British Baby Gas Masks From World War II

These masks looks like deep-sea diving helmets but are in fact gas masks for babies, dating from World War II. In 1938, the British Government gave everyone, including babies, gas masks to protect them in case the Germans dropped poison gas bombs on Britain.

These gas masks were for children up to two years old. Parents placed their baby inside the mask so that the head was inside the steel helmet and the baby could see through the visor. Then they wrapped the canvas part around the baby’s body with the straps fastened under its bottom like a nappy, and its legs dangling free below. The canvas had a rubber coating to stop gas seeping through the material, and the straps were tied securely so that the mask was airtight.

There is would have been asbestos filter on the side of the mask, and this absorbed poisonous gases. Attached to this is a rubber tube shaped like a concertina with a handle. This was pushed back and forth to pump air into the mask. With the baby inside the mask, an adult could start to use the hand pump.

Health Visitors and Child Welfare Centres gave lessons on how to use the mask. Despite instruction courses, few parents were totally happy with encasing their child in an airtight chamber. In fact there was some question over its safety. During demonstrations there were reports that babies fell asleep and became unnaturally still inside the masks! It is likely that the pump didn’t push enough air into the mask and the babies came close to suffocating. Luckily, they were never put to the test in a real situation.

As well as the infant gas mask, there was a gas-proof pram that could be used to protect babies from poisonous gas attacks.

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As the Allies Approached Berlin, Citizens Did Their Best to Take Care of Berlin Zoo’s Animals

Opened on 1 August 1844, the Zoologischer Garten Berlin was the first zoo in Germany. The aquarium opened in 1913. The first animals were donated by Frederick William IV, King of Prussia, from the menagerie and pheasantry of the Tiergarten. The nearby U-Bahn station was opened the same year.

During World War II, the zoo area was hit by Allied bombs for the first time on 8 September 1941. Most damage was done during the bombardments on 22 and 23 November 1943. In less than 15 minutes, 30% of the zoo population was killed on the first day. On the second day the aquarium building was completely destroyed by a direct hit. Of the eight elephants only one survived, the bull Siam. 2-year-old hippo bull Knautschke was saved from the fire in his animal house. Most damage was done during the Battle of Berlin. From 22 April 1945 onwards, the zoo was under constant artillery fire of the Red Army. Heavy fighting took place on the zoo area till 30 April. Because of safety measures, some predators and other dangerous animals were killed by the zoo keepers.

By the end of the war, the zoo was fortified with the Zoo Tower, a huge flak tower that was one of the last remaining areas of Nazi German resistance against the Red Army, with its bunkers and anti-aircraft weapons defending against Allied air forces. At the entrance of the zoo, there was a small underground shelter for zoo visitors and keepers. During the battle, wounded German soldiers were taken care for here by female personnel and the wives of zookeepers. On 30 April, the zoo flak bunker surrendered.

A count on May 31, 1945, revealed only 91 of 3,715 animals had survived, including two lion cubs, two hyenas, Asian bull elephant Siam, hippo bull Knautschke, ten hamadryas baboons, a chimpanzee, and a black stork. After the battle, some animals disappeared or were eaten by Red Army soldiers. Following the zoo’s destruction, it and the associated aquarium was reconstructed on modern principles so as to display the animals in as close to their natural environment as feasible. The success in breeding animals, including some rare species, demonstrates the efficacy of these new methods.

In the middle of the hail of bombs in 1943, hippo “Knautschke” was born in Berlin Zoo and was one of only 91 zoo animals to survive the Second World War. Here he presents himself in May 1957 together with his daughter “Boulette” on the rural part of the grounds of the hippo house, which was newly opened in 1956.

Chimpanzees “Titine”, “Lore” and “Susi” were served food at the table in the 1940s.

The first zoo giraffes to reach Germany were born in the wild, captured there and transported to Europe. Giraffe “Rike”, however, was born in October 1938 in the Berlin Zoo. She stayed there until she died of lung disease in February 1957.

Shoebill stork being cared for after the bombing of the Zoo, 1943.

Siam, the elephant before the war.

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In 2015, 4 Survivors Posed With Iconic Auschwitz Photo 70 Years After the Notorious Death Camp Was Liberated

In 2015, child survivors of the holocaust who were photographed huddled together at notorious Auschwitz have been reunited 70 years after the notorious death camp was liberated. This is the moment four of the survivors pointed themselves out in the shocking photograph, that was taken by Red Army photographer Alexander Vorontsov on the day they liberated the concentration camp.

