Polish flag over the Reichstag first?

Poles, Poles.....;) You are still the same....vainly proud....So, it were Poles who won the war, isnt it?

Thats where your wrong.

We lost the war, but that isn't the point.


I already said if you didn't know there were Poles fighting on the Russian side! I assumed the people who were interested in this topic already knew that.


The Polish flag over the Brandenburg Gate has been confirmed, there's even a picture of a Polish soldier fighting in the gate, and yes a POLISH soldier, you could tell by his uniform, and that's just one example. Plus there being no records of the Polish flag over the Reichstag, does it make sense that the Soviet would try to erase that form history? I mean the man who presumably hung the flag was shot by the Soviets.

And Silesians never forget

That is correct, polish flag was hanged next to the USSR flag on the Brandenburg Gate, there's even pictures but i can't locate one now however i did manage to trace the picture that is the source of the controversy...

This picture circulated the press in the 50s as "polish soldier waving the flag over Berlin" though some claim this is a scene from the polish city of Lublin but the photo is of such quality (thats not deliberate by the way) that its impossible to say.

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  Polish flag over Berlin or Lublin?
  

I am pretty sure there most have been many Polish soldiers who took a Polish flag to Berlin with them , eager to proudly display it over the capital of the enemy that had invaded their homeland , there is photographic evidence of these flags in various places , but as yet we don,t seem to have tracked down any evidence that they managed to fly one over the Reichstag , even for a brief period before the Soviets removed it...

On the other hand , there is no proof it did not happen either , so until some hard evidence turns up it must remain one of those historical mysteries...

The Poles can be proud they took part in this battle , and certainly the Polish flag should have flown over the Reichstag , along with the Russian one...

We may never know if it did or not...???

probably not, of course if it did happen the soviets would try to erase that form history


I did manage to find two pictures

first picture in this video I believe is also with the gate
youtube.com/watch?v=sK_niVvkkbg

and this other picture took a while to find

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  Brandenburger_gate.j.jpg
  

nope,by this time completly different,the LWP were largely equipped in fully Polish style uniforms by this time,the exception being that many in Berlin were wearing british lend lease battle dress with Polish rogatewkas.


Nope,ethnic poles in the Red Army may ,nay ,will have worn standard m35 or m43 soviet uniforms but the Poles at berlin were not in the Red Army,they were under nominal Polish (communist) command in Polish units in Polish uniform ...

I have a copy of zoilnierz Polski from june 45 that has a picture artical on the LWP in Berlin,they are very clearly NOT in soviet uniform,as stated it is a mix of the very Polish style czpka rogatewka (square topped cap) long polish overcoats or pre war style 4 pocket tunics or full british battle dress with polish caps.

IMHO this story is balderdash,what is true is that the famous pictures of the first red flag being raised are faked as the first red army soldiers there were not ethnic russians but a mix of kalmucks and siberians........

an interesting addition to this is in a victory parade of Poles through berlin(yeah,stop moaning,uncle joe let your boys parade too...) the guys with the DP machine guns(the ones that look like they have an LP on them) have large Polish eagles painted on the magazines of their machine guns.

Well , i have learned something...i thought the Poles wore Russian army uniforms in the Berlin battles...

But it makes sense that if they were not part of the Red army , they would have wanted their own uniform...

Unfortunatly my copy of the origional magazine is still in storage but Im sure a good search of the net will turn something up...I did post them on a site a few years back now so will have a look see....

Id previously known about the LWPs "Polish" uniforms(ie,looking like 1939 era Polish soldiers) but the British battle dress was a surprise andthe photos were very definatly taken while the smoke was still in the air so to speak,a big group round the Brandenburg gate etc

I know all about the Poles in the British army , and of course the Royal air force , but i did not know very much about the Poles that fought with the Red army...

I assumed incorrectly that they would look just like the Russian soldiers....

