Help ID: Rare Color WWII Footage Of Dead & Captured Germans?
The only explanation I have is that these are dead, dying, and captured Germans, and in Yugoslavia. That looks like Americans toward the end. Anybody have any ideas as to what this may have been? A WWII battle in Yugoslavia vs Germans, but where exactly?
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Hmmm…no helmets to be found…collected as souvenirs by our guys? I saw what appeared to be two civilians. One early on and one at the feet of the GI’s at the end. At least one guy had the decency to cover the one dead guy’s face with a piece of cloth. Wait’ll the left gets wind of this. They’ll try to tar the whole American Army of WWII as heartless bastards.
August 6th, 2008 at 10:23 amI dont know where this was? But It looks like they all had been beaten to or near Death. (Mob Maybe) No weapons in site. Someone felt sorry for the Girl? They let her live.
Sucked to be German that day!!!
August 6th, 2008 at 10:26 amToo many head wounds. Too many dead with their faces in the dirt. A woman beaten badly.
What does that add up to?
August 6th, 2008 at 10:32 amLooks to me like the locals dispensed some frontier justice. The girl in the middle of the video had obviously been roughed up, maybe for sleeping with a German. The civvies might have been collaborators, real or imagined by someone with a grudge.
Our guys seem to have arrived after everything had already happened, and collected the dead and wounded.
Of course, this is all conjecture on my part.
August 6th, 2008 at 10:59 amWell, it seems that Yougoslavia was liberated by Tito and his commies resistants in october 1944; the allies soldiers that might have been in the aeras should be the Brits, they were also fighting in Greece. Tough the Americans didn’t take part in the fightings, a delegation was sent from the London headquaters just for witnessing.
in that video we can see that the german soldiers and the civils were “starving” (not very thick), food was also rare there.
It is said that the serbs were sympathetisans to the Germans, while the main resistance came from the actual Croatia
August 6th, 2008 at 11:19 amTicticboom I believe you are on the right track. The German soldiers are minus weapons,helmets, and ammo making it look like they were ambushed by partisans. The woman being beaten adds to this as a partisan act. The US troops came after this was done and probably saved her life.The question I have is this in Yugoslavia or someplace in Western Europe?
August 6th, 2008 at 11:23 amCzechoslovakia would make sense. Patton’s 3rd Army was there at the end of the war.
August 6th, 2008 at 1:35 pmAn interesting glimps to the past. I love our troops! They make me proud wherever they go.
August 6th, 2008 at 1:48 pmLoneWolf, you might be right, cause in the video, the scene is situated in a flat country ; Yougoslavia, is all except a flat country
August 6th, 2008 at 1:51 pmDon’t let the clothes of the civilian people gathered at the end fool you as a direction towards Yugoslavia.
In 1945 almost everyone in Nazi-occupied Europe were wearing clothes like this. Simply ’cause nothing better was at hand after the Nazis robbed every country they had occupied blind.
According to the fresh green leeves at the trees this must be somewhere around April/May but not later as the women still wear cardigans. The American GI’s that can bee seen in this footage also still wear jackets buttoned-up and their helmets planted firmly on their heads. I’ve seen many pictures of American liberators who were not wearing a jacket anymore and their helmet shoved back on their heads because of the high temperatures during June and July whilst they moved further into Europe untill they encountered the Russian who came from the East.
Another significant clue is the beaten up woman, half way this footage. She walks on a clearly broad and large road.
Roads this big where built, using the locals as slaves for doing the hard labour at gun-point, mostly to make a swift approache of Nazi troops and material possible after another country was occupied and became part of the third Reich. Later on to make way for troops and material towards the tw fronts, one towards the East, (Russia), another towards the West after D-day 1944.
The villagers do look skinny but that would have only made their typical Slavic features more visable as Yugoslavia was part of the once existing European Slavic region.
Therefore, this footage could have been shot anywhere in Europe, but at a place whith some hills and slopes as the close observant must have seen.
Belgium, France, certain parts of Italy, Poland and yes, also Yugoslavia are possible.
As for the uniforms of the German soldiers, dead or alive. These look like the typical Summer-uniform the nazis wore and they still look in very good condition. (Uhm, the uniforms I mean.) Therefore these soldier could not have come back from the Russian front.
According to the time-frame, April/May 1945, and the liberation of Europe around this time-frame, combined with the large and broad road the beaten woman walked, on my guess is the centre of Polland.
Just my two cents……..
August 6th, 2008 at 2:04 pmHELP!!!!! Save my comment from the Spaminator!!!!
August 6th, 2008 at 2:05 pmMy father-in-law served in the OSS in Yugoslavia (operating off the island is Vis) about the time of this photo. He is not doing very well with his health (85 years old). I will have him view this clip and see what he says.
