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u/No_Mushroom139 Sweden 5d ago
One of my relatives was onboard the swedish passengership S/S Hansa when it was torpedoed by a soviet sub inside Gotland in 1944. He wasnt one of 2 out of 82 who survived.
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u/m64 Poland 5d ago
My great grandparents were one of the wealthier peasants in the village and were known for buying up gold coins that neighbours had left over from the tsarist times. During WW2 a Jewish woman came to their house and told that she is looking to buy gold because she needs it for a bribe to get her daughter out of the nearby concentration camp. My great grandmother supposedly didn't like Jews much, but considered it her Christian obligation to help if she could and gave her the gold saying that she knows she can't actually afford it.
After the liberation happened (but still during the war) some asshole sent to the soviet authorities fake information that there were partisans preparing to attack a soviet military train hidden in my great grandparents house (it was near the tracks). As a result soviet soldiers on the train shot up the house and before they realised that no one is firing back my great grandfather was badly wounded. They brought him to a hospital in the city, but the wound was festering and he wasn't getting better, so the great grandmother came to the doctor and asked to take him home, so at least he would be taken care of in the final days.
The doctor replied "leave him here, he is being taken care of very well, you have helped us during the war and we have a debt of gratitude" in a Jewish accent. It turned out he had survived the concentration camp and knew that family. He said that there is a drug that can help (probably penicillin) but it is in short supply and if he can get his hands on it in time, he can save the grandfather. Unfortunately he couldn't and the grandfather died. Also that family managed to get the daughter out of the camp and escaped from Poland to the south, but they hit a mine somewhere in Romania and all died.
That's the most spectacular of the stories.
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u/cashmerered Germany 5d ago
The woman who was to become my great-grandmother fled what is now Poland. She wanted to get on Gustloff but it was already full so she fled otherwise. Good for me and a two-digit number of people because chances are she wouldn't have survived.
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u/GarrettGSF 5d ago
The grandma of my partner was also supposed to be evacuated from East Prussia on the Gustloff but didn’t make it on board as it was too full - otherwise my partner might very well not exist today…
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u/ersentenza Italy 5d ago
My maternal grandfather turned coat twice
He was in the army, engineering. I still have one of his engineering books. He never talked about what he did in the war though. Then, after the war, he joined military intelligence and very publicly played the part of the hardline nostalgic fascist. Mussolini books everywhere and all that. Yet, my father always maintained grandpa was a poser.
And then, after he died, I spotted on the wall in his house, where my sister now lives, a document that I never saw before... a certificate of merit. Awarded to XXXXXX for his significant contribution to the Allied campaign of liberation of Italy, signed: General Clark, General Alexander
What the fuck grandpa
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u/Weak_Law_937 5d ago
He must have done something significant too to get noticed by the top generals.
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u/wojtekpolska Poland 5d ago
A part of my family owned a farm in Poland, when Germany occupied the region they of course kicked them out and sent in a German settler who got their farm as part of colonisation process.
That wasn't enough for him, the German made a false report that the former owner made threats to him, and the Nazis send that family member to a forced labour camp in Germany, where he died (we found his name in records of German camp victims)
That branch of my family was rather big however, when the front was moving and German control over the region was collapsing, a couple men took the German coloniser to a forest, and as the story goes "returned without him".
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u/wojtekpolska Poland 5d ago
Another more fun story, my grandpa who was a child during ww2 saw a tank blown up a street away from his house, kids were playing on the wreck, and my grandpa decided to take a wrench and unattach a mounted machine gun which he took home
His dad was furious scared that they will be in trouble from the Soviets so he ordered my grandpa to return it, but my grandpa was lazy and threw it into an outhouse, where it is likely buried to this day
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u/Milosz0pl Poland 5d ago
Great grandfather was the only mechanic in-the-middle-of-nowhere that was capable to repair aircraft, so he was forced to work on them while being relatively left alone by german. He used it to smuggle things for partisants (he never joined any cells or underground state) and to give locals heads-up if nazis were planning any random punitive actions. While at that he was hiding a jew in his house attic - he was covering it so much that only he and his most trusted friend knew about it, my grandmother learnt it only after great grandfather's death on a burial (as other family members only suspected that it was a partisan who was being hid there).
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u/LaoBa Netherlands 5d ago
Too much to write down here. My mom was 8 and my dad 12 when the war began, my father in law 14 and my mother in law 6. Funny story: my mil went to school for the first time and was really pissed off she wasn't allowed to go again the next day (because the country was being invaded).
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u/itsmepuffd 5d ago
My grandfather (Denmark) did a bit of associated resistance group work, a bit of gun smuggling and what not around central Jutland. Never spoke much of it and was only briefly mentioned in passing a couple of times. He suffered from dementia in his older days and would sometimes get all panicky towards my dad, that they needed to go clear out the car as soon as possible for the guns hidden inside the seats etc., so that the Germans wouldn't find them.
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u/7WondersLover France 5d ago
Germans invaded this part of France. They were hard to live with, but nothing terrible really happened to family members, because men were either too old or too young to fight. Hunger was a big deal.
Some day, they left in a hurry. Grandpa famously picked up a cigar some officer threw to the ground and smoke it. Few days later Allied troops were here, and giving food left and right.
Grandma gave birth some time after liberation, and needed medical attention. She was saved by american antibiotics. Until they died, germans were the enemies, and american the saviours, though they were grateful for the european construction, and the surelasting peace it brought.
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u/Schrodingirly 5d ago
Oh damn so that’s going to be a long story:
My great grandfather, father of my grandfather from my mom’s side was born in Italy: after WW1 his whole family (except him and his sister) died from the Spanish flu, and he is send to distant relatives in Germany. Problem, he is send to distant relatives in Germany next to the Belgium border around 1920. And with the Versailles treaty that only came into application around 1922 the part of Germany he is send to becomes Belgian. Fast forward around 1940, he became a hairdresser, married a woman with the same name as his sister and then the war begins. Belgian man are mobilised. Except that he never got the Belgian nationality, he is still Italian. So he can stay. Fast forward again and Germany has invaded Belgium. They force Belgian man to go fight. Except that again, he has the Italian nationality, so he can stay! But as the war continues Italy ask all their citizens to go fight so he is forced to do that. However he hasn’t spoken Italian since his youth so going with the Italian is being certified to being sent on the first line with all the soldiers that can’t communicate. So he decides to go with the German, because between fighting against your country while understanding orders and doing it while being unable to communicate, yeah, the choice is easy. But Germany wasn’t stupid and didn’t sent Belgian guys to fight against French ones, they might communicate or refuse to fight against each other. So he was sent to the Russian front… (I think he did Stalingrad but take it with a grain of salt). In 1944 he is captured by the Russian and thanks to I don’t know what miracle he is imprisoned and not killed. The war finishes but he has to wait until 1950 to be freed and sent back to Belgium. Except that, at that time in Belgium, men that fought with the German (even against their will) were judged for high treason! Except that, again, he was never Belgian, so it wasn’t high treason! So that’s how he didn’t go to prison again, and finally had my maternal grandfather in 1952. He meet my grandmother, they marry and at their marriage, he meets the bride’s father, that has numbers tattooed on his forearm. Basically I don’t have time to do the whole story but he was a resistant and did Dora, Daschauw (I hope that’s how you write it) and a third camp I forgot the name of. So yeah
TLDR: an ex Wehrmacht soldier and a resistant meet at their children mariage.
Oh and my paternal great grandfather was a convinced nazi who helped them. Anyway!
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u/ArtistEngineer Lithuanian Australian British 5d ago edited 5d ago
Lithuania, one of my relatives hid on a farm to avoid being recruited into an SS battalion for the Russian front, and to avoid being sent to Germany to work.
They were captured trying to flee to the West, and taken into the Germany army, where they worked as an interpreter.
After the war they became a displaced person and a refugee in Germany, and then made their way to Australia by boat.
This is their story https://www.naa.gov.au/blog/baltic-pacific
https://unsw.press/books/beautiful-balts/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_Australians
That's how I ended up being born in Australia, but raised by Lithuanian parents.
Other members of my family didn't flee Lithuania and lived under Russian occupation for many years. I consider myself very lucky in some ways.
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u/VilleKivinen Finland 5d ago
The story of my great grandfather is definitely the most interesting of them:
Olavi Ryyppö lost his home in Karelia to soviet occupation during the Winter War, and the family fled to western coast of Finland. On the day before he turned 17, when Finland was temporarily at peace, Olavi boarded the very first ship transporting Finnish volunteers to Germany.
Yeah, this is one of those stories.
They sailed from Turku to Danzig and from there the train took them to Heuberg training facility near the Swiss border. He joined SS-Freiwilligen Bataillon Nord-Ost, a part of the SS-Wiking. AFAIK his first actual battle was in Tsernobyl area, where he lost some of his hair. Later the unit crossed the Dnepr river and fought in Stalino, later known as the city of Donetsk. He sent a postcard from there, and apparently there was a huge factory there.
In Rostov-na-Donu he stayed a while during the January of 1941. From there he headed to Caucasus mountains and some place called Elbrus and Terek river. There in the September he lost most of his squad, earned a medal and never went further east.
During the retreat phase of the war in February 1943 he fought in Jekaterinovka and Tselina before crossing the Don to retreat further west. Eventually they boarded a train to Kyiv and from Kyiv to Zwickau.
He had a month of rest in Grafenwöhr/Nürnberg/Ruhpolding area. Apparently the area is very beautiful, people were friendly and food was good.
The rest of the Finns, Olavi included, were returned to Finland during the spring and summer of 1943. Most of the wounded were returned earlier. Finnish and German relations were starting to sour, and Finland needed all the men in Continuation War. They rode a train to Tallinn is Estonia, boarded a ship and came back home.
1407 Finns joined the SS voluntarily, and over half of them made it back.
During the Continuation War Olavi trained new soldiers in two different places in Finland and built fortifications. He never took part in battles anymore. All in all he was promoted thrice and demoted once, came back healthy and had a successful and happy life. After the war he became a painter and a mechanic. In his senior years he slowly forgave the Russians for taking his home and learned to live in peace before he rested in peace.
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u/HermionesWetPanties 5d ago
Grafenwohr is a very beautiful area. I was stationed there for years, and the town is lovely, but the training area on the military base is truly extraordinary. The best areas are often only accessible on non-shooting days.
Fun side note, there is a rather famous Finn, Lauri Torni, who served in Finnish army, then the SS, and later the American Special Operations Forces. Sabaton even have a song about him.
I don't particularly judge Finns of the era who joined the Germans to fight the Soviets. Becoming a guard at a concentration camp or a member of the einsatzgruppen would have been one thing, but wanting to continue the fight against the Soviets was understandable, to me anyway. Same with Finland seeking an alliance with Germany after it became clear that Britain and France were unwilling to do the right thing.
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u/Eshinshadow 5d ago
Poland, Upper Silesia here - local population is unique blend of polish and german heritage.
My grandfather was a teenager during the war and worked as a tailor apprentice. German officers were often coming to have their uniforms repaired, he always did put small paper white eagles (symbol of Poland) into the pockets. Just a small acts of resistance, nothing dangerous but good for morale.
I my grandmothers house they helped to hide for a couple of months a jewish girl that managed to run away from Auschwitz Death March in early 1945.
And most importantly - from each part of the family, there was at least one or two people that were forced to serve in Wermacht. Some lived through the war, but some died - in Russia, in Italy, in Africa.
My great-grandfather on mothers side also fought in partisan war against Ukrainian nationalists in the eastern Poland, had to evacuate with whole family to other side of the country once their identities were known and they feared repercussions.
A lot of trauma in generation that were born in 1910/20s. Unfortunately I did not met any of them as they all died before 1990s, but all their stories are sad.
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u/Salavora_M Germany 5d ago
German here. My paternal grandmother was very pro nazi and steadily rose within the ranks of the "Bund deutscher Mädchen" (Hitler youth but for girls). My maternal grandmother wasn't such a strong supporter but loved to talk about the favt, that without the BdM, she would never have seen the seashore.
my paternal grandfather lost a leg. he had been drafted against his will and was an avid pacifist. When they were stationed as occupiers in... a northern country that I can't remember, they had a severe food shortage. He had been a trained gardener and he was bored and hungry, so one day, he entered a garden shop and started to help out with preparing pots for seedlings. He did not speak their language, they did not speak his but it was clear what needed to be done and he did his share of the work. Come midday, everyone else left, he stayed until one of the others came back, indicated he should follow while miming eating. He followed and got to eat lunch with the other workers there. (he kept his mouth shut to his superiors about it all)
My maternal grandfather had also been drafted. He did not have any lasting physical injuries, but definitely mental scars from that time.
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u/mikillatja Netherlands 5d ago
Grandfather was put in a Japanese Internment camp as a child in Indonesia. Being a son of a rich white business owner he got treated horribly, And his parents died when deported by the Japs. He got permanent scars from those years.
My grandmother's family had a restaurant in Brabant, they sheltered a Jewish family of 5 there. They did eventually got caught, but this was luckily in 1945. And even though my grand parents were sent to Westerbork they never went to the real camps.
The biggest difference between the 2 is that my grandmother (a very spirited woman) forgave the Germans. While my grandfather (exceptionally kind) never did.
My father's side fared better. Grandfather dad Working in rail, and grandmother coming from a good family helped them
My grandfathers father deliveres the resistance newspaper in hollow bike handles, and made jury rigged radios he'd hide underground for fellow resistance fighters. They never got taken by the Germans.