At various points a lot of them would have,its hard to go in depth here because it varies from unit to unit and what time between 43 and 45 your talking about and it was often a real mix within the same unit but,suffice to say the vast majority of the troops at Berlin would have looked distinctly Polish to the trained eye,though if your a frenchman in the SS I imagine it all looked like a scary mud brown hoard.....

I remember reading a story about some French SS troopers that were captured by an American unit , led by a guy who was Polish...

The Pole asked what a Frenchman was doing in an SS uniform to which an SS trooper replied....Whats a Pole doing in an American one..?

His smart ass answer did not impress anyone..the SS guys were later shot...

Sounds like a Parisian,funny,but youd want to slap them :)
Yes,there were times when it was officially sanctioned to American units,by their HQs that they had to shoot all captured wSS men,which was a bit of a twaty thing to do because by then most were conscripts who happened to be a couple of inches taller than avarage and foundout that made them Aryan enough!!:(

Mind you the french(and to some extent the Poles too) didnt bother too much with little distinctions like whether someone was in the SS or the german postal service,countless men were shot while "trying to escape"....saying that though,Im sure had more of britain been occupied than just the channel islands Im sure "our" boys could have been just as hot headed..

Meaning that British units didn't do it?

Depends on the unit. No,there were never any official orders (as under Americans) or mass shootins as under most troops from occupied nations,but no, I certainly didnt mean no British soldier ever shot a pow, one of the D Day VC winners openly boasted of having shot unarmed germans.....the recce group at Arnhem routinly killed every german as they couldnt take them captive. But those are far different to the widespread,mass participation murders of pows some of our allies took part in.

The Waffen SS had unfortunatly for them , the same comander in chief as the guys that were staffing the concentration camps , and exterminating Jews...

They also wore the same SS emblems on their uniforms as the camp staff.... After some of the camps were liberated , not suprisingly the allied soldiers saw this SS symbol as one worn by murdering thugs , and anyone caught wearing this symbol was given harsh treatment by many allied soldiers....

Members of a Waffen SS elite Panzer divsion had little in common with the criminals running the camps , but for many soldiers it did not matter , if the SS guys were lucky they just got beaten up , but many suffered worse treatment...

Of course any SS troopers falling into the hands of The Russians were killed without hesitation , most chose to fight to the death , rather than surrender to the Russians...

Well the wSS generally had orders not to bother taking russian pows except as tongues,so the Russians simply reciprocated. Normal "rules" simply did not apply on the ost front.

The incidents of the w SS being shot on capture by western allies were generally in retaliation for specific crimes,such as the Malmady massacre in the opening stages of the Bulge. In the case of less official crimes by British troops against the w SS a lot of the time it dated back to two infamous massacres of British pows during the retreat to Dunkirk in 1940.

If you look say at the battle of Arnhem the w SS demonstrated the other side of ther proffesionalism where on the whole they stuck to the accepted rules of war even including captured Poles in this despite this being at the height of the warsaw uprising.

Also,after the camps were liberated many American commanders issued orders for all SS to be shot on sight.
Lets face it,the winners are always innocent post war.....

Well...so goes the myth but I don't buy it: Waffen SS helps a red army tanker

It was a mixed image...the german army took millions of russian POW's during the first days and weeks. They had been totally unprepared to feed all these people and only send them back, most of them landed in labor camps where most of them died.

Also the Einsatzgruppen hunting Jews and Communist who followed every army group did not helping the image.

But as I read often it had been the Soviets who started the torturing to death of german POW's, hanging their corpes onto trees to mock the enemy. Like that:

Polish soldiers murdered by soviet soldiers

Also it didn't help that Stalin never subscribed to the Geneva conventions and that the war soon became a total war.

And on the other hand I have no qualms with the "Kommissar order". These NKVD types killed much more of their own troops than the enemy...most of them complete arseholes, no soldiers.

Michael Wittmann became famous as he was asked for a wish as a reward for a special successful day on the Panzer front in Russia...he asked for the lifes of the russian whose tanks he just had destroyed. He wanted them to be brought to the lazarett.

To say generally the german soldiers generally were much worse, started it and deserved it anyhow is just another convenient after war myth.

