My uncle was a medic in ww2. They had him guarding 300 Germans by himself. He didn't even put bullets in his gun. The Germans were happy to get captured by the americans
they were happy it was over and also.. they did not get cought by the soviets.. that would have meant going to a goulag and getting tortured and starved ..
@@klepetar it also meant many of them (nazis) would be spared and saved from prosecution and justice for the crimes they committed. USA saved thousands of nazis in Operation Paperclip.
My dad was with the 151st Armored Signals Company (attached to the 11th Armored Division). He rode his Jeep over the Nibelungenbrücke in Linz on May 8, 1945. I still have his personal album of photos taken back then, where on one of them he sits on the hood of his heavily loaded Radio Jeep (with a big wire cutter rod in front) and his buddy took the picture where you can see the Pöstlingsberg in the background. I am forever grateful to have the memories of a few stories he told me about that time. He was 21 years old then.
My grandfather was with the 356 Guards Rifle Regiment (attached to the 107th Guards Rifle Division of the Red Army). On May 8, 1945 he was near St. Pölten (100 km east of Linz). He also was 21 years old and turned 22 the next day.
Mein Vater war 19 Jahre Alt und was er mir erzählte war, da er beide Siegermächte kennenlernte, der Russe bot seine Naturbelassene wenigen Zigaretten den Gefangenen an und der Amy zertrat seine Gerauchte, denn der Gefangene sollte nichts davon haben, das ist das Bild, das in mir eingebrannt ist.
Color brings these people to life. It's as if you are there watching them walk by just like you do with people in the street today. My father was only around 4 or 5 then. Imagine if I could see him walking by as a child in that street.
У меня дед , 2 МИРОВУЮ ВОЙНУ, прошёл в артиллерии, наверное из-за низкого роста😃, но плотный и коренаст с басом в голосе , пел очень хорошо! В этот период времени их части, или,как называли- ВТОРОЙ УКРАИНСКИЙ ФРОНТ, перебросили на Восток, так как надо было защищаться от Японии. Кому-то нужны воины. !!! Как будто 😔😪 специально организовывались и ОрганизовываютСЯ !!!!! Именно когда Советская Армия вошла, в Европу и пошла на Берлин, активизировалась Япония,чтоб ослабить силы Красной Арми Советского Союза. Всегда смотрела хронику. Так интересно, вглядываться в лица, понять, почувствовать атмосферу ситуации, времени. Почему так боялись каммунизм, даже просто красный цвет. Может БОЯТСЯ самодостаточности людей? Независимости от мирового капитала? Боятся дружбы между людьми? Ведь ПРИ ВСЕМ, ВЫШЕПЕРЕЧИСЛЕННОМ, организовывать войны, будет Т Р У Д Н О ? Кто-то............... войны специально организовывает❣. Для этого используеются СМИ. Неправильный перевод текста использую. И многое другое. Я ЖЕЛАЮ ВСЕМ ЛЮДЯМ МИРА🕊 И ЛЮБВИ,💞 ЧИСТОГО НЕБА,🕊 И ДУШИСТОГО ХЛЕБА🌾 👨🦰👩🦰 💞 🙋♀️🙋♂️🤦♀️👨⚕️🤷♀️👩🏫👨🏫 💞👶👨🦰👱♂️
@@ИраОрлова-р1ь They were afraid of communism because of all the horrific crimes committed in it's name, the lack of freedom of people living under it's yoke, and because the communists were allied to the Nazis before the Nazis turned on them. Just look at how many of America's POWs survived, and how many Russian POWs. Even many Russians didn't want to be "liberated" by their own people - they begged the Western allies not to return them, because Stalin punished those who had surrendered (even though many units at/near the border still had the order not to provoke IN ANY CIRCUMSTANCE because Stalin had thought the warnings were false, and went into hiding for over a week when the Germans attacked). Sadly, they were returned because of agreements with the Soviets. Oh and one more point regarding "why fear communists": who built the iron curtain, and murdered people who simply wanted to cross peacefully?
My great grandfather was able to escape when Hitler began to draft the austrian men. His brother (which were nazis at that moment) betrayed him by telling german authorities that he was trying to escape the draft. He went to Europe, then to Honduras (central america) which was an ally of the US. He was constantly tortured and persecuted by honduran authorities, but later on he married a honduran which gave him citizenship of that country. After that he sent supplies to his family in Austria which helped them survive.
What a story ! So much for blood being thicker than water. I would never betray a family member no matter our political differences. Did he ever talk to his brother again ?
Notice how alot of the soldiers where aloud to keep their medals like their combat badge, wound badges, iron crosses and shields. The mixture of old and newer stocks, individual ranks and colours of the uniforms, diffrent unit markings. It's so interesting and almost each soldier is brimming with history!
@@richardravenclaw318 Decorations, man, how comic you are 😂😂😂😂😂🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣. Also, you must say the victorious, because if Hitler had heard the words of his generals and had not been tense, arrogant and stupid, he would have won the Second World War, especially that he owned Erich von Manstein, who, if Paulus heard his words and disobeyed Hitler, would have won the Nazis in the Battle of Stalingrad, which caused In the low morale of the National Socialist German soldiers, in short, the German National Socialist spirit would have existed, and they would have occupied the Soviet Union. Also, Hitler removed Heinz Guderian, the terrifying third general after Rommel without any risk and Erich von Manstein in 1941, so you don't talk much, you silly standing in The paradoxical allied rapists, thieves, talk about National Socialist Germany as evil and call them
@@richardravenclaw318 And they called them the Nazis, meaning that they are the idiot , the naive , and they stole from them the jet planes invented by the National Socialist Germans and the terrifying Horten 229 plane, which if completed and manufactured at the beginning of World War II, and the bird could see its enemies from a distance even if their enemy was covered with dust and fired 1000 shots or Almost more, but only three were made of them, so they were defeated, and then the contradictory America came and stole it, even though it says about them Nazis, which means the idiot, the naive. Britain and the Soviet Union, and how many semi-few countries
Although my father is Italian, he had to join the Transport Korps Speer RegimentNo.7 in 1944 has he was living in northern Italy. He was with them for most of 1944. I still have his service book (Soldbuch)
@The smoker You have the nerve to tell someone whose parent was forced to join the fascists in a war that killed hundreds of millions that immigrants coming into Europe and making people grumpy is somehow WORSE? You're insane.
Someone watches Fox News too much (The smoker). Especially if you think "immigration" is the worst thing on the planet. Maybe start thinking for yourself?
@Ken Storm…..Things sure were better in the states in those days. You could start a business or do many other things to earn a living in this country. Today, the opportunities to have a career and livelihood are very limited to mostly retail slave work at low pay or living on the streets and panhandling for a living. This country has taken the wrong path and it’s killing people. If the daily suicide rate was actually published or talked about by news media….peoples heads would be spinning if they knew the number of people who commit suicide each day here in the U.S. I’m sure the numbers are staggering. Myself alone, I know of three people in the past several years who have killed themselves over lack of rewarding work, lack of opportunities and the severe lack of mental health assistance in America. I can remember going to a doctor 20 years ago and actually receiving some help……today, unless you’re wealthy or have the best health insurance you are not getting any help from a doctor in the United states. When a country is founded on greed under the guise of freedom, nothing good could possibly come out of it, unless you’re one of the mega wealthy.
Fascinating to watch after visiting Linz for the first time a year ago. So much is familiar and yet so much has changed on the north side of the river. Good video.
My Great Uncle was killed in Gramastetten on May 4th, 1945. This video is surreal. His brother told me that my other uncle and the driver of the truck, were killed and were to be taken back to the last morgue location, while the rest of the troops in the back of the truck, which were wounded, continued on with the jeep and 2 escorts. My Great Uncle and the driver's body both disappeared. He is listed as MIA.
I'm very surprised his body wasn't recovered and identified, given the exact dates and area are known. Perhaps he was recovered in the time since and listed as an unknown soldier. You should contact your local Congressman to help you with the DOD. Using some DNA samples from your and others in your family it might be possible to identify his body and put his name on his grave. This happens more often than you think. All I can imagine is they didn't look hard enough for him before the occupying Soviets moved into Austria. They didn't leave for about a decade and I rather doubt there were intensive searches for unidentified dead Americans.
