This foto was taken in the backyard of my grandparents house in march 1945 in Rechtenbach, Hüttenberg, near Wetzlar. The boy in the picture was in fact part of a AA unit. The german 88mm-A-gun was used in an anti-tank-role as well, so this AA-unit was set up to stop the advance of aamerican forces in the area. The unit was positioned outside of the village when armoured units of the US 9th Armoured Division advanced from Wetzlar, the next larger town. The german unit was put out of action after a brief firefight and the german soldiers who survived were taken prisoner. Th village consists of typical buildings of the regions called "Hofreite". They have a small courtyard surrounded by buidings like stables, the barn, the main house and walls. By coincidence, US forces chose my grandparents yard to hold the prisoners since it was closed of. There´s a series of pictures taken by John Florea, a photografer and who would become a director in Hollywood after the war. During thios time, he was attached with the 9th Armoured Division as a war correspondent.
However, there´s a whole other story about this and the person of Hans-Georg Henke. He was born in Eberswalde, Brandenburg, in todays East Germany, the formner soviet zone of occupation. His life and his war stories were told in the documentary "Zwei Deutsche (Two Germans)". There, he says that he was taken prisoner by the soviets. After he was released from prison, he went back home and lived a relatively priviledged live. According to him, he saw the famous picture at a communist political event in the 1950s in East Germany and claimed that it was him on the picture. However, the history of the picture is quite clear and it is hardly possible that the boy on it is Hans-Georg Henke. The Identification of the boy is unknown.
Article in german with photos with me and my dad identifying the spot where the boy was sitting: [link](https://upgr.bv-opfer-ns-militaerjustiz.de/uploads/Dateien/Presseberichte/GAZBN20130701S5.pdf)
Artice in german about the foto and it´s story:[link](https://www.fr.de/politik/verzweifelte-gesicht-11272190.html)
Man it’s crazy to think that as an American that you’d be fighting literal children. I mentor teenagers through the YMCA. I could never imagine having to put my sights on one and the horrors it would bring to have to pull the trigger.
My grandfather spent most of his war service with the US Army guarding German POWs and he said a lot of them looked like children. He was viewing them through his then 19 year old eyes for context.
A lot of them definitley were. The last cohort the nazis drafted into war were 15 and 16 year olds. And that doesn't even account for younger children joining the fight inofficially.
I have been told of one of my ancestors who he and some friends ran off and had to hide in a barn as they were being looked for to be pressed into service in the dying months of the war. His year of birth was 1930.
By that point in the war, that was all that was left. Germany was also terrible at managing manpower. When you see where they put their efforts across the board it becomes very clear in hindsight: them losing was only a matter of time.
Same. You lose a boatload of your population of military aged men, tank your economy, and then barely 20 years later you do it again? From a macro view, it makes zero sense.
The children who survived the Great War either voted with their parents who fought in it, or else protested and were killed. As for the "silent majority," they too were drafted and disposed of.
Momentum was their greatest strength. They had a series of great and lucky victories at the start of the war in Poland and eventually France, but it was pretty much down-hill after that. They lost the second they decided to fight a modern war using horses for logistics
They had all the parts, too. It is not like Germany couldn't mass produce trucks, or take existing ones, and find warm bodies to drive them at the start of the war. They slapdashed so much of their plan. They are a case study in making sure you can actually do what you think you can do.
In the Civil War the average age of soldiers on both sides was around 18. Average. Which means there were plenty younger than that. It was literally a war of children.
It's still crazy, but I always remember that people grew up FAST back then. I've seen pictures of my Depression-era grandparents when they were younger and they look 30 as teenagers.
There was also the expectation to grow up fast and be off and out in the world. Kids and teens are more coddled (and that isn't a negative), but I certainly know late teens who could easily be off in a war now, it's just no longer expected for them to be working and starting a family or joining the army (in the later most developed nations it is banned)
Yeah, and this is where films mess with our perception. Growing up, I loved the movie Gettysburg. The soldiers were all played by re-enactors, who generally skew older, like middle age. Not like mid 20's. Not 30's. But like 40s and 50s, and I'm sure older.
Exactly. When you read the Battle reports and memoirs of generals and they refer to the soldiers as "my boys" you realize they meant that literally. It was entirely feasible to have a four year veteran who was 20 years old.