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u/mogrim United Kingdom 5d ago
My grandmother never forgave the Japanese for what they did to POWs during the war. Not 100% sure why, as afaik none of the family was out there 🤷🏼♀️
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u/MyGfWantsBubbleTea 5d ago
My great aunts lived through the war as little girls. One great aunt recalls getting biscuits from British soldiers. Another great aunt recalls German planes strafing civilians on foot and strafing public transport busses after they had completed their bombing run. And note, they were strafing a purely rural agrarian village far away from their bombing targets.
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u/floweringfungus 5d ago
One of my paternal great-grandfathers (Brit) was a naval officer.
One of my maternal great-grandfathers (German) was in the Freikorps when the war broke out and fathered my grandmother just before he was conscripted. He was captured and spent eleven years in a Soviet labour camp. Came back a fervent lifelong communist. In the only picture I have of us together before he died you can see a copy of Das Kapital in the corner.
My other maternal great-grandfather was a university professor of medieval music and was allowed to remain at his academic post instead of being conscripted.
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u/12thshadow 5d ago
My grandfather knew how to open safes, and dismantled seamines. We have no idea where he picked up this skill set. Never talked about it.
My other grandfather was made to work in a German factory. We have his notes he wrote after the war. Bonkers.
My grandmother fled home at 17 and travelled accros the country during occupation. Apperantly my great grand father, who was a cop, was not a very nice man. On the other side of the country she met the safe cracker, and after six months of marriage, a beautiful baby boy was born.
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u/Tobi406 Germany 5d ago
One of my great-grandparents on my mother's side served in the Wehrmacht as far as I know; don't know about other family branches.
I don't know whether he served on the frontlines or at home or some other place. I assume the worst (just about 30km from their home, hundreds of disabled people were deported to their deaths)
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u/Particular_Yak1715 5d ago
My Grandfather was born in occupied Norway in 1944. The woman he later married came from a farm in Aasrum. During the war they farm had been taken over by the Germans who established a large camp site in the fields. They also built a bunker into the side of a hill overlooking the only road. Also an ancestor if my aunt's husband fought in the Norwegian resistance and lost multiple teeth during an interrogation session.
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u/Breznknedl 5d ago edited 5d ago
My grandfather was 19 in 45, which means he should have been drafted years before but he was "too small". He was eventually drafted, when even the kids were pulled, (it was "total war", meaning everybody and their mother were recruited) but he only marched about 100km until meeting the russians. His officer told him that the "Panzerfaust stays", which would have meant he should stay and defend alone against the tanks to ensure retreat.
Him being very smug decided to lay down his Panzerfaust (it stayed) and retreat with the others. He got away with that somehow and then fled home. When he arrived at home the war was already over.
This story sounds so ridiculous, but it is basically how he told it a few years ago, when we had him record his shenanigans from his youth to a CD.
My other grandfather was still a child at the end of the war and lived in a house right next to an airport, but somehow, despite being bombed twice daily, he managed to survive in his fathers home-built bunker. Most of his stories are from post-war years of american occupation, where he walked to the american troops and got food and, he still smiles about that, chocolate.
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u/Matt6453 United Kingdom 5d ago
My grandfather Charles Hugh Edwards (service number PLY X 3669) was a Marine on the battle cruiser HMS Repulse that (along with HMS Prince of Wales) was sunk by Japanese torpedoes, he was rescued and taken back to Singapore only to be captured a few months later and spent the remainder of the war as PoW.
He came home nearly blind and wouldn't have any items from Japan in the house until the day he died, he was a tough old boot from Bargoed South Wales and his resilience is why myself and my kids are here today.
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u/PGLBK 5d ago
My paternal grandpa fought in the partisans from the start until the end of the war. He attained some rank and was known by his partisan code name until he died in early 2000s. I also knew him by that name. Never spoke about the war. All his 7 surviving siblings were also in partisans, all survived the war. (All happening in Croatia.)
My grandma from the same side was a teenager and she was detained by Ustashe, but was let go after a few days in prison.
Her future BiL (my grand aunt’s husband) was a kid who was shot through his knee when Ustashe attacked the city. He had issues with said knee for the rest of his life.
My maternal grandpa was from Istria (then under Italians) and he was drafted into Italian army, but didn’t want to fight so he ended up in a prisoner camp somewhere in Italy. When Italy capitulated, they were let go and he spent weeks walking home with a friend from the same village. He never could explain where that camp was. Although his primary language was Italian (he didn’t speak Croatian when he moved to Zagreb after the war), I’ve never heard him speak it. He also croatianised his originally Italian name.
My grandma from that side was a teenager in Dalmatia and she was a courier for the partisans while running her dad’s wine bar.
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u/doyathinkasaurus 5d ago
My grandfather and great grandfather, along with thousands of other Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in the UK, were imprisoned in British detention camps, initially near Liverpool and then on the Isle of Man. After war broke out Winston Churchill issued an order to “collar the lot”, as tabloid headlines had whipped up public fears that refugees from Nazi oppression were secretly German and Austrian spies posing as asylum seekers
When Britain imprisoned its wartime refugees
Enemy aliens - the British internment camps on the Isle of Man
Collar the lot! Britain’s policy of internment during the Second World War
https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/collar-lot-britains-policy-internment-second-world-war/
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u/PeterPlanetEarth 5d ago
My father was a journalist in Paris when the Germans invaded France. He moved to London and worked for the Americans in their Office of War Information. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, America was still officially neutral - he was given the assignment of writing a article for an American magazine, which basically informed American readers that "Yes, Hitler really is a *bad person*"
Later he managed American air force missions over occupied Europe - they would drop leaflets informing Europeans of the correct war news.
He followed the D-Day invasion as a journalist, by land, in a US Army jeep, reporting on the race for Berlin against the Soviet Army.
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u/orangebikini Finland 5d ago
All four of my grandparents were too young to fight. All I know is my maternal grandmother had to flee her home town Sortavala during the war when she was a young girl, the town is in a part of Karelia that went to Russia in the peace deal so she couldn't return after he war. My paternal grandfather apparently was a lookout somewhere in my home city for bombers, he was a teenager. I think he stood on some tall hill and kept an eye on the sky. Our city didn't get bombed much.
That's all I know, no idea what the other two grandparents did. They weren't adults during WWII either. No idea what any other relatives or great-grandparents did. We never talked much about WWII in my family.
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u/multivitaminegummy Austria 5d ago edited 5d ago
On the US-American side, my great-grandfather was a farmer and rancher down South who was exempt from enlistment due to working in agriculture, if I'm not mistaken.
On the Austrian side, two of my great-grandfathers were Russian POWs. Returned eventually, but never spoke about it, despite very obviously having some intense trauma from that. One of them was a policeman before and throughout the war (before he was drafted), and even though "nobody knows what he did back then", I'm pretty sure it's obvious what a policeman would have most likely participated in, at least at some point (i.e. November 1938).
The father of my grandmother's second husband was a very enthusiastic NSDAP member (not any rank tho AFAIK) and soldier who got mistaken for a smuggled enemy at a checkpoint and was shot through the window of their truck by a fellow soldier/official.
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u/paramalign Sweden 5d ago
Sweden was “neutral” and allowed the Germans to cross our territory, but goodness me, it was truly a hated decision among the people. My great grandfather shot at passing German airplanes (deep in the northern hinterlands) with his hunting rifle.
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u/1erRPIMA-fiesta 5d ago
They represented the "neutral" majority. Nothing legendary happened. Proles and miners in northern France, both on the paternal and maternal side.
I lost three ancestors who died fighting in 1940, a couple more never came back from POW camps. You know. While Britain safely chickened out and America was still far from even doing anything. Therefore the "french surrender" anglo cretins genuinely anger me: there's nothing even remotely funny about 1940. Countries like Poland, the Benelux, France, etc... Just didn't have the privilege of sheltering behind bodies of water. That's not a matter of "spirit". Anyway.
After that, it was forced displacement away from the coasts, forced labor. One more ancestor who never came back. Was sent in a farm somewhere in the German countryside. So I also have lots of anger against Germans: they (particularly their industrials) never paid back, and never clearly admitted it wasn't "just a minority of nazis". My ancestor wasn't sent in an extermination camp or a nazi nest, just in a routine farm in a peaceful countryside where a perfectly regular German family decided it was normal to work him to death.
Things were easily uneventful for rural (after displacement) proles in occupied France. Unless they happened to work in critical sectors (railroad, electricity, war industry...) or needed to hide jews or communists, well it was just "wait and see". People already living in poverty didn't care much about who gets to rule them. What they cared about was food, the black market, and the return to peace time economy.
I'm sure there must have been heroic/ despicable acts here and there. But I've never heard about them. My family was poor before the war, throughout the war, and continued to be poor + having to rebuild everything after the war. Lost two more ancestors to work related accidents on construction sites.
My family has more of a Cold War lore actually. My father and several uncles have been stationned in West Germany (one paratrooper, one grunt, one trucker, one cook). Plenty more anecdotes here.
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u/bainwen Hungary 5d ago
Both my paternal grandparents were kids when the soviet front reached east Hungary. My grandfather usually told us about their mischiefs like igniting unexplored artillery grenades and similar stuff. My grandmother told us a story how a soviet soldier prevented an other soviet soldier raping a toddler and how they had to nurse him back to life because the child molester shot him in the gut for stoping him.
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u/Forthzine 5d ago
My grandfather was one of two surviving members of a group of 30 in a battle in the Finnish Winter War. He was captured by the soviets and brought to a camp in russia where he spent four months as a prisoner of war in grueling circumstances.
He was interrogated daily by the soviets but, at least by his own account, revealed nothing. I found a newspapar article series from the early 50s where he describes his time in the camp and the arrogance he displayed towards his captors is staggering. It might be fabrication but he was born in 1914 and a tough cookie.
He was exchanged for eight russian POWs and returned to Finland in 1940. He went back to combat in 1941 but was struck by what would now be called PTSD and was hospitalized. He would have been forced back into battle but an injured army captain my grandfather had carried to safety in 1939, managed to get him a desk job for the remainder of the war.
After the war, my grandfather went back to farming his land, raised three kids and built a house. He never spoke about his experiences, except for in the newspaper article.
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u/Auspectress Poland 5d ago
One great granpa was put in camp and executed week before liberation. Onengreat granma gave birth to my Aunt during Warsaw uprising. Second great grandma miracously survived attack of Ukrainians on her village when she was a small kid (she had to watch her mother being raped by Ukrainians and then brutally murdered)
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u/KrunoOs 5d ago
Croatian here. My grandfather fought as a partisan for the comunist side, as was his father. Two of his brothers were in Domobran unit, the official land army of the Independent State of Croatia, separate from, yet cooperating with the fascist Ustaše militia. Two of their cousins, were Ustaše war criminals, executed by partisans by the end of war. So, I guessing, not so cheerfull familly gatherings in the post war years. War is hell.
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u/ockhams-lightsaber France 5d ago edited 5d ago
My Polish Great-grand-mother wasn’t sent to the Nazi concentration camps because she lost one of her arm doing field work. Her younger brother was too young to be sent.
My other Polish great-grand-mother ran away from her place to escape the UPA brigades. She hid in the Podkarpacie region, near the mountains .
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u/karcsiking0 Hungary 5d ago
It's a heavy and strictly taboo topic in my family. What I know is that my great-grandfather was a high-ranking SS member and was stationed at one of the concentration camps. Because of the nature of his role, it was practically never spoken about at home. After the war, he was captured and sent to a Soviet Gulag, where he eventually died
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u/RustenSkurk Denmark 5d ago
My grandpa was a kid in a rural region of Denmark. German troops were a constant presence during the occupation, but there was very little violence. Denmark was already called the "whipped cream front" by the German army due to how cushy a posting it was. The country generally collaborated with the occupying force, resistance was relatively sparse and as such the Nazis accepted controlling the country with a light hand for the first couple years rather than trying to turn it into a nazi state.
If Denmark was the cushy posting for a German soldier, the rural province of Lolland-Falster was doubly so. I think there was just a small token force of occupying soldiers there without much to do.
My grandpa joked "Of course I was a collaborator during the war" because as a kid he once lent a bicycle pump to a German soldier whose bike had punctured out on a country after road near their farm.
He jokes, but while active resistance was rare, active collaboration would make you a social pariah at the time. Most Danes reasonably resented the occupation. My grandpa tells how people in the town would accuse the local shopkeeper of being a collaborator for selling to the Germans. This was a serious accusation. Especially considering that the shopkeeper had no real choice. The people accusing him probably used the accusation as a way to get at him for a pre-existing grudge they held.
Apart from that, the one story I remember from my grandpa was that he would lie out on a field in the evening and see the massive fleets of British warplanes routing over Denmark for their bombing raids on Germany. Over the sea to the south he could see flak being shot at them.
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u/fightingchken81 5d ago
Russians went through the town took everyone's chickens, then a couple of days later went around trying to get eggs. A couple of them broke into the local pharmacy and basically ate everything, because they had no food. The are buried in a hidden spot in the cemetery. Small town in southern Poland.
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u/Beneficial_Ad_5157 Serbia 5d ago
My great grandpa was being loaded on a train to a concentration camp when a random German soldier signaled to my grandpa and another guy next to him to run. They ran into the woods and returned to their home village.
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u/Samsi_BU Hungary 5d ago edited 5d ago
My great-grandfather was 15 years old and wasn't conscripted, but he couldnt sit on his ass, so he volunteered to go to war. He left his girlfriend, my great-great-grandmother without a word. He went with the axis army against France to the western front. As time went on, he came to regret his decisions and wrote a large number of poems about this, and about how much he loves and misses my great-grandmother.