My grandfather was in the 1st wave on D-Day. He was a minesweeper; the guys who went in BEFORE the marines to clear traps. His leg got caught in the transport ramp; it got stuck, he tried to release it, broke his leg, and had to go back to the main ship. He got a purple heart while his entire squad got wiped out...
And then they arrived at rheinwiesen lager or somewhere else and thought that dying in combat would be a thousand times better then dying of diseases and starvation 🤷♂️
@Fabian Kirchgessner I bought a book some years ago, where it was written that 1.5 million German POW's were interned in France. 900.000 died of starvation, red cross Parcels never reached them, no medical attention. The guys had 2 options:starving to death or sign up for foreign legion to follow the French expeditionary force to Indochina.,which many did. Some managed to defect En route to Vietnam, jumping from the boat in the Messina straits ot suez canal. Most of them died in combat, so survived. I forgot the title of the book, but I can remember the author who also wrote "1943, the victory that never was" These 2 books were borrowed from me and of course never retrieved
@Fabian Kirchgessner Fabian, good for your grandfather, hope he had a good long life and died in his bed. What I can remember of that book is that German POW's had extreme hard detention condition in French pow camps, because rationing was still running in France in these days. In THORIGNY_LA FLÈCHE, still according to this Canadian or American author, the death rate was appalling. I am not extreme right complotist nor a nazi nostalgic, I'm 60 year old and not born at the time. 900.000 prisoners dead was the figure he revealed, that's all I can remember. But, tell me, did the guards ask your grandfather to sign up for Indochina?
@Fabian Kirchgessner What has largely escaped the victors’ history books, however, is that another program of internment and mass murder was put together at the end of the war by Allied forces, who took in millions of German prisoners in the summer of 1945 and deliberately starved roughly one in four of them to death. The story of the Rheinwiesenlager, or “Rhine Camps,” was then covered up and obfuscated by professional historians for decades after the war while the survivors grew old and the prisoner records were destroyed. Rheinwiesenlager: Last Moves Of A Lost War Allied Camp Surrendering Germans Flickr/ArmyDiversity In the spring of 1945, the handwriting was on the wall for Germany. Millions of Allied troops poured into the Rhineland from the west, while the German SS and Wehrmacht forces staged desperate last stand actions in Vienna and Berlin to slow the Soviet Red Army’s advance in the east. During this collapse, as German General Jodl stalled ceasefire negotiations to buy time, as many as three million German soldiers disengaged from the Eastern Front and trekked across Germany to surrender to American or British troops, whom they hoped would be less vengeful than the triumphant Soviets. The German influx quickly grew so large that the British stopped accepting prisoners, citing logistical problems. Sensing that the Germans were turning themselves in en masse simply to delay an official, inevitable total German surrender, U.S. General Eisenhower then threatened to order his troops to shoot the surrendering German soldiers on sight, which forced Jodl to formally surrender on May 8. The prisoners kept streaming in, however, and they all needed to be processed before the U.S. Army decided their fate. The Army then hit on a solution for coping with large numbers of undesirable people that was similar to the one that the Germans had used in Poland: commandeer large stretches of farmland and wrap barbed wire around the prisoners until something could be sorted out. Dozens of large holding camps thus sprang up in western Germany during the late spring of 1945, and by early summer, German prisoners of war still wearing their worn-out uniforms began to fill them. Army officers skimmed off suspicious-looking prisoners, such as SS personnel and men with blood group tattoos on their arms (often a sign of SS membership) and sent them to intelligence officers and war crimes investigators for special scrutiny. Meanwhile, officers allowed rank-and-file members of the Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe, and Kriegsmarine to simply pick a spot on the ground and sit down until somebody up the chain decided they could go home. Or so they thoughtWhat none of the surrendering Germans knew was that General Eisenhower, in consultation with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt in 1943, had already decided to use the inevitable German weakness following defeat to permanently cripple that country’s ability to wage war. As early as 1943, at the Tehran Conference, Roosevelt and Stalin had famously toasted to the shooting of 50,000 German officers after the war. They may or may not have been serious, but early in 1944, Eisenhower appointed a special assistant named Everett Hughes to handle the details of the surrender. That summer, a postwar plan devised by Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. was initialed (and presumably approved) by both Roosevelt and Churchill. The Morgenthau Plan, as it came to be known, was beyond punitive: Germany was to be divided into occupation zones, its industry destroyed, crushing reparations imposed, and large sections of its population forcibly resettled to wipe out the German capacity for war once and for all. It was, by modern standards, practically a blueprint for national genocide insofar as millions of Germans would have to starve or relocate to make it work. Everett Hughes was all in favor of the Morgenthau Plan, but after the PR disaster that followed the October release of some of the details, he was cautious. On November 4, Hughes sent a memo to Eisenhower urging him to classify details of prisoners’ rations as top secret
The Vienna Offensive was launched by the Soviet 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts in order to invade Vienna, Austria, during World War II. The offensive lasted from 16 March to 15 April 1945. After a few days’ street fighting the Soviet troops captured the city. While the street fighting was still intensifying in the southern and western suburbs of Vienna on 8 April, other troops of the 3rd Ukrainian Front by-passed Vienna altogether and advanced on Linz and Graz. the fighting took place under the command of the marshals of the Soviet Union Tolbukhin and Timoshenko.
There were uprisings in Vienna and Innsbruck, among other places. The Vlasov Army joined with the rebels in some places but naturally fled the Communists. Whole swathes of Austria were occupied by the Americans and turned over to the Soviets as part of their Zone of Occupation.
As humans, we are just spots on a time-line. These guys in the video occupied a certain, explosive period in human history. We occupy a different, later period in human history.
From 7:50 to 7:52 (brown uniform), at 5:56 and 9:38 i think, they are some hungarian soldiers and troops. I hope they survived the communist revenge after the war.
Pendejo! YOu do not understand the Europeans who invaded Russia in 1941 wanted to kill all the Soviet people they could physically do. By your words you just defend genocide. What have the Hungarians in particular forgotten at the River Don? Hungarians were still more sadistic that the Germans. Communist victims is just nothing as compared to the victims of the unites European armies in the USSR.
Urfahrstadtpfarrkirche says the Frau, who attended as a girl. Also known as „josefskirche“. de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urfahrer_Josefskirche She lived round the corner in „Getreidehaus Schierz“.
No. Slavery under demons is the worst thing you could ever experience in your life. I grew up knowing some survivors of Nazi concentration camps. They clearly would have rather suffered and died in war that have experienced the extermination of their entire families and communities. My ancestors were English slaves in Ireland as a result of losing wars. Better to fight, kill and die than have that happen to my family.
On what a brave and glorious thing it is to die for your country ! Says the poet sarcastically. What a futile waste of lives. Villages had no young men. Millions were killed and more were displaced. Hitler and Stalin caused such cruelty the world has ever known. And for what ?
Rothschilds played Germany with Russia, England and United States as their pawns to establish a banking empire that is global and omnipotent. Germany defended against it, Stalin enabled it. There is your answer.
@@mongo2022 Hitler and Stalin invaded Poland at 1939. The whole war started for the defence of Poland. The result: Poland and rest of the east Europe fell into worst kind of slavery for 45 years. Western allies, how did that work out, on a scale 0-5?
These seem like mostly garrison troops, almost all are cleanly shaven, Austria didn't see much combat at the end of the war. The irony is the germans had more men in "arms" at the end of the war than at the beginning...but they were poorly trained and outfitted vs. fully mobilized and trained.
A good amount of these soldiers were of the Hitlerjungen Waffen SS. 14 (could be less) to 17 years old. Yhat is why they look outfitted or as you say ; poorly trained ' Let's say, TIRED..
Hungary was the last allies for the Germans and Austrian ... And look how they've been treated now today.. Like a piece of shit.. They own gratitude to them and should be treated like equal ,but not.... they've been neglected and used as a slaves at work even today 2021..
Germans made my Father walk from Belgium to Poland after dunkirk, Britain entered the war when Germany invaded Poland, then after the war left Poland with a even worse enemy, great stuff
Some of these guys look like your fathers, sons and nephews today. It's hard to believe that, if they are still alive today, they would be around 100 years of age or more.
@@novadhd Scary. My great-grandfather was one of the SS officers working there. He shot himself after the Americans took Gramastetten (the town in the first clip of this video) and the decision was made to lift the defense of Linz.