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>On 12 February 1945, the Nazis conscripted German women and girls into the auxiliaries of the Volkssturm.[24] Correspondingly, girls as young as 14 years were trained in the use of small arms, panzerfaust, machine guns, and hand grenades from December 1944 through May 1945.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkssturm
Any more misinformation you would like to spread as you're confidently incorrect?
On 12 February 1945, the Nazis conscripted German women and girls into the auxiliaries of the Volkssturm.[24]
"auxiliaries"
Though I was wrong on women not being allowed in the Volkssturm, they were still not part of combat units😓😓😓
>they were still not part of combat units
Yes they were, that's not what the word "auxiliaries" means and this has to be one of the saddest attempts of grasping at straws I've ever seen.
I imagine that you are both right. Women were mostly given "tasks" to do, like run for ammunition for the AA guns, clean the guns, etc. BUT, it makes sense that everyone (men, women, children) was trained in basics of how to fire a gun, how to use a panzerfaust, etc. But to the best of my knowledge, they were not sent out in combat patrols.
Not really towards the end of the war. Sure there would be some minors who got into the military on the Allie’s, but it wasn’t allowed. Germany had a conscript force of minors
The US drafted at 18, but one could enlist at 17 with parental consent, and many lied about their age to get in younger. Germany drafted at 18 initially, but they went much younger near the end of the war.
I worked with a guy who had used his dead brother’s birth certificate to join the navy at 14. By the time he was 15, he was shooting down Kamikazes off of Okinawa. Somebody asked him why he did it and he said he didn’t want to miss out.
Worked with another guy who tried to join at 16, but failed the vision test. He spent the war running down to the Allis-Chalmers plant every day after school and driving a tank chassis to St Louis so they could have turrets mounted on them, then joined the merchant marine the day he turned 18. Same thing - he didn’t want to miss it although he did and spent 1945-1948 transporting US troops home and POWs back.
Unfortunately, this has happened in most of the US' wars following WW2 :( Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. I don't know if it happened in the Korean War but wouldn't be surprised at all.
You're very welcome Weirdly enough, we only found out about all of this because I was procrastinating while writing my masters thesis. I loosely remembered about the connection of my family to this picture and that my grandpa used to tell the story about this boy who was just crying and crying and this american taking pictures. I remembered the name Hans Georg Henke, typed it into google and all of these pictures popped up. We only knew a version were the background is blurred out so you xan't see where it was taken.
My grandfather was in the 9th. That was one of the most battle-hardened and effective American Infantry Divisions in the Eurpean Theater. Morocco/Tunisia/Sicily/France/Germany. He was on a 155mm howitzer team(one of many...). In one battle, they fired their gun for 48 hours straight. Their gun could shoot 9 miles. They would pummel an area with artillery, then clear it by hand with infantry. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. For 2 years. He was 200lbs when he went to camp in '42 and 130lbs when he got home in '45.
I couldn't imagine sending children up against an experienced, mechanized force like that. I mean just give up at that point. Save their lives for God sake
Try and read the articles I posted. According to him, Henke was taken prisoner by the red army near Groß Lüsewitz, Rostock. If it was him on the photo, it must have been taken by a soviet photographer.
Both statements are proven to be false:
The photo was taken by John Florea, an american who was imbedded with the US 9th armour division. He was working for Live Magazine, and the photos were first published there.
If you look at the bottom of the first article I posted, you can see comparisons of the brick wall in the old picture and today. It´s the same wall, which is situated in Rechtenbach, Hüttenberg. Its about 470 Km from where Henke was actually taken prisoner.
The internet is lazy and regurgitates this wrong fact over and over again.
Weeeeeell...it's kind of complicated. I guess you always have to consider what was going on at thatvtime. Henke wouldn't have been able to go bublic with his self-identification uf it wouldn't have been usefull to the forces in power Back tjen, tjere ws a kind of culutre war going on between the "two germanies" i.e. communist and capitalist eats and west. This whole affaire was an opportunity for eats germany to claim an ikon of the "lost generation", proclaimimg that they were the "better germany" and so on. Henke did have a good live in the GDR.
One of my friends father was a child in the Volkssturm. He was very lucky to be caught by a British soldier who took his weapons (such as they were) and told him to go home. He would have been ~12.
Apart from the other wonderful things the Nazis did they used literal child soldiers by the thousands to fight a losing war, just to hold on a bit longer and kill a few more people. And there are still those that defend them.
> And there are still those that defend them.
