petermorwood:themagdalenwriting:nudityandnerdery:dieselpunkflimflam:the-alt-historian:call
petermorwood: themagdalenwriting: nudityandnerdery: dieselpunkflimflam: the-alt-historian: callmeshifty: the-alt-historian: fruitflyfairy: erwin-und-panzer: the-alt-historian: erwin-und-panzer: enragedshithead: the-alt-historian: Germany’s famous unit of immortal soldiers pose with their heads in their hands, 1921. The Immortals, ordinary men resurrected from death by a process as yet unknown, served with honour in the First World War until they were liquidated (by being burned to death, the only way they could be killed) by the Weimar Republic in 1924. What the fuck what the fuck SOMEONE EXPLAIN THIS TO ME The description basically says it all. The man on the far left is Oberleutnant Hans von Pommen, the commander of the unit. In the last month of the Battle of Verdun he was stabbed 18 times, shot twice by French snipers and stepped on a land mine. The land mine was the hardest thing for him to recover from, but he eventually grew back his missing legs. Third from the right is Feldwebel Ulrich Mannstein, who single-handedly (ie both by himself, and with only one arm) stopped a charge of Mk V Females on the Somme. I’m sure there are some other famous ones there. The description doesn’t mention that the French eventually had dedicated flame units to deal with the Immortals. The unit was originally 150 strong. some pertinent quotations regarding the Immortals: “Coming back is like waking up from a deep sleep, a sleep that fills you like quicksand. When you wake up it’s like breaking the surface of a scummy pond. I’ve never felt as energized or strong as after I’ve come back.”– Oberleutenant Hans von Pommern, Belgium 1914 “I feel good. I feel fine. After a few times you don’t even notice the pain anymore.” – Gefreiter Georg Steinbrenner, after having his spine broken in three places and one arm severed by a shell impact. France 1916. “We don’t need weapons anymore! We don’t need tools of any sort, we are invincible, we’re fucking gods on Earth!”– Unteroffizier Wilhelm Eichelberger, France 1915 “How did I do it? Focus, that’s all. Focus is really all you need.”– Feldwebel Ulrich Mannstein, on how he knocked out four Mark V Females with nothing but a sharpened shovel and grenades “I can’t do this anymore, please don’t wake me up I’m not going back I’M NOT!”– unidentified Immortal, German aid station, 1917. The words were recorded in the war diaries of Hauptmann Friedrich Ritter von Sternberg, the attending surgeon, who later wrote that “such plaintive screams, coming from a man whose entire face was a wet and bloody pulp, cut me to my very core” “Their demeanour was strange, almost cheery, as we started up the flamethrowers. Quite unsettling were their guttural cries as they burned, strange animal shouts of pleasure and joy. We had all heard the stories of how they became unhinged towards the end. I hope the government has the good sense not to re-start a project like this.”– unidentified Provisional Reichswehr officer who witnessed the burning, 1925 “The jerries walked right through our lines. Can’t have been more than a platoon. I saw only one of them fall, an FT had blasted him with its cannon and took the top half of his body off. If I hadn’t known better I’d say he kept crawling. It was then that I noticed the French were bringing up some guys who had the weirdest apparatus attached to their backs. Looked almost like they were wearing some sort of deep sea suit. Heavily armoured with two tanks on the back, carrying a pipe which had a cable streaming out from the tanks. I don’t know what was more terrible, the Germans who didn’t die, or the weapons the French used… I’m still haunted to this day.” - Corporal Alan Michael, American Expeditionary Force recounting an incident in 1918 I call bullshit. Theres no way that this is real. look up “They Wouldn’t Die: Memoirs of An Investigation into Germany’s Most Secret Military Unit” published 1931 by CPT Jacob Klemenz, USMC. Klemenz came face-to-face with members of the Immortals during the Great War, and afterwards embarked on a decade-plus research project to find out why and how they existed. his account is for sure on Project Gutenberg, it’s a little dry but makes for fascinating reading Wait… so zombie Nazis are real? not zombies technically, and not nazis either (Reichswehr) but yes To the Führer’s infamous Geisterbeschwörergruppe, the distinction between ‘zombie’ and ‘ghoul’ was academic; battlefield dominance was all that mattered. Okay, first off, the mention of the Geisterbeschwörergruppe is pointless. The Immortals- the Unsterblichsoldaten, if you want to use the accurate term for the German unit- predated the establishment of the Geisterbeschwörergruppe by over two decades. Don’t mix them up.Also, how has no one mentioned “Final Judgement in Belleau Wood: Immortals, Hounds of Hell, and the Fight for the Soul of Europe” by Dominick Ledford? I don’t know if there’s a better depiction of how the Immortals fought, or what the US Marine Corp did to stop them. I don’t think the Vatican has ever officially revoked that missive damning the entire corp. petermorwood, your thoughts? More references from the German side would be useful, but I’m not surprised there are so few. English-language memoirs about World War One service against the Unsterblichenkommando are rare enough; Ledford’s “Final Judgement” is excellent, though I recommend the eye-witness testimonies recorded by Klemenz in “They Wouldn’t Die”, at least if you don’t plan to sleep for a while. Unfortunately both titles are collector’s items and command collector’s prices, because they’re incredibly hard to find. Even when they came out they were already being dismissed as scary woo-woo stories for Hallowe’en and Universal monster movies, but not for serious study. Once the truth came out in 1924 that Germany’s Corpse-Reclamation Factories (Kadaververwertungsanstalt) were no more than atrocity-propaganda fabrications, anything associated with “that kind of thing” was labelled as sensationalist fiction if not outright lies. (Unfortunately, twenty years later this attitude led to another story about corpse factories getting the same label, when it was anything but.) German-language material about the UKo is even harder to track down and almost impossible to buy since those who have, keep, and there aren’t many of them. After the Reichswehr-Hausputz of 1924 (“Army housecleaning” and yes, the secondary meaning applies in German) new UKo memoirs were rejected and existing ones went rapidly out of print. Copies in private hands got very private indeed, or were simply destroyed. There’s no indication of “if you know what’s good for you” warnings, this was still the Weimar Republic not Nazi Germany; it just seems that publishers unanimously agreed to stop production, and their air of caution filtered down to their customers. A rumour keeps popping up amongst movie buffs that F. W. Murnau (of “Nosferatu” fame) was about to direct “Totenkopf”, (’Deaths-Head’) a drama about the UKo starring Max Schreck, Emil Jannings and Conrad Veidt. Not with Veidt, at least - he was in Austria shooting “Orlacs Hände” (’The Hands of Orlac’). In fact the whole thing is most likely a rumour, mixed with a dash of wishful thinking, because war movies weren’t good box-office in Germany until post-1939 when they started winning again. One of the few German memoirs to survive is „Unsterblichen Ruhm - Sechs Tage im Kaiserschlacht mit unsere Todlosensturmtruppen“ by Oberstleutnant Karl-Otto, Graf von und zu Schwabenfels (pub. Erfunden-Geschichte Verlag GmbH, München 1920). ’Undying Glory - Six Days of the Kaiser-Attack with our Deathless Stormtroops’ is a pretty enigmatic title IMO, capable of more than one interpretation. It’s a difficult read, not only because the book is printed in Fraktur but because von Schwabenfels frequently lapses into a faux-archaic vocabulary reminiscent of Sir Walter Scott at his worst. Keep reading -- source link