9:11 well hello from me after 73 years ! This is makes me a little sad i don’t know why ! Like I’m right here sitting in my bed just watching these dead people suffering oh god I can’t explain
To think all this devastation, including the Communist regime that took over after the war, could have been avoided! All the heads of states knew what the Nazis were preparing for war arming themselves. They just needed to stand together and stop Germany from rearming...journalists were recording what the Germans (Nazis) were doing.
@@marinazagrai1623 Das Deutsche Reich hatte nach dem ersten Weltkrieg, nach Hungersnot mit fast einer millionen Hungertoten und Reparationszahlungen in bis dahin noch nie dagewesenem Umfang, gerade mal angefangen wieder ein wenig sozialen Wohlstand zu schaffen und dachte nicht im Traume daran die Welt zu überfallen, wie es uns die Propaganda weismachen will. Dazu fehlte es auch massiv an entsprechenden Resourcen. Im Gegensatz zu allen anderen dem Reich feindlich gesinnten Staaten. Das ist ganz leicht an den offiziellen Rüstungsdaten aus der damaligen Zeit zu erkennen (Googeln)
@Gayle Elizabeth Genau eine Kabale der Verrückten Die Amerikaner - Engländer und Franzosen die wahren Mörder der Deutschen und ihrer Verbündeten . DIe Russen mit ihren 11 Millionen Gefallenen haben den 2 Weltkrieg ganz alleine gewonnen und nicht die Amerikaner und schon gar nicht die Feigen Engländer oder Die Französischen Frosch Schenkel Fresser . Amerikaner sind und bleiben Soldaten Mörder und Diebe ( Patent Diebe )
God bless you, R F. You’re a sentient human. If you can watch this aberration of humanity without feeling anything, then you should be very concerned.❤️
He's long gone, of course...we're not cuckoo, but the face of the supposed dead Hitler was unrecognizable. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but the facts are not conclusive of his demise.
@@bryanneideffer3969 it's easy to brainwash young lads of that age. Look at the decades of child soldiers in Africa and those who were forced to fight for ISIS.
You can look at them as a defeated army or as the men who built Germany in to what it is today (with the help of American money in order to create a fortified buffer against the Soviets). It's all a matter of perspective.
The prisoners were lucky to have got to the Americans! Russian, for all the troubles that the Germans brought to them, would have driven them to Siberia, to clean the snow!
Germans were very lucky not to be entirely wiped out for all evil they done in USSR. Instead Soviets fed German and Austrian population at the same time when Soviet people was near starvation but worked hard to repair territory devastated by Germans
@@christschool I suspect many of the hardcore Nazi officers couldn't stomach that they were surrendering to a mixed-race army, like the U.S. Army, It went against everything they'd been brainwashed to believe about their superiority. Just imagine being of "pure Aryian heritage" and having to submit to a body search by a 20 yr. old half Irish Catholic/half Polish Jewish kid from Brooklyn. There's something strangely satisfying about that thought...
J Howe 🧐 Imagine being in a national army and knowing it took three foreign empires, four long years, to defeat you. There’s something strangely satisfying about that
@@mattkierkegaard9403 Not really. Germany was building up for this war for years and took an offensive approach while the allies had to build up the capacity. If you want to be impressed, look at what the Taliban has been able to do with very little.
My father ended his service by occupying Austria for six months after the war . Reopened the brewery so villagers could go to work. Smart Man… saw hitlers digs on the mountain . Said The 101 airborne took everything !
They are most probably Kriegsmarine (Navy) officers (see their -dark navy blue, not black- coats). Could seem strange in a landlocked country as Austria, but Austria had large Danube River fleet and a pool of skilled workers and boatmen, so the Kriegsmarine had recruiting offices here. (Linz is second largest city on Danube in Austria, after Vienna of course) But interesting detail and good observation...
Well, they were marching south, so their destination was most likely a place which was simply called "Die Baracken" ("the shanties"). Those guys were lucky, since the bridge they are crossing was the border between the American and Soviet occupied areas. Most of them were released just a few weeks later. Some got transported to different countries like France as forced labourers and a small portion got handed over to the Soviets when the camps were filled to the brim already. Depending on where they came from, some of those guys had to stay at the shanties for as long as 15 years, but as you can see, most guys in this crowd were either old men or juveniles. If they still had a home to return to, they would do so fairly early after the war had ended. If not, they would become the future "shanty people", which were the poorest of the poor and thus the social dregs of Upper Austria. Quiet a few of their decendants are still poor today due to the fact that it was highly unlikely to get a job as a former shanty dweller up until the early 80's and therefore building up wealth was not a thing at all for them.
пришли натворили столько горя и смерти и страданий на нашей земле, а сейчас в комментариях к ним сочувствие и сострадание люди удивительны и не имеют долгой памяти!!!
yeah, cos killing 20 milion soviet people and bombing all their major cities to ashes so they spent years rebuilding them kinda made them feel angry and stuff yaknow
@ Mr. Human Well Stalin and the Bolsheviks/Soviets were monsters long before that. Research what the Soviets did in Finland, Estonia, Lavtia, Lithuania, Poland, etc. before the Germans invaded. Both ideologies are morally bankrupt.
+ddd7386 Lol evil is evil. True, the Soviet invasions ended up killing less than the Nazi invasions. However, it is estimated that Stalin had killed 20-25 million of his own people (peasants, military officers, political dissidents, etc) So, in essence, Stalin and his Soviets killed more people than Hitler. Not to mention the Soviets killed a million or two in Afghanistan, long after Hitler and Stalin were dead.
in the Vienna offensive operation, a large Wehrmacht grouping was defeated. Berlin lost control over another major industrial center of Europe - the Vienna industrial region, including the economically important Nagykanizsa oil region. The road to Prague and Berlin was opened.
@@mtomek1111 I find it completely irrelevant. They did their duty. They obeyed orders. Would you call every Red Army soldier, who thusly served Stalin, a "bandit and a murderer"? I wouldn't.
@@alexf80m32 Of course, the Americans do not kill innocent people, Vietnam, Kosovo, Iraq since the Berlin Wall fell, they are the only ones who constantly break the balls ... and maybe if Europe were less divided we could aspire to count something .. ..
These sights in the video I hope looks pretty much the same today ~ Of course the way people dress today is very different and the cars look different too ~ but I hope if I visit Austria, everything else will be the same
After the assault on Crete - a succes, but at heavy cost - German paratroopers were only used for small scale airborne operations or as ground troops. Nothing unusual to see them among the other prisoners.
Could be, but I'm not so sure. Felgrau uniforms could vary substantially in hue, not seldom far into the dark green spectrum. You saw any Edelweiss insignia on the side of those caps? Me neither.
You have to wonder what those soldiers are thinking. How will I be treated, what is my future and what is the future of my country? Who knew that they and their country would come back so far so quickly?
@@VotanLoad Well, a lot of relatives of mine who were young adults at this time are still alive today, so I had some insight when and why they started hating him. It was mostly for the reason that he presented himself as the saviour and protector of all German people and in the end he just threw them into the meat grinder like there was no tomorrow. My grandfather for instance had to operate an AA gun during the battle for Linz at the age of 12 along with three other boys his age and a 17 year old SS member. If it wasn't for their commanding officer, who sent them home after the Allies made a whole tank division ready for a ground assault, all of them would've died within that week. The actual order from Berlin was to fight to the last man. So they didn't start hating him after the war, it rather began at the end of the war already.
@@GodlordBazi Thank you for your reply. You have just supported my point. In general German people started hatng him for loosing the war. Some after Stalingrand, the majoriry when they realized the war was lost and the rest after. Hitler represented a new idea for the old German national imperial plan which had failed again in 1944-1945 and German people blaimed him for it.
We are spoiled by today's digital video technology. Back in 1945, movie photography was primitive and no sound at an amateur photographer level. The grinding noise is of the sound of a movie projector dubbed in.