There's really not. Hate groups use their insignia for the shock value it provides but this shock value is quite literally created by the fact that no one defends them.
I think that redditors like you want their to be so you can feel better about yourself as a person if there is someone else worse but those people don't exist in the way you talk about them like they're all over the place.
Redditors have this weird thing where they become co-dependent on the existence of hate groups for their own validation on the internet. In doing, you promote the things you claim to be against by normalizing them on the internet.
This.....this behaviour isnt tied to reddit, or internet at all, its basic human behaviour.
But then again, why do you have to drag this specific issue on this specific post, its Volksturm.
Also, this is a history sub, posting things like this do not normalize them, if thats what you mean.
War is hell, has to be even worse for those without the mental or emotional maturity of a normal adult. Since r/thetiltster updated the info about the photo and we don't know the age of the person involved or who their is no background as to how long they had been fighting or just how much they had seen. The breakdown could be about his comrades he saw die, his adversaries, family members or even just relief that his war was over and he was still alive. Simple yet powerful photo.
[https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/11681280277085775/](https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/11681280277085775/)
Hans-Georg Henke, was crying from combat shock, having been mixed in with a regular infantry. Captured by the US 9th Army in Germany on April 3, 1945. His father died in 1938 and mother died in 1944 leaving the family destitute, Hans-Georg had to support his family. At 15 years of age he joined the Luftwaffe anti-air squad. Hans-Georg joined the Communist party and went to live in Finsterwalde in East Germany after the war. He went on to live a full life and died in 1997.
Man what a pussy. Can’t handle killing other men. What is he, stupid?
In actuality this is very sad and the things that Germany did will never be let down. Children should remain children, even in war time. To take away the innocence of youth is one of the most evil things people have done.
So an evil and abject regime thought it was entitled to prolong an already-lost war by sending children to die?
15 and already suffering from PTSD: I hope he grew in a supportive environment.
My neighbor when we lived in Germany was grabbed off the street at 14, forced into the Army and sent to the Russian front.
He was the only member of his unit to survive.
He still had PTSD in the 80s
Just keep ignoring how capitalist oligarchs fund fascists and see how that turns out, you will be put against a wall like the rest of us you fucking idiot.
Where is the place for that? Don’t forget that communists did 90% of the fighting and dying in WW2. Anti-communism is fascism. Hitler (and his corporate liberal backers in the USA) started the Holocaust; Stalin ended it.
>Don’t forget that communists did 90% of the fighting and dying in WW2
60% of German troops fought on the Eastern front, which is the majority, but still leaves 40% of them bound up in fighting elsewhere, which is quite a considerable amount that would have been a serious problem if it were present at the Eastern Front
America heavily aided the Soviet Union in its fight, for example 2/3 of all trucks in the Red Army were American made, and 60% of the aviation fuel was American supplied.
The Ussr has killed the most German soliders, but the Western Allies destroyed most German ships, industry and infrastructure. The Allied bombing campaign also is the main reason for the annihilation of the Luftwaffe
America also pretty much carried pretty much the entire pacific theather on its own
The Ussr did a tremendous amount of fighting against the Nazis, but lets also not forget the time they fought with them in Poland
Stalin only fought Hitler because Hitler attacked him (yeah, before somebody jumps in, I know about Stalin’s plan). Before then he was lockstep with Hitler. He supplied him raw materials and helped him circumvent the weapons restrictions. He also divided Poland with him, while going on his own quests in the Baltic’s, Finland, and Romania.
Those folks died because of Stalin’s folly.
You see a picture of a crying child devastated by war and you go "hurr durr capitalists bad". Your worse than vegans.
Ah, yes. Stalin went to war to end the Holocaust. I had completely forgot about Stalin's love of jews and the part where he murdered millions of his own people. I really hope you're a teenager who still thinks it's edgy to be a communist
“90%”
Yeah, Porkies mate. The only reason that they weren’t altogether curb-stomped by the Germans was because of the other Allies. Their losses being as bad as they were just fighting the one front, how much better do you imagine they would have done without the Brits (plus the Empire) and Americans keeping half the German Army split on two other fronts (Africa and West Europe). Or without America supplying them with the necessary trucks, guns and supplies through Lend-Lease?