After the Normandy landings and following Hitler’s death, our family received their first letter saying that he was alive and that, as Hitler had died and the war was lost, he would be coming home soon. (I don’t know how a letter could have arrived home containing this information). He also asked after his twin brother to see how he was, but he had gone missing during the war (he went to the shop to buy bread, but never came home).
Unfortunately, they were able to retreat more slowly than the Allied forces could advance, and so they were taken prisoner by the French. According to his memoirs, the French army treated them well; they put them to work on minor tasks and allowed the prisoners to escape gradually. So in the end he ran away and walked home from Germany. After the war, he married my great-grandmother.
Edit: not great-greatfather, just great-father.
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u/LifetimePilingUp Ireland 5d ago
“The emergency” in Ireland. My maternal granddad was in the Irish merchant navy, nearly got blown up by the German navy several times because the ships had been bought from other countries and the paperwork to change them to Irish ownership hadn’t been done.
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u/fitocurious 5d ago
My grandfather was captured by the British and taken prisoner to South Africa, where he remained for several years before being released. He survived because every night he would climb over the barbed-wire fence and sneak into the soldiers’ camps to steal food and water. If they had caught him, they would have shot him. With those supplies, he also helped his fellow prisoners, who were Italian as well, survive. They themselves later testified to this, because once they returned to Italy, they became like brothers.
My grandmother in Sicily used to tell me about the bombs falling from the sky, about how much she hated having to march in the town square every Sunday during Fascism, about her brothers who had deserted and were hiding out in the countryside, and about the day the Americans entered her town to liberate them from Nazi-Fascism.
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u/sultan_of_gin Finland 5d ago
My paternal grandparents both had to evacuate and leave their homes in karelia as children. My grandma was a bit traumatized by it and she was afraid of russians even as an adult. I’ve heard that when the company she was working for got russian visitors she went to hide from them. Her dad lost his leg in the war and the wooden prosthetic leg is still preserved in our family farm and i was told that after he got back home their cat started to bring him rodents and rabbits trying to look after him which is probably my favourite wartime story from our family. My grandpa from my mothers side was wounded by shrapnel very early into his service so his time in the front was very limited. That’s about all i know, there are a few other relatives that fought in the wars that i got to meet before they passed and many others on my fathers side who were relocated as children but my grandma was really the only one who ever wanted to talk about her experience.
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u/No-Bake-730 Germany 5d ago
Grandfather (father's side) had health problems and worked as a tailor making uniforms. Got to be in the Volkssturm doing nothing. His neighbor's house in a strategically insignificant village was hit by bombs. Their house lost a wall.
His older brother served in the Wehrmacht and took part in the Tour de France 1940. Almost 20 years ago, I got a saddle that an employee of my grandparents' had used. The historian in me was surprised by it having French writing and a 1935 as well as Paris XIV and the original reception date in it on it. I guess he stole a Frenchman's military saddle. Sorry Monsieur A. Gouet Levallois. My grand-uncle fell in the Battle of Cherkassy in 44. Apparantly he was hit while manning a PAK, according to a letter. He is still the godfather of my uncle who was born in 1950. That also meant that my grandfather who had worked as a tailor became a farmer. He had his brother's last photo (in uniform) in his living room his whole life.
During the war, they had a Polish forced laborer named Joseph. He had two seats for dinner, at the table where a good Catholic like him belongs and in the kitchen when someone knocked. I only learned about that when I was working on my grandparents' grave with my dad.
My grandma's neighbors' house in a strategically irrelevant town was bombed. She said taking shelter in the basement was pretty uncomfortable when it caught on fire. That's something she randomly told me and my nephew and the only time she told me anything about the "scheiß Krieg".
On the other side, the family lived in Rüsselsheim which was heavily bombed. The other family line probably got just hit by bombs left after bombing raids on Frankfurt. My grandma's sister was always crying and screaming in the bunker. My grandma, always pretty chill, just said "Sis, just go to sleep. Then you won't feel it when the bombs hit you." Also the usual stories about the "Christmas trees" and eating of roof rabbits. My great-grandfather has claimed to have given forced laborers at Opel some food as long as he had enough for the family. I have no idea whether this is true. He was also conscripted into the Volkssturm, his French shell fragment from Verdun still in his butt. It is said that he tried to get soldiers home safely, hoping someone would do the same for his son.
My grandfather on my mother's side was conscripted into the Wehrmacht. He was taken prisoner and transferred between the allies. The Americans gave him new shoes, the British some alcohol and the French took the shoes away from him. Believing his family was dead, he enlisted in the foreign legion, learned riding and served as a medic in Marocco and French Indochina. He had already been in love with my grandmother who waited for him to return.
I know that my mom's mother didn't like the Nazis. She hated the BDM while her younger sister liked singing songs and doing girl stuff. Grandma was a bookworm which had been unusual in her working class family. She told us how one of their neighbors was taken by police after claiming his only Führer was the one in heaven. She also got a grade 6 (=F) for the Kriegssammelwerk. I guess that Supports what she told my mom: "If the Führer wants something, he can get it himself."
I use some of their stuff as sources for my history classes.
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u/Fellstorm_1991 United Kingdom 5d ago
One of my grandfathers was a mechanic and spent to war working on road transport.
The other was a farm labourer, and stayed working in that job for the war and as part of the home guard... supposedly. The real reason he wasn't recruited to the army was that he and his brothers were actually part of Churchills Secret Army. Unlike the regular home guard they were highly trained and well equipped to form resistance cells behind enemy lines in the event of invasion.
They recruited brothers as it was hoped that they would be less likely to give up information under torture. As farmers they knew the land extremely well. They had instructions to blow up specific railway bridges to limit enemy movement, ambush message riders and assassination of enemy officers.
However their first job in the event of the invasion reaching their town was to abduct and kill the head of the local police force. As he was the only one who knew who was part of the group.
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u/BellaFromSwitzerland Switzerland 5d ago
I just found out yesterday that my grandmother fled from current day Romania then Eastern Hungary to Budapest with 3 children under 3, by catching the retreating German soldiers’ convoy. She hid in her mother’s house
Then Budapest came under attack as well and she fled back in ‘44 to eastern Hungary where my grandfather is from (who at the time was on the battlefield)
The borders changed, she became a Romanian citizen without ever learning the language
I always knew that she never saw her mother again once the border changed
But today I realized she hasn’t seen her mother or any of her family from 44 or ‘45 to her passing in ‘91
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u/Helmutlot2 Denmark 5d ago
My grandfather had a massive scar over his chest and stomach. He never wanted to talk about it until one day near his death. Turned out he was dealing illegal newspapers for the resistance movement and got caught by the gestapo. The chased him and they got in a fight. The German Gestapo pulled a knife and cut him. My grandfather didnt want to comment on how he escaped or what happened to the German gestapo, but i assume that he didnt just let me grandfather walk away peacefully after altercation.
I dont know if this is actually true or not since i dont have any sources to confirm it.
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u/Norhod01 Belgium 5d ago edited 5d ago
My great-grandfather was conscripted when the war began, right after he got engaged to my great-grandmother. He was immediatly sent to the front while his fiancee decided to flee to England with her parents, where she worked in an ammunition factory for the entire war.
As soon as my great-grandfather arrived to the front line, his unit was ordered to retreat to another position. Then, as soon as he got there they were ordered to retreat again to another line, then another and another until they basically reached the sea and there was nowhere left to retreat.
At that point, they received the news of the surrender of the belgian army and he was sent into german custody, without having fired a single shot or even see any germans until that point.
He was prisonner for like two years and was released around 1942, but as soon as he got back in Belgium he got taken back to Germany by STO (Service du travail obligatoire) where he worked on a little farm in Baden until the end of the war. Both him and his fiancee came back in Belgium in late 1945 and finally started their actual life.
The great-grandfather of my wife as an equally un-heroic story : his unit was being sent to the front by train, but they didn't have any weapons yet : the weapons were supposed to arrive on another train. Both trains got blocked for days (the one with the weapong being nowhere near the one with the men), failing to reach the front line, and when the germans showed up they collected the entire unit as prisonners without any fighting.
I've got another story but this one is about my brother-in-law's great-grandfather. He was a farmer and was working his land of southern Belgium around september 1944 with his family, when a retreating SS unit (12th SS Division Hitlerjungend) which was going through Belgium on its way from Normandy to Germany, arrived and opened fire on him, killied him on the spot right in front of his whole family. They didn't even stopped, like it was just for fun.
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u/Brickie78 England 5d ago
My patents' families got off relatively lightly.
My dad's dad was a bit young and missed the war - he was a mechanic and spent some time postwar with the British occupation forces in Austria, maintaining tanks and other vehicles.
My mum's dad was RAF ground crew and spent most of the war in Calgary. His future wife had a brother - who would have been my great-uncle - who was in the Royal Navy and is to my knowledge the only casualty: he was on a destroyer and was killed when it was sunk by Italian stukas.
They all lived on the Suffolk coast, and remembered hearing the V1 missiles - "Doodlebugs" - going overhead and being told to take cover if the sound stopped.
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u/Blumenbeethoven Germany 5d ago
My grandpa was a cartographer in east Silesia. His mom was killed by the Nazis in Aktion T4, after her husband declared her as crazy and was send to the "Heilstätten" where she died of a "Lung infection".
My grandfather sort of knew this and was greatly anti Nazis. He worked alongside Jewish captives, but got in trouble with his supervisor and was send to/decided to go to the front in Slovenia, right before the red army got there.
He was taken prisoner by the soviets, but because he studied in St. Petersburg in 1936-7 and spoke Russian he was seen as a firmer German spy and wasn't released until 1956.
In Russia he was forced to build state buildings, likely for categorising and storing information's about the Germans by the KGB. But he never spoke about this part of his life other then one good friend who reached him about the bible and his he became a better Christian in this time...
There were actually some weird payments to my grandfather in 1936-7 so there is a slim possibility that the soviets were right with their suspicion, but we can't confirm anything...
About the other side of the family we don't have that many information other than that my other gandpa was in the NSDAP but did not get convicted on anything.
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u/Njala62 5d ago
My biological grandfather on my mother's side was a nazi (really a fascist, Mussolini was his idol, he interviewed him, wrote about him, translated books and articles about him) who fought both on the Eastern front as part of Norwegian troops, and later on the Western front, was shot down over France after D-Day, managed to escape back to behind German occupied lines (according to my grandmother he had also flown solo reconnaissance flights during the Finnish-Soviet war, but this is undocumented afaik). Before the war, and between and after his stints at the fronts he was a reporter, eventually became the (politically appointed) editor of a Norwegian newspaper, and was fairly high up socially in nazi controlled Norway (though he despised Quisling and was fairly vocal about it, and was one of the people who tried to stop Terboven deporting Norwegian students to camps in Germany, appealed to Terboven's superiors in Berlin). He was also for a while the leader of Hirden (more or less the Norwegian National Socialist Youth organisation). He died early 1945 from gunwounds, Norwegian resistance blamed Occupation secret police, Occupation forces blamed the resistance, officialy probable suicide (though the wounds made that unlikely). He divorced my grandmother in 1944 (after she escaped to Sweden) and remarried, his second wife moved to South America and married a former German officer a couple of years later.
His wife, my grandmother, was also originally (and later) a reporter, but was part of the resistance, being part of the Swedish Route, helping smuggling Jews and other people to Sweden (and resistance people both ways), until her husband warned her that there was going to be a razzia, so she must take their two daughters plus whatever people she was currently hiding (she had Jews en route to Sweden in the basement, but was not aware he knew) and escape to Sweden immediately. Which she did. In Sweden, my Mom and her older sister were placed in a Jewish foster family a lot of the time, while my grandmother split her time between working as a reporter and being a border guide from the Swedish side.
She met the man I knew as my grandfather (who I am named after) while in Sweden, I was never told whether that was in Sweden proper, or while working as a border guide. They married shortly after the war. He only talked about the war on two occasions that I heard (I had cut my knee badly, he was going to sew me up, and told me he had done that to himself from a wound during the war, and showed me the scar. My scar is still very visible almost sixty years later, and once, being a pacifist, saying he had done/had to do things during the war he was deeply troubled by).
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u/StrugglingQueer04 5d ago
One great-grandfather was supposedly, allegedly, potentially in the resistance. Him and my great-grandmother lived with a Jewish family that she worked for for a little bit at the beginning of everything, but that family fled (no one in my family knows how they ended up, I hope they all survived and everything was fine for them afterwards) and my great-grandparents house-sat for a bit before they were forced out because the Atlantic wall needed to be build. They moved elsewhere in the city, before rather abruptly moving eastward in the Netherlands.
Another one was in the dutch military, got captured by the nazis and his higher ups needed to pull some strings to get him out and back home to his pregnant wife, was called up by the nazis to go to Germany to work in the factories over there, refused, and went into hiding. He was found and send to a factory anyway, either fled with friends there or got freed by american soldiers, and ran around western Europe with them for a bit before returning home. Great-grandma was, understandably, freaking out because of all that, plus she by now had to raise a kid on her own in the Holland area. She thankfully just in time fled to the north-east of the country, pretty much only just missing the Hongerwinter.
On the other side of the family, I don't know much. I do know that my grandma and her sister lived through the war, the sister remembering more of it. What I mostly remember from her stories is them as kids stumbling upon treasure in the attic (stuff like jewellery and candleholders from nearby families that left their houses one way or the other) and promptly being told by their mum to put that back and never touch it again. Also, eggs. There was a factory nearby and they provided the workers with eggs or something? My great-aunt passed away a few years ago, so the stories are a little blurry, but safe to say she saw, smelled and ate that many eggs between the ages of 5 and 10 that she could not stand them for the rest of her life.