Omg. I wonder how many of those German soldiers made it home. They must have been so worn out and tired and I am sure they all just wanted the war to end and go home. Pity they lost the war. Bless them all. They are remembered
My grandfather was a truck driver in the 2nd engineer combat battalion. Have a birthday photo of him near a concrete building and wouldn't fence post in Linz
Ab 5:26 sieht man einen Kameraschwenk von Urfahr - ein Stadtteil von Linz - um 180° zum Linzer Hauptplatz. Die Brücke (Nibelungenbrücke) wurde dann Zonengrenze zwischen dem russisch besetzten Mühlviertel (Urfahr-Seite) und dem amerikanisch besetzten Rest von Oberösterreich. Die Nibelungenbrücke und das Gebäude zwischen Brücke und Hauptplatz im linken Teil des Bildes (Brückenkopfgebäude, ab 10:31 sieht mans von der anderen Seite) wurden im Rahmen des Sonderauftrags Linz von den Nazis gebaut. de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linz#Zeit_des_Nationalsozialismus de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonderauftrag_Linz en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%BChrermuseum
+chronoshistory leider kann ich die brennende kirche zu beginn des videos nicht identifizieren, aber ich bleibe dran. wenns noch mehr footage aus österreich (insbesondere oö) geben sollte, dann nur her damit!
chronoshistory meine Frau ist im „Getreidehaus Schierz“ aufgewachsen, Hauptstraße 10, ist zum Josefskirche als Mädchen gegangen. Meine Schwieger Mutter muss täglich die Niebelungen Brücke überqueren von Urfahr nach Linz zum Gymnasium. Die Russen hatten ein Checkpoint im Urfahr und die Amis auf der Linz Seite. Damals wird man von DDT gespritzt innerhalb des gewandtes wegen Furcht von Typhus. So was musste die Schwieg-i jeden Tag erleben.
I think that is the point of the video. Linz was of huge symbolic importance to Hitler. Now, defeated German troops are forced to march through it in utter humiliation. They would have understood the symbolic importance. Hence why they were not smiling.
Many of them walked miles and miles against the clock to reach the American side. Brave enough to pick a fight with the Russians but scare as hell of being captured by them.
Thanks for uploading this and your other Spirit of Liberation videos. This is the ultimate rebuttal to the idiotic fantasies of all the neo-Nazi bugs that crawl all over the internet. Subscribed.
My uncle was a medic in ww2. They had him guarding 300 Germans by himself. He didn't even put bullets in his gun. The Germans were happy to get captured by the americans
they were happy it was over and also.. they did not get cought by the soviets.. that would have meant going to a goulag and getting tortured and starved ..
@@klepetar it also meant many of them (nazis) would be spared and saved from prosecution and justice for the crimes they committed. USA saved thousands of nazis in Operation Paperclip.
many US army rape german women
The final victorious country in Europe
Germany!
Look at the EU.
@@hellboybihac yes, Operation Paper Clip = Save the German top rank high skill engineers for the USA. 😊 🙏
My dad was with the 151st Armored Signals Company (attached to the 11th Armored Division). He rode his Jeep over the Nibelungenbrücke in Linz on May 8, 1945. I still have his personal album of photos taken back then, where on one of them he sits on the hood of his heavily loaded Radio Jeep (with a big wire cutter rod in front) and his buddy took the picture where you can see the Pöstlingsberg in the background. I am forever grateful to have the memories of a few stories he told me about that time. He was 21 years old then.
My grandfather was with the 356 Guards Rifle Regiment (attached to the 107th Guards Rifle Division of the Red Army). On May 8, 1945 he was near St. Pölten (100 km east of Linz). He also was 21 years old and turned 22 the next day.
Hallo from Upper Austria
Mein Vater war 19 Jahre Alt und was er mir erzählte war, da er beide Siegermächte kennenlernte, der Russe bot seine Naturbelassene wenigen Zigaretten den Gefangenen an und der Amy zertrat seine Gerauchte, denn der Gefangene sollte nichts davon haben, das ist das Bild, das in mir eingebrannt ist.
Als gebürtiger Linzer echt spannend zu sehen, wie es damals ausgesehen hat. Danke fürs Hochladen!
Color brings these people to life. It's as if you are there watching them walk by just like you do with people in the street today. My father was only around 4 or 5 then. Imagine if I could see him walking by as a child in that street.
У меня дед ,
2 МИРОВУЮ ВОЙНУ, прошёл в артиллерии, наверное из-за низкого роста😃, но плотный и коренаст с басом в голосе , пел очень хорошо!
В этот период времени их части, или,как называли- ВТОРОЙ УКРАИНСКИЙ ФРОНТ, перебросили на Восток, так как надо было защищаться от Японии.
Кому-то нужны воины. !!!
Как будто 😔😪 специально организовывались и
ОрганизовываютСЯ !!!!!
Именно когда Советская Армия вошла, в Европу и
пошла на Берлин, активизировалась Япония,чтоб ослабить силы Красной Арми Советского Союза.
Всегда смотрела хронику.
Так интересно, вглядываться в лица, понять, почувствовать атмосферу ситуации, времени. Почему так боялись каммунизм, даже просто красный цвет.
Может БОЯТСЯ самодостаточности людей? Независимости от мирового капитала?
Боятся дружбы между людьми?
Ведь ПРИ ВСЕМ, ВЫШЕПЕРЕЧИСЛЕННОМ,
организовывать войны,
будет Т Р У Д Н О ?
Кто-то............... войны специально
организовывает❣.
Для этого используеются
СМИ.
Неправильный перевод текста использую.
И многое другое.
Я ЖЕЛАЮ
ВСЕМ ЛЮДЯМ
МИРА🕊
И ЛЮБВИ,💞 ЧИСТОГО НЕБА,🕊
И ДУШИСТОГО ХЛЕБА🌾
👨🦰👩🦰 💞 🙋♀️🙋♂️🤦♀️👨⚕️🤷♀️👩🏫👨🏫 💞👶👨🦰👱♂️
@@ИраОрлова-р1ь They were afraid of communism because of all the horrific crimes committed in it's name, the lack of freedom of people living under it's yoke, and because the communists were allied to the Nazis before the Nazis turned on them. Just look at how many of America's POWs survived, and how many Russian POWs. Even many Russians didn't want to be "liberated" by their own people - they begged the Western allies not to return them, because Stalin punished those who had surrendered (even though many units at/near the border still had the order not to provoke IN ANY CIRCUMSTANCE because Stalin had thought the warnings were false, and went into hiding for over a week when the Germans attacked). Sadly, they were returned because of agreements with the Soviets. Oh and one more point regarding "why fear communists": who built the iron curtain, and murdered people who simply wanted to cross peacefully?
I'm from Philadelphia but happen to be in Linz right now while watching this. Amazing.
Are you near that church and if it got damaged has it been repaired or replaced?
The final victorious country in Europe
Germany!
Look at the EU.
@@bobwitkowski6410 I live there, the church still exists.
@@UriNierer to bad you can't post an updated photo of that church.
Looks kind of like Kensington doesn't it!
My great grandfather was able to escape when Hitler began to draft the austrian men. His brother (which were nazis at that moment) betrayed him by telling german authorities that he was trying to escape the draft. He went to Europe, then to Honduras (central america) which was an ally of the US. He was constantly tortured and persecuted by honduran authorities, but later on he married a honduran which gave him citizenship of that country. After that he sent supplies to his family in Austria which helped them survive.
Cool story bro.
What a story ! So much for blood being thicker than water. I would never betray a family member no matter our political differences. Did he ever talk to his brother again ?
@@larrybaker9924 His brothers died in the war fighting for the nazis but his sisters survived
@@jsierra-fx5fq he's brother is a hero of history
@@عبداللهاعشوي ЕГО
БРАТ- ГЕРОЙ, ВЫ ИМЕЕТЕ В ВИДУ ТОГО, КОТОРЫЙ, СРАЖАЛСЯ НА СТОРОНЕ НАЦИСТОВ?
That photo says it all. Young boys and old men. The rest are dead.
the german military had five and a half million deaths in ww2. 30% of them. that includes grade school kids.
So sorry for the war criminals and nazis , the same was in Serbia who was fighting against them ,just children and old people, after WW1 and WW2
@@geraldmiller8973 USSR had 20 -27 000 000 deaths they were hiding the fact that they were sending minors to fight the nazis ,may they rest in peace
6 mln of Poles were dead. Among them Polski Jestem kilked by the german in Auswitsch KL
@@mirjanamilosavljevic4261 What a bull. Soviets didn't send minors to fight nazis.
Big thanks to the cameramen aware enough to document history in the making. So well documented might I add.
From 11:57 you can see the "Wasser Apotheke" its a pharmacy and still there at Hauptplatz 8 in Linz.
