Category Archives: Defiance

The brave face of WWII

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Despite all the death and the destruction during WWII and the uncertainty of what the future would hold, so many people were still putting up a brave face and continued their daily lives as best as they could.Or defy the enemy even after being captured.

The picture above was taken after a German bombing raid during the London Blitz, a British woman remains consummately British. She is seen here drinking tea on a pile of rubble. The photo was taken in 1940.

Two American soldiers having a moment of levity during WWII. It’s an odd, but humorous picture.They could still crack jokes

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Coca-Cola was popular in America before World War II broke out.

This bottling plant was built in Saipan to supply American troops with Coke in the Pacific theatre.

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Heinrich Himmler looks at a young Soviet prisoner of war during an official visit to Shirokaya Street Concentration Camp in Minsk, Belarus, on or about August 15, 1941. You had to be a hard man to look Himmler in the face like that. This is standing for what’s right, this is a single man who, after losing so much, stands up and stares Himmler himself. This image is defiance.

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Abandoned boy holding a stuffed animal amid ruins following German aerial bombing of London, 1945.The boy did in fact survive the war and became a truck driver. In the photo he’s sitting outside where his house used to be.

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With the German invasion of France, many French citizens fled the country.These French refugees are seen encamped in a quarry.

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A soldier sits for a meal before the Battle of Normandy. He’s sitting on a stockpile of shells.The photo was taken in May of 1944, in England.he appears to be in a good mood.

 

A warden gives directions to a mother and her two children during a World War II gas drill in Southend on Marcy 29, 1941.

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A warden gives directions to a mother and her two children during a World War II gas drill in Southend on Marcy 29, 1941.

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Rare glimpse of daily life at Canadian WWII Internment camp for Japanese.

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This photo shows how blackout curtains fitted behind ordinary curtains. The girl in this 1943 photo was Doreen Buckner, then aged 7.

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British artist Albert Perry at work with some of his pupils during their daily one hour gas mask practice, August 19, 1941

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Dancer Ena Squire-Brown leaves her bombed home on the day of her wedding
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Police escort women and children past a bombsite
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The Inn keeper who told Hitler to take his business elsewhere.

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Hitler maintained three residences during the Third Reich: the Old Chancellery in Berlin, his Munich apartment, and Haus Wachenfeld (later the Berghof), his mountain home on the Obersalzberg.

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Hitler asked his neighbor Karl Schuster, the owner of the Türken Inn, to sell him a piece of his adjacent property. Schuster refused on the grounds of having six children to consider, but offered to let Hitler use the land for free. Despite having supported the National Socialist Party in its early years and been a member since 1930, as well as having known Hitler personally for a decade, Schuster soon learned that old loyalties meant little to the Führer when someone stood in his way.

A month after Schuster refused Hitler’s request, he found himself accused of having insulted the drunken SA and SS men who frequented his inn. The incident triggered a boycott by the Berchtesgaden chapter of the NSDAP, whose members blocked the hotel’s entrance and forced out guests and staff, leaving only the family within. When they tried to leave, they were hit by rocks and spat upon by the pilgrims waiting near Haus Wachenfeld. Ostensibly because of the threat to his safety, Karl Schuster was taken into “protective custody” and imprisoned for two weeks. Hitler, meanwhile, refused all contact with his neighbor, and as the hotel’s finances went into the red, Schuster sought out buyers. Offers evaporated, however, when local officials made clear that the hotel’s license would not be renewed.

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Finally, Angela Raubal, Hitler’s sister, who lived with him at Haus Wachenfeld—and who was wholly unsympathetic to her neighbor’s plight but aggrieved by how it inconvenienced her—notified Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary and manager of his Obersalzberg properties.

 

Bormann compelled Schuster to sell him the inn and, after the family left in November 1933, transformed it into barracks for Hitler’s SS bodyguards.

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The Schuster family was forbidden to resettle anywhere near the Berchtesgaden region, and its adult members were compelled to sign an agreement not to speak about having been Hitler’s neighbor or about their expulsion. When Schuster did confess to his new neighbors, who were suspicious of a man who refused to talk about his past, he was again imprisoned.