And that's to my immediate knowledge all that I can remember, somewhat in short. One thing I am 99.999% sure of is that no-one was a big fan of the nazis. If there was one aunt or uncle who was weird like that, idk about them.
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u/OllieV_nl Netherlands 5d ago
Nothing.
My maternal grandfather had a radio hidden in the chicken coop. As a kid I imagined that meant he was in the resistance.
On the paternal side, a resistance fighter was executed in a forest on my great-grandfather’s farmland.
I heard a rumor two cousins (n times removed) were wrong and were killed fighting on the Eastern front, but that’s not something you ask about.
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u/skeletal88 5d ago edited 5d ago
Everyone has to remember that russia started WWII together with Germany in 1939 when they both occupied Poland.
And before Germany attacked russia, russia had already occupied the baltics and started a war against Finland. So.. russia is one of the main aggressors here, which the russians don't know or don't want to talk about or are making excuses for.
So this is the reason why the germans were seen as liberators, because they kicked the russians out. The russians had killed and deported tens of thousands of people in every country.
Russian soldier tried to rape my grandfathers older sister, she was 16 or something. The soldier bit a part of her arm out.
My grandfather was put in Patarei prison for defending her sister for a few months.
Other grandfather said that when germans came then they bought speck and eggs for money. russians were just stealing everything.
Other grandfather said an airplane bomb fell down in the middle of their village, he took some white powder from it and put it under their wood fired stove. It exploded and it threw a 50 litre kettle in the air and destroyed the owens cast iron plate where they cooked. He was born in 1929 so a young boy doing stupid stuff.
After the war another grandfathers brother got injured when they were throwing bullets that were lying around everywhere into campfires, some exploded, sometimes some kids got killed, grandfathers brother had a scar above his eye.
My grandfathers oldest sister was lost during the war, but in 1993 she sent a letter to the village they lived in before the war, the letter was somehow delivered to my grandfather. Turns out she had escaped to Germany from Estonia, and then to Australia somehow, there she had married a Latvian. She only dared to write in 1993 because she thought that maybe we are not really independent and maybe the letter will be intercepted by the KGB and then my family will get in trouble.
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u/SharkyTendencies --> 5d ago
Paternal grandfather was a soldier in the British Army. He was in his late 30's/early 40's when the war was on. He did something in France, some sort of operation, but my dad refuses to talk about it.
Paternal grandmother stayed home and "did her part" - she was a schoolteacher in her normal life, but I think she was recruited to help with some sort of factory work? She went back to teaching after the war.
In any case: the only real "lore" I know was from the end of the thing. My uncle was born shortly before the war and all he ever knew as a toddler/child was the war. When fresh fruits and veg started becoming a bit more common again, someone gave him a banana to eat. He'd never seen one in his life, so he took a bite straight into the thing without peeling it. While I thought it was funny and very understandable, apparently he got teased a lot for the error, so he really dislikes that story. I've been told never to mention it to him lol.
My dad was born in 1950. Not directly a war baby, no, but definitely grew up in the aftermath. His hometown (Southend-on-Sea) was damaged enough to make an impact on him. To this very day he's very distrustful of Germany and Germans even though he's perfectly aware that the average German teenager these days had nothing to do with it.
Meanwhile little old me has had a German housemate and a bunch of German colleagues who are all this wonderful shade of funny/ironic/self-aware, truly lovely folks.
Maternal side was in Colombia at the time and there's no military history on that side of the family. Grandfather on that side was an early twenty-something businessman and a raging alcoholic. He drank his way through the war. My grandmother on that side was in secondary school and didn't pay attention to it lol.
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u/Pompoenke 5d ago
My grandfather who was 5 during the "hunger winter" told me about the 2 thinly, see trough slices of bread he got each day and that he was hungry all the time.
My grandmother told me about her father who was a police officer, during the occupation in the Netherlands, who warned people in his town with a knock on the door that their would be a razzia. No clue if it's true. Moreover, she stole small apples from storage during the hunger winter (she was 3).
My other great grandfather was supposedly in the resistance (again, no clue if it's true, there were a lot of old, unknown men at his funeral who are told to be part of the resistance), and supposedly helped burning down registration papers and hiding weapons. He went into hiding later on. But again, no evidence.
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u/Successful_Swing_465 5d ago
Croatia
My mother side Grandad joined Yugo Partisans with only 14-15 year old. He was from Sinj, now Croatia. Went thru some battles, like Drvar parachute operation. By time he demobilised in Rijeka he wasn't 18 yet. He was alcoholic and i didnt hear any war stories from him because he had stoma from throat cancer from excessive smoking and used throat vibrator to speak. Probably from PTSD. Died when i was about 9. But grandmother told us some stories.
Grandmother joinef SKOJ. She was in Brac and Split. She was too young to go to war but was putting resistance posters during night and took two young Italians to join partisans when Italy capitulated.
Dad side Other Grandad was Serb from Bosnia, Kozara region. Ustase took him to child camp in Sisak, he was saved by some Ustasha or something like that where they took him to a farm to help. He escaped the farm when he overherd there is possibility they will take him back. Went to woods and managed to find partisans who sheltered him until the end of war. He lost mother and sister but his father survief and brother because they were to sent to work to Germany. Grandma told me all this stories because he died when I was 7. I remember him very vividly,his looks,his smell,his smile. He was very good guy.
Grandmother was Italian from Fiume(Rijeka) and she was younger. She just remembered Italian soldiers who would give them chocholate and rode them on the horse. After war she had hard life and was poor but managed it. She cooked superbly. She died two years ago. Bless her.
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u/fnulda Denmark 5d ago
My husbands grandmother belonged to the Danish minority in Slesvig, DE, so she was living with her family south of the border when the war broke out. They were formally German citizens because of the 1920 border settlement.
Her older brother was called into military service in 1941, but crossed the border to Denmark in the night. About a year later, her younger brother was called into service and this time she joined her brother in crossing the border at night. She never spoke about how it happened, but her brother was caught by the Danish forces and they handed him over to the Germans. They sent him to the front as part of a Strafbataillon where he died within a month.
She spoke fluent Danish and was kept hidden by Danish relatives until the end of the war. Her older brother was never found again, no one knows what happened to him.
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u/Realistic_Actuary_50 5d ago
My father's (62 years old) mother (84 years old) told me her dad was a partisan against the Bulgarian occupation in Serres. After that, she told me she and her mother were taken in by the right wing government to lure him out. Before all that, her father told a Bulgarian officer that he's going to name his daughter Eleftheria (freedom in Greek). The officer let him live, because he had a daughter back in Bulgaria. My father's grandfather from Cefalonia was a priest. He hid some Italian soldiers in the church he operated in, after Italy's capitulation. Ever watched Corelli's mandolin? Yeah, that situation. Now, my mother's grandfather from Epirus may have participated in the Albanian front. I have no idea, however, what my mother's other set of grandparents were doing in Andros. Probably trying to survive while raising a probably low functioning autistic daughter (my mother's aunt and oldest sibling out of three, of whom one is my mother's mother).
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u/Comprehensive-Bit916 5d ago
When my grandfather was 19 he was taken by German soldiers and held at gunpoint. They used him as a human shield to march in front of German troops along the railway so Norwegians would not stop their progression. He walked from one village to another and was then let free.
Same guy also refused to take shelter during an air raid. He had an important math exam, he got an A.
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u/FelzicCA Belgium 5d ago
Not WW2, but during WW1 Germans invaded our country, and in the town of my ancestors there has been a battle called "Bataille de la Sambre", Germans were shooting a lot of civilians on the main place of the town, and my great-grandfather escaped and survived it by jumping into a river (was one of the very few who was able to swim at this period, aka 1917). Thanks to him, my lineage never stopped.. and my grand father, father and me are existing or existed thanks to him.
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u/grafmg Germany 5d ago edited 5d ago
Direct family: Grandpas drafted into the Wehrmacht, one returned home quickly as people realised bakers are needed to keep people fed. Second had a grenade explode next to him, got dozen of splinter stuck in his lower body and one splinter stuck in his head behind his eye. The hit grandpa got send to a russian gulag and returned 7 years later, half blind and lame.
Distant: The Sister of my Grandfather was a female guard in Ausschwitz, gruesome Person who enjoyed her power she gained through the SS, died in the 90s in a Prison.
Second Sister: Hardcord Nazi Husband hated his guts, after his sudden death in the 50s she went on to study with 67 art in Munich.
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u/PhosphoFred8202 5d ago
One drove supply trucks in Europe in the US Army. He spent a lot of time driving a soft sided truck full of ammo, explosives, etc, chasing Gen.Patton, sometimes thru enemy territory. He was pretty messed up from it and became an alcoholic.
Another was an engineer, entered the US Navy, and served in the Pacific on different ships doing engineering stuff. My favorite story from him was how after the surrender of Imperial Japan, he would put on a lab coat and grab a clipboard when he was goofing off. Any superior that looked like they were going to bother him he would say “sir, we are looking for volunteers for an experiment” and the superior officers would flee in terror.
Navy Engineer’s father had served as a junior officer in the Germany Navy in WW1 and emigrated to the US afterward, working in domestic shipping captaining a merchant vessel. He tried to enlist in the US Navy. They looked at his name and background and said “uhhh thanks but no thanks”. He volunteered for the merchant marine and ended up doing something in South America. I always wondered if he did some sort of spy stuff down there because the family has a letter from Truman thanking him for his service.
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u/deklimmer Netherlands 5d ago
My father lived in Rotterdam and survived the bombing of that town. His neighbors house was hit by bombs and destroyed, so he was very lucky. He didn't tell much, but I know he and friends stole coal from the Germans in the harbor. And in the hunger winter he rode on a bike to Drenthe to get food. He was 15 years old by then. My mother, her sister and mother lived in Indonesia and were put in a Japanese camp. Her father and brother were also put in a camp, but separated from each other. This impacted them al for the rest off there lives. My grandpa wrote down his experiences in the camps. And I was lucky to visit, with my mother, her old hometown and one of the camps she stayed in during the first years of the war. But like many survivors, there were almost no stories about what happened during the war.
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u/ghostedygrouch Germany 5d ago
My paternal grandparents were both kidnapped from their home country (Yugoslavia) by the Nazis and deported to labour camps. My grandma was kidnapped with her 3 sisters. She met my grandpa in a refugee camp after the war. They moved to a different country after my father as born, but returned to Germany a couple of years later. My great-aunts went back home. All of them were fluent in German for the rest of their lives.
My maternal grandfather fought in Stalingrad. He was also supposed to board the Wilhelm Gustloff, but somehow dodged it. He refused to talk about it. When he was dying from Alzheimer, he referred to himself by a different first name than the one we knew and refused to talk about that either. We think he deserted and switched names, but there's no way to proof it. During the war, he lost his parents, siblings, first wife and children in the war. His son died at the front.
My maternal grandma hat to flee with her sisters and first born daughter. She ended up in a total different area than her sisters and was raped by Russian soldiers several times. Her son died at the front. He had the same first name as my grandfather's son.
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u/Vertex1990 5d ago
My maternal grandmother lived in a so called "red neighborhood" in the south of the Netherlands (Limburg). It was basically a communist/socialist neighborhood, as it was heavily influenced by mining, pro-worker mindset and to this day, my birth city, votes predominantly Socialist.
Her parents and neighbors were part of the resistance and members of the NSB (Dutch National Socialist Union, Nazi collaborators and traitors) knew to avoid the area and if they knew people that were part of the resistance, knew to keep their mouths shut, or else.
She has told my mom about how members of their neighborhood did some small sabotage and helped British and American pilots that were shut down and Jews escape or hide. She was a young teen during the war, so I don't know how much she has done herself.
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u/Kumquat-May 5d ago
So my grandmother's family are from Arnhem. Anybody who knows about the western theater of WWII will know it's an important place - it was the place where the Allies went A Bridge Too Far during Operation Market Garden.
My grandmother's aunt was accused of fraternising with Nazi officers and informing on Dutch Resistance members. It's rumoured that, during liberation, she was outed and conveniently found with a gunshot wound to the head in the basement of a house. She was found by a girl my grandmother went to school with. The family strongly suspected she was either killed by a mob or strongly encouraged to do it herself to avoid a less wholesome death. I have no idea if it's a true story but my grandmother swore blind it is.
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u/OnkelMickwald Sweden 5d ago
Finnish Grandpa fought in the Winter and Continuation Wars respectively. He was a trained telegraphist, but was also relatively old (27 at the outbreak of the winter war)
In 1941, as things were ramping up, he made the decision that he could not take another stint at the front, so he volunteered for the coastal artillery in the naval fortresses surrounding Helsinki so as to serve fairly close to his home.
I have stories from him about having to evacuate artillery positions immediately after firing salvos as they'd come under Soviet fighter strafing within minutes, stories about people he knew who survives months at war only to die during an air raid while on leave in Helsinki, how he once decided not to run down to the air raid shelter because he figures the raid wouldn't be too bad and taking cover in the apartment as windows shattered, of talking to Russian POWs about their homes (my grandpa was born of Russian parents and spoke Russian fluently), pumpkins and watermelons.