Most of the enlisted men just look relieved that it's finally over.
The final victorious country in Europe
Germany!
Look at the EU.
On both sides!
Notice how alot of the soldiers where aloud to keep their medals like their combat badge, wound badges, iron crosses and shields.
The mixture of old and newer stocks, individual ranks and colours of the uniforms, diffrent unit markings. It's so interesting and almost each soldier is brimming with history!
yeah, thats why I like to watch these kind of videos. Every man, woman and child has a history behind their eyes.
What of the Russian POWs ? Did the Russians allowed this ?
it's traditional to let defeated soldiers keep their decorations.
@@richardravenclaw318 Decorations, man, how comic you are 😂😂😂😂😂🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣. Also, you must say the victorious, because if Hitler had heard the words of his generals and had not been tense, arrogant and stupid, he would have won the Second World War, especially that he owned Erich von Manstein, who, if Paulus heard his words and disobeyed Hitler, would have won the Nazis in the Battle of Stalingrad, which caused In the low morale of the National Socialist German soldiers, in short, the German National Socialist spirit would have existed, and they would have occupied the Soviet Union. Also, Hitler removed Heinz Guderian, the terrifying third general after Rommel without any risk and Erich von Manstein in 1941, so you don't talk much, you silly standing in The paradoxical allied rapists, thieves, talk about National Socialist Germany as evil and call them
@@richardravenclaw318 And they called them the Nazis, meaning that they are the idiot , the naive , and they stole from them the jet planes invented by the National Socialist Germans and the terrifying Horten 229 plane, which if completed and manufactured at the beginning of World War II, and the bird could see its enemies from a distance even if their enemy was covered with dust and fired 1000 shots or Almost more, but only three were made of them, so they were defeated, and then the contradictory America came and stole it, even though it says about them Nazis, which means the idiot, the naive. Britain and the Soviet Union, and how many semi-few countries
Although my father is Italian, he had to join the Transport Korps Speer RegimentNo.7 in 1944 has he was living in northern Italy. He was with them for most of 1944. I still have his service book (Soldbuch)
@The smoker You have the nerve to tell someone whose parent was forced to join the fascists in a war that killed hundreds of millions that immigrants coming into Europe and making people grumpy is somehow WORSE? You're insane.
Someone watches Fox News too much (The smoker). Especially if you think "immigration" is the worst thing on the planet. Maybe start thinking for yourself?
So strange to see the city in Austria I live in in these times. Linz didn't change much from the looks of it. Great video!!
Germany either. Most Europe is still the same, not big changes like America. Things were cooler and easier in the old days here In the states
@Ken Storm…..Things sure were better in the states in those days. You could start a business or do many other things to earn a living in this country. Today, the opportunities to have a career and livelihood are very limited to mostly retail slave work at low pay or living on the streets and panhandling for a living. This country has taken the wrong path and it’s killing people. If the daily suicide rate was actually published or talked about by news media….peoples heads would be spinning if they knew the number of people who commit suicide each day here in the U.S. I’m sure the numbers are staggering. Myself alone, I know of three people in the past several years who have killed themselves over lack of rewarding work, lack of opportunities and the severe lack of mental health assistance in America. I can remember going to a doctor 20 years ago and actually receiving some help……today, unless you’re wealthy or have the best health insurance you are not getting any help from a doctor in the United states. When a country is founded on greed under the guise of freedom, nothing good could possibly come out of it, unless you’re one of the mega wealthy.
Fascinating to watch after visiting Linz for the first time a year ago. So much is familiar and yet so much has changed on the north side of the river. Good video.
My Great Uncle was killed in Gramastetten on May 4th, 1945. This video is surreal. His brother told me that my other uncle and the driver of the truck, were killed and were to be taken back to the last morgue location, while the rest of the troops in the back of the truck, which were wounded, continued on with the jeep and 2 escorts. My Great Uncle and the driver's body both disappeared. He is listed as MIA.
What side was your uncle on? it doesnt matter, I'm just curious
@@ptrekboxbreaks5198 He was a US soldier.
I'm very surprised his body wasn't recovered and identified, given the exact dates and area are known. Perhaps he was recovered in the time since and listed as an unknown soldier. You should contact your local Congressman to help you with the DOD. Using some DNA samples from your and others in your family it might be possible to identify his body and put his name on his grave. This happens more often than you think. All I can imagine is they didn't look hard enough for him before the occupying Soviets moved into Austria. They didn't leave for about a decade and I rather doubt there were intensive searches for unidentified dead Americans.
@@brianmccarthy5557 His name is listed on the Tablets of the Missing at Epinal American Cemetery in France.
My grandfather was in the 1st wave on D-Day. He was a minesweeper; the guys who went in BEFORE the marines to clear traps. His leg got caught in the transport ramp; it got stuck, he tried to release it, broke his leg, and had to go back to the main ship. He got a purple heart while his entire squad got wiped out...
I'm sure that everyone was glad that the fighting was over, it must have been such a relief to be out of combat.
And then they arrived at rheinwiesen lager or somewhere else and thought that dying in combat would be a thousand times better then dying of diseases and starvation 🤷♂️
@Fabian Kirchgessner
1 million German soldiers starved to death in the matter of 16 months.
@Fabian Kirchgessner
I bought a book some years ago, where it was written that 1.5 million German POW's were interned in France.
900.000 died of starvation, red cross Parcels never reached them, no medical attention.
The guys had 2 options:starving to death or sign up for foreign legion to follow the French expeditionary force to Indochina.,which many did. Some managed to defect En route to Vietnam, jumping from the boat in the Messina straits ot suez canal.
Most of them died in combat, so survived.
I forgot the title of the book, but I can remember the author who also wrote "1943, the victory that never was"
These 2 books were borrowed from me and of course never retrieved
@Fabian Kirchgessner
Fabian, good for your grandfather, hope he had a good long life and died in his bed.
What I can remember of that book is that German POW's had extreme hard detention condition in French pow camps, because rationing was still running in France in these days.
In THORIGNY_LA FLÈCHE, still according to this Canadian or American author, the death rate was appalling.
I am not extreme right complotist nor a nazi nostalgic, I'm 60 year old and not born at the time.
900.000 prisoners dead was the figure he revealed, that's all I can remember.
But, tell me, did the guards ask your grandfather to sign up for Indochina?
@Fabian Kirchgessner What has largely escaped the victors’ history books, however, is that another program of internment and mass murder was put together at the end of the war by Allied forces, who took in millions of German prisoners in the summer of 1945 and deliberately starved roughly one in four of them to death.
The story of the Rheinwiesenlager, or “Rhine Camps,” was then covered up and obfuscated by professional historians for decades after the war while the survivors grew old and the prisoner records were destroyed.
Rheinwiesenlager: Last Moves Of A Lost War
Allied Camp Surrendering Germans
Flickr/ArmyDiversity
In the spring of 1945, the handwriting was on the wall for Germany. Millions of Allied troops poured into the Rhineland from the west, while the German SS and Wehrmacht forces staged desperate last stand actions in Vienna and Berlin to slow the Soviet Red Army’s advance in the east.
During this collapse, as German General Jodl stalled ceasefire negotiations to buy time, as many as three million German soldiers disengaged from the Eastern Front and trekked across Germany to surrender to American or British troops, whom they hoped would be less vengeful than the triumphant Soviets.
The German influx quickly grew so large that the British stopped accepting prisoners, citing logistical problems. Sensing that the Germans were turning themselves in en masse simply to delay an official, inevitable total German surrender, U.S. General Eisenhower then threatened to order his troops to shoot the surrendering German soldiers on sight, which forced Jodl to formally surrender on May 8.
The prisoners kept streaming in, however, and they all needed to be processed before the U.S. Army decided their fate.
The Army then hit on a solution for coping with large numbers of undesirable people that was similar to the one that the Germans had used in Poland: commandeer large stretches of farmland and wrap barbed wire around the prisoners until something could be sorted out.
Dozens of large holding camps thus sprang up in western Germany during the late spring of 1945, and by early summer, German prisoners of war still wearing their worn-out uniforms began to fill them.
Army officers skimmed off suspicious-looking prisoners, such as SS personnel and men with blood group tattoos on their arms (often a sign of SS membership) and sent them to intelligence officers and war crimes investigators for special scrutiny.
