Conquering Germany - post-WW2 Occupation

WWII Relic Hunting

I want to go World War II relic hunting someday... I don't want to be blown-up though, of course. That goes almost without saying. Ever since I was a little kid, I've liked military history and the idea of digging up cool kit from WW2 on the battlefield. Leaving aside discussions of policy, the Holocaust, Gitmo, warrantless wire-tapping - all that sh*t - there is something so cool about the treasure-hunting aspect of it...finding and connecting with a physical reminder of this world's very, very complex history. If any of you have done this, gone relic hunting on WWII battlefields, drop me a line or leave a comment.

More Interesting WWII History Footage

For the WWII history buff, this content is fascinating:

[link deleted because it was giving me trouble]

"WORLD WAR II SHOWN FROM GERMAN PERSPECTIVE. Mostly TV Documentaries and History books only shows the Allied´s side point-of-view of the conflict. In this channel, we show the point-of-view from Axis´s side.

This material is taken from German Wartime Newsreels, Wehrmacht training films, 16 and 35mm footage. All videos are in original format and sound."

Here is another great link: WWII in Color

"Welcome to a great collection of World War II photographs on the Internet. Experience World War II like you never seen it before by viewing some of the most dramatic photos taken during the war. Contribute to history by posting your comments on each photo. Videos are coming soon."

Ich hatt' einen Kameraden

"Der gute Kamerad" ("The good Comrade"), also known as "I had a comrade", is a traditional lament of the German Armed Forces. The text was written by the German poet Ludwig Uhland in 1809. In 1825, the composer Friedrich Silcher set it to music. "The Good Comrade" plays an important ceremonial role in the German Armed Forces and is an integral part of a military funeral.

The song has also become traditional in obsequies of the Military of Austria, the Austrian firebrigades and the highly prussianized Chilean Army. It is also used to some degree in the French Army. When the song is played, soldiers are to salute, a custom shared only by national anthems. Occasionally the song is played at civil ceremonies, most often when the deceased had been affiliated with the military. It is also commonly sung at the funerals of members of a Studentenverbindung. Finally, the song is often played on Volkstrauertag, the German Remembrance Day, at memorials for the fallen.



"I once had a comrade,
you won't find a better one.
The drum was rolling for battle,
he was marching at my side
in the same pace and stride.
A bullet flew towards us
for him or meant for me?
It did tear him away,
he lies beneath my feet
like it was a piece of me.
´wants to reach his hand to me,
while I reload my gun.
"Can't give you my hand for now,
you rest in eternal life
My good comrade!"

For Big Collector of Tanks, Panzer Was Last Hurrah

WSJ Online
FEBRUARY 6, 2009, 8:04 P.M. ET
By STEPHEN MILLER

One of the nice things about owning a battalion's worth of tanks is that when you throw a party, you can show off your war machines by crushing a car or two for your guests.

Jacques Littlefield, who boasted one of the world's most extensive private collections of rolling armor, enjoyed that perk. He had a trained engineer's love of mechanical innovation and the leisure to do painstaking restoration, bringing the rumble of martial steel to the verdant hills of Portola Valley, Calif.

Along with a small staff of mechanics at his ranch, Mr. Littlefield restored more than 200 pieces of military equipment, from self-propelled Soviet artillery to a British Rapier missile launcher to 65 tanks. The machines were displayed in a football-field-size garage at his private museum, which welcomed about 5,000 visitors annually.

The pride of his collection was a German Panzer V Panther from World War II, recovered from a Polish river, that his mechanics toiled for five years to restore. One of only a handful of working Panzer V's in existence, it received its finishing touches just weeks after Mr. Littlefield's death at 59 from cancer Jan. 7.

"His was one of the places on your bucket list," notes Reg Hodgson, editor of Army Motors, the journal of the Military Vehicle Preservation Association. While the association boasts 9,200 members world-wide, only a handful have the resources to collect significant quantities of vehicles.

Mr. Littlefield was born into wealth. His great-grandfather having founded the Utah Construction Co., which helped build the Hoover and Grand Coulee dams. His father oversaw a 1976 merger with General Electric Co. that made him a member of the Forbes 400 Richest People in America.

Mr. Littlefield grew up making models and loving technology. "My idea of a fun vacation was to look at factories -- a refrigerator factory in Louisville, a Cessna plant in Wichita," he told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2007. At his ranch was a mile-long track of model railway maintained by local hobbyists, as well as a baroque-style pipe organ he commissioned based on European originals in an acoustically high-tech hall.

Like his father, Mr. Littlefield studied engineering and business at Stanford University. Instead of joining fellow students in war protests, he spent his spare time in the engineering shop and once built a ¼-scale M-60A1 Patton tank with a working flamethrower.

"His politics were a bit different," chuckles William A. Boller, an old friend and colleague who now is president of Mr. Littlefield's Military Vehicle Technology Foundation, which oversees his legacy.