But then...who cares...


And here too...what a big thing was made about that. Even as allied soldiers massacred german POWs since the landings.

Jochen Peiper said that the mostly very young soldiers had just come from towns totally destroyed by the fire bombings and that their hate was such that he couldn't control them.

For decades after the war it was not often heard that allied soldiers did their Malmedies too...it was of course only the Germans who got hanged for it!

War is hell and such things are part of the madness...I'm glad we got over the time where only one side is blamed for everything.

No myth BB, there was never an order but there's enough "suggestions" in official reports, SS was not big on prisoners, big on executions though.

The guy on the pic is not SS he's a Wechrmacht panzergrenadier.


And whats wrong about that? You know my opinion, every German of the WW2 era whether man, woman or a child deserved death,civilians a quick one and soldiers needed to be skinned alive, the longer they died the better.

You should be grateful Stalin didnt just decide he wants Germans extinct, any sort of mercy or understanding towards Nazi Germany and its general populace is bloody stupid.

Germany started the war with a full intent of exterminating 200 milion people, you wanted to make Warsaw and Moscow into water reservoirs after gassing/expelling their populations, sorry mate but if german soldiers were tortured i can only hope the f*ckers died a long and painfull death.


Why did he have to ask for their lives though? Sorry the odd human being among Germans circa 1936-1945 does not justify any sort of leniency.

Germans of WWII were not human beings but rabid monsters who deserved total extermination and got away with much less, they wanted to kill 200 milion people, wipe out their often millenium long heritage, they had plans to create human farms ffs!

Germans of WW2 should have been exterminated, anything less was a lucky break for them and needs to be treated as such.


Its not the war itself Germany is blamed for, if it was just war people would get over it quickly, its the idea to wipe out half of european population and degrade the survivors to the level of human farm animals that ticks people off.

Soviets might have killed slightly more people but they were nowhere near as creative and you could survive under soviet rule, under Germans you were either soap or a farm animal.

People and countries play pretend games called politics but BB lets be honest the world will never forget what Germany did or plan to do, ever, though adult people wont be stereotyping the words German = Nazi are embedded in global consciousness for good.

Jesus ... you are a simple mind! As if every German during that time was a Nazi. Only someone with no braincells at all can make statements like that. And don't try to comment, Mr. Dickwad. You've lost all credibility or the faintest notion of respect with a remark like that. I won't bother talking to a cvnt rag like you.

here here,got to agree with that. Sorry sokrates but youve just decended to the level of the worst nazi scum.


Nope,ther man is clearly wearing SS camoflague,the Heer camo for pzgs was along army patterns,totally different,and no heer units wore wSS uniforms.


BB,sorry,but look at the "soviets" in that photo again fella...there is no way those uniforms(and huge moustaches) are from ww2. Looks more like something from the civil war era.

BB,to clear up re wSS rarely taking POWs,this I believe was less idealogical than it was "practical",ie,fast moving advances etc,just like the brits charging up mount tumbledown in 82.


No,the more disturbing thing was that it was hardly a secret. Just look at the scene in the film The Longest Day(a scene based on fact) where the Ranger shoots the unarmed surrendering germans and turns to the GI beside him after and asks "what does bitte bitte mean" followed by a "joke" "look,i just washed my hands?".....scene coppied in Saving private ryan.

An old boy I know told me of the time he and his friend were ordered by their officer to "dispose" of the by then interogated russian pows they had in a shed.He told me he and his mate let the russians slip away before throwing in a couple of potatoe mashers. I asked him if this was normal practice for wSS,he told me,no,never in the 12 months he'd served had he known of pows being released or even passed back down the lines,he admited that although as a human he was glad he didnt murder that day the only reason they didnt was they figured the war was lost anyway by then and they would probably end up in the hands of the soviets any day now.(he and his unit made it west to surrender )

I believe in mass responsibility as far as nation-wide crimes, every single German initially profitted from invasion of Poland, food prices dropped by 70% because confiscation of polish harvest from people who were left to starve for example.