Around Berchtesgaden, by contrast, talk about the family’s treatment was spreading, prompting the town’s NSDAP chapter in January 1934 to publish a notice in the local newspaper forbidding any further discussion of the Schuster case. Those who disobeyed were warned that they would be labeled enemies of the state and sent to the Dachau concentration camp,including Karl Schuster.

When the Gestapo arrested him,Schuster’s wife laid down in front of the vehicle in an attempt to stop them,but to no avail.

Karl Schuster, a broken man, blamed himself for his family’s ruin and died of a heart attack in 1934, at the age of 58.

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Heinz Heydrich-The good Heydrich.

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Some name are synonymous with evil Goering and Heydrich would be some of them.But like Herman Goering had a brother who was the opposite of him and rather then killing Jews he helped them. So did Reinhard Heydrich(The Butcher of Prague), he had a younger brother who also saved Jews.

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Heinz Heydrich was born in Halle an der Saale to composer Richard Bruno Heydrich and his wife Elisabeth Anna Maria Amalia Krantz. Her father was Eugen Krantz, director of the Dresden Royal Conservatory.The Heydrich family were well-to-do Catholics. The father, Richard Bruno Heydrich, was an opera singer, the founder of a music conservatory in Halle, and a German Nationalist who instilled patriotic ideas in the minds of his children.

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The Heydrich household was very strict and the children were frequently disciplined. As a youth, Heydrich engaged his older brother, Reinhard Heydrich, in mock fencing duels.

Heinz Heydrich was an Obersturmführer (lieutenant), journalist and publisher of the soldiers’ newspaper, Die Panzerfaust.

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He was very proud of his Nazi association and his older brother’s position within this unique organisation. He continued his active association with the S.S. until June of 1942.

Early in June, Heinz’s older brother Reinhard died, asassinated by resistence-members in Czechosolvakia. His car was ambushed at a blind corner in a road and he was mortally wounded, dying a few days later in hospital. It was this event that changed everything. Almost overnight, Heinz received a bundle of Reinhard’s personal papers and files…included in these were detailed plans about the “Final Solution”, in which Reinhard had been heavily involved.

Operation Anthropoid-The Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich.

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Heinz Heydrich had been given a large packet containing his brother’s files, released from his strongbox at Gestapo Headquarters, 8 Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, Berlin.

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Next morning his wife noticed that her husband had sat up all night burning the documents from the package. Heinz, on leave from the front, could not be engaged in conversation, his wife remembered; he seemed to be elsewhere mentally, and like stone. The files in the package were probably Reinhard Heydrich’s personal files, from which Heinz Heydrich understood for the first time in all its enormity the systematic extermination of the Jews, the so-called Final Solution.

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Thereafter, Heinz Heydrich helped many Jews escape by forging identity documents and printing them on Die Panzerfaustpresses.

Realising fully for the first time what he’d signed up for when he joined the S.S., Heinz was horrified. He burnt most of the papers in disgust.

Soon after this event, Heinz began to realise that he was in a truly unique position. Being the brother of a prominent S.S. general (albeit, a dead one), and being the editor of the party newspaper meant that he had a lot of influence. He used this to help as many Jews as possible escape from Germany. As a writer and editor of the party newspaper, Heinz had access to a commercial printing-press. He used this to print fake travel-documents which he signed and forged and stamped, and gave to Jewish families, so that they could escape from occupied Europe to countries of safety.

When in November 1944 an economic commission headed by a State Attorney investigated the editorial staff of Panzerfaust, Heinz Heydrich thought he had been discovered and shot himself in order to protect his family from the Gestapo. Ironically, the attorney knew nothing about the forgeries, and was only trying to find out the reason for shortages in paper supplies. Heinz Heydrich is buried in the Soldatenfriedhof (soldiers cemetery) Riesenburg, according to the Deutsche Dienststelle (WASt).

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I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you. To donate click on the credit/debit card icon of the card you will use. If you want to donate more then $2 just add a higher number in the box left from the PayPal link. Many thanks.

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August Landmesser- The Defiant Nazi

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Most of us will have seen the picture of the Nazi rally where one ‘Nazi’ refused to salute. This man was August Landmesser and he defied the Nazi regime in one more than one way.