Meanwhile, officers allowed rank-and-file members of the Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe, and Kriegsmarine to simply pick a spot on the ground and sit down until somebody up the chain decided they could go home. Or so they thoughtWhat none of the surrendering Germans knew was that General Eisenhower, in consultation with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt in 1943, had already decided to use the inevitable German weakness following defeat to permanently cripple that country’s ability to wage war.
As early as 1943, at the Tehran Conference, Roosevelt and Stalin had famously toasted to the shooting of 50,000 German officers after the war. They may or may not have been serious, but early in 1944, Eisenhower appointed a special assistant named Everett Hughes to handle the details of the surrender. That summer, a postwar plan devised by Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. was initialed (and presumably approved) by both Roosevelt and Churchill.
The Morgenthau Plan, as it came to be known, was beyond punitive: Germany was to be divided into occupation zones, its industry destroyed, crushing reparations imposed, and large sections of its population forcibly resettled to wipe out the German capacity for war once and for all.
It was, by modern standards, practically a blueprint for national genocide insofar as millions of Germans would have to starve or relocate to make it work.
Everett Hughes was all in favor of the Morgenthau Plan, but after the PR disaster that followed the October release of some of the details, he was cautious. On November 4, Hughes sent a memo to Eisenhower urging him to classify details of prisoners’ rations as top secret
The Vienna Offensive was launched by the Soviet 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts in order to invade Vienna, Austria, during World War II. The offensive lasted from 16 March to 15 April 1945.
After a few days’ street fighting the Soviet troops captured the city.
While the street fighting was still intensifying in the southern and western suburbs of Vienna on 8 April, other troops of the 3rd Ukrainian Front by-passed Vienna altogether and advanced on Linz and Graz.
the fighting took place under the command of the marshals of the Soviet Union Tolbukhin and Timoshenko.
Qq
There were uprisings in Vienna and Innsbruck, among other places. The Vlasov Army joined with the rebels in some places but naturally fled the Communists. Whole swathes of Austria were occupied by the Americans and turned over to the Soviets as part of their Zone of Occupation.
Who doesn't want to see five minutes of a house on fire skip directly to 5:20.
Danillo Fleetwood thanks for that
Thanks
Church, actually.
Many thanks
@jas zg Aside killing 85% of Axis forces in Europe and destroy 75% of airplanes and 70% of tanks? American propaganda about WW2 must end.
Always wondered if these soldiers realized they were the lucky ones being detained by the Allies and not the Soviets.
Yes they did. Masses of Axis soldiers tried to flee Westwards at the end of the war.
The soviets were the allies.... thats the terrible thing
@@psychonaut33yes, but allied expeditionary force call them brother in arms in another fronts
@paul Josip Tito massacred all those fighters and resistance. The partisans would do full 24 hr shifts killing and mutating
@paul like what professor? Didn't know you where in Soviet territory suffering any atrocities at the hands of the Einsatzgruppen.
Danke für den Upload...gute Reportage
wow!! Sehr spannendes Zeit Zeugnis, in dieser Qualität ...hammer!
Ja super echt 👍
What are the odds that I had this video recommend to me on May 5th. Exactly 75 years ago. (May 5, 1945- May 5, 2020)
As humans, we are just spots on a time-line. These guys in the video occupied a certain, explosive period in human history. We occupy a different, later period in human history.
In Linz auf dem Hauptplatz...mit der Pestsäule. Sieht heute noch genauso aus.
I war a da. Auch Grammastettin
tolle Aufnahmen, man sieht den Überlebenden Soldaten an das sie glücklich sind das der Wahnsinn vorbei ist.
From 7:50 to 7:52 (brown uniform), at 5:56 and 9:38 i think, they are some hungarian soldiers and troops. I hope they survived the communist revenge after the war.
That´s right, that were Hungarians. But their coats were of green colour.
Some of them were drafted again when the soviets came
Pendejo! YOu do not understand the Europeans who invaded Russia in 1941 wanted to kill all the Soviet people they could physically do. By your words you just defend genocide. What have the Hungarians in particular forgotten at the River Don? Hungarians were still more sadistic that the Germans. Communist victims is just nothing as compared to the victims of the unites European armies in the USSR.
The lucky once. My father returning 1952 from Siberia.
Linz, the city near which Hitler was raised and where he went to school.
14:45 ganz böser Blick 😬
Aber super Video , Danke für dieses zeitgeschichtliche Dokument.
Ja, ja, ja !!!
Brown guys at 5:57 are hungarians.
Thanks. I was wondering what that uniform was.
can confirm the Nibelungenbrücke and Hauptplatz.
The church in the beginning looks extremely familiar, but so far all my googled guesses were wrong.
it´s a village called gramastetten, the viewpoint in the vid is more or less exactly where i live now
First sequence is Linz, upper Austria
00
Urfahrstadtpfarrkirche says the Frau, who attended as a girl. Also known as „josefskirche“.
de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urfahrer_Josefskirche
She lived round the corner in „Getreidehaus Schierz“.
Yes-The church is NOT in Linz. It is Gramastetten.
Fascinating, wonderful images, thanks!
Es ist wirklich Schade!!So viele junge Menschen!!!Deswegen ist der Krieg,das schlimmste Ding,das man in seinem Leben nie erleben muss
Das denke Ich auch!
Das erleben wir doch gerade jetzt in 2020. Bloss ist es noch nicht in allen Köpfen angekommen.
@@drexlev guten Tag
No. Slavery under demons is the worst thing you could ever experience in your life. I grew up knowing some survivors of Nazi concentration camps. They clearly would have rather suffered and died in war that have experienced the extermination of their entire families and communities. My ancestors were English slaves in Ireland as a result of losing wars. Better to fight, kill and die than have that happen to my family.
Bis jetzt!
FINALLY! Something real that doesn’t involve misdirection. Sadly it has to date back to WW2 footage.
On what a brave and glorious thing it is to die for your country ! Says the poet sarcastically.
What a futile waste of lives. Villages had no young men. Millions were killed and more were displaced. Hitler and Stalin caused such cruelty the world has ever known. And for what ?
for revenge against the allies
For nothing!
Rothschilds played Germany with Russia, England and United States as their pawns to establish a banking empire that is global and omnipotent. Germany defended against it, Stalin enabled it. There is your answer.
Do you remember Hitler invaded the USSR?
@@mongo2022 Hitler and Stalin invaded Poland at 1939. The whole war started for the defence of Poland. The result: Poland and rest of the east Europe fell into worst kind of slavery for 45 years. Western allies, how did that work out, on a scale 0-5?
This is Upper Austria, Linz.
Austria….another country I need to visit before I leave this earth. It’s on my bucket list for sure, along with Germany and Poland.
I thought with the torment ,and misery they created; any one with any heart, would give them a MISS...!
@@woodenseagull1899 i mean if youre ignorant and resentful then yea... probably
It´s pretty interesting watching my hometown and place of birth 36 years before I was born
You know the Getreidehaus Schierz? My wife grew up in that building. Hauptstrasse 10
@@jthunders Yes...that should be in Linz/Urfahr next to Rudolfstraße
gramastetten my place of birth, really fascinating to see these pictures
Do you know the Rinners? We are still in touch with the daughters. One of them is in Alberta.
@@jthunders sorry johnny i dont know them!
greets from austria
These seem like mostly garrison troops, almost all are cleanly shaven, Austria didn't see much combat at the end of the war. The irony is the germans had more men in "arms" at the end of the war than at the beginning...but they were poorly trained and outfitted vs. fully mobilized and trained.
A good amount of these soldiers were of the Hitlerjungen Waffen SS. 14 (could be less) to 17 years old. Yhat is why they look outfitted or as you say ; poorly trained ' Let's say, TIRED..
"Men with RIfles" - Not effective front line combat troops.
Oh the memories this evokes. In May of 1945 I was in Bregenz, Austria.
Which army and regiment were ypu in Allan?
Laber nicht so ne Scheisse daher
@@stephenroney6490
Der Spinnt !!
7 minutes at 52, Hungarian soldiers can be seen on the recording ?
Hungary was the last allies for the Germans and Austrian ... And look how they've been treated now today.. Like a piece of shit.. They own gratitude to them and should be treated like equal ,but not.... they've been neglected and used as a slaves at work even today 2021..
These German Soldiers look they are still in good fighting shape. Not many young boys or old men with them.