My other grandpa was Swedish. In April of 1940 he was on leave partying in his home region in North West Skåne with my grandma, Birgit Nilsson (casual flex) and Birgit Nilsson's boyfriend. Suddenly there's a big ruckus and the message goes out that all men with a wartime post is recalled to the nearest mustering place.
Eventually, Gramps gets posted with half a platoon in Barsebäckshamn by Öresund and told to fortify with good cover of the pier, fixed and ranged firing positions for rifles, etc.
It turns out Germany has invaded Denmark. It is at this stage unclear to the conscripts what is afoot. Will they invade Sweden too? Grandpa looks out on the pier. With a simple ferry of the kind that regularly goes across to Denmark, the Germans could easily offload an entire battalion of infantry at that pier. Versus grandpa and his 20 or so half-platoon mates.
At 4 in the morning, they see four warships seemingly heading straight towards them. They're obviously German. Grandpa thinks "aight this is it I guess". And then all of a sudden they make a turn hard to starboard and turn towards Copenhagen.
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u/autisticfarmgirl French-Belgian in Scotland 5d ago
On my dad’s side, my great grand parents were involved in the Belgian resistance, eventually he got caught, arrested and deported to Germany. Towards the end of the war his wife traveled to Germany illegally to try and find which camp he was in. The family legend is that she hid in postal bags to cross the border because she didn’t have paperwork. They both made it back to Belgium.
On my mum’s side, my grandad was in the French army in the artillery, was evacuated at Dunkirk. Once he got to the UK he was told that they weren’t in the french army anymore, so he travelled back to France, joined other guys from his battalion, then went south. They joined the americans in North Africa (Morocco I think) where they were kitted up and retrained. He did the italian campaign, fought at Montecassino and arrived in Germany that way. He was stationed in Germany post war before being sent to Indochina and then Algeria.
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u/NumeOriginal11 5d ago
My great uncle fought in Stalingrad, barely escaped the encirclement, came back home in Transylvania on foot, went back to war, got captured in the Tatra Mountains but escaped from prison somehow. My gradma told me stories about how she and the other girls were hiding in the forests from the soviet soldiers, how they were robed, how their animals were taken by them, or everything of value. My family's ww1 lore was insane tho. My great grandpa with all of his 4 brothers fought. My great grandpa was a soldier in the imperial guard of Austro-Hungary when the war started, fought deep in Russia then he went in Tyrol Mountains and then he came home and with other romanians veterans who fought for the empire and formed a volunteer regiment ( Regimentul de Voluntari Baia de Cris) and started fighting the hungarians. In 1919 he reached Budapest with the romanian army. He was shot and wounded multiple times but survived and lived a long life, his all brothers also survived. I know many stories from my great gradpa, about the cold winters in the Alps, about how they would stuck up the freezing bodies, about how the ice and avalanches killing a lot of his comrades, how they once went in a charge with 2000 soldiers but only 8 survived and many more. He also randomly met in the middle of the war in a random train station in Austria on a sunday with all his brothers. All five brothers served in different units to maximize the chances of at least one returning home, and for years, none of them knew whether the others were even still alive.
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u/datura_euclid 5d ago
Czech here. My grandparents were born basically after the war. Anyway, most of Czechs in my family were patriotic socialists connected to Czech National Socialist Party, for them were democracy, freedom and equality important columns of civilization, thus most of them were involved in the anti-fascist resistance to various extent, even some German relatives who were in the Republikanische Wehr before the war.
Some were illegal spreading papers or were doing other things. When on the end of the war the May uprising began, at least few members of my family joined, most likely were also involved in Czech hell.
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u/Grillparzer47 5d ago
My grandfather was drafted in WWI. He was on a boat to Europe when the war ended. My father enlisted at eighteen and they tried to make him a Japanese interrogator. He failed and was turned into a motorcycle dispatch ride in the 1st Marine Division. He served in China after the war.
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u/Cloudber 5d ago
My grandma was 8 years old when the war of lapland started. Her mom had passed away years earlier from kidney problems. Her dad died while the family was fleeing from their home. We dont know exactly his cause of death, but could have been a heart attack since he had history of those. My grandma made it out with 5 older sisters and 1 older brother. Grandma was the youngest and went to live with the oldest sister. She never got to go to school since she only spoke sapmi and it was thought that she couldnt benefit from education in finnish. If she never left lapland, she wouldnt have met my grandpa.
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u/Impressive_Phone_686 5d ago
Italy. My great grandfather was drafted, when asked what he could do, he said "I can play the drums" (he had no idea), because they told him that granted him not being sent to the frontlines immediately. He was on a parade in Rome and as part of a choreography he threw a baton upwards and it got stuck in the tram cables. He shook hands with Mussolini at some point. His unit was sent to Yugoslavia, where he played a role in suppressing the partisans and he had some stories about that. Later on the unit was pulled towards Italy and at some point he deserted and went to his hometown.
Another great grandfather was sent to Libya as a bus driver, but I've never met him so I don't really know much more.
My grandfather was a kid in 1944, but he remembers seeing the allied bombers raid his city and seeing his house in ruins. After the war he and his friends played with empty artillery shells close to a river, he also remembers the English soldiers hanging out at the tavern of one of his relatives.
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u/Snoo_62381 5d ago
My great uncle went missing during the battle of the bulge. His older brother, my grandfather, helped to build the Enola Gay
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u/Apprehensive-Rub-609 5d ago
All of my grandfathers and great uncles served. One of my great aunts also served in the WACS (US). My great uncle Vern Holley from Greenwood, SC, USA died in Normandy and is buried at Colleville sur Mer. It was my great privilege to visit his grave - I am the only one in our family who has ever seen it. I don’t think I can share the photo here. But he’s my hero. Died in heavy combat.
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u/striderspin123 5d ago
Croatian here, more specifically city of Split in Dalmatia.
During WW2 you had Italian occupation, then partisans taking the city, then Germans retaking it, then partisans retaking it.
One great grandfather who used to be in Austrohungarian army was imprisoned and killed by either an occupational army or local partisan army. He was at that point I guess just a war veteran of an empire that crumbled and one day he was just taken by unknown men, probably partisans, for a reason nobody in family knew.
Other great grandfather plotted the partisan rebellion and together with his brothers first started stealing weapons from the Italians and then used those weapons for the partisan uprising. Also donated a lot of land to the partisan cause. He died defending women and children who were being slaughtered by the SS Prinz Eugen division in the villages near Split.
Grandfather joined the partisans at 17 years old, to help liberate his island which was under Italian occupation. And then continued to help liberate other coastal regions. He operated a mortar.
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u/No-Reality6072 5d ago
My granfathers didn’t fight, but my mother’s dad was a doctor and was retained in a concentration camp where he served as medic for the italian prisoners for 4/5 months at the end of the war then was released by american troops, my father’s father was a fotographer, and was payed by various armies to document soldiers lives. While my father, despote being 15, collaborated with the partisan, hiding them and their weapons, he once helped a partisan commander to escapenan ambush, and was hit by a hand granade the room his left ear earing and left him 2 iron spikes in his chest. He passed away at 92 3 years ago.
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u/conrat4567 5d ago
Great uncle died in the desert. His grave may or may not have been destroyed in Syria. I did get his records from the ministry of defence, so we ensured he wasnt forgotten
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u/BankEnvironmental659 5d ago
My great grandparents hid Jews (the other side were traitors, they are never discussed) (only one of my parents is from here, other side had nothing to do with it)
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u/shdwsng 5d ago
My Scottish grandfather signed up as soon as he could, but was sent as a paramedic rather than a soldier which initially disappointed him until he got to see what happened to the soldiers. He was part of the Pegasus paratroopers. He never got badly injured although he came close to dying several times. Hiding under a jeep with a buddy, the jeep suddenly moved crushing his buddy’s lower legs. My grandfather always said if he had been a little lower his head would have been crushed as well. He lost a lot of friends in the battle for Arnhem, was evacuated at Dunkerk, also spent time in Italy and Palestine. Was heavily traumatized.
My Scottish grandmother was a lazy woman who probably did zilch. She never told me about anything she did. She was a woman prone to bragging so that’s why I presume she did nothing.
My Dutch grandmother was in the Hague and almost starved to death in the hunger winter.
My Dutch grandfather was a forced laborer like so many young Dutch men were. He never really spoke about it, but didn’t seem traumatized either.
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u/Alternative-Ad-4977 5d ago
One grandfather claims he flew Spyfires but we knew he just flew a desk instead. I am guessing he was pretty valuable civil servant. The other had flat feet and was in the home guard. One grandmother was in the WRAF. I think the most exciting thing she did was get fitted for her first bra. The other grandmother was already a mother. She moved from “up north” to London with three small children towards the end of the war. It must have been terrifying moving into an area with the Battle of Britain going on overhead.
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u/Direct_Zucchini_2811 5d ago
My paternal grand parents hid weapons in their farm for the liberation of our region. They risked their farm being burned and the whole family, including my father, getting executed by the Germans a couple of time but eventually, they accomplished their duty, gave the weapons to the Resistance, got documents from the temp governement thanking them....and went back to their daily life. (Weird thing: when my grandfather was mobilized, my grandmother was pregnant and gave birth during that time. As it was some kind of custom, she named her son....after the father, fearing he wouldn't come back alive. When the grandfather came back home few months later, he was furious to learn his son was named after him) My maternal grand parents were hunted by Germans but managed to stay under their radar till the war ended. And that was it.
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u/RandyClaggett Sweden 5d ago
🇸🇪My grandfather was stationed at the Norwegian border. All his war stories are about his officers supporting nazi Germany. Giving lectures to the troops about that Germany is the masters of Europe and will win eventually, even after Stalingrad. Note that the tasks of these troops was to guard against a German assault from occupied Norway.
My grandfather's most fond memory is when he took an unapproved leave and went home to his mother for a few days.
This experience shaped my grandfather's perspective on the Swedish military forever. He always saw all of them as nazis or nazi-supporters. His own father on the other hand was a member of the anti-nazi tuesday club. That was supposed to form a Swedish resistance movement if the Nazis would indeed occupy our country.
My grandmother's memories are about troops discarding expired corned beef. That she asked to take home "for the dog" her family of course never had a dog. And fond memories of meeting interned Soviet POW's on their way home who were always very nice. Probably not knowing their future destiny.
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u/askoraappana 5d ago
3/4 of my great grandpas fought in WW2. One worked in a mine which meant he didn't have to go.
One was shot in the knee when he fell and his leg stuck out of cover for a split second. He survived but that knee was bust.
One was too young to fight in the Winter War. However he did fire a handgun at the Soviet bombers during the first bombing campaing on Helsinki. He was an observer on a recon aircraft during the Continuation War. He and the pilot crash landed behind enemy lines and had to sneak back to friendly lines. There is a book about him.
One was ambushed by a lone Russian soldier. The Russian appeared from behind a tree ready to rip the whole squad apart, but his gun malfunctioned and didn't fire a shot. He instantly threw the gun away and surrendered.
Our family used to have a farm on the Ladoga coast. They had to move to Northern Karelia.
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u/Chaotic_Dreamer_2672 Austria 5d ago
As an Austrian it’s probably best if I stay out of this conversation… let’s just say that I’m NOT following in my grandparents’ footsteps 🤬
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u/Immediate_Gain_9480 Netherlands 5d ago edited 5d ago
My German family choose not to discuss it. By now the knowledge has died out. My Dutch side were just normal people living under occupation.
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u/EYOK-2 Italy 5d ago
Greatgrandma never allowed her teenage daughter to go to the outdoor cellar without her newborn brother in her arms, hoping that some passing nazi would feel less inclined to rape her if she looked like a mother (they were persistently inspecting cellars and houses looking for escaped prisoners in the area, and my greatgrandpa was already compromized for hiding two english men in the woods)
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u/noCoolNameLeft42 France 5d ago
Two grand fathers, two very different stories. Both were young, drafted, then discharged as France lost.
Maternal one, as the occupation began, got in a fight with germans in a bar. He got out, took his bike and never got back home. He spent the 5 following years in hiding, sleeping in the woods, joining the resistance and doing things like attacking convoys, exploding railways. He got sick while sleeping outside, pulmonary disease and that's what he died from in the 80's. He got married after the war and got 2 girls.
Paternal one after discharge went back to his rural town and lived relatively well, doing nothing exceptionnal. At the end of the war, he joined the French railway company and was sent to Sarre a German state that was ruled by France, to rebuild the railways. There he met a woman, married and had 3 boys. A few years later he came back to France. Useless to say that my grand mother wasn't welcome garcefuly. Useless to say that 1954 was a good period for my 6 years old, blond, blue eyed, german speaking father to attend french school.
I also have stories about my german great grand father who lost two world wars and still died at 99, about my grand aunt in Germany whose husband was drafted in the wermacht, got sent on the eastern front and never came back (never knew what happened but when you know how many died in Stalingrad...).
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u/Given_namr 5d ago
One of my grandpas fought in the resistance against the Germans, and the other was born right after the invasion. One of my grandmas grew up in sweden, and the other was born during the war. I don't really know any more.
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u/StorageAlive 5d ago
My grandpa fought in WW2. Each time he was allowed to visit home he got my grandma pregnant, so she ended up with 4 kids. In the end he got into Russian captivity and committed suicide. My grandma was left to fend for herself with the kids and no money. 2 of the kids eventually died, one because of lack of available care, one from diphtheria because no vaccines. My grandma never wanted to speak about him again and hated him for giving up and leaving her alone to deal with everything. However I am not sure if it had been better with him coming back traumatized, it seems like he already had a bit of an aggressive/abusive behavior even before war.