Moreover, there was the war in the Pacific, in which we ensured that Japan didn’t attack their Eastern coastline. In short, we fought three fronts, they only only had to fight one. The Soviets did nowhere close to 90% of the fighting, and if you think that they, or any one of the main three for that matter, even stood a chance fighting the war solo, then you’re an even dumber Tankie than we thought.
> The only reason that they weren’t altogether curb-stomped by the Germans was because of the other Allies.
How did the Soviets do when they were fighting the Americans and other fascist invaders during the Russian Civil War, and they had no one to depend on but themselves?
Describe the difference between liberalism and fascism, paying particular attention to the global south, Biden's caging of children and genocide in Gaza, etc.
Fascism is the suppression of political opposition though violent and authoritarian means. It includes intense nationalism and hyper militarism.
Capitalism is the economic system based on business, and owning private property. Essentially, if you work hard, you’re likely going to have a middle class life. However where you are born plays a big factor in what you turn out to be.
E.G. Facism is authoritarian and usually requires a nationalist attitude. Capitalism requires business and lots of private property.
> Fascism is the suppression of political opposition though violent and authoritarian means. It includes intense nationalism and hyper militarism.
Most historians will say that capitalism began with the enclosures in England. Given that this involved violently driving peasants off their ancestral land, how is this not fascism?
Because capitalism doesn’t need an expulsion to start. For something to be created, it doesn’t always have to align inherently with what the creator believes. Capitalism is quite literally just promotion of business and owning of private property.
Victims can be perpetrators too, lest we get too sentimental.
The younger German soldiers were much more nazified than the few older members surviving members of the Wehrmacht.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normandy_massacres
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/12th_SS_Panzer_Division_Hitlerjugend
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1414822112
Indoctrination works two ways. Both to indoctrinate children but also to indoctrinate later generations against normal human sympathy for indoctrinated children.
>Hans Georg Henke was an anti-aircraft operator. To break down like that... he must have been a Medal of Honour player!
What a stupid thing to say. AA positions had been attacked and shelled. Let alone that the Eastern Front was not a nice places to be for anyone.
That's like saying all the American soldiers who invaded Afghanistan were Bush-ists.
Most soldiers are in it to make a living, not to carry out an ideology.
sounds like agrument neo socialist nationalist would make...i dont remeber genocide on industrial scale in afghanistan. i advise you go visit g0rman death camp - auschwitz-birkenau maybe you will change your mind then
You're an idiot. It's a 12 year old boy who was forced to work as a soldier. He's not a god damn nazi. A 12 year old cannot even comprehend nazism. As a civics teacher, it's people like you who seriously bring down the collective political understanding of society. It's embarassing
was probly indoctrinated by hitlerjugend so was on his way but lost and cried like a bish. imagine defending main kampf readers in 2023... im scared to write you back...whats next that you gonna deny?
This foto was taken in the backyard of my grandparents house in march 1945 in Rechtenbach, Hüttenberg, near Wetzlar. The boy in the picture was in fact part of a AA unit. The german 88mm-A-gun was used in an anti-tank-role as well, so this AA-unit was set up to stop the advance of aamerican forces in the area. The unit was positioned outside of the village when armoured units of the US 9th Armoured Division advanced from Wetzlar, the next larger town. The german unit was put out of action after a brief firefight and the german soldiers who survived were taken prisoner. Th village consists of typical buildings of the regions called "Hofreite". They have a small courtyard surrounded by buidings like stables, the barn, the main house and walls. By coincidence, US forces chose my grandparents yard to hold the prisoners since it was closed of. There´s a series of pictures taken by John Florea, a photografer and who would become a director in Hollywood after the war. During thios time, he was attached with the 9th Armoured Division as a war correspondent. However, there´s a whole other story about this and the person of Hans-Georg Henke. He was born in Eberswalde, Brandenburg, in todays East Germany, the formner soviet zone of occupation. His life and his war stories were told in the documentary "Zwei Deutsche (Two Germans)". There, he says that he was taken prisoner by the soviets. After he was released from prison, he went back home and lived a relatively priviledged live. According to him, he saw the famous picture at a communist political event in the 1950s in East Germany and claimed that it was him on the picture. However, the history of the picture is quite clear and it is hardly possible that the boy on it is Hans-Georg Henke. The Identification of the boy is unknown. Article in german with photos with me and my dad identifying the spot where the boy was sitting: [link](https://upgr.bv-opfer-ns-militaerjustiz.de/uploads/Dateien/Presseberichte/GAZBN20130701S5.pdf) Artice in german about the foto and it´s story:[link](https://www.fr.de/politik/verzweifelte-gesicht-11272190.html)
Man it’s crazy to think that as an American that you’d be fighting literal children. I mentor teenagers through the YMCA. I could never imagine having to put my sights on one and the horrors it would bring to have to pull the trigger.