One the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on January 26, 2015, a group of survivors hold up and point to a picture of themselves, which was taken the day the camp was freed by the Soviet army.

The four – 86-year-old Gabor Hirsch of Switzerland, 80-year-old Eva Kor of Chicago, 81-year-old Paula Lebovics of Los Angeles and 79-year-old Miriam Ziegler of Toronto – were part of a historic delegation of 300 Auschwitz survivors visited Poland to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 26, 2015. An initiative of the USC Shoah Foundation finally brought them together – decades later.

For Ziegler, this was the first time back on Polish soil. “I swore I would never go back to Poland, but I feel it’s my duty now to do it,” she said during a recent interview with the Canadian Press.

During the shoot she recreated the gesture. “How come I am the only one showing my number? I don’t know what made me do it,” she tried to explain in the interview, adding that, at her then-youthful age, one army looked like any other.

In the photo, Vorontsov, who accompanied the soldiers of the Red Army when they liberated the camp on 27 January 1945, depicts 13 children – ten of whom are still alive today.

Yad Vashem had previously said that six of them live in Israel: Gabriel Neumann (fourth from the right), Bracha Katz (second from the right), Tomy Shacham (81, first from the left), Erika Dohan (84, fourth from the left), Shmuel Schelach (third from the right), and Marta Wise (80, seventh from the left).

“That I survived and my sister survived is beyond me,” told Wise in an interview with the Associated Press. Wise, who was a 10-year-old Slovakian Jew and weighed just 17 kilograms (37 pounds) when the camp was liberated, is now 80 and lives in Jerusalem. “I’ve never been able to work it out. To me, as far as I am concerned, the 27th of January is my second birthday... because that’s when we got another lease on life.”

The survivors – From left: 81-year-old Paula Lebovics, 79-year-old Miriam Ziegler, 85-year-old Gabor Hirsch and 80-year-old Eva Kor pose with the original image of them as children taken at Auschwitz at the time of its liberation on January 26, 2015 in Krakow, Poland.

Gabor Hirsch

Paula Lebovics

Miriam Ziegler

Eva Kor

(Photos: Getty Images)

30 Incredible Vintage Photos of Warsaw Uprising Have Been Brought to Life After Colorized

The intricate process of coloring black and white photographs has been carried out by Mikołaj Kaczmarek. The photographs presented here come from collections of, among others, the Warsaw Rising Museum, the Polish Press Agency, the KARTA Center as well as private collections. They are part of an exhibition prepared by the IPN’s National Education Office entitled “Warsaw Uprising 1944. Battle for Poland”.

Artist Mikołaj Kaczmarek from Gostyń, Wielkopolska, has spent years painstakingly recreating some of the key moments of the Uprising. Now the breath-taking colorized images have earned his Facebook page, Mikołaj Kaczmarek – Kolor Historii, over 54K followers, who are drawn by the shocking immediacy that color brings to people and scenes that have been known only in black and white.

However, Kaczmarek admitted that his interest in history came as a surprise to him. “I was never particularly interested in history. In fact I nearly didn’t complete the year on two occasions.”

Kaczmarek first became interested in photo colorization when he saw the film Warsaw Rising, which told the story of the battle using colorized footage. “The film made a huge impact on me,” he told The First News. “They lived in a time of apocalypse and whether they wanted to or not they had to fight and they often died. The colorization made me realize that they were people just like us, they just happened to live at that time.”

“The first photo I tried was the girl next to a grave. When I finished, I was in shock – the past just came right out at me. You might see an image of a pretty girl that looks like it was taken a week ago, but she fought in the war and died,” he added.

The Warsaw uprising began on August 1, 1944 at 5 p.m. That moment is now named in the Polish history as “Godzina W” (the W hour) with W standing for Warsaw.

Approximately 45,000 members of the AK under commandment of general Antoni Chruściel “Monter” joined the combat. They were supported by 2,500 soldiers from other resistance movements, such as the National Armed Forces (Narodowe Siły Zbrojne, NSZ) and the communist People's Army (Armia Ludowa, AL). Only a quarter of the partisans had access to weapons, fighting against 25,000 German soldiers equipped with artillery, tanks, and air forces.

Within the first few days of the uprising, Polish forces took over several districts of Warsaw, including downtown and the Old Town. After the initial success of the AK, German troops gradually recaptured the city. They surrounded the Old Town and other areas. On September 2, after more than two weeks of combat, the last Polish soldiers left the Old Town through the sewers. Warsaw’s historical district was turned into ruins. In mid-September, the Red Army took Praga, the district of Warsaw on the east bank of the Vistula River, but did not cross the river to intervene.

