Posts Tagged ‘Nazi Germany’
This year marks the 75th Anniversary of the beginning of the Second World War. Iconic Photos look back at how it all began — and how we covered it.
Hitler’s first appearance in Iconic Photos date from 1914, when a figure allegedly identified as Adolf Hitler was seen outside Field Marshals’ Hall listening to the announcement of the First World War. After the war, his rise in a defeated and dejected Germany was meteoric. In 1926, he became the Führer of the National Socialists; the then-37-year old was also already a millionaire, thanks to his book Mein Kampf.
His party won the plurality in the elections of 1933. On January 30th 1933 when President Paul von Hindenburg, hero of a World War, called upon Hitler, villain of another, to be German Chancellor. Less than a month later, the Reichstag burnt down in a pivotal event which paved the way for the rise of Nazi consolidation. Hitler fingered Communist agitators as arsonists; civil liberties were suspended, and countless politicians and journalists were locked up, and the communist party was outlawed. When Hitler visited Tanneberg — the site of a famous battle in which East Prussia was liberated from the Russians during the First World War by Hindenburg — later that year, the ceremony was uncomfortably patriotic and militarist. Germany rearmament began on those blood-soaked fields.
A strong re-emerging Germany was on display in pomp and splendor of Berlin Olympics in 1936. There were a few hitches for the Nazis, like Jesse Owens winning 100 m sprint and smashing Hitler’s theories of racial superiority, but the Olympics were a great success for Germany. The next year, the Fuhrer welcomed the Duke of Windsor, the ci-devant Edward VIII, to his Obersalzberg retreat.
Hitler’s plans for a Greater Germany were sown years ahead. Already in 1934, he has orchestrated the murder of Austrian dictator Engelbert Dollfuss, who was vehemently against Nazism, and set Austria on the course that would eventually led to its capitulation to his Third Reich in the Anschluss of 1938. A few months later, British Prime Minister was in Munich to sign the Anglo-German Non-Aggression Declaration. Sudetenland was transferred from Czechoslovakia to Germany in an attempt to satisfy Hitler’s desire for Lebensraum.
A little over a year later, emboldened German troops were in Warsaw, having divided Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union, and the world was in a cataclysmic world war yet again.
Yesterday I posted about Khaldei and three tableclothes-cum-flags he took from Moscow to Berlin. Here’s how they went up in Berlin:
The first flag was raised next to the Nazi Eagle at the Templehof Airport. The Eagle was dismantled at the end of the war and taken to West Point in 1960. It was quietly returned to Templehof in 1985, and has since been serving as the Berlin Airlift memorial on the airport grounds.
The second flag was hoisted next to the destroyed Quadriga on the Brandenburg Gate. The series of photos above suggest that there was some confusion as to which side of the Quadriga should the flag go. In the third picture, we see the flag already flying (on northside), and Khaldei himself poses before the Quadriga. The gate, which was badly damaged, but miraculously still standing by the end of the war, was restored by the governments of two Berlins — although at the Communists’ insistence, stood without Iron Cross and Prussian Eagle until 1991.
The raising of the third flag became the iconic image of Nazi Germany’s final defeat. Note two watches on the soldier supporting the flag-bearer. Despite being the primary scene of the Soviet airstrikes and the symbolic flag raising, the Reichstag was a mere symbol. It had remained unused since the Fire of 1933.
The photo here suggests that Meliton Kantaria and Mikhail Yegorov raised that flag. It remains a mystery whether the duo (along with a third man, Alexei Berest) were the first soldiers who raised the original flag 2 days earlier, or whether propaganda was given to them just because they were a Georgian and a Russian respectively, two of Stalin’s favored nationalities. (And as I noted yesterday, Yegorov died in 1946, from drunk-driving).