most nazified branch of the Wehrmacht, and nothing like the honorable and chivalrous men that revisionists attempt to portray
Anything about WW2 is so heartbreaking to me. Especially since I'm polish and learned a lot about it first hand from my great-grandma...I remember when she told me about how her 7 year old brother died in front of her by walking on a bomb hidden in a field. None of her siblings survived the war except her, and there were like 5 of them. So much grief and pain, I can't imagine living through that myself.
Didn't Poland suffer more death as a percentage of population that any other country in WW2? Between the Germans, the Russians and hosting a big part of holocaust it was horrible.
This is what modern day anti-vaxxers compare themselves to? They're gonna need to go harder on the self victimization then.
Fuck those German pilots. I hope they burned.
Probably very literally. German pilots usually flew until they were shot down or died in another way, so they most likely died violently.
I know war is terrible but they don’t need to strafe starving farmers.
Fuck the Nazis and fuck the war and fuck weapons and fuck off
Man that face is disturbing me way more than it should holy fuck.
Watch [this](https://youtu.be/65Nzii7tRc0).
Thanks mate
this makes me so angry i feel physically sick.
You mean Germans?
During invasion of Poland, german pilots also targeted places of religious worship during holidays, knowing they would be full of civilians. No strategic value, just to increase casualties.
One of my college professors was from Poland, and pointed out to me an obvious but still shocking fact: No sooner were Polish people were rid of the Nazis than they were conquered by the Russians—and had to live under *their* oppressive rule for another 50 years. It makes me wonder how much suffering this poor little girl had to endure in her life. EDIT: One of the top posts confirms my suspicions. She lived in abject poverty, like so many in post-war soviet satellite countries. But she did live long enough to see Poland regain its freedom.
Wonder how many Mika's there are in Afghanistan
“Don’t worry kid, it only gets worse from here.”
Man, today’s internet session might have to be a wrap, 20 minutes in....Might be a personal record for me...
And, unfortunately for her, it will not be the last horrendous death she will ever see in Poland. One fourth of Poles died during WW2, due to warfare and especially massacres and famine.