Douno postcard. Private Collection.
A postcard published by Douno ‘Edition Photochrom’. To me the color makes it look like they were kissing on a warm and sunny early evening, right before dusk. A beautiful postcard added to the other tinted ones of the same genre I fell in love with.
Handsome WWII German sailor. Kriegsmarine Heribert. Bremen 1943. RPPC. Private Collection.
Smiling Heribert could have been an actor. He certainly had the striking good looks. But unfortunately he was a submariner serving under Hitler. Posting a picture of a German military guy from WWII is always an icky affair for some, but not for me.
The Kriegsmarine crews manned U-boats. Those submarines earned the nickname of “iron coffins”.
By war’s end, 28,000 out of 39,000 German sailors had died at sea. That’s 3 out of 4 wiped out, the highest casualty rate of all German forces. They did considerable damage to Allied forces too: 3,000 Allied ships (175 warships; 2,825 merchant ships) were sunk by U-boat torpedoes. The numbers are staggering on both sides.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once wrote “The only thing that really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril.”
But let’s come back to Heribert.
Without a last name there is no way of knowing if he made it through to the end or not, but the statistics are against him. Most German mariner casualties happened in the second half of the war when Allied technology advanced enough to effectively counteract their offensive.
[…] Memory / from Your Friend. Heribert. The other half of the postcard is blank.
There is no address and the postcard wasn’t posted, This was a picture he gave or left behind for his friend to find.
Photographer: Kunstfoto A. Klein. Kiel, Holstenstr. 104. Germany.
A (long) note to the casual reader:
I do not support racism, intolerance or other extreme views.
I have American, Russian and British soldiers who fought the same war in this collection. And while I understand the knee-jerk reaction of demonizing anyone who wore the Nazi uniform I like to dig beyond the surface.
I don’t see the world strictly in black and white terms and believe your average drafted WWII German soldier, sailor and pilot began the war for family and country but ended it disillusioned and horrified. They did what every soldier does in wartime: go on missions and hope they and their friends survived it to see another day. The alternative for the Germans was execution.
By the second half of the war 100,000 of the German military took the risk and deserted, 25,000 of them got caught and executed, and tens of thousands more ended up in concentration camps or “punishment battalions” where they were made to do the most hazardous tasks. By comparison, only one American soldier got executed for desertion, Eddie Slovik.
With all this said the SS and gestapo’s horrifying war crimes were deliberate and absolutely inexcusable in any way; you won’t find any of them on this blog.
“I was a good soldier. I see today that because of that, I was merely a good tool for an unbelievably criminal regime.” Heinz Otto Fausten. WWII German infantry veteran.
This quote is from an insightful article worth a read: A Son’s Quest For The Truth: The Last Battle of a German WWII Veteran
1920s romance postcard. Private Collection.
I spent quite some time restoring this amazing and rare Italian series of romantic postcards. The originals have all kinds of white speckles that are not too bothersome to the naked eye, but scanned…heh! The postcards also have a pin hole on the left of each card at the same spot, as if they were all stacked and pinned on a wall to take down when the mood strikes. I can see a soldier doing this on the wall of his bunk bed, but that’s my fertile imagination talking. :)
I call this gorgeous series The Motion Picture Kiss because all 5 postcards back to back look like a kiss in motion of the man making his way to the woman’s lips.
Publisher: Casa Editrice – Ballerini e Fratini. Firenze (Florence). Italy. This publishing house was established in 1912.
“Psss…don’t stop with the necklace!” – Private collection.
This man’s got a dangerous look on the postcard above. Must be that creepy little thing on that chair whispering things into his head! :) I didn’t even notice it until I scanned the pictures. Yikes!
If I saw just one of the postcards instead of all four, I’d think an artist painted the backdrop. Instead, this photoshoot looks like it happened by a real seaside under the moonlight. You can see the moon going up the sky, the changing clouds and a few sailboats passing by. The lighting was expertly done, because this really does look like an indoor studio setting…or was it a photographic trick with a film playing behind them, the couple placed behind the projected screen?
Foto Ars was an Italian publishing company.
Digital restoration work titled Romance In The Moonlight – series of 4 by Caroline C. Ryan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Austrian boy with very high collar & cigarette. CDV. Personal Collection.
A thick late period CDV of a dapper Austrian boy. He’s wearing a high collar and white tie that together elongate his silhouette. His jacket’s wrinkled but his gentlemanly appearance is complete with a straw boater hat, buttonhole jewelry chain and a cane tucked on his arm.
The backdrop is plain and looks like a painted room corner.
This card reminds me of the German one.
Photographer: Atelier Tegeffhoff. Inh. F. Jelinek. Vienna. Austo-Hungarian Empire.
Bowlers And High Collars 