Interesting photos of the Soviet Union under occupation

On this forum I occasionally check, there's a thread which contains a number of photos from the occupied Soviet Union and I thought I'd share it here incase anyone else was interested (you don't need to be a member, etc)

I don't really know a lot about the forum, but I'm pretty sure it's legit and that I won't be breaking any rules here by linking to it.

Well anyway the thread can be seen here

There's some interesting photos and also some bizarre ones of kids smoking and drinking.

I've used Axis History Forum to look things up before. They usually have interesting material posted on there, and as far as I can tell, it's a legit source that attracts people with real interest in history, with decent discussions most of the time. They also monitor pretty closely for pro-fascist materials.

Interesting photos, and the Germans giving the kids cigarettes and alcohol is pretty weird. I also thought it was funny that there was one picture where a German soldier let a kid drive a car...

Quite a few photos, as pointed out by the users on the site, definitely appear to have been staged or taken by soldiers who were on decent terms with the people whose homes they billeted in. These of course cannot be a full reflection of what the occupation was like, but they are quite different from what I expected nevertheless.

Oh another thing I remember being taught was that German soldiers loved taking pictures of "exotic" areas with plenty of "backwards Slavic peasants." Whether it was because it was "exotic" or they just enjoyed having memento to remind themselves of how "inferior" and for propaganda use back home is another story. It did bug me that a couple of users on there were being condescending and saying things along the lines of "Looking at how poor those Russians were now I realize how lucky I am" and from a user of Latvian ancestry:

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My family lived in Latvia that was occupied by Russia shortly before WW2 started. It is beautiful country and now looking at the pictures of Russian villages and towns I understand why my family was so afraid that our country will change and look like Russia. And this is reason why people worked so hard to preserve everything.

Maybe I'm having irrational knee-jerk reactions, but that kind of attitude just pisses me off.

Here are a bunch more pics of occupied USSR, featuring what look like a lot of smiling collaborators, including plenty of Orthodox churchmen.

Here you'll see that some stories do have a happy ending...the Red Army in Berlin!

I think some of the English Russia pictures were taken from the Axis History Forum site, and the guy who wrote the intro sounds like a revisionist.

Also, I find it funny that both are "Russia under Nazis during WW2" and "Russian Army in Berlin, Germany" when it wasn't just the Russians who were under occupation (some of those pictures were taken in Belarus, Ukraine, and elsewhere in the USSR), and it was the Soviet army, comprising of the many peoples of the USSR who took Berlin. Oh well...

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Also, I find it funny that both are "Russia under Nazis during WW2" and "Russian Army in Berlin, Germany" when it wasn't just the Russians who were under occupation (some of those pictures were taken in Belarus, Ukraine, and elsewhere in the USSR), and it was the Soviet army, comprising of the many peoples of the USSR who took Berlin. Oh well...

I understand you.Some French documentary(Apocalypse: The Second World War) insisted on using "Russia" instead of SSSR and "Russians" instead of Soviets.It's really lame,unscientific and mean towards the non-Russian victims of the GPW.

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Also, I find it funny that both are "Russia under Nazis during WW2" and "Russian Army in Berlin, Germany" when it wasn't just the Russians who were under occupation (some of those pictures were taken in Belarus, Ukraine, and elsewhere in the USSR), and it was the Soviet army, comprising of the many peoples of the USSR who took Berlin. Oh well...

That's western propaganda for you. It's easier for the Americans to portray the USSR as a kind of Russian Empire, occupying sovereign lands and succumbing other peoples, while the USSR was in fact the pinnacle of multinational states.

Wakizashi the Bolshevik wrote:

That's western propaganda for you. It's easier for the Americans to portray the USSR as a kind of Russian Empire, occupying sovereign lands and succumbing other peoples, while the USSR was in fact the pinnacle of multinational states.

I agree with this 100%