This photo is a tough one to post. Most of the photos I own show troops in more or less peaceful situations, and one might be thinking that it wasn’t that bad after all. Then there’s this photo, which I’ve hesitated to post for a long while, but which I think is important as it shows what soldiers saw on a daily basis. The badly burned corpse of a soldier, most likely a Soviet, lies in a ditch next to a tank. There’s a drum magazine in the lower right hand corner, which might be for a Soviet PPSh-41 submachine gun. I haven’t been able to identify the tank, which would make the nationality of the dead soldier more certain. Was he one of the crew of the tank, and was the tank hit and set afire, the crewmembers desperately trying to get out, their uniforms on fire? We can only surmise that his last moments in life were horribly painful.
What about the German soldier who took the photo? What was he thinking? It’s hardly the kind of photo you put in the family album. There’s something almost casual about the photo, as if the photographer found the corpse interesting but not much more. We know that soldiers in all times have become numbed to the horrors of war, and things that we find hard to view were something they got used to. Anyway, I have a photo which is even worse, but that one won’t get posted. This photo will have to serve as a reminder that war is one of the absolutely worst things humans can experience.
World War 2 in Photos 