spooky wartime findings

wow, a real reminder of the horrors of war. One can only hope those remains found are properly ID'd (if possible) and returned to their home country for a proper military funeral.

On a lighter note I bet that x54r ammo would still work...
 
i bet that dp could work after a good cleanup too.
it's something special to see these remains with the whole id plaque,finaly maybe the family of these soldiers know more than just reported missing...
 
Interesting how much better stuff is when it's preserved in bogs and peat. Lots of it looks like it was buried yesterday.

I wonder about their digging up the bodies - if they're digging in known burial areas or just warzones, if they're getting the bodies repatriated/properly buried etc.
 
I friend of mine was five years old when the Soviets pushed the Germans out of the east. He remembers seeing fields with so many bodies he couldn't see the ground.
I asked if it affected him. He said he saw some neat stuff on the dead soldiers he wishes now he had taken!
Some of those look like mass graves. But at least there was beer.
Hungarian.
 
german remains (ones with id tags or german uniform bits) are usually turned into the government and a few times a year are returned to the german government

russian remains cant be id very often as the id cards were paper.........
 
Found where they fell or were buried in a shallow grave. Spooky in deed that they are only a few of hundreds of thousands that still lie in the former battlefields of Russia that remain on an unending tour of duty. For these men, their 60 year tour has come to a close. I wonder what is going to be done with the findings ? Sent to their respective military cemeteries I hope.

If I start seeing their personal belongings popping up on E-bay I am going to be quite offended.

To think also, that when you are holding your RC Kar98k or a refurbished 91/30, you could very well be holding the weapons picked up from these dead soldiers. That is a spooky thought indeed that sends a shiver down my spine.
 
Nabs said:
To think also, that when you are holding your RC Kar98k or a refurbished 91/30, you could very well be holding the weapons picked up from these dead soldiers. That is a spooky thought indeed that sends a shiver down my spine.
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very true
 
There is a HUGE market for battle field finds. Most of that stuff will be cleaned up and sold for profit. Really sad to think of the guys that lost their lives to be then found like that with ID and then be stripped of artifacts to be sold. No shame!
 
Oldsmobiler said:
There is a HUGE market for battle field finds. Most of that stuff will be cleaned up and sold for profit. Really sad to think of the guys that lost their lives to be then found like that with ID and then be stripped of artifacts to be sold. No shame!
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That is just wrong. I can understand finding a random German bayonet in a field out in Russia with no human remains nearby but when you stumble upon grave sites like that with personal belongings, ALL of it should go with the soldier(s) to their respective military cemetery for proper burial.
 
Some of those pictures were linked to another article on legitimate archaeology sponsored by one of the big Russian universities. The bones were reportedly re-interred where no ID was found. BS or no, I have no idea.

There is another group of pictures of Russian troops digging trenches hundreds of feet long after the thaw and pushing everything -men and material, German and Russian- in before burying them. Witnesses reported that in some places it was years before the stench faded completely.

Figgure the Germans lost 500,000 men at Kursk, 200,000 at Stalingrad etc... That's a lot of dead people.
 
There are accounts by German soldiers of building minor fortifications out of (mostly Russian) bodies when it got too cold to dig. When they got driven out of those positions there would be huge piles of corpses permanently stuck together.
 
Bodies needed to be buried or burnt for the sake of the people still living. There was no luxury of proper burials and identification. This has happened all over the world since before history was written. Very sad indeed. None of these soldiers wanted to be there, and their families never knew what actually became of them. You do have to wonder where things came from when buying military artifacts. Does it come from a warehouse or a grave robber?
 
Nabs said:
If I start seeing their personal belongings popping up on E-bay I am going to be quite offended.

It happens all the time; like every day. Just look at the dozens of videos on YouTube. Use your imagination and enter searches like "battlefield finds" or "bunker finds" and you'll come up with literally DOZENS of videos of guys digging this stuff.Those guys are professional "treasure hunters". There is also at least one website dedicated to these people and what they do.
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I thought that digging up dead soldiers was mostly illegal over there? I'm pretty sure most of those groups need to get approved for archeological research or something before the first shovel even hits the ground. And any interesting artifacts are meant to be returned to the grave or museum.

Doubt thats going to happen though.
 
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