I can understand why this stuck in your mind. It’s unlikely they survived (and the fate of their female family members doesn’t bear thinking about), but it is a worthwhile subject illustrating how an appalling regime’s propaganda infected the children of deluded parents with tragic results. They grew up knowing nothing else but Nazi ideology. Most of those kids have now passed on, I think – or hope – most who survived came to realise how brainwashed they were, principally by their parents.
You are right, they didn’t have much chance of survival because the Red Army had a lot of tanks and the soldiers in the East hated the Germans especially if they were in the SS or Panzer Corps.
Maybe the father in the picture was a Nazi or maybe they had no choice but to go to the front.
Those who tried to avoid military service without a very good reason were usually hanged as traitors.
Indeed. There’s a well-known newsreel clip by a soviet cameraman of an attic space somewhere in Germany around the time of the capitulation. It shows a mother and two kids laid out in a row, shot by their father who’s hanging from a rafter nearby. He decided his family would suffer when the Russians arrived. It haunts me a lot, those innocent children who might otherwise still be alive today.
“Indeed. There’s a well-known newsreel clip by a soviet cameraman of an attic space somewhere in Germany around the time of the capitulation. It shows a mother and two kids laid out in a row, shot by their father who’s hanging from a rafter nearby.”
That was a selfish act from the father, because no one would have blamed his children or wife.
That is not completely true: German women were quite frequently raped by Russian soldiers. Specially the 2nd or even 3rd echelon. They took revenge like that on what the Germans did to their home land.
It was more that the men tried to prevent, albeit in a terrible way, the gruesome fate the women were facing…
Of course propaganda magnified everything, but not everything was a lie
Just to be clear – as I understood it the thread began about last-ditch defence by non-military age German males in April/May 1945. The OP didn’t actually clarify whether he intended to make a vignette based on the photo, I guess a couple of us just assumed he was considering it. Rightly or wrongly.
And the discussion morphed into prevailing conditions at that time, specifically the potential fate of civilians confronted by the Red Army. It was possibly the only time Nazi propaganda was actually accurate – mass rapes & summary executions ensued. In that context the attic clip I mentioned was a tragic example of the effectiveness of Nazi propaganda – 12 years of lies, and a few months of truth.