Hitler was Austrian... Not was just Germany ...
@@carolinatoapantaserrano2956 wow great carolina tells us about history and now??
May be Austrians.
they should have sent them to Eastern Front
I saw many young boys in the line. Short and young face
Germans made my Father walk from Belgium to Poland after dunkirk, Britain entered the war when Germany invaded Poland, then after the war left Poland with a even worse enemy, great stuff
Some of these guys look like your fathers, sons and nephews today. It's hard to believe that, if they are still alive today, they would be around 100 years of age or more.
Amazing footage.
On may 5th CC Mauthausen some 30 kms east of Linz was liberated by a reconnaissance unit of 11th tank division of 3rd US army.
yep my grandfather was one of them prisoners
@@novadhd Scary. My great-grandfather was one of the SS officers working there. He shot himself after the Americans took Gramastetten (the town in the first clip of this video) and the decision was made to lift the defense of Linz.
I am beginning to see a pattern; did those camera guys have their own mortar team?
O melhor exército do mundo se rendendo
14:45 That "I'll be back" look
9:11 well hello from me after 73 years ! This is makes me a little sad i don’t know why !
Like I’m right here sitting in my bed just watching these dead people suffering oh god I can’t explain
To think all this devastation, including the Communist regime that took over after the war, could have been avoided! All the heads of states knew what the Nazis were preparing for war arming themselves. They just needed to stand together and stop Germany from rearming...journalists were recording what the Germans (Nazis) were doing.
@@marinazagrai1623 Das Deutsche Reich hatte nach dem ersten Weltkrieg, nach Hungersnot mit fast einer millionen Hungertoten und Reparationszahlungen in bis dahin noch nie dagewesenem Umfang, gerade mal angefangen wieder ein wenig sozialen Wohlstand zu schaffen und dachte nicht im Traume daran die Welt zu überfallen, wie es uns die Propaganda weismachen will. Dazu fehlte es auch massiv an entsprechenden Resourcen. Im Gegensatz zu allen anderen dem Reich feindlich gesinnten Staaten. Das ist ganz leicht an den offiziellen Rüstungsdaten aus der damaligen Zeit zu erkennen (Googeln)
@Gayle Elizabeth
Genau eine Kabale der Verrückten
Die Amerikaner - Engländer und Franzosen die wahren Mörder der Deutschen und ihrer Verbündeten .
DIe Russen mit ihren 11 Millionen Gefallenen haben den 2 Weltkrieg ganz alleine gewonnen und nicht die Amerikaner und schon gar nicht die Feigen Engländer oder Die Französischen Frosch Schenkel Fresser .
Amerikaner sind und bleiben Soldaten Mörder und Diebe ( Patent Diebe )
Get a grip snowflake
God bless you, R F.
You’re a sentient human. If you can watch this aberration of humanity without feeling anything, then you should be very concerned.❤️
Adolf made it out at 8:45
He was disguised as a rank-n-file soldier all that time!
Haaa! Mystery solved after all these years! There he is again at 9:03.
He's long gone, of course...we're not cuckoo, but the face of the supposed dead Hitler was unrecognizable. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but the facts are not conclusive of his demise.
Germans were trying to look like Adolf...there were many who designed their mustache to look like his!
@@marinazagrai1623 this mustache was traditional in austria and the guys up there were wearing it long before Adolf was born
Muy buen documento !
Most of these POW's look to be in better physical shape and spirits than their captors.
Rear echelon troops.
That soldier is just a kid.. OMG :'( 8:52
Hitler youth they were very loyal and fanatical many fought on the western front
@@bryanneideffer3969 it's easy to brainwash young lads of that age. Look at the decades of child soldiers in Africa and those who were forced to fight for ISIS.
So, no "soldier".
You can look at them as a defeated army or as the men who built Germany in to what it is today (with the help of American money in order to create a fortified buffer against the Soviets). It's all a matter of perspective.
The prisoners were lucky to have got to the Americans! Russian, for all the troubles that the Germans brought to them, would have driven them to Siberia, to clean the snow!
Germans were very lucky not to be entirely wiped out for all evil they done in USSR. Instead Soviets fed German and Austrian population at the same time when Soviet people was near starvation but worked hard to repair territory devastated by Germans
Jedem das Seine.
Well, the Germans considered the lower Slavs and massacred entire populations as prisoners of war soldiers, is that not talked about?
Lucky for what ?!? Being sent to Eisenhower's death camps ?!?
@j808 ... Just historical facts ... If you are an ignorant lobotomized I can't help you ... 😁
The regular soldiers seemed happy the war was over. That officer at 14:45 didn't seem too happy.
No, he actually looked sort of arrogant, considering he was on the losing side.
@@elsemorris906 I think had I been there and seen that look, I would have given him the butt of my rifle off the top of his head.
@@christschool I suspect many of the hardcore Nazi officers couldn't stomach that they were surrendering to a mixed-race army, like the U.S. Army, It went against everything they'd been brainwashed to believe about their superiority.
Just imagine being of "pure Aryian heritage" and having to submit to a body search by a 20 yr. old half Irish Catholic/half Polish Jewish kid from Brooklyn. There's something strangely satisfying about that thought...
J Howe 🧐 Imagine being in a national army and knowing it took three foreign empires, four long years, to defeat you. There’s something strangely satisfying about that
@@mattkierkegaard9403 Not really. Germany was building up for this war for years and took an offensive approach while the allies had to build up the capacity. If you want to be impressed, look at what the Taliban has been able to do with very little.
Were these the defeated German troops and the U.S. victors? Very good photography. The Germans always had the most stylish uniforms
Thanks
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Thank you - I'm living in Linz! Great!
Order a Bosner mit Pommes for me next time you’re at the TaubenMarkt. And a 1L Bier!
My father ended his service by occupying Austria for six months after the war . Reopened the brewery so villagers could go to work. Smart Man… saw hitlers digs on the mountain . Said The 101 airborne took everything !
Took everything until no swastika memorabilia is nowhere to be found ?
11:07 the guys in the black great coats.i assume officers as the guy behind them with the shiney bootd
They are most probably Kriegsmarine (Navy) officers (see their -dark navy blue, not black- coats). Could seem strange in a landlocked country as Austria, but Austria had large Danube River fleet and a pool of skilled workers and boatmen, so the Kriegsmarine had recruiting offices here. (Linz is second largest city on Danube in Austria, after Vienna of course)
But interesting detail and good observation...
Any ideas were those soldiers were heading towards?
Well, they were marching south, so their destination was most likely a place which was simply called "Die Baracken" ("the shanties").
Those guys were lucky, since the bridge they are crossing was the border between the American and Soviet occupied areas. Most of them were released just a few weeks later. Some got transported to different countries like France as forced labourers and a small portion got handed over to the Soviets when the camps were filled to the brim already.
Depending on where they came from, some of those guys had to stay at the shanties for as long as 15 years, but as you can see, most guys in this crowd were either old men or juveniles. If they still had a home to return to, they would do so fairly early after the war had ended. If not, they would become the future "shanty people", which were the poorest of the poor and thus the social dregs of Upper Austria. Quiet a few of their decendants are still poor today due to the fact that it was highly unlikely to get a job as a former shanty dweller up until the early 80's and therefore building up wealth was not a thing at all for them.
пришли натворили столько горя и смерти и страданий на нашей земле, а сейчас в комментариях к ним сочувствие и сострадание люди удивительны и не имеют долгой памяти!!!
Они исполнители чей-то воли
Немецкие нацисты убивали людей раньше до 1941 года, а СССР стал и только смотрел и стоял бы до сегодняшнего дня, если бы Гитлер не вторгся в СССР.
Who were the soldiers in the brown uniforms with the Germans?
Sean Roberts Hungarians
No more wars please!!!
what do you do if you have to piss or shit
No More Brothers Wars
Brothers? ahah
are there Hungarian soldiers in the mix too? I occasionally see some brown colored uniforms
lucky to be captured by Americans and not the Soviets
yeah, cos killing 20 milion soviet people and bombing all their major cities to ashes so they spent years rebuilding them kinda made them feel angry and stuff yaknow
@ Mr. Human Well Stalin and the Bolsheviks/Soviets were monsters long before that. Research what the Soviets did in Finland, Estonia, Lavtia, Lithuania, Poland, etc. before the Germans invaded. Both ideologies are morally bankrupt.