Adopted by the Nazi Party in the 1930s, Hitler’s infamous ‘sieg heil’ (meaning ‘hail victory’) salute was mandatory for all German citizens as a demonstration of loyalty to the Führer, his party, and his nation.

August Landmesser (born 24 May 1910; KIA 17 October 1944; confirmed in 1949) was a worker at the Blohm + Voss shipyard inHamburg, Germany, best known for his appearance in a photograph refusing to perform the Nazi salute at the launch of the naval training vessel Horst Wessel on 13 June 1936.

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He had run afoul of the Nazi Party over his unlawful relationship with Irma Eckler, a Jewish woman. He was later imprisoned and eventually drafted into military service, where he was killed in action; Eckler was sent to a concentration camp where she was presumably killed.

Landmesser joined the Nazi Party in 1931 and began to work his way up the ranks of what would become the only legal political affiliation in the country.

Two years later, Landmesser fell madly in love with Irma Eckler, a Jewish woman, and proposed marriage to her in 1935.

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After his engagement to the Jewish woman was discovered, Landmesser was expelled from the Nazi Party.Landmesser and Eckler decided to file a marriage application in Hamburg, but the union was denied under the newly enacted Nuremberg Laws.

 

The couple welcomed their first daughter, Ingrid, in October 1935.

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And then on June 13, 1936, Landmesser gave a crossed-arm stance during Hitler’s christening of a new German navy vessel.

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The act of defiance stands out amid the throng of Nazi salutes.

In 1937, fed up, Landmesser attempted to flee Nazi Germany to Denmark with his family. But he was detained at the border and charged with ‘dishonouring the race’ or ‘racial infamy’ under the Nuremberg Laws.

A year later, Landmesser was acquitted for a lack of evidence and was instructed to not have a relationship with Eckler.

Refusing to abandon his wife, Landmesser ignored Nazi wishes and was arrested again in 1938 and sentenced to nearly three years in a concentration camp.

He would never see the woman he loved or his child again.

The secret state police also arrested Eckler, who was several months pregnant with the couple’s second daughter.She gave birth to Irene in prison and was sent to an all-women’s concentration camp soon after her delivery.

Eckler was detained by the Gestapo and held at the prison Fuhlsbüttel, where she gave birth to a second daughter, Irene.

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From there she was sent to the Oranienburg concentration camp, the Lichtenburg concentration camp for women, and then the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück.

 

ADN-ZB: Im faschistischen Deutschland 1933-45 Unmittelbar nach der faschistischen Machtergreifung werden im Frühjahr 1933 überall im Land Konzentrationslager errichtet. SA-Männer als Lagerwache des KZ’s Oranienburg bei Berlin.
ADN-ZB 17.4.85 [Herausgabedatum] Bez. Potsdam: Zum 40. Jahrestag der Befreiung des KZ Ravensbrück Wie die Frauen des KZ unter den extremsten Bedingungen die schwierigsten Arbeiten verrichten mußten, zeigen mehrere Fotos im neuen Museum der nationalen Mahn- und Gedenkstätte. Insgesamt geben etwa 700 Fotos, Dokumente und andere Sachzeugen Auskunft über das Schicksal der rund 135 000 Frauen, Mädchen und Kinder aus 20 Nationen Europas, die hier eingekerkert waren.

A few letters came from Irma Eckler until January 1942. It is believed that she was taken to the Bernburg Euthanasia Centre in February 1942, where she was among the 14,000 killed; in the course of post-war documentation, in 1949 she was pronounced legally dead, with a date of 28 April 1942.

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Meanwhile, Landmesser was discharged from prison on 19 January 1941.He worked as a foreman for the haulage company Püst. The company had a branch at the Heinkel-Werke (factory) in Warnemünde.In February 1944 he was drafted into a penal battalion, the 999th Fort Infantry Battalion. He was declared missing in action, after being killed during fighting in Croatia on 17 October 1944.Like Eckler, he was legally declared dead in 1949.

Their children were initially taken to the city orphanage. Ingrid was later allowed to live with her maternal grandmother while Irene went to the home of foster parents in 1941. Ingrid was also placed with foster parents after her grandmother’s death in 1953.

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