Vintage Military - Part 29

 WWII - Eastern Front, Germany

Last time, we saw the Eastern Front from the Russian side.  Today we'll see it from the German side.

On August 23, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union signed a secret non-aggression pact that divided up Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence.  Days later, on Sept. 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, starting World War II in Europe, and two weeks later, the Soviets invaded Poland from the east, dividing up Poland as per the secret agreement.

But Hitler was not satisfied with half of Poland.  On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany began Operation Barbarossa, invading Soviet territory.  The first Soviet region conquered was the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, now known as Belarus.  Above, German soldiers washing in a river in Belarus in June, 1941 soon after the invasion started.

These are soldiers of the Wehrmacht (the German military) on their way to a delousing tent in Belarus in 1941.  Lice were a problem for soldiers under crowded and unsanitary conditions, so soldiers' clothes had to be steam-treated to kill the lice while the soldiers showered and were sometimes treated with chemicals such as creosote and pyrethrins.

A Wehrmacht soldier leaving the delousing tent.  During World War II, the U.S. developed DDT, and by the end of the war the U.S. was using DDT to kill lice and mosquitoes, for which it was marvelously effective.  Only decades later was it shown that DDT was also toxic to birds, fish, and other wildlife.

These are Russian prisoners of war in Germany being deloused in August, 1941.  Although delousing seems like humane treatment, Germany eventually starved or worked to death 3.3 million Russian prisoners of war.

This clip from a German newsreel in August, 1941 shows German soldiers bathing, naked of course, on the Eastern front.

After capturing Belarus, the German army moved into Russia.  Above, German soldiers sunbathing in 1941 near Smolensk, Russia, which is about halfway to Moscow.

Russian resistance was easily overcome.  This 1941 photo shows German soldiers on a captured Soviet KV-1 tank.  The description didn't say why the soldiers were naked.

Poland and Russia were not the only countries in the East invaded by the Germans.  Nazi forces captured all of Eastern Europe.  This short clip shows Wehrmacht soldiers drying off, probably after swimming, in Romania in 1942.

And this photo of a German soldier scrubbing his buddy's back is only identified as being somewhere on the Eastern Front in 1942.

This German newsreel clip shows soldiers stripping and bathing in a river on the Eastern Front in September, 1942.

This photo shows German soldiers in a sauna somewhere on the Eastern Front.

And this German newsreel clip shows German soldiers on the Eastern Front entering a sauna, then running out of it, naked, into a stream.

We end with some Wehrmacht soldiers bathing in a stream in Volkhov, Russia, outside of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg).  The photo is undated and could have been taken at any time during the siege of Leningrad, which lasted from Sept. 1941 to Jan. 1944.

The German advance into Russia stalled in 1943, after which Soviet forces of six million men drove the Germans westward back into Germany, eventually meeting American forces moving eastward from France and culminating in the defeat of Nazi Germany in May, 1945.