D. Augustine probably yoh are right in any way, but soviets didn't kill over 20 million people in Germany or anywhere else.
+ddd7386 Lol evil is evil. True, the Soviet invasions ended up killing less than the Nazi invasions. However, it is estimated that Stalin had killed 20-25 million of his own people (peasants, military officers, political dissidents, etc) So, in essence, Stalin and his Soviets killed more people than Hitler. Not to mention the Soviets killed a million or two in Afghanistan, long after Hitler and Stalin were dead.
Many Americans just turned German POWs over to the Soviets anyway.
in the Vienna offensive operation, a large Wehrmacht grouping was defeated. Berlin lost control over another major industrial center of Europe - the Vienna industrial region, including the economically important Nagykanizsa oil region. The road to Prague and Berlin was opened.
14:45 This defeated officer didn't like the idea of capitulation but his situation was farrrrr better than those in soviet hands.
Or maybe he was just maintaining a respectful pose towards the camera.
@@somerandomvertebrate9262 A bandit and a murderer will always be a bandit and a murderer.
@@mtomek1111 What makes you think he was any of those things rather than an officer serving his country?
@@somerandomvertebrate9262 They served Hitler. Bandits and murderers.
@@mtomek1111 I find it completely irrelevant. They did their duty. They obeyed orders. Would you call every Red Army soldier, who thusly served Stalin, a "bandit and a murderer"? I wouldn't.
there were some people, before explosion.
was the explosion committed by those men?
8:52 - so young and so danger
Where is the statue at around 11'0"?
It is so sad to watch this
@@alexf80m32
Of course, the Americans do not kill innocent people, Vietnam, Kosovo, Iraq since the Berlin Wall fell, they are the only ones who constantly break the balls ... and maybe if Europe were less divided we could aspire to count something .. ..
Cristian Mannschaft
Where are you from?
@@kathycaldwell7126 Italy
Cristian Mannschaft Yeah we got this world policeman job - you can have it!
This is really, really strange for me. I was in Linz, in that very main square. Eerie.
These sights in the video I hope looks pretty much the same today ~ Of course the way people dress today is very different and the cars look different too ~ but I hope if I visit Austria, everything else will be the same
The guys in the back of the column had different uniforms - Hungarians ?
Yes.
nuestros hombres marchan con honor
Indudablemente.
Im assuming all the German soldiers were heading west away from the Russians.
7:55 SS prisoners in camouflage clothing
Or HG1. They wore SS camo, too. Notice the Luftwaffe officer near the end in the brown shirt and black tie.
They might be from a Felddivision.
I would rather say paratroopers.
@@flitsertheo no fucking paratroopers in the middle or austria😂
After the assault on Crete - a succes, but at heavy cost - German paratroopers were only used for small scale airborne operations or as ground troops. Nothing unusual to see them among the other prisoners.
the green coated troops in caps appear to be gebirgsjäger, mountain troops. probably some in other uniform types too.
Could be, but I'm not so sure. Felgrau uniforms could vary substantially in hue, not seldom far into the dark green spectrum. You saw any Edelweiss insignia on the side of those caps? Me neither.
Они счастливы, что попали в к американцам.
You have to wonder what those soldiers are thinking. How will I be treated, what is my future and what is the future of my country? Who knew that they and their country would come back so far so quickly?
Incredible, how fast the Nazi flags were dismounted and the red white red stripes flag was mounted.
Pat McTallica All I saw was a white flag in that Plaza. Granted I didn’t stay to the end...
Yes, and how quickly they started hating Hitler.
@@VotanLoad
...who might be you?
Have you ever been to any war, moron?
@@VotanLoad Well, a lot of relatives of mine who were young adults at this time are still alive today, so I had some insight when and why they started hating him.
It was mostly for the reason that he presented himself as the saviour and protector of all German people and in the end he just threw them into the meat grinder like there was no tomorrow. My grandfather for instance had to operate an AA gun during the battle for Linz at the age of 12 along with three other boys his age and a 17 year old SS member. If it wasn't for their commanding officer, who sent them home after the Allies made a whole tank division ready for a ground assault, all of them would've died within that week. The actual order from Berlin was to fight to the last man.
So they didn't start hating him after the war, it rather began at the end of the war already.
@@GodlordBazi Thank you for your reply. You have just supported my point. In general German people started hatng him for loosing the war. Some after Stalingrand, the majoriry when they realized the war was lost and the rest after. Hitler represented a new idea for the old German national imperial plan which had failed again in 1944-1945 and German people blaimed him for it.
What i don't get is why no sound?
We are spoiled by today's digital video technology. Back in 1945, movie photography was primitive and no sound at an amateur photographer level. The grinding noise is of the sound of a movie projector dubbed in.
at 1445 you can see something tucked into the officers belt .....what is it ?
I hope somebody knows. You have sharp eyes, it looks like a radio, but for those days it is too small, I think.
King Joffrey Baratheon i Google it and you're absolutely right it is indeed a flashlight.... thank you.
Wie hieß er, der Offizier? Sein Grad?
@@dieterh.9342 Er war ein Luftwaffenoffizier
Sehr nett dieser Offizier
14:45 Anyone can know what this things in his chest? Its Camera or what ?
A lamp
Omg. I wonder how many of those German soldiers made it home. They must have been so worn out and tired and I am sure they all just wanted the war to end and go home. Pity they lost the war. Bless them all. They are remembered
Pity an oppressive regime was denied the chance to carry out a madman's dream of a world. Read hitler's book his playbook for the thousand year reich
My grandfather was a truck driver in the 2nd engineer combat battalion. Have a birthday photo of him near a concrete building and wouldn't fence post in Linz
Ab 5:26 sieht man einen Kameraschwenk von Urfahr - ein Stadtteil von Linz - um 180° zum Linzer Hauptplatz. Die Brücke (Nibelungenbrücke) wurde dann Zonengrenze zwischen dem russisch besetzten Mühlviertel (Urfahr-Seite) und dem amerikanisch besetzten Rest von Oberösterreich. Die Nibelungenbrücke und das Gebäude zwischen Brücke und Hauptplatz im linken Teil des Bildes (Brückenkopfgebäude, ab 10:31 sieht mans von der anderen Seite) wurden im Rahmen des Sonderauftrags Linz von den Nazis gebaut. de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linz#Zeit_des_Nationalsozialismus de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonderauftrag_Linz en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%BChrermuseum
+chronoshistory leider kann ich die brennende kirche zu beginn des videos nicht identifizieren, aber ich bleibe dran. wenns noch mehr footage aus österreich (insbesondere oö) geben sollte, dann nur her damit!
profan111 richtig binn aus Enns....Die Aufnahmen Sind zu 3/4tel aus linz
profan111 in Hörsching steht ziemlich die gleiche Kirche.
chronoshistory meine Frau ist im „Getreidehaus Schierz“ aufgewachsen, Hauptstraße 10, ist zum Josefskirche als Mädchen gegangen. Meine Schwieger Mutter muss täglich die Niebelungen Brücke überqueren von Urfahr nach Linz zum Gymnasium. Die Russen hatten ein Checkpoint im Urfahr und die Amis auf der Linz Seite. Damals wird man von DDT gespritzt innerhalb des gewandtes wegen Furcht von Typhus. So was musste die Schwieg-i jeden Tag erleben.
So many historical buildings were lost In that war on both sides. What a shame.
Austria had been invaded many times.
Somewhat ironic. hitler envisioned making linz [most substantial town he lived in as a boy] as the cultural capital of europe.
I think that is the point of the video. Linz was of huge symbolic importance to Hitler. Now, defeated German troops are forced to march through it in utter humiliation. They would have understood the symbolic importance. Hence why they were not smiling.
Many of them walked miles and miles against the clock to reach the American side. Brave enough to pick a fight with the Russians but scare as hell of being captured by them.
Ohne zu wissen das Ihnen der Tod auch dort erwarten wird
Fanatical Germans and Austrians, defending this town when the war was already lost and forcing the destruction of the church. Madness.
Thanks for uploading this and your other Spirit of Liberation videos. This is the ultimate rebuttal to the idiotic fantasies of all the neo-Nazi bugs that crawl all over the internet. Subscribed.
Bob Hunton You are one blinded dog.
Amazing film.