Video of WW2 items found west of Volgagrad

It looked like the bones were being collected for reburial. Better they are dug up and properly reburied with dignity than destroyed by farm equipment or scattered by animals as they pop out of the ground, IMO. If all that stuff was laying in the woods near my house I 'd be grabbing it up too - better I find it than my little kids, or yours.
 
Are they allowed to do this ? I thought these sites were war graves and not to be disturbed ?

I surely hope they are not finding human remains next to these relics and simply discarding them.

If the recovery is funded by the state, the items are going to a museum for display and educational purposes, and any remains are properly buried with honours, then I don't have an issue. If it is a random team of people digging through the country side for the fun of it then that I have a serious problem with what they are doing.
 
Most of the pics are from a governed recovery project in Russia. They are reburied in proper graves. There are lots of pictures of this effort on englishrussia, and other russian sites.

Lots of cool stuff still out there, but obviously shows the cost of war.
 
Interesting the M1917 or P14 looked like it had a bubba stock. Amazing how well the items were preserved. If it was around here, there would be just a brown stain on the rocks where the artifacts used to be lol. I am going to go into this in a bit more detail next year in school, but the decay of metals depends on the nature of the soil and the bedrock in a given area. If there is a lot of sulfide minerals present, then it is going to cause sulfuric acid to form, like in a lot of places in Nova Scotia - *exposed bedrock means 'acid mine drainage'. I guess some types of soils are relatively inert, as possibly is the case in the area the artifacts were found in the ops video clip.
 
FYI Volgograd = Stalingrad, site of over 1.25 million casualties. There is likely a huge haul of archeological treasure.

I hope its being properly and legally excavated, documented and catalogued.
 
Remember, about 90% of casualties on the Eastern Front have no known graves.

It was VERY unlike what happened in the West.

They just bulldozed a ditch or used a handy ravine and filled it up, then covered it over.

And another point: about 90% of the documented POWs never made it home. This includes Germans, Romanians, Hungarians.......and British, Canadians and Americans who were in German POW camps "liberated" by the Soviets.

So far, nobody has complained except a few veterans and the odd crank. Nobody wants to get Comrade Stalin upset.

Funny: I thought the miserable murderous b*stard died when I was a kid.

And STILL nobody has opened their fat political mouth.
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Smellie, I think for the Russian's who still call it the "Great Patriotic War", Stalingrad was the turning point that saved them from annihilation.

It is something for them to have as part of their greater national pride and history. I think they are reluctant to sully the memory of their great struggle with all the horrors that were perpetrated by both sides.

The Eastern Front was truly a war of annihilation. Never in history have two countries been so set on complete destruction of each other.
 
I thought the heaps of bones at 2:23 and the P14/M17 in the sporterized stock at 2:38 was more interesting. That P14/M17 was probably a trophy from the northern sectors that some German was whittling in his spare time. He must have been a short man from the length of the butt!

Some of it, like the panzerschrek 1:27 and the MP44 mag at 1:58 must have been a long way west of Volgograd!

These people are basically a bunch of grave robbers looking for trinkets from the dead that they can sell.

(Plenty of MIA's from Korea that no one seems to care about either, but then people generally don't care about much outside their own little sphere, so not so surprising.)
 
trapandhunt said:
I find it facinating how well peserved the metals are after all these years.
Click to expand...

It the mud, they get buried and the mud cover it and makes a good seal so the metals don't get a lot of time with oxygen. Remember those browning machine guns that was recovered from a bog and they still fired after all this time.
 
My great uncle was liberated from Stalag 8B by Russian troops, he had to show them where the Russian compound was, as he was the senior NCO on the detail that "fed" the Russians. The Russian compound consisted of a fenced area with machinegun towers - no buildings, food consisted of potato peelings and kitchen slops dumped on the ground from wheelbarrows. The treatment of Russian POW's was absolutely hideous. The Russians took him to the nearest town and told him to take whatever he wanted, gave him a pistol and said that if any of the locals tried to stop him, just kill them. The locals were all in hiding, between the Stalag, the Russian Compound and Auschwitz they were mostly employed supporting the business of genocide. Many of them would walk by the Stalag on Sunday afternoons and laugh at, and taunt the prisoners. He would have been shipped out, as many prisoners were, but he was in very poor condition from being tortured, so he was left behind when the Germans pulled out.
 
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