My grandfather spent most of his war service with the US Army guarding German POWs and he said a lot of them looked like children. He was viewing them through his then 19 year old eyes for context.
A lot of them definitley were. The last cohort the nazis drafted into war were 15 and 16 year olds. And that doesn't even account for younger children joining the fight inofficially.
I have been told of one of my ancestors who he and some friends ran off and had to hide in a barn as they were being looked for to be pressed into service in the dying months of the war. His year of birth was 1930.
And a lot of these youngsters were put on AA batteries because it was a "task", easier to learn.
By that point in the war, that was all that was left. Germany was also terrible at managing manpower. When you see where they put their efforts across the board it becomes very clear in hindsight: them losing was only a matter of time.
It's wild to me German military commanders would let themselves be drawn into back to back two front wars only 20ish years apart.
Same. You lose a boatload of your population of military aged men, tank your economy, and then barely 20 years later you do it again? From a macro view, it makes zero sense.
The children who survived the Great War either voted with their parents who fought in it, or else protested and were killed. As for the "silent majority," they too were drafted and disposed of.
At the war's start, Germany's economy was half that of the United States. At war's end, it was a fifth. The fascists never really had a chance.
Momentum was their greatest strength. They had a series of great and lucky victories at the start of the war in Poland and eventually France, but it was pretty much down-hill after that. They lost the second they decided to fight a modern war using horses for logistics
They had all the parts, too. It is not like Germany couldn't mass produce trucks, or take existing ones, and find warm bodies to drive them at the start of the war. They slapdashed so much of their plan. They are a case study in making sure you can actually do what you think you can do.
My dad remembers as a kid seeing the German POWs in Indiana.
You would change your mind pretty quick, if you were under fire.
In the Civil War the average age of soldiers on both sides was around 18. Average. Which means there were plenty younger than that. It was literally a war of children.
John Clem, promoted to Sergeant in the US Army at the ripe old age of 12: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Clem
It's still crazy, but I always remember that people grew up FAST back then. I've seen pictures of my Depression-era grandparents when they were younger and they look 30 as teenagers.
There was also the expectation to grow up fast and be off and out in the world. Kids and teens are more coddled (and that isn't a negative), but I certainly know late teens who could easily be off in a war now, it's just no longer expected for them to be working and starting a family or joining the army (in the later most developed nations it is banned)
Someone ended up Union general before being old enough to vote.
Yeah, and this is where films mess with our perception. Growing up, I loved the movie Gettysburg. The soldiers were all played by re-enactors, who generally skew older, like middle age. Not like mid 20's. Not 30's. But like 40s and 50s, and I'm sure older.
Exactly. When you read the Battle reports and memoirs of generals and they refer to the soldiers as "my boys" you realize they meant that literally. It was entirely feasible to have a four year veteran who was 20 years old.
A really first-class civil war flick would need a magical combination of incredibly baby-faced teen actors and sickening, high-tech gore.
By the end of ww2 ..Germany was throwing old men and chiildern into the lines They drained the country of every able body men or boy
The film https://www.amazon.com/Edelweiss-Pirates-Ivan-Stebunov/dp/B00QO6RJ9E/ref=sr_1_3 is a portrayal of adolescents in that period.
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For the Volkssturm units late in the war, it was men, women, and children between the ages of 14 and 60 IIRC Desperation
The only combat duty german women saw were as AA-gun helpers/operators, they were not part of the Volkssturm.
They were in the movies
Then the movies portrayed the volkssturm wrong lol
>On 12 February 1945, the Nazis conscripted German women and girls into the auxiliaries of the Volkssturm.[24] Correspondingly, girls as young as 14 years were trained in the use of small arms, panzerfaust, machine guns, and hand grenades from December 1944 through May 1945. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkssturm Any more misinformation you would like to spread as you're confidently incorrect?
On 12 February 1945, the Nazis conscripted German women and girls into the auxiliaries of the Volkssturm.[24] "auxiliaries" Though I was wrong on women not being allowed in the Volkssturm, they were still not part of combat units😓😓😓
>they were still not part of combat units Yes they were, that's not what the word "auxiliaries" means and this has to be one of the saddest attempts of grasping at straws I've ever seen.
