Thank you Dave, for your contribution. Just wanted to note that this thread is about photographing <b>own</b> casualties, which is done pretty scarcely. For other photographs of casualties, I mean civilian and enemy, your original thread will serve the purpose!
Sorry Akira! You are right. I got the scanner out last night and got caught up on some scanning I had wanted to do.
As far as the nationalities of some of these photos, I dont think we will ever know. It is more likely that they are enemy then German, but the hanging may very well be German deserters or Russian partisans. And for the burned bodies... who knows...
as the precision of this thread has gone - slightly - astray i have the honor to post some strong material from group member vincon, which he had mailed me privately and i had asked him to share with us. some might know vincon from his high grade ebay auctions (feesmann is by the way his new id there).
1.) gef. Fallschirmjäger auf Kreta
paratrooper, most likely near maleme, 20.5.41, 3./ E. Fjg (or "flg" ?). MG Btl. Gefreiter Günter Mischke (according to the cross-inscription on his gravesite). this fj has been strip-searched (by english troops?) before comrades found him. soldbuch and personal papers are scattered on the ground. out of this lot someone has planted a family pic into his hand like a u.s.-death card...
I once meat a Norwegian Waffen-SS-soldier who in 1941 took a photo of a fallen fellow countryman.
It was full combat and the terrain was in Russian hands one moment and in German the other. There was no sharp line between the two. He took the photo – it is a portrait and it clearly shows the Norwegian Unterscharführers features and that he really is dead – as they couldn´t take his body with them. As some sort of proof and/or memory.
I have meat several German soldiers (or soldiers who served on the German side), but I have never heard anyone of them talk disparaging about the foe; fallen, captured or alive and kicking. And no photos as souveniers or trophies...
dear ludwig,
thanks for your contribution, though i cant second your opinion on a gentlemen sort of war. if there was "respect" for the enemy - if such a thing ever existed in any war - during the campaigns in the west, this for sure was dropped with the start of "operation barbarossa". ns propaganda had branded the enemy, "den russen", subhuman, a pest and as such the russians were generally treated. until september 1941 1,4 million of soviet soldiers in german captivity had died of hunger, illnesses etc. clemency towards the enemy was a remarkable rare thing on the "ostfront".
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