Towards the end of September 1944, German forces took control over further parts of Warsaw, systematically destroying most of the city to the ground. On October 2, 1944, the uprising ended. The number of victims exceeded 180,000 people. More than 11,000 AK soldiers were captured as prisoners of war, including “Bór” and “Monter.” Soviet troops resumed their offensive much later, liberating devastated Warsaw on January 17, 1945.

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Rare Photographs Reveal British Soldiers Manning Anti-Aircraft Guns in Full Drag in World War II

This set of photographs, taken by John Topham while working in RAF intelligence, was censored by the British Ministry of Information when they were taken during the Second World War. The images were captured during a visit to the base of the Royal Artillery Coastal Defence Battery at Shornemead Fort, near Gravesend, in Kent.

Taken in 1940, these pictures show the gunners going about their business in dresses, complete with their usual helmets. Others show the men applying makeup to each other, running up steps as their dresses blow in the wind and showing off their undergarments on stage. The troops had been rehearsing in drag for one of the shows they often staged to keep themselves entertained.

However during one of Topham’s visits, the men were called to attention in order to deal with the approach of Luftwaffe bombers, going over the Channel to southern England. As there was no time to change back into their uniforms they had no choice but to return to their battle stations still dressed in drag.

After the war, Topham revealed that the Ministry of Information was concerned that these specific pictures could undermine morale. It was feared that it would give the impression that British troops were not quite as masculine as the public believed. There may have also been concern that Nazi propaganda chiefs would use the images of the troops in drag shooting anti-aircraft guns to ridicule Allies.

(Photos: TopFoto)

Shocking Photos of Germans Cutting Jews’ Beards in an Effort to Dehumanize and Psychologically Destabilize Their ‘Enemies’

Male Orthodox Jews considered their beards and sidekicks an important aspect of their religious identity. Shaving these off not only took away their ‘identity’ and served as a source of great embarrassment, but their hairless faces and shaved heads (the latter also true of women) made them look other-worldly and less human. This dehumanization made it easier for the ‘civilized’ German soldier to perceive of the Jew as an untermensch, some lower form of human, or even as non-human, ripe for isolation and/or extermination.

Most of the 1.5 million German soldiers who participated in the attack on Poland had been socialized in the Nazi state and had also undergone ideological indoctrination in the party’s mass organizations. In late 1939, 31 percent of the solders in an average German infantry division were members of a Nazi organization. One-fifth were former Hitler Youth members, between one-third and one-half had served in the Reich Labor Service (Reichsarbeitsdienst or RAD), and all had done at least one year of military training. Members of the SS and the police, most of whom had an affinity for Nazi doctrine anyway, underwent special ideological training. Propaganda and indoctrination were used to strengthen and radicalize the already widespread resentment of Poles and Jews in German society.

After the German invasion of Poland, aggressive anti-Semitism found release in “lightning pogroms” (Blitzpogrome), during which so-called Eastern Jews (Ostjuden), in particular, were humiliated, abused, and also murdered. In addition to subjecting these Jews to drills and forced labor, the regime’s henchmen often mocked them by cutting or burning off their beards – a practice that was later continued during the military campaign against the Soviet Union.

After WW II, the French were known to have shaved the heads of women who collaborated/ fraternized with the Germans.

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Three Boys Behind Barbed Wire, 1944

This photo is called “Three Boys Behind Barbed Wire”, taken by Toyo Miyatake in 1944. As a professional photographer and a Japanese-America, Miyatake snuck film into the internment camp Manzanar and built a camera out of scrap wood, since cameras were strictly forbidden inside the camps.

(Photo by Toyo Miyatake, courtesy Toyo Miyatake Studio)

The photo shows three young boys standing at a barbed wire fence with a large watch tower in the background. There is much symbolism in this one photo alone. For example, Miyatake purposely chose young boys rather than older boys or adults to pose for this photo. The reason for choosing younger subjects helps to convey their innocence. Miyatake also made a point to place the tower in the background of the photo. The watch tower is massive and looming over the camp, in contrast with the small stature of the young children.

Toyo Miyatake was a man who migrated from Japan to Los Angeles when he was 13 to join his father. At only 27, he bought a photography studio and began receiving awards for his work. When WWII started he was interned and smuggled a camera lens into the camp and made a camera body from wood. He spent 9 months secretly photographing the true plight of the Japanese Internee. When he was first found out he had his camera taken away, but they slowly allowed him to photograph again, first with a WRA “assistant.” He made over 1000 exposures during his time there and was celebrated upon his release.