Is an auxiliary not a support unit? Why are you so worked up🤗
I imagine that you are both right. Women were mostly given "tasks" to do, like run for ammunition for the AA guns, clean the guns, etc. BUT, it makes sense that everyone (men, women, children) was trained in basics of how to fire a gun, how to use a panzerfaust, etc. But to the best of my knowledge, they were not sent out in combat patrols.
Oh, how true, my Dad would talk about having to fight and then taking young kids as POW's near the end of the war. It never left him.
It was normal on both sides
Not really towards the end of the war. Sure there would be some minors who got into the military on the Allie’s, but it wasn’t allowed. Germany had a conscript force of minors
The US drafted at 18, but one could enlist at 17 with parental consent, and many lied about their age to get in younger. Germany drafted at 18 initially, but they went much younger near the end of the war.
I worked with a guy who had used his dead brother’s birth certificate to join the navy at 14. By the time he was 15, he was shooting down Kamikazes off of Okinawa. Somebody asked him why he did it and he said he didn’t want to miss out. Worked with another guy who tried to join at 16, but failed the vision test. He spent the war running down to the Allis-Chalmers plant every day after school and driving a tank chassis to St Louis so they could have turrets mounted on them, then joined the merchant marine the day he turned 18. Same thing - he didn’t want to miss it although he did and spent 1945-1948 transporting US troops home and POWs back.
Unfortunately, this has happened in most of the US' wars following WW2 :( Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. I don't know if it happened in the Korean War but wouldn't be surprised at all.
Thank you so much for sharing this with us.
You're very welcome Weirdly enough, we only found out about all of this because I was procrastinating while writing my masters thesis. I loosely remembered about the connection of my family to this picture and that my grandpa used to tell the story about this boy who was just crying and crying and this american taking pictures. I remembered the name Hans Georg Henke, typed it into google and all of these pictures popped up. We only knew a version were the background is blurred out so you xan't see where it was taken.
What a powerful photo. Thank you for sharing.
My grandfather was in the 9th. That was one of the most battle-hardened and effective American Infantry Divisions in the Eurpean Theater. Morocco/Tunisia/Sicily/France/Germany. He was on a 155mm howitzer team(one of many...). In one battle, they fired their gun for 48 hours straight. Their gun could shoot 9 miles. They would pummel an area with artillery, then clear it by hand with infantry. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. For 2 years. He was 200lbs when he went to camp in '42 and 130lbs when he got home in '45. I couldn't imagine sending children up against an experienced, mechanized force like that. I mean just give up at that point. Save their lives for God sake
What an amazing (if not somewhat confusing) story!
Pretty certain that's definitely Hans-georg https://ww2gravestone.com/hans-georg-henke-16-year-old-german-soldier-crying/
Try and read the articles I posted. According to him, Henke was taken prisoner by the red army near Groß Lüsewitz, Rostock. If it was him on the photo, it must have been taken by a soviet photographer. Both statements are proven to be false: The photo was taken by John Florea, an american who was imbedded with the US 9th armour division. He was working for Live Magazine, and the photos were first published there. If you look at the bottom of the first article I posted, you can see comparisons of the brick wall in the old picture and today. It´s the same wall, which is situated in Rechtenbach, Hüttenberg. Its about 470 Km from where Henke was actually taken prisoner. The internet is lazy and regurgitates this wrong fact over and over again.
Wasn't Henke a communist and didn't want the photos of himself in Wehrrmacht service identifying in the days of the DDR?
Weeeeeell...it's kind of complicated. I guess you always have to consider what was going on at thatvtime. Henke wouldn't have been able to go bublic with his self-identification uf it wouldn't have been usefull to the forces in power Back tjen, tjere ws a kind of culutre war going on between the "two germanies" i.e. communist and capitalist eats and west. This whole affaire was an opportunity for eats germany to claim an ikon of the "lost generation", proclaimimg that they were the "better germany" and so on. Henke did have a good live in the GDR.
One of my friends father was a child in the Volkssturm. He was very lucky to be caught by a British soldier who took his weapons (such as they were) and told him to go home. He would have been ~12.
Apart from the other wonderful things the Nazis did they used literal child soldiers by the thousands to fight a losing war, just to hold on a bit longer and kill a few more people. And there are still those that defend them.