August 6th, 2008 at 2:27 pmThis footage has been on you tube for ages.
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=aJ7N9E58dWo
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=dQWv9KpDWEg
It looks to me like this girl was gang raped, beat and relieved of her clothes, that’s why she’s wearing army trousers.
August 6th, 2008 at 3:00 pmFrom all the headshots, it looks like these guys were executed.
The card about halfway thru the video said “April 1945…Haglund”
Is there or was there a Haglund,Yugoslavia?
August 6th, 2008 at 4:43 pmYou have it backwards franchie. The Croats were Muslims fighting with the Germans. Thats why you had the war in Yugoslavia, when Clinton was Prez.. The Croats massacred thousands of Serbs. The Serbs were getting revenge.
August 6th, 2008 at 5:05 pmThose ignorant of the past(history), are doomed to relive it in the future.
For everything happening now, I can show you how the past brought it about.
31Mike is on to something. The sign displayed is a date (4/2/45)with a place, Haglund, written on it. This was most likely done by one our our guys; a European would have written the day, then the month, then the year…to look like this > 2/4/45. I think that if we find out where Haglund is we will find the answer.
August 6th, 2008 at 6:14 pmThe only Haglund that I could find in Europe is in Sweden. I don’t think that this took place there.
August 6th, 2008 at 6:19 pmI noticed that the dead wore uniforms, but with no insignia…the German Army was big on decorations and rank designations…at the end of the war demilled men made their way back to homes all over the former Reich. At this time too, there was, what we call today an insurgency…It was small in numbers but had the codename of Werewolf. This was quickly mobilized near the end of the war to terrorize the civilians from transitioning to peace, and to kill Allied soldiers when possible. When the Allied soldiers caught some of these guys, not all of them made it to the “proper authorities”…This is my guess…man, a good mystery video though…
August 6th, 2008 at 8:00 pmIn occupied countries, women who slept with the Germans generally had their heads shaved by the villagers after the war. This woman’s hair was not shaved off, so it makes me wonder exactly what happened to her. Did the Americans stop some kind of vigilante activity against her? She was hanging very close to the photographer.
The military vehicle at the end has a series of approx. eight numbers and letters on it.
“Haglund” may be the photographer’s surname. Weather conditions look more like April than February (unless it was an unseasonably warm February). 31Mike and infidel are probably right: The photographer was American.
August 6th, 2008 at 9:37 pm31 Mike tou mean that ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleiburg_massacre
effectively there were “regulations” between the different factions, the croat ustashi collaborators that fought with the Germans, the royalist resistants, the chechnik resistants fell under the Tito partisans hands, that apparently had the Alliees’ favor.
Tito was also a Croate
Probably that these guis were executed
JI, the croats that were the fighting with the germans were the Ustashi. Though the majority of the population hated him.
August 6th, 2008 at 10:20 pmand yes, the latter Balkans wars were the logic following of the end of WWII there
The Germans weren’t fighting with muslim Croats. There aren’t any! Total bull…
Croatia’s religious profile, according to the CIA factbook:
Roman Catholic 87.8%, Orthodox 4.4%, other Christian 0.4%, Muslim 1.3%, other and unspecified 0.9%, none 5.2% (2001 census)
For those of you here who think they know a thing or two about those images - what you’re looking at are mainly young recruits, who hardly reached 18 years of age. It is obviously towards the end of the war (when America had direct battle engagement with German troops on mainland Europe). Those boys were drafted, were no older than 7 or 8 when Hitler came to power, and calling them Nazis is really a bit ignorant.
August 8th, 2008 at 3:20 pmObviously this was filmed by an american names Hagelund (browse the net and u’ll find many with this surname) and the dates shown (at two instances on the movie) are in April not May, so the war was still going on. Was Patton this early (8th April 45) in CZ ??
August 24th, 2008 at 6:23 pmHaglund is a scandinavian surname, not a place. Can’t tell where this was recorded, there are americans present so it can’t be east of Berlin. Juding from the houses and the landscape you can catch a glimpse of, I’d say it’s more likely that the scenery is Belgium, Holland or northern France.
September 1st, 2008 at 5:43 amThis film was shot in western Bohemia (Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia) by a US Army soldier named “Haglund” in April and May of ‘45 as the Germans were surrendering to the US Army. The dead men are supposedly German SS who have been killed by the avenging Czechs. The “German girl” may have been attached to the SS and hence beaten up by the Czechs. At the end, the smiling people appear to be “spitting” symbolically at the deposed Nazi oppressors.
Read more about it here:
November 22nd, 2008 at 2:02 pmhttp://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=77&t=145596&p=1265977#p1265977