7/20: WW2 suicides

[IMG]pictures/olddead.jpg[/IMG]

Leipzig, 1945. The Allied forces are bearing down on your city and defeat is ensured. You're a German politician who supported Hitler and the war efforts. What do you do?

You gather the family 'round and commit suicide, that's what.

I can see suicide for the members of the family complicit in war crimes, but the whole family? Was the fear of stigma so great or do you suppose it was a honor hara-kiri sort of thing. So much death...

Do you notice how the window is open? I bet when the picture was taken it did not smell to good in there.

If we were to follow the vein of the past week, I could claim this is a fake by saying that nothing graphically shows that these people actually are dead.

Nazi or allied though, it would have been gruesome to watch their final moments

The smell probably wasn't too overpowering. Smell usually correlates with bloat in battlefield corpses.

Not pleasent ill agree. You shoudl have seen what they did to supporters of nazis in france after they left...No that i saw it first hand mind

Another Photo

Here's another interesting one from The Smoking Gun


(snippet from the page)

With U.S. forces closing in on Leipzig in 1945, this German general committed suicide as he grasped a portrait of Adolf Hitler (notice that Der Fuhrer's mug got perforated by the chair as the Nazi toppled to the floor).

There are worse fates than death.

It would be interesting to know where this family was located. The Russian army invading nazi Germany committed more atrocities than most occupying forces. For e.g. most females (incl children and grandmothers) were raped and beaten.
<P>US occupyping forces were considerably more civil (presumably because Germany never actually invaded the USA), but there is plenty of evidence of similar abuses.
<P>Interesting trivia: In order to exempt themselves from the Geneva Convention, the Allies defined captured Germans as "non-human". For e.g. According to eyewitness reports, thousands of German POWs were deliberately starved to death in the United States. One group of german prisoners smuggled food into the camp under the clothing of a fellow prisoner who suffered a skin disease - because the Americans wouldn't search him.
<P>
Just goes to show that there are no 'good guys', and that man's inhumanity to man is programmed behavior. Look inside yourself. Haven't you ever wanted to kill? That's an evolutionary 'feature'.

Re: There are worse fates than death.