In 1975, Mr. Littlefield acquired his first military vehicle, an American M3A1 scout car, rather like an armored Jeep. Slowly acquiring more, he discovered a love of collecting. "There is a genre of human being like me," he told the New York Times in 2003. "It's like a type of dog."

The end of the Cold War brought a lot of Soviet-bloc armaments onto the market. Mr. Littlefield worked with fellow collectors and agents to import all sorts of hardware, but usually vehicles that represented some sort of technical or functional advance.

He also amassed spare parts, which cropped up from odd places and which he shared with fellow collectors. When he didn't have a spare, his mechanics could usually improvise something, often based on original blueprints that Mr. Littlefield housed in a large library.

The point was to be true to the original specifications, down to the nuts and bolts. Even the textile-coated wiring of an earlier day was replicated. The Panzer V's engine was rebuilt with the original engine block and transmission, even though, Mr. Littlefield said in a documentary for the History Channel, it was too light for the 49-ton behemoth and the gears were vulnerable to stripping.

Photo (c) Bernard Zee

Mr. Littlefield's workshop helps illuminate differences in war strategy. The Germans favored big, complicated tanks in part because they could always transport them to a factory for repairs. The Americans, fighting on battlefields an ocean away from home, built smaller, easier-to-repair tanks from standardized parts. In 2001, Mr. Littlefield told Forbes it took four Sherman tanks to destroy a Panzer, and three might end up destroyed themselves.

Dave Marian, the foundation's curator, explains that "Germans solve problems in Germanic ways. A Panzer tank had probably eight times more parts than a [U.S.] Sherman tank."

Mr. Littlefield didn't lend his vehicles to Hollywood studios, though he did let Steven Spielberg record tank sounds for the film "Saving Private Ryan." He also had a few high-profile items, such as the halftrack personnel carrier Lee Marvin drove in the movie "The Dirty Dozen" and one of the screws from the oceanliner Lusitania.

His collections extracted a personal cost. "It happens to a lot of guys," he told The Wall Street Journal in 1992. "It happened to me. You get a tank, you get divorced. You get divorced, you lose the tank to pay the settlement."

Video: Panther w/ turret first drive!!!!

Photo Collection from Littlefield's museum.

The Tunnel that Made the Great Escape Possible

Thanks to Tom Williams for tipping me off to this...If you want to go straight underground, click on The Tunnel that Made The Great Escape Possible.


"Electric lighting. A railroad. An air ventilation system. Against incredible odds, the Allied airmen imprisoned at the Nazi POW camp Stalag Luft III secretly engineered these and other technological marvels 30 feet underground in the three escape tunnels they named "Tom," "Dick," and "Harry." They used only tools that they could manufacture themselves out of tin cans, and they scavenged building materials at great risk. When they were done, the airmen carried out one of the greatest mass escapes of all time. Through this interactive map, drawn after the war by one of the POWs, Ley Kenyon, explore the remarkable story of Harry, the 300-foot tunnel that 76 men snuck through during their infamous getaway on the night of March 24-25, 1944."

Stalag Luft III (Stammlager Luft, or Permanent Camp for Airmen #3) was a German Air Force prisoner-of-war camp during World War II that housed captured air force personnel. It was near Sagan, now Żagań in Poland, 100 miles (160 km) southeast of Berlin. The site was selected because it would be difficult to escape by tunnelling, but it is best known for two famous prisoner escapes that took place there by tunnelling, depicted in The Great Escape & The Wooden Horse.

The first prisoners, or kriegies, as they called themselves, to be housed at Stalag Luft III were British RAF and Fleet Air Arm officers, arriving in April 1942. The first compound of the camp was completed and opened in May. USAAF prisoners began arriving in significant numbers in October, 1943, followed by completion of a second and third compound by March 1944, when U.S. officers were separated from their RAF counterparts and housed separately. Eventually the camp grew to approximately 60 acres (240,000 m2) in size and eventually housed about 2500 Royal Air Force officers, about 7500 U. S. Army Air Corps, and about 900 officers from other Allied air forces, for a total of 10,949 inmates, including some support personnel officers...

The "Great Escape"

In January 1943, Roger Bushell led a plot for a major escape from the camp. The plan was to dig three deep tunnels, codenamed "Tom," "Dick," and "Harry." Each of the tunnel entrances was carefully selected to ensure they were undetectable by the camp guards. The tunnel "Tom" began in a darkened corner of a hall in one of the buildings. "Dick's" entrance was carefully hidden in a drain sump in one of the washrooms. The entrance to "Harry" was hidden under a stove.

Tunnel construction

In order to keep the tunnels from being detected by the perimeter microphones, they were very deep — about 10 metres (30 ft) below the surface. The tunnels were very small, only two feet square (about 0.37 m²), though larger chambers were dug to house the air pump, a workshop, and staging posts along each tunnel. The sandy walls of the tunnels were shored up with pieces of wood scavenged from all over the camp. One main source of wood was the prisoners' beds. At the beginning, each had about twenty boards supporting the mattress. By the time of the escape, only about eight were left on each bed. A number of other pieces of wooden furniture were also scavenged..." More...