Recycling German Helmets

[Subdeacon Joe]

 

 

[Dapper Dave]

https://youtu.be/Htw6HWxBs1U?si=5DqVGNRJH2TN8nGi

Mark Felton's excellent video on the road made with German helmets. 

Edited January 15 by Dapper Dave

[Subdeacon Joe]

9 hours ago, Dapper Dave said:

https://youtu.be/Htw6HWxBs1U?si=5DqVGNRJH2TN8nGi

Mark Felton's excellent video on the road made with German helmets. 

 

Thanks!  That was interesting.  

[Pat Riot]

There was a surplus store in PA when I was a kid that was selling German WW2 helmets. They were selling like hotcakes to bikers. 
The only thing I would use one for is target practice with my M1 Garand. 

[watab kid]

there was a lot of surplus left after the war , the populations had donated a lot of metal and done without during the war , these should have given back to those that suffered and did without .............most of that was based on what i know my family suffered , now lets look at the german public that were taken from because they were not all nazis , 

 

just like we all dont subscribe to the marxist views of some here , 

 

a lot of this surplus should have gone t helping the public that suffered from the war 

[Dapper Dave]

If you look it, that is kind of what happened, with a British road repaired by the helmets of those who tried to destroy her. Huge amounts of war material was recycled, which is why there are so few German tanks and such left, many of them were torn down to help rebuild. Much of the scrap was used by whoever was nearby, as moving mass quantities of destroyed tanks and rubble was a Herculean task with little benefit. This does include German civilians living in the rubble - they used what was at hand to rebuild, and then much help was given by The Allies to rebuild Germany into a productive nation again, same as Japan. Some of the biggest wastes of the war was the US military destroying completely usable equipment like planes, simply because they didn't need them, acres of B24s and B25s just blown up. Some were sold very cheaply to American citizens who wanted them, but, we had just finished many long weary years of war, and not many people wanted to be reminded of the human or materiel cost. This is also why so few Warbirds still fly. Right up the street from me lives a Privateer, a version of the B24 that was used for antisubmarine warfare in the Pacific. It is the only flying one left in the world. 
Another reason was getting rid of reminders of the horror - my stepfather was a radio operator on a C-47 during the Normandy invasion, and talked very little about it. My Uncle Art was a medic inside Bastogne during The Bulge. The experience broke his mind. Another uncle served in the US Navy in the Pacific, and ended up stationed in Occupied Japan after the war as well. 

The nazi party was certainly not all Germans, not by a long shot, which was one reason General Eisenhower had many German townsfolk help cleanup the concentration camps, so it could not be forgotten or swept under the rug of history. Even so, people to this day attempt to deny what happened. 

My son is a huge history nut, especially WWII, and would love to crawl all over German and Russian tanks, but I raised him to understand the human cost of blindly following leaders, and what those people did then and now. 
MY favorite piece of film remains the blowing up of the swastika on the Reichstag building. 

[Ozark Huckleberry]

1 hour ago, Dapper Dave said:

I raised him to understand the human cost of blindly following leaders, and what those people did then and now. 

At a school where I taught, the language arts teachers taught a unit on Anne Frank. The history teachers taught a parallel unit on the Holocaust at an 8th grade level. One of the things I worked to get across to the students what '6 million' represented, without the time and tedium of linking paper clips or making paper chains. This is what I came up with.

 

When we started the unit, the kids came in to a sheet of paper on their desks, with some simple little math problems for them, and instructions not to turn the paper over.

 

These were the problems:

 

1. If a sheet of paper listed names in four columns, with six lines per inch and one inch margins, how many names would be listed on the paper? The answer was 216.

 

2. How many names would be listed on 25 sheets of paper? The answer: 5,400

 

3. If a ream of paper had 500 sheets of paper, how many names would be listed in a ream of paper? The answer: 108,000

 

4.If a case of paper held 10 reams, how many names would be listed in a case of paper? The answer: 1,080,000.

 

5. How many cases of paper would it take to list 6,000,000 names? The answer: 5.56.

 

I'd direct their attention to the front corner of the room, where I had 6 cardboard cases that paper had come in, then tell them to turn their papers over. On their papers, in four columns, 54 lines per column, were a number of simple statements:

 

- This was someone's brother.

- This was someone's sister.

- This was someone's child.

- This was someone's father.

- This was someone's mother.

- This was someone's cousin.

- This was someone's wife.

- This was someone's husband.

 

 . . . and so on.

 

Then I'd collect their papers so they could see how small the little stack was, and walk over to drop it into the top box.

 

Then we would start the first lesson.

[Pat Riot]

The concentration camps held mostly Jews. They also held Gypsies, Gays, the Disabled, people with mental issues and mental disabilities and probably political enemies. People seem to have forgotten that. 
 

 

[Subdeacon Joe]

5 minutes ago, Pat Riot said:

The concentration camps held mostly Jews. They also held Gypsies, Gays, the Disabled, people with mental issues and mental disabilities and probably political enemies. People seem to have forgotten that. 
 

 

 

Also clergy, mostly Roman Catholic and Lutheran, Jehovah's Witnesses, Anabaptists, artists and actors who had been even mildly critical of the National Socialists. Also non-Jewish Poles, Serbs, Ukrainians, Russian citizens.  Estimates I've seen of non-Jewish murders in the Camps vary between 6,000,000 and 8,000,000.  Murdered to appease a Socialist ideology.