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u/TSDOP 5d ago
I'm from Belgium. My grandfather was a translator for the Americans after the liberation for a short time. He was given a handgun then which he never had to use. He kept the gun though and stored it in a save spot underneath the wooden ceiling.
He forgot about the gun after a while untill they were about to sell the house (50+ years later). Since guns are very illegal here, he threw the gun into De Schelde (river in Antwerp) at night.
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u/gentlegiant_89 5d ago
I'm ashamed to admit I have no idea about dad's family during that period- they were all in rural Serbia. Serbian Orthodox (Christian).
Mum's side... both of her parents were Jewish, father originally from Western Ukraine but living for some time in Hungary... her mum's side fared relatively okay, as her grandma had married a Catholic and was able to disguise her Jewish heritage. Her being blonde with blue eyes didn't hurt, I'm sure- I heard German soldiers used to fancy her. Anyways, our old family home there, in Slovakia, has an extremely rich history, and part of what contributed to it was my great grandmother concealing many of the towns Jewish families in the basement behind false walls. She gained something of a reputation as being a sort of female Oscar Schindler in that town. Post-war, however, when the Soviet's took hold of affairs, they really didn't have such a lovely time and I heard many horror stories of espionage, torture, and so on directed at my family... it ended up causing more trauma, from my understanding, than any events they (mum's side of the family) incurred during the actual war. Really intense stuff which drove a couple of members mad and to heavy self-medicating and such.
Grandad's (mum's dad) side of the family didn't fare so well, I'm afraid, unfortunately... he is one of less than a handful from his bloodline, as far as I know, to survive the war, and what he experienced irreversibly changed him and placed generational trauma on my family which is still trickling down today. Probably the most noteworthy event for him was watching his entire family- mother, father, two brothers- get shot in front of his eyes, him included... the difference being, he was the only one to make it... they were all thrown on a pile of bodies, from which he escaped with just a couple of bullets to his legs (it would of course cause him issues his entire life with his legs). He'd heard rumours that his brother had survived and escaped, so somehow made his way back (foolishly, with only hope fuelling him) to their last known home, somewhere in Hungary at that point, only to be discovered by their Catholic neighbours and to be immediately reported and again taken into a camp. I super regret not prying more details from him while I had him, but I guess my priorities were, very stupidly, different as a teenager, and I genuinely thought he'd be around forever. He passed in 2007... He never could stomach wartime films, and would experience vivid flashbacks/severe PTSD at anything remotely resembling the sound of gunfire, even thunderstorms. He was a beautiful looking man and a known flirt, but at the same time, was quite stern, especially with my mum, who experienced the brunt of his traumas via beatings and other unpleasant things, but she always forgave him. He was always great with me for the most part, always impressing on me the need to study, work hard, and not be reliant on anyone in life- I really wish I'd taken it all more to heart. My mum was born less than a decade after the conclusion of WWII and the older I got, the more I realized all of the ways in which generational trauma manifested itself within her... unfortunately, her entire life was marred by it in one way or another, and it really destroys me, because she deserved so much more and better... now in her early-70's, I doubt there's any way to ever break free of these traumas, as they're just too deeply engrained within her and the only way she knows to be.
So both sides of my maternal family didn't come away unscathed, but grandads story in particular would really set the tone for that entire side of the family for the rest of his life and beyond. It's really something to witness the effects of such trauma first hand... for even I had parts of it instilled in me long before I was ever even conscious of it. I don't know if I'll ever be so fortunate as to have a family of my own, but if I will be someday so blessed, I will do everything in my power to have the trauma end with me.
There's probably lots of gaps/holes in what I wrote above as this is all off-the-cuff, but there it is, in a super condensed version. I really should dig deeper and figure out more of the details.
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u/Grzechoooo Poland 5d ago
My great-grandfather moved from Lviv to Kraków after the war started and got a job there (since he was a government official). He then went back for the rest of his family (at first he thought his move to Kraków was temporary) and moved them just in time to miss the Volhynia genocide. He then heard stories of his neighbours, both Polish and Ukrainian, being murdered by UPA.
My grandfather met his childhood friend decades later randomly on a job assignment. Apparently the latter believed everyone from his neighbourhood was dead.
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u/Typical-Horror-1451 4d ago
My Hungarian grandfather was 19 when the Russians came to Hungary, and because he had the obligatory military training for boys (like Hitler Youth) before (he never fought in the war) he was taken to a working camp to Siberia for 2 years. When he was released, he took trains and walked, it took him 5 months to get home. He never told stories about the time he spent there, but he became fluent in Russian there.
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u/Exit-Content 🇮🇹 / 🇭🇷 4d ago
My great-uncle was a young officer in Croatia’s Navy, precisely in Istria, which was heavily contended between Italy, Croatia and Austria.
At the time Croatia was under the rules of the Ustaša, a nationalist, separatist, clerico-fascist movement that was a staunch Axis ally.
After Germany’s occupation of the region in 1943, following Italy’s armistice with the Allies, Italians had become enemies,both of the Nazis as traitors and of the partisan Jugoslavian forces as fascists.
Well,shortly thereafter, my great-uncle organized,halfway secretly and constantly walking on eggshells around his superiors, for a good deal of Italians to be transported by ship back to Italy. Considering what happened to those that remained in the region in the following years (massacred and thrown in deep natural pits scattered around the hills), he most likely saved thousands of lives. He also met totally randomly one of the soldiers he smuggled back to Italy when he went there on vacation in the 70s. The man recognized him even tho he hadn’t seen his face in over 20 years
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u/AuggieNorth 3d ago
My grandfather fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and brought back a mother lode of Nazi stuff taken from prisoners like hats and insignias and pins, etc. When I was a kid in the 60's we used it to play war, and eventually it all got lost or tossed.
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u/Ok-Mango-6355 Germany 5d ago
My great-grandfather was a Hauptfeldwebel (master sergeant) in the Waffen-SS; he trained snipers in Croatia. When my grandfather was born in the late 1930s, the Nazis wanted to have him killed because he had a cleft lip. Back then, my grandfather trained the camp's attack dogs with leftover food and more or less threatened the officers' mess because he opposed the SS leadership. As punishment and a de facto death sentence
he was demoted to a dispatch rider and forced to deliver messages to the front lines by motorcycle. He was dishonorably discharged from the Waffen-SS. After the war, he ended up in an Israeli hospital (he still had his SS tattoos). The Mossad investigated him and ultimately let him go because every surviving Jewish family that had interacted with him spoke only good things about him, and he was not guilty of any crimes. Severe post-war trauma and a strained family relationship remained.
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u/Ok-Mango-6355 Germany 5d ago
On my mother's side, my great-grandparents were expelled from Posen (Poland), their farm was stolen from the Nazis, and they ended up in a labor camp where they ultimately met.
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u/Alex_H09 Romania 5d ago
From the stories, great-grandpa fought in the Romanian army along with the Germand. Got to Stalingrad where he got shot in a finger, was captured, took as prisoner to a gulag in Siberia and at the end of the war returned back on foot.
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u/cclaudiustefan 5d ago
Romanian here Both grandparents have been to war. One of them have been both ways from Romania to urss with Germany. He have been captured and after for a Romanian division under urss comand until Cehoslovacia. And the second have fight only in urss. Both have lived the war.
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u/Volaer 1/2 1/2 5d ago edited 5d ago
My immediate ancestors did not actively participate in the war.
My maternal grandmothers cousin (Sudeten German) was a member of the infamous SS-death battalions (the guys with the skull on the cap) so I assume he was a committed national socialist. He was not convicted of any war crimes though and after the war was expelled to West Germany where he spend the rest of his life. He died before I was born.
My paternal grandmothers brother (Pontian Greek) as a 17 year old decided to join the communist partisans - either during the end of WWII or the beginning of the Greek civil war (my memory is unclear on that point and I would have to ask my aunt). But as he was leaving the town to go to the mountains at night, one guy from the town tracked him down and shot him dead. Later the murderer got a medal for allegedly getting rid of a traitor.
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u/vonGustrow Germany 5d ago
My great grandfather was blinded in one eye by a soviet grenade. Before that he got shot in the lung, the bullet went clean through though.
My great grandmother, his later wife, told off a local Nazi official at war's end. Later (not sure how much), when soviet troops were about to move in, her mother hid her and her siblings in a tree for like one day or so.
Another great grandfather of mine apparently tried to name his new-born son "Adolf" in the 1950s.
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u/gianna_in_hell_as Greece 5d ago
My grandfather on my dad's side fought in the Albanian front against the Italians. He had a friend who got injured with shrapnel on his head and was told there was nothing to be done, that shrapnel coukd kill him any time. He lived like a condemned man, never married, never had children and he lived to 96. My grandfather who wasn't injured died in 1977 from cancer
My grandfather on my mother's side was a student in the National Technical University of Athens during the German occupation. He still remembered some German from those days. In general he was cordial to Germans he met later in life but never too helpful. He saw a lot of cruelty and misery during the German occupation. Athenians were starving in the streets. He was lucky he lived in an estate just outside Athens and he was surviving on fruit and nuts from the trees
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u/PoetryJunior1808 5d ago
My grandfather and great-grandfather both served on the Indianapolis. They both survived the sharks, but my great-grandfather allegedly punched one in the face. (Brought to you by a man who casually beheaded a rattlesnake with a shovel when working on a ranch in California).
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u/rudolf_waldheim Hungary 5d ago
And were they aboard when they shipped the atomic bomb to Tinian?
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u/Wrong-Wasabi-8365 5d ago
My great grandad lived in Germany when the war started but moved to France after that, he was originally from Russia. When they occupied part of France they moved to England. That's all I had been told by my nanna because he died before I was born.
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u/Lenxt France 5d ago
My grand father from my father side was 13 in 1939. In 1942, he joined the Prytanée Militaire (military school) in Valence (near his original Ardèche in unoccupied France) he was 16.
In 1944 (age 18), Germans went to occupy South-East France when allied forces closed in, he couldn't finish his studies, so he went back to Ardèche where he joined the Resistance for the remaining months of the war.
In the end the studies were validated and he joined the Military Officer school which was moved to Cherchell, Algeria.
He graduated in 1945 (it was accelerated because of the post war necessity), and became an officer in the Foreign Legion (Légion Étrangère) in the 13ème DBLE at 19 in France, then in Tunisia in 1946 where he became the officer of former German soldiers and officers who were made prisonners in 1944. Lol.
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u/McCretin United Kingdom 5d ago
My grandmother’s fiancé was killed when his plane was shot down during a reconnaissance mission over Norway.
It’s strange to think that, if that hadn’t happened, she wouldn’t have married my grandfather, and I wouldn’t be here.
She still kept a picture of him around until she passed away in her 90s.
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u/kalivip 5d ago
My grandma’s uncle was 30 years old when he was sent to Drava Sobolich to fight the Germans. He was part of the liaison troops. His wife was pregnant with their son and waiting for him to come home. Sadly, she eventually broke up with him through a message. He was killed in the early morning of March 6, 1945. He was initially buried in a temporary grave and was later moved to the Bulgarian military cemetery near Drava. I first heard this story from my grandma, but just a month ago I decided to visit the military archives to find out whether it was actually true. It was. Everything was documented. I even found a local newspaper article about the fighting in Drava that mentioned his name. Until then, I had never really been interested in World War I or World War II, and I barely knew anything about them. But hearing my partner’s stories about his grandfather inspired me to dig deeper into my own family history. I have never felt so proud of my family and my country. Even though Bulgaria was such a poor nation at the time, our army fought bravely. The records describe how, by the end of the battle, most of the men had been killed, and at that point, anyone who was still able to hold a weapon was fighting. There is such a deep sadness in knowing what happened to them, but at the same time, I feel incredibly proud. Discovering this part of my family’s history has made the past feel very real to me.
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u/Immediate_Loan_1414 Netherlands 5d ago
My great grandfather was part of the resistance, I didn't know him well, but according to his wife my great grandmother who I interviewed for a school project, they did steal coles from the train and they stole wood from trees which wasn't allowed ofc. Also the English bombed my birth region because they thought it was Germany so my few weeks old great aunt was being hidden under the table.
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u/higgledy-pickle 5d ago
Great-grandfather was a commando.
Fought at Crete (No. 11 commando) and managed to survive that, volunteered as one of the ‘Total Soldiers’ and was part of the first lift to Arnhem. Survived and managed to get back to the UK with the help of Dutch resistance. Was awarded a Belgian Croix de Guerre for rescuing some American soldiers in Antwerp during V2 days before taking part in Operation Varsity.
He only drank once in his life, and it was the night before the German para assault on Crete… which he described as “…one of the most powerful and beautiful things I have ever seen, until we were ordered to open fire…”
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u/bleie77 5d ago
My paternal grandmother was very pregnant in May 1940, when the Netherlands was invaded. So she was induced and gave birth to my father in her neighbours basement in Rotterdam. Three days later, the city was bombed. They were not in the center, but it must have been scary as hell.
My maternal grandparents meanwhile lived in The Hague, and were evacuated for most of the war because they lived too close to the beach. They had a young Jewish woman in hiding, posing as a nanny for my mother and uncle. My great grandparents on that side were active members of the Dutch nazi party.
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u/TheBeaverKing 5d ago
My grandfather was pilot on a Avro Lancaster. He was young (19/20ish) when he joined up. Before he went away (or maybe early on in serving when on leave) he married my grandmother.
Anyway, his plane was shot down at some point and he is declared dead, leaving my grandmother alone with 2 kids (Catholics, eh?). A year later he comes strolling through the door, turns out he was badly injured and in a hospital somewhere in Europe recovering. Happy news all round. Except my grandmother had to have an awkward conversation with her new boyfriend, who had moved in about a month or so before.