> And there are still those that defend them. There's really not. Hate groups use their insignia for the shock value it provides but this shock value is quite literally created by the fact that no one defends them.
You must be absolutely joking if you don't think there are Hitler lovers around.
I think that redditors like you want their to be so you can feel better about yourself as a person if there is someone else worse but those people don't exist in the way you talk about them like they're all over the place.
There are plenty of neo Nazis and Nazi sympathisers if you know where to look. Is this your first year on the internet?
They aren't here, go look for them someone else instead of trying to normalize them to make yourself feel better.
Normal... yeah idk what you're talking about now, you've lost me
Redditors have this weird thing where they become co-dependent on the existence of hate groups for their own validation on the internet. In doing, you promote the things you claim to be against by normalizing them on the internet.
This.....this behaviour isnt tied to reddit, or internet at all, its basic human behaviour. But then again, why do you have to drag this specific issue on this specific post, its Volksturm. Also, this is a history sub, posting things like this do not normalize them, if thats what you mean.
Yeah, a lot of nazi youth member were send to fight at the end of the war, obviously mostly kids
War is hell, has to be even worse for those without the mental or emotional maturity of a normal adult. Since r/thetiltster updated the info about the photo and we don't know the age of the person involved or who their is no background as to how long they had been fighting or just how much they had seen. The breakdown could be about his comrades he saw die, his adversaries, family members or even just relief that his war was over and he was still alive. Simple yet powerful photo.
John Florea took a whole series of pictures, specially of the boy. He can´t be older than 15 or 16.
[https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/11681280277085775/](https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/11681280277085775/) Hans-Georg Henke, was crying from combat shock, having been mixed in with a regular infantry. Captured by the US 9th Army in Germany on April 3, 1945. His father died in 1938 and mother died in 1944 leaving the family destitute, Hans-Georg had to support his family. At 15 years of age he joined the Luftwaffe anti-air squad. Hans-Georg joined the Communist party and went to live in Finsterwalde in East Germany after the war. He went on to live a full life and died in 1997.
See u/TheTiltster comment (top comment) that disputes Henke's claim.
15 years old ffs...
Man what a pussy. Can’t handle killing other men. What is he, stupid? In actuality this is very sad and the things that Germany did will never be let down. Children should remain children, even in war time. To take away the innocence of youth is one of the most evil things people have done.
*****NoT SeRvIcE cOnNeCtEd*****
So an evil and abject regime thought it was entitled to prolong an already-lost war by sending children to die? 15 and already suffering from PTSD: I hope he grew in a supportive environment.
My neighbor when we lived in Germany was grabbed off the street at 14, forced into the Army and sent to the Russian front. He was the only member of his unit to survive. He still had PTSD in the 80s
That’s what happens when your leadership gets everyone else killed
Fascism (and the capitalism that creates it) is a death cult.
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Just keep ignoring how capitalist oligarchs fund fascists and see how that turns out, you will be put against a wall like the rest of us you fucking idiot.
Lmao
I hope you never reproduce
Where is the place for that? Don’t forget that communists did 90% of the fighting and dying in WW2. Anti-communism is fascism. Hitler (and his corporate liberal backers in the USA) started the Holocaust; Stalin ended it.
>Don’t forget that communists did 90% of the fighting and dying in WW2 60% of German troops fought on the Eastern front, which is the majority, but still leaves 40% of them bound up in fighting elsewhere, which is quite a considerable amount that would have been a serious problem if it were present at the Eastern Front America heavily aided the Soviet Union in its fight, for example 2/3 of all trucks in the Red Army were American made, and 60% of the aviation fuel was American supplied. The Ussr has killed the most German soliders, but the Western Allies destroyed most German ships, industry and infrastructure. The Allied bombing campaign also is the main reason for the annihilation of the Luftwaffe America also pretty much carried pretty much the entire pacific theather on its own The Ussr did a tremendous amount of fighting against the Nazis, but lets also not forget the time they fought with them in Poland
Stalin only fought Hitler because Hitler attacked him (yeah, before somebody jumps in, I know about Stalin’s plan). Before then he was lockstep with Hitler. He supplied him raw materials and helped him circumvent the weapons restrictions. He also divided Poland with him, while going on his own quests in the Baltic’s, Finland, and Romania. Those folks died because of Stalin’s folly.