Germans as a nation were willing to go to war and pay the price for regaining their pride with the lives of half of Europe, for that they should have been exterminated.


Thats not relevant, the vast majority profitted (untill the bombs started falling) and just for that as well as for quiet acceptance they needed to be shot, the few innocents who'd get killed would get sorted by God afterwards.


Why? I never made it a secret that i hold a grudge towards Nazi era Germany, grudge big enough that i dont care if a random German was firebombed along with his family.

That doesnt stop me from admiring Germany as a historical entity and BB can attest to that, i enjoy their architecture, music and much of their history but if i and Uncle Joe would exchange minds my first order would be to kill every man, woman and child in Germany untill there's none left.

There's crimes big enough that they justify mass responsibility in my opinion, its by gones now of course but i will never ever have pity on german soldiers, these people enabled the spread of death and concentration camps, no pity at all.

If it was me i'd bring back the time tested polish practice of impalement or skinning alive or whatever, anyone who was serving in Wechrmaht deserved a long and painfull death by default.

Well...I can understand your grudge Sok and it would be fruitless and senseless to discuss your feelings, I accept them. After all when I see the images of Dresden or Hamburg I harbor dark thoughts myself, whatever unreasonable they might be.

I'm just glad that the victors of WWII had been more reasonable in the long run (have to thank the cold war for that one too I think). I would miss Germany and Europe needs Germany too as we can see right now again.

And after all, revenge was tried after WWI and only helped sowing something much worse...

Hmm if the Germans didn't wear Nazi marks then maybe... but... it's really a tricky question... If the Germans would "abandon" their "claims" on Poland and let her have 1939 borders then ma aybe... Still not sure when I think about all the holocaust and all... The brutal occupation... The Polish army serving the soviets wouldn't be so fast about dropping arms if they saw Germans in an "Western" ally army!


I know how you feel... But we are still Poles... We shouldn't degrade to such an level...


Can't see any army emblems on him so idk what army he is from :/
Also I guess you know that by... 1941? 1943? All tankmen had to use SS-like uniforms... Did it also apply to infantry serving in/with/close to tank divisions as support?


Indeed BB, indeed

nope,no need for markings,he's wSS,clear by the wSS specific camo.....
Again,not really true that....The german army Tankers had always worn black panzer uniforms,in a sense,the wSS tankies copied the army style.

Some pzgr units did wear a camo smock but this was in a distinctive army camo pattern. All easily researchable Im afraid.

Then why oh did I read about an Wehrmacht commander that complained about him wearing an SS like uniform? If they would been Wehrmacht first then he wouldn't have complained right? (He was an colonel btw)

Revenge works if used with excessive force, you either wipe someone out or learn to see their better half if they have one, Germans have one and its water under the bridge now.


Yes there is need for markings, the 1943 pattern uniform was worn by panzergrenadiers and SS, this guy is clearly Wechrmacht, SS always had their markings, they carried an asston of spares too.

Yeah didn't they wear soem SS symbols near their throat? at the jacket... kinda like what Polish officers used just that they didn't have SS markings of course ;)

erm,clearly not fella.what are you pratling on about? The m43 was the grey tunic and trousers worn by all heer and many wSS,not the WAFFEN SS camo smock and helmet cover clearly being worn by this WAFFEN SS man.

Being as the wSS never wore insignia on their camo,beyond in the later stages occasionally wearing lufftwaffe style rank on the sleaves,but very very rarely, Im not sure how a lack of insignia proves anything.

"They carried an asston of spares" eh? WTF,some medic(?) clearly not in the frontline(as photographers rarely get in front of soldiers in battle) ,what do you want him to be covered in. Looks to me like he's dumped his belt order in order to get to his water bottle( a real b itch to try to get off while its strapped to the bread bag).

If I really wanted to score a cheap point I could cut and paste the photo to a forum Im on and within hours have the exact pattern of wSS camo the guy is wearing,and from the tank probably also his unit......