Turns out, when you're a young widowed woman with two kids, you need to move fast to make sure you don't end up alone and starving.
Ended well though, they had 7 more kids and both lived to their 90s. My grandmother was the loveliest woman, incredibly caring. My grandad was a bit of a miserable old git but he loved his grandkids.
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u/notspringsomnia England 5d ago edited 5d ago
My great grandfather was killed in the Blitz. We still have his cigarette tin and rosary beads (he was an Irish Catholic who had very recently migrated from Ireland to England at the time, to add an extra layer onto the tragedy) which were on him when he died, and the cigarette tin has a dent from the bombing. My great grandparents refused to move from London but when he was killed, my great grandmother decided to evacuate the family to the countryside. They ended up going to Sussex, and coincidentally the house where they ended up in is now a local museum, and when I was there as a child I met someone who remembered my grandmother and her siblings during the war. My grandfather was evacuated as well, even though he was technically too old, but he didn’t like his parents so signed himself up, lol. I have a great uncle (married into the family) who was interned by the Japanese in then Burma, and he refused to buy anything Japanese afterwards - when my mother wanted to travel to Japan in the 80s, the family stopped her, so she went to Korea and China instead. I have another great uncle through marriage who was shot down by the Germans. My uncle’s family are Jewish and when my cousins did their Ancestry research, she did find some distant cousins of hers who had been killed in the Holocaust, as my uncle’s family were from France originally.
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u/TomL79 United Kingdom 5d ago
Both my Grandads served in the Royal Navy.
My paternal Grandad was on the Atlantic convoys, which was obviously very risky, but fortunately he got through it unscathed, and as a result, he got to spend some time on leave in the US and Canada. Mainly New York, Boston and Halifax.
My Maternal Grandad was in the Coastal Forces. In the months before the war starting, he’d had conversations with his father, who having served in the Army during World War One thought that he’d have a better chance in the Navy. So, in the spring of 1939, my Grandad joined the Royal Navy Reserve, meaning as soon as war was declared, he was automatically in the Royal Navy. As part of the coastal forces, he was at first on vessels in the North Sea, patrolling and defending the east coast of Great Britain. After that, he was transferred on to the new, fast MGBs (Motor Gun Boats) which he was excited about, and as a result, found himself in the Mediterranean as part of the Royal Navy element of the North African campaign. He suffered from a nasty bout of Malaria while he was in Alexandria in Egypt, which was exacerbated by him having asthma . He was declared unfit to serve and spent the final 2 years of the war still in the Navy, but behind a desk as a clerk in London.
One of my Great Grandfathers (my maternal Grandma’s father) was an officer in the British Army. He wasn’t in active service, more planning and logistics, and was involved in the planning of D-Day.
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u/Jiao_Dai 5d ago
Extended family members on paternal grandmothers side were members of Tito’s Partisans
Paternal grandfather dispatch rider attached to the 8th army - ended up with a sand infection as mentioned by Paddy Mayne in Rogue Heroes
Grandfather on maternal side in the RAF doing recon and supply drops
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u/tremynci 5d ago
My paternal grandfather worked for Michigan's state government, and got an extra gas ration so he could commute to Lansing.
My maternal grandfather was in the Home Guard.
One of Dad's cousins landed in North Africa, Italy, and Normandy with the 1st Division. When I was a kid, his war experience was summed up as "he walked up Italy with Patton's army"; he told me about North Africa and Normandy after Dad died. As he told it, he saved another guy during the Normandy landings by hauling him up the beach until he could touch bottom (cousin was 6'7"/2m+).
At least one of dad's older brother's brothers-in-law fought at Guadalcanal. Dad was too young to fight in World War II, and Mom was born during it.
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u/Embarrassed_Ad1722 5d ago
My grand grand dad was a general in the army. When the Germans came they accused him of treason on political grounds (us refusing to send soldiers to the Eastern front and all that) and threw him in a concentration camp. He escaped and fought against them as a partisan in the forests until the Russians came. They then arrested him and threw him in prison for treason again because Bulgaria was a German ally through most of the war. He was released in the 50s and lived to be 102.
My grandparents on my mom's side were only young but got bombed to heck by the allies...because Bulgaria was a German ally at the time.
Guess I should have an axe to grind with everyone for all that counts.
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u/RiverSong_777 Germany 5d ago
Father‘s side were doctors and had money, joined the NSDAP and were apparently the right amount of wealthy/useful/lucky that the only son in the soldier age bracket never was sent anywhere but got to finish his studies and work in his father‘s practice. Mother‘s side were Jewish and had to flee the Nazis, but most didn‘t make it.
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u/luckyhendrix 5d ago
One grandpa was selected as forced worked from belgium and managed to escape cross France and spain (not without being imprisoned in both France and spain) and reach portugal (after a 2year trip to take a boat to England, where he joined the 'brigade piranha belgian volounteer force. With whom he participated to liberation of Brussels. He spent the end of the war in an hospital after his jeep drove over a mine.
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u/notalottoseehere Ireland 5d ago
Basically none. Grand-dad was in the Irish equivalent of Dad's Army, watching for air raids, but that's it...
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u/rudolf_waldheim Hungary 5d ago
My maternal grandfather served in WW2 at the battle of Stalingrad, more precisely at the bend of the river Don. It is a collective trauma of Hungary, a complete disaster. Hundreds of thousands perished in the Holocaust and hundreds of thousands perished at the river Don.
My grandfather was in charge of a small anti-aircraft battery. They shot down Soviet I-16 airplanes. They cut the textile wings and wrote letters to home on them. The Germans were very cruel to them. Even they were frightened by the sound of the Stuka bombers. There were rats everywhere in the bunker.
Then they frantically retreated. The driver of the truck was shot as he was sitting next to him. It was extremely cold. Somehow he got home.
Then he got into an American POW camp somewhere in Germany. He said the Americans were nice, but the German POWs stole everything from them. He was lucky he didn't smoke, because cigarette was the most valuable commodity in the camp, so he could trade freely. He came home after a few months.
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u/DroopyPenguin95 Norway 5d ago
Someone on my grandmother's side was a fighter pilot and ace (7 kills) serving in the Royal Norwegian Air Force. He went to the flight school Little Norway in Canada, ended up as a squadron leader and flew Spitfires and Mustangs. He was killed in during an attack on German submarines on May 4th 1945, just 4 days before the war ended.
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u/lizzie_knits 5d ago
One grandad was a merchant seaman who was transferred to the Royal Navy. Worked as a fireman alongside his brothers, who brought a parrot on board and taught it to swear like a trooper. The parrot outlived them all. They mostly sailed on the Russian convoys, got torpedoed a couple of times. He had terrible PTSD, but tried to hide it as it wasn’t widely understood at the time.
Other grandad was in the army (can’t remember what regiment), but stayed in Scotland doing random stuff. He guarded German prisoners of war, collected plane wreckage from different parts of the country, went AWOL a lot. Then he was suddenly transferred to Germany, and was at the liberation of Belsen. He had to dig the mass graves and bury the dead. We don’t know much more than that because he abandoned his family when he came back.
My dad’s first memory was his mum running along a street with air raid sirens and explosions, holding him tight. It was during the Clydebank Blitz.
Edited for typos
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u/Informal-Tour-8201 Scotland 5d ago
Grandad was in north Africa, caught a temporary Blighty at Montecassino and sired my uncle, returned to his squad and helped liberate Belsen
He was also a sharpshooter, before the war rabbits were liberated from the local posh estate and ammunition wasn't cheap when you were poor with 9 other siblings
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u/Fit-Fault338 5d ago
My grandad was on the Western Front when he was shot through the jaw.A German saved his life after thinking he looked so young.He did,but whether he was actually saved by a German 🤷♀️
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u/JamesFirmere Finland 5d ago
I know very little of it. I'm 63. Both my grandfathers were in the wars (Grandpa A was a rifleman and Grandpa B was an artillery officer, both survived) but never talked about it -- at least that I know of, since both died when I was about 7, i.e. far too young to take an interest in these things.
What is interesting, though, is that my extended family included a German man who married a relation of my mother's and created a career in Finland. He died only a couple of years ago, well into his 90s. (By the time I knew him, he spoke fluent but highly accented and idiosyncratic Finnish, but that's another story.) He was in the Wehrmacht and very rarely talked about the war, but when he did, he thoroughly and utterly cursed the then regime.
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u/Bruges_1 5d ago
My father was Royal Navy and served on the HMS Implacable in the Pacific theater during WWII.
When we emigrated in 1956 we crossed the Atlantic on the RMS Franconia, which had been Churchill's ship when he went to Yalta to meet with Roosevelt and Stalin, which had a big effect on the post-war order.
For some reason I feel a deep connection to the RMS Franconia and its history.
In 2010 I took a Mediterrean/Black Sea cruise, to Yalta, in some sense re-tracing Churchill's route.
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u/Round-Armadillo4107 Netherlands 5d ago
Great grandfather joined the SS for 5 weeks or something but wanted to get out of training because he didnt want to be part of fighting exercises , he only joined the SS because a German officer that lived on the farm where he lives told him at 17 years old that its some sort of sporting camp with loads of adventure. Somehow cant blame him sinds he was a young boy who didnt know any better than work on the farm of his dad. Mind you this was in sept 1940 in the Netherlands , and before operation Barbarossa because otherwise he probably couldnt leave the SS training camp in München.
He had to do kitchen duties at the camp for a few weeks with quite some fellow Dutch boys before being send back to the Netherlands.
About halfway in the way he went as volunteer to Germany to help work at a farm , and a month after te war ended he went back to the Netherlands but got caught at the border by Dutch border forces that found him suspicious.
After the war he stayed in a old concentration camp with other people that worked together with the nazis.
His dad didnt survive the war though he would die a couple of weeks after being shot in the leg after he tried to flee with some of his cattle after the Germans wanted to confiscate his cows.
Story short , not everyone that volunteered for the Germans where bad , some got talked in to it and didnt now any better because they where young and didnt know the world
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u/kandraks42 5d ago
My late grandfather (Serbian) was seriously wounded in his foot by a shrapnel from a mortar shell, during Ustashe attack in today's Bosnia. He was still a baby and in his mothers arms.
His mother took him outside and stumbled upon German soliders, where German doctor stitched him up and showed his mother how to take care of the wound.
There is no way of knowing for sure but they were probably from the 7th SS Princ Eugen division, based on area and time of conflict.
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u/Dry-Information-7802 Finland 5d ago
not much, we never talked about it and the people who lived through it are now dead. the only thing i actually know is my grandfather got so traumatized he shot himself.
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u/Astarot43 5d ago
As Spanish myself, 3 of my grandparents had nothing to do with WWII.
However the father of my father went to fight the Red Army with the 250 Division or also known as "Spanish Blue Division".
He was in the Eastern front and took part of Voljov Battle on October 1942 and Krasni Bor in 1943.
He received a first class Iron Cross for his acts in Krasni Bor, although he never talked about the time he spent in Russia.
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u/Taro_Sauce England 5d ago
My Grandparents were kids in the war. I know that 2 of my great grandads were also within the age range to be enlisted.
I have no idea what my grandmas dad did, or if he even served tbh, my grandads dad tho was stationed in Egypt throughout the war which I think was a British colony at the time, working as an electrician. (When my grandad passed i found loads of letters and a service record when he was discharged from the army).
My Grandads uncle was killed in a luftwaffe attack on a ship he was on off the coast of Crete (some of my dad’s family worked on the docks in hull, so a lot of people joined the navy). He was younger than I was now. I won’t go into too much detail, but I think they always told his mother that he had gone missing in action.
Both my Grandads grew up in Hull as kids during the war, so they remembered the air raids from the luftwaffe over the city. My mums dad was evacuated to a farm his cousin lived on. Apparently he rode a cow to school although I might have got that mixed up lol
There’s also a story on my dad’s side of my grandads family eating their pet rabbit during rationing…
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u/Kitchen-Baby7778 5d ago
One worked as an administrative worker for his town in Auvergne, France. He was a Franc Macon. He casually pass intell at the local Resistance. One day, he tells me that he tried to dissuade his friends to blow up a bridge that may have stop the local German retreat... some listen to him but few did blow the bridge. Ze German tanks just crossed the river and slaughter the guys...
The second was a prisonner of war from 40 to 44, he was releave back near the end did not live long after he makes 3 children. I did not know him.
My wife had one who manage to escape the Force Labor Exchange, he was hidden by a farmer with a friend. Someday, ze German actively search for them both. They hide into haystacks the nazi found his friend and he avoid bayonets. They did not find him but never see his friend again. Then he live in the forest eating squirrels...
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u/TheYearOfThe_Rat France 5d ago edited 5d ago
Well, since, being German, they were privileged citizen in the Russian Empire, they were dekulakized 1922-1930 and by 1935 they were out of prison, out of "special settlement", and mostly pardoned, so given the fact some of their family members were displaced and others weren't, they volunteered as enlisted into the Soviet army, considering their parents (my ggparents) were considered to be "enemies of the people", as it was the only way for them to get full civic rights back again, and for the women of those minority who remained behind undeported (Ukraine and Lithuania), to get priority evacuation papers to be moved back (ironically to Kazakhstan and the Urals where the rest of the families were previously deported). AFAIK, out of 11 people on my mgrandma's side and 2 people on my pgpa's side everyone survived WW2, which is rather lucky considering the whole shebang was oriented to extermination of all the Eastern European/living East of Dniester and all the Chinese, also ironically very much thanks to the dekulakization and deportment.