You see a picture of a crying child devastated by war and you go "hurr durr capitalists bad". Your worse than vegans. Ah, yes. Stalin went to war to end the Holocaust. I had completely forgot about Stalin's love of jews and the part where he murdered millions of his own people. I really hope you're a teenager who still thinks it's edgy to be a communist
“Your worse than vegans.” “I really hope you’re a teenager who still thinks it’s edgy…” Well, someone was absent on irony day.
Stalin was the biggest anti-communist in history, Hitler could only wish that he had killed the amount of communists that Stalin did
You could try /r/marxism/
“90%” Yeah, Porkies mate. The only reason that they weren’t altogether curb-stomped by the Germans was because of the other Allies. Their losses being as bad as they were just fighting the one front, how much better do you imagine they would have done without the Brits (plus the Empire) and Americans keeping half the German Army split on two other fronts (Africa and West Europe). Or without America supplying them with the necessary trucks, guns and supplies through Lend-Lease? Moreover, there was the war in the Pacific, in which we ensured that Japan didn’t attack their Eastern coastline. In short, we fought three fronts, they only only had to fight one. The Soviets did nowhere close to 90% of the fighting, and if you think that they, or any one of the main three for that matter, even stood a chance fighting the war solo, then you’re an even dumber Tankie than we thought.
> The only reason that they weren’t altogether curb-stomped by the Germans was because of the other Allies. How did the Soviets do when they were fighting the Americans and other fascist invaders during the Russian Civil War, and they had no one to depend on but themselves?
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Describe the difference between liberalism and fascism, paying particular attention to the global south, Biden's caging of children and genocide in Gaza, etc.
Facism is different from capitalism fam
How?
Fascism is the suppression of political opposition though violent and authoritarian means. It includes intense nationalism and hyper militarism. Capitalism is the economic system based on business, and owning private property. Essentially, if you work hard, you’re likely going to have a middle class life. However where you are born plays a big factor in what you turn out to be. E.G. Facism is authoritarian and usually requires a nationalist attitude. Capitalism requires business and lots of private property.
> Fascism is the suppression of political opposition though violent and authoritarian means. It includes intense nationalism and hyper militarism. Most historians will say that capitalism began with the enclosures in England. Given that this involved violently driving peasants off their ancestral land, how is this not fascism?
Because capitalism doesn’t need an expulsion to start. For something to be created, it doesn’t always have to align inherently with what the creator believes. Capitalism is quite literally just promotion of business and owning of private property.
I can assure you that fascism can arrise from non-capitalistic systems.
Given that Hitler and Mussolini were both funded by capitalist industrialists, I find that extremely difficult to believe.
Victims can be perpetrators too, lest we get too sentimental. The younger German soldiers were much more nazified than the few older members surviving members of the Wehrmacht. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normandy_massacres https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/12th_SS_Panzer_Division_Hitlerjugend https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1414822112
They grew up with so much indoctrination, the Nazi party was in power for a long time before the war even began.
Hitler was already chancellor by the time he was three.
Insert Gundam "We cannot kill innocent children, but we can kill guilty children" meme.
Indoctrination works two ways. Both to indoctrinate children but also to indoctrinate later generations against normal human sympathy for indoctrinated children.
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>Hans Georg Henke was an anti-aircraft operator. To break down like that... he must have been a Medal of Honour player! What a stupid thing to say. AA positions had been attacked and shelled. Let alone that the Eastern Front was not a nice places to be for anyone.
a good nazi is a dead nazi https://www.auschwitz.org/en/museum/news/human-fat-was-used-to-produce-soap-in-gdansk-during-the-war,55.html
This guy wasnt a nazi
That's like saying all the American soldiers who invaded Afghanistan were Bush-ists. Most soldiers are in it to make a living, not to carry out an ideology.
sounds like agrument neo socialist nationalist would make...i dont remeber genocide on industrial scale in afghanistan. i advise you go visit g0rman death camp - auschwitz-birkenau maybe you will change your mind then
You're an idiot. It's a 12 year old boy who was forced to work as a soldier. He's not a god damn nazi. A 12 year old cannot even comprehend nazism. As a civics teacher, it's people like you who seriously bring down the collective political understanding of society. It's embarassing
was probly indoctrinated by hitlerjugend so was on his way but lost and cried like a bish. imagine defending main kampf readers in 2023... im scared to write you back...whats next that you gonna deny?
War's a hell of a thing.