War bring backs

[762mm]

In 1976, I was in Vienna, Austria. They were demolishing an old building and came across an old arms cache in a secondary basement (basement to a basement).

There was just about every small arm of the period you could want in there. Machine guns, machine pistols, all sorts of pistols, rifles and ammunition.

They shut down the site pretty quickly and wouln't let any of the laborers leave, without being searched.

All of the spectators were herded out almost immediately. They had done this often before. It was handled with the precision of familiarity.

I tried to find out what happened to the firearms but it was deep dark secret.

I later talked to an aquaintance in the Austrian Army, stationed in Vienna and he told me they had a huge warehouse for this sort of thing and that such firearms went there for sorting and in some cases eventual destruction.

Back then, they were still selling certain types of these firearms to the world surplus markets. I wouldn't mind knowing what happened to them, just to satisfy my curiosity.

I couldn't see much from my perch but I can remember one of the workers picking up and inspecting a Panzerfaust and another looking over a K98. They looked clean but dusty, maybe from the demolition.

They had also dumped over a couple of crates of machine pistols and other pistols.

They obviously didn't suspect this stuff was there, or they would have been more careful and there certainly wouldn't have been any civilians around.

Awesome story... thanks for sharing! Having grown up in Europe myself, I know for a fact that these stories are pretty common, especially in the liberated countries, because Germans expected to come back in a not-so-distant future when they retreated and decided not to haul all their light armament around... so they would make small "caches" here and there. They were the efficient types, you know...

Even as a kid, I remember that I've always wondered about who had access to the maps or directions of where those caches were set up, because they must've kept a record of it somehow (as the caches were designed not to be easily found by locals or advancing enemy armies). Believe it or not, caches such as these are still being discovered to this very day in old farmhouses and forests of eastern Europe (and sometimes underground in cities), usually during excavation work or simply by chance. There are people who buy metal detectors and search the woods specifically for these WWII "artifacts" and, upon discovery, send them to war museums or perhaps sell to collectors (if law permits). Good on them, I guess... I'd probably be into such a hobby myself, but here in Canada the only armament you'll find buried in the woods are native arrowheads every few thousands miles, lol!



Some lucky ones sometimes even find buried or submerged WWII tanks or other armor as well (when I was young, we lived in a city near a recreational park that contained a fresh water pond where there was a submerged Russian T-34 on the bottom that no one ever bothered to pull out). It used to be an old German quarry that was later filled with water and a park was built around it... But they've left the T-34 right where it was. I remember pulling out what looked like rusted 8mm Mauser ammo buried in the surface clay around said pond, 5-10 meters in front of park benches where people/families would sit down to relax or have a picnic... only some 25 years ago or so. I wouldn't have been surprised if there were still a few German stick grenades or other stuff in that mud. If there was ammo, there must've been other stuff as well. I just never dug deep enough with my plastic kiddy shovel, I guess.

Sometimes the past is astonishing... and so easily forgotten.