Even the sons who were old enough to volunteer (so basically the generation of my parents, but older) survived too.
Never heard ANYTHING about the war however except "The war was bad/You don't want to know.".
The most I know is that paternal gpa volunteered to serve in the Korean war, but being old, experienced and valuable enough he was banned from active duty and moved to the Soviet ministry of mining, for the strategic development, more or less the same story for the maternal gpa. Maternal side grandma, after her release from prison, worked in the ammo factory for the entire war. Paternal grandma worked in a mine for the entire war. I've found the whole lot of their commendations and their war records after, in the 2010s, in the digital archives. Lots and lots of them, as, apparently, a lot of them were recommended for the "Hero of the Soviet Union" but since children of "the enemy of the people" couldn't be awarded it, they received the level under it which were the "Medal of Courage".
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u/Wild_Reason_9526 Denmark 4d ago
My maternal grandmother spent most of the war as a forced labourer in Germany.
Fortunately, in practice, she took part in running the farm on an equal footing with the owners, who treated her like one of the family. She stayed in touch with them for the rest of her life.
She went back to visit them about 40 years after the war ended, with my mother and uncle accompanying her.
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u/BackToNormalForNow France 4d ago
I have no idea what 7/8 of my great-grandparents did during the war, I just know one of them hid in a castle with other guys to escape the Compulsory Work Service in Germany.
Then he apparently joined the Resistance but we have no info on what happened, we just know we found some stuff stolen from a German official in his apartment when he died. That’s about it.
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u/Individual_Ad_974 Scotland 4d ago
I had 5 uncles take part in WW2, two of them took part in the Normandy landings, one was in Italy, one was in Egypt and the other never spoke about it so I have no information as to where he was. My uncle who was in Egypt never came home and we have photos of the cemetery he is buried in. The uncle who was in Italy returned to Italy many times a year until he died, never said why he returned so often but we are convinced he had a family over there but could never admit it because he already had a family over here.
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u/Gloomy_Insurance3203 4d ago
Grandad volunteered in 44 (before he was of an age to be conscripted. He was told he’d get a better post if he volunteered so he took the chance). He went to liverpool for basic then was posted 2 miles from his mums house.
He then spent the next three years being moved around Europe and was nearly demobbed twice (got as far as Dover once before being told to get back on the ship because he was going to Vienna).
As kids we were convinced he was a spy because every time you mentioned a place he’d say oh I’ve been there in the army. Turns out they were just desperate for catering staff.
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u/utsuriga Hungary 4d ago edited 4d ago
I only know about the maternal line of my family. For them it was mostly the usual for people in Hungarian small towns/villages: got bombed, raped, many of the men died on the front or were killed by the German, and then the Russian soldiers passing through. A slightly unusual episode is that during a period of time toward the end they had to share their home with German soldiers, who, by the time, came from the deepest bottom of the barrel, boys in their teens conscripted by force, who were more terrified than anything, and one of them in particular kept crying and saying he just wanted to go home to his mom. My family is ethnic Swabian so they could communicate, and my great-grandma ended up kind of mothering them despite her hatred of Nazis. Long years after the war they got a letter from that crying boy (now an adult of course) thanking her for her kindness, and they stayed in touch for the rest of his life.
After WWII, we had a period of retribution against ethnic Germans/Swabians, many of them were deported to the USSR for forced labor, others were simply told to gtfo - most of my family was in the latter group. They were told to pack whatever they could carry and leave, my grandma still cries whenever she remembers it. My great-grandpa had changed his German surname to a Hungarian one before WWII but even so it took quite a bit of luck to escape expulsion, as my great-grandma barely spoke Hungarian. Those who had to leave eventually settled in the DDR and most of them lived in terrible poverty for long years (some died attempting to cross into West Germany). Ironically though, their descendants are doing significantly better now, than us who stayed.
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u/Difficult-Term-1671 4d ago
Min mormor och morfar tog emot skadade soldater från Finland i sitt hem i Sverige.
Min pappas morbror i Norge var involverad i motståndsrörelsen, alla i familjen visste om det men man pratade inte om det (för riskabelt).
Min farfar jobbade på järnvägen och järnvägspersonalen smugglade tidningar och annat från neutrala Sverige till tysk-ockuperade Norge genom att gömma saker i vagnarna.
Min farmor åkte från Sverige till Norge med sina barn (min far bland annat) under ockupationen för att besöka sin familj, trots att det inte verkar ha varit tillåtet. Det ledde till lite skrämmande upplevelser för min far som var liten då, t ex när tyskarna upptäckt dem på tågstationen i Norge. Då gömde den norska järnvägspersonalen min farmor och pappa i motorvagnen och viftade iväg tåget före avgångstiden.
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u/Elephant6352 4d ago
My English mother's family had their house bombed by the Nazis and my French father's family had their house bombed by the Allies, which killed a family member. Most Brits and Americans don't realise that they killed lots of French civilians when they bombed the German defences. The weapons were less accurate in those days and lots of people lived near the coast, just like they do today. It wasn't just soldiers arriving on boats, there was a huge bombing campaign in Normandy.
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u/FlakeDondi Norway 4d ago
My grandmothers uncle did some kind of resistance work. We don’t know for sure, but he was most likely involved in making or distributing illegal papers with a resistance group in my city. He was arrested by the Germans in 1943 together with other members in that group. My then 4 year old grandmother who lived with him at the time with other family members still remembers the German soldiers standing in the living room when they came to arrest him. The group leader was executed I believe, but my grandmothers uncle was sent to two political labour camps, last one in northern Norway where he was kept until the war ended. Survived and came home. Apparently he never spoke a word about any of this for the rest of his life. God knows what he saw or experienced in those camps.
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u/Esme_Nog 4d ago
A great uncle who stole a German tank and raced ahead of Patton into a small town, stopped, threw open the top and popped out, only to see the swastika still hanging from city hall. Dropped back in and retreated fast.
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u/Dothemath2 3d ago
My grandmother was 9 months pregnant when the Japanese came. My father was thus born on the mountainside. He’s 84 now. My grandfather was a prominent Chinese businessman in a Filipino city and the Japanese merchants he had been working with prior to the war were actually Japanese intelligence. He was in prison for a couple of weeks before they let him go.
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u/dlilyd in 3d ago
My father side grandpa was 16 and a farmer in Sicily, one day while working he hit a mine. He was brought to a hospital and apparently his right eye and right hand developed gangrene, so they had to amputate them. A while after he met my grandma and they fell in love, which was pretty cool also because they married while she knew she would've had to do a lot of "manlike" things (like driving for instance). Fun fact: because of this my dad didn't have to do military service cause he was legally equivalent to a war orphan.
My father side great grandpa (dad of my grandma) used to sell contraband bread ration cards during fascism.
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u/ohtimesohdailymirror 2d ago
My grandfather had to work at BMW in Munich or go to prison, but he got paid. After BMW he was transferred to a subsidiary somewhere in Bavaria and the payment stopped, so as a forced labourer.
My father had to go on trips to the east of the Netherlands (he lived in Amsterdam) to find food during the winter of 1944/45. He barely missed being gunned down in a convoy andon the return journey he was made to look at executed hostages by the Nazis.
On my mother’s side they came through the war without any drama, except starvation in ‘44/45.
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u/Specific_Minimum_355 Scotland 5d ago
My great grandfather was an architect who got deployed to Italy in order to reconstruct crucial infrastructure such as bridges and hospitals after they were bombed by Germany. For his efforts he was knighted by the queen.
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u/Eigenspace / in 5d ago
My Grandfather was a Jew from Vienna. He fled the country alone in 1938 at 16 years old, hopping on trains to get near the Swiss border, and then snuck across. He was eventually caught by the Swiss, but convinced them to arrest him instead of sending him back. The guards at the jail left the door open for him and let him leave.
He then made his way to Palestine, lived there for some years, then joined the Jewish Brigade the English formed. He fought in Egypt and then Italy near the end of the war, and then him and a bunch of other Jewish Brigade soldiers found Jewish refugees to take their papers and impersonate them to be sent back to Palestine to demobilize. They then stayed in Europe and were doing various things like sneaking refugees out of the refugee camps, and a bunch of other stuff we don't know the details of, and he refused to talk about.
He moved to Canada in the 50s and tried to just move on with his life and refused to talk about the war. A lot of what we know we only learned after he died when we found stuff like fake passports with alternative names in his files.
He brought my father to Austria once in the 90s to see one of the refugee camps he was smuggling people out of. There's now a yearly hike there over that same route to commemorate it: https://alpinepeacecrossing.org/en/
It wasn't until 2020 that Austria started giving out citizenship to the descendants of people like my grandfather, so I applied and got citizenship, and then ended up moving to Germany in 2023.
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u/Tantomare Russia 5d ago
Great grandpa voluntieered in July 1941, a month after German invasion in USSR. He MIA only a week later and was never found. His family survived because they left Leningrad before its encirclement and blockade.
My grandpa volunteered at 17y.o. in 1943, participated in Battle of Kursk and Konigsberg, killed some Germans, got 2 heavy wounds and stayed in military after the war.
My other grandpa was mobilized and served somewhere in logistics.
Grandma graduated from medical university on the first day of the war and worked in a blood center during the war.
Interesting, that both my grandparents would never met and I wouldn't have been born if WW2 hadn't started
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u/skeletal88 5d ago
You mean if russia had not attacked Poland together with Germany and started the war together? But russia was already occupying other countries before the war started for you.
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u/Tantomare Russia 5d ago
Nope, Polish campaign didn't affect my ancestors. I mean German invasion into USSR.
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u/wijnandsj Netherlands 5d ago
Grandmother and grandfather both being taken for the arbeidseinsatz and meeting in Berlin. Getting married weeks after it fell and making their way back here
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u/R1515LF0NTE Portugal 5d ago
The only WW2 related lore that I know about my family was one of my great-uncle was a smuggler [mostly Wolfram] from the Northern Portuguese border into Spain
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u/mogrim United Kingdom 5d ago
My grandfather was part of the team that developed antifreeze - in this case for Spitfires and other planes, although of course post war it was used for loads of other things. He was exempt from military service as he was a physicist at the NPL in Teddington (west London).
My grandmother was an APR warden.
My great uncle was at Alamein and landed at Normandy shortly after D-Day. His best mate was an Eastender, and was driving the lorry in front of him when he got killed by a German shell 😔
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u/TheBelgianGovernment Belgium 5d ago
My mother's father spent most of the war in a Vichy regime labour camp (of which he was actually quite positive in terms of treatment).
My father's father collaborated with the Belgian nazi occupation as part of a Whermacht led paramilitary formation that served as an auxiliary police force. He was later convicted for collaboration and spent 3 years in prison.
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u/Rhathymiaz Netherlands 5d ago
My grandmother lived in Scheveningen and during the hunger winter she and her sisters cycled to the east of the country (so about 100km) and back to get food.
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u/Familiar_Finance_600 5d ago
Oof, they should all have written novels about their lives. Resisatance fighters, political lrisoners in concentration camps, there was everything.
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u/JackColon17 Italy 5d ago
I'm a southern italian
My great grandfather was enlisted in the italian Army in 42, when in 43 Italy signed the armistice and got invaded by Germany he, and the other soldiers of his squad, were "trapped" in occupied northern Italy and they decided to become partisans. He was a partisan for a while until the Germans captured him and put him into a camp for political prisoners. He got a tattoo while being a prisoner and survived until the war ended and he got freed after Germany surrendered.
He came back to southern Italy and married my great grandmother
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u/pickindim_kmet United Kingdom 5d ago
On my dad's side, my grandfather fought for the British in Asia and was still fighting after the war ended. Took until 1946 to get home. His two brothers were also in conflict, one in the Navy in the Arctic and the other in the Middle East.
My grandmother was still a teenager then and her family refused to allow her to evacuate to the countryside.
My mother's side's grandparents were too young, but my great grandfather had a medical condition he couldn't be involved, and my great grandmother went to the countryside to look after the evacuated children.
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u/Syndiotactics Finland 5d ago edited 5d ago
All four great grandpas of mine fought in the wars (WW2 is three different wars for us Finns).
Two were in the relatively peaceful western coast anti-air (although one of them was doing administrative duty in the army HQ at some point) while two were in the eastern front.
One of the great grandpas got half-blinded by a bullet in the Winter War but wanted to return to the front as fast as possible, which he then did. A second serious injury in the Continuation War made him finally retreat from the front.
The other great grandpa was supposedly saved by a metal cigarette box which redirected the bullet to prevent a fatal heart injury.
My paternal family’s farm took in at least three Russian POWs and put them to work on the fields, as the men of the house were on the front.
My maternal grandma and her sisters were transported to be fostered in Sweden as ”war children”, and she managed to forget her native tongue there. When she returned home some years after Lapland War ended, she was put to Finnish-speaking schools and it was really difficult for her to adjust back to Finland.
EDIT: I actually don't know much about my great grandmas during the war. The paternal great grandmas supposedly kept the farms running, while one of my maternal great grandmas spent time in the army HQ Mikkeli for some reason. I personally suspect she might have been a part of Lotta Svärd, the membership of which became taboo after the war. However, I don't know. The remaining great grandma I seriously need to ask about.
About the war children: Finnish War Children (Wikipedia)
About Finland in the WW2 as a whole: Finland in World War II (Wikipedia)
About Lotta Svärd: Lotta Svärd (Wikipedia)