Japanese internment camps were established during World War II by President Franklin Roosevelt through his Executive Order 9066, which affected the lives about 117,000 people—the majority of whom were American citizens. From 1942 to 1945, it was the policy of the U.S. government that people of Japanese descent would be interred in isolated camps. Enacted in reaction to Pearl Harbor and the ensuing war, the Japanese internment camps are now considered one of the most atrocious violations of American civil rights in the 20th century.

During World War II, Lots of Americans Ate Horse

Eating a horse was considered less disturbing during the Second World War when beef was rationed. As rationing made it more difficult for families to find beef, American butchers across the country sold horse meat, and consumers literally ate it up.

Republican leaders, eager to use the new equine diet to embarrass President Truman, took to derogatively calling him “Horsemeat Harry.” As this 1942 Pittsburgh Press article suggests, Philadelphians were denied the pleasure of eating horse due to a state law. At roughly half the cost of beef, horse was served as a protein supplement until well after the war in some places, though. Time reported that during the inflationary years of the early 1970s, a butcher shop in Connecticut was wholesaling about 6,000 pounds of horse meat every day.

Horse meat is not only high in protein, but a good cut has about half the fat, less cholesterol and twice as much iron and Vitamin B as beef. It also contains fewer calories, and a significantly higher omega-3 fatty acid concentration (that’s the good fat)—with 360 mg per 100 grams serving, compared to just 21 mg in a beef steak.

Slaughtering horses for human consumption was illegal until 2011, when President Obama signed a bill lifting a five-year ban that had kept federal inspectors out of slaughterhouses. According to David Duquette, president of the United Horsemen, which lobbied for lifting the prohibition, prior to the ban, meat (most all of it for export) made up 80 percent of the more than $100 billion a year horse-processing industry.

Until 2007, only three horse meat slaughterhouses still existed in the United States for export to foreign markets, but they were closed by court orders resulting from the upholding of aforementioned Illinois and Texas statutes banning horse slaughter and the sale of horse meat.

Butchers cutting up horses for use as meat, 1943.

Butchers cutting up horses for use as meat, 1943.

Butcher carving hunk of horse meat, 1943.

Horses standing in corral prior to slaughter, 1943.

Photograph depicting the sale and consumption of horse meat during WWII.

Signs advertising horse meat (“NOT RATIONED”) outside a Seattle butcher shop sometime during WWII.

This butcher shop at 1417 Gratiot in the 1940s - when meat was rationed during World War II - was the first horse meat market in Detroit.

Historic Photos of Jewish Removal to an Open-Air Ghetto in Poland in 1940

Historian Julia Werner discovered this set of photos in the Jewish Museum in Rendsburg, Germany, and they constitute one of the only visual records we have of the construction of an open-air ghetto. Taken on June 16, 1940, by German soldier Wilhelm Hansen, the photographs track the forced movement of the Jewish population of Kutno, Poland, from their homes to the grounds of an abandoned sugar factory, where they were ordered to set up camp.

When Hansen took these photos, he was a soldier in the Wehrmacht; a year later, he applied for, and was accepted to, membership in the Nazi Party. A longtime amateur photographer, Hansen appears to have made this photographic record for his own purposes, rather than in an official capacity. “Hansen basically spent all day documenting the forced move,” Werner writes. “From these photos, we can infer that Hansen moved around freely and did not try to hide his camera.”

After WWII, Hansen discovered super-8-film cameras and started to document the local life around Schleswig, gatherings of the local rifle associations, goat breeders, etc. It is unclear and impossible to reconstruct what his motivations were. What we know for a fact is that he didn’t do much with his filmic and photographic material; he archived it and kept it mostly to himself. It is only due to a fortunate coincidence that we have access to these photos today. Jan Fischer, an archeologist and collector who was dealing with Hansen’s sisters house and her belongings after her death, came across his photographic collection and identified their value.

Today you can find about 800 of Hansen’s photographs from the Warthegau in the archive of the Jewish Museum in Rendsburg.

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Love During WWII: 30 Cool Pics of a Couple of Lovers in the 1940s

A set of cool pics from Daniel Schmid that captured portraits of his grandparents Gene and Maxine Schmidt during WWII when they were in love.

“My Grandma in Oakland, she was probably no more than 22 here. My Grandparents met during the War and fell in love, and wrote over 3,000 letters.”

Grandma Maxine Schmidt & car

Grandma & dog

Grandma fur coat

Grandma fur coat

Grandma Maxine on fence, Oakland

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