Submitted by alcapwnage0007 t3_z707uq in todayilearned
"You may keep your sidearm, Colonel."
-- Major Dick Winters
Ironically that Colonel probably had it unceremoniously confiscated by the next guard he met.
A lot of high ranking german officers had multiple "surrender" pistols that they carried with them. Goering had a gold plated pistol he intended to use to surrender the nation to the allies, and a couple regular ones if he got captured.
There are several stories like this and those pistols sometimes end up in auctions with solid provenance documentation.
It’s kind ironic, eh? “I am planning and prepared to surrender” is absolutely packing.
Dunno if this is a known fact or not but during the last few months of the war a lot of high German officials were competing to be the one surrendering the nation.
In the sick powerplay of the final day's of the Third Reich surrendering the nation was, internally, seen as equal as being appointed as the next person in line to command the nation in the post war.
It was more or less known for months that uncle Addie wasn't going to stick around to let himself be captured, so a lot of the higher officials used whatever excuses they could find to bail out of Berlin before the Soviet Boogie came to town.
This started a competition to see who would be the one that would get the chance to surrender Germany and use that position to try to appoint himself as a provisory Chanceler.
Himmler had this mind boggling plan to drive to the Brits and more or less present himself as the only person with authority to keep control of the Nation and in his mind the Allies would welcome the SS as a police force in the post nation.
Goering planned to present himself as the leader of the only major branch of the German military that were "clean" of warcrimes and a lot of propaganda was created around it, something that stuck to this day by the way.
At the end Donitz was chosen by Hitler for the task, since he was seen as the least power hungry of the trio. A fact that was both false and led to a lot of unnecessary deaths in the final days as Donitz wanted to try to secure his position before the surrender.
All three, and some other more, had presentation pistols chosen to be used for the occasion. While they packed an assortment of other side arms to give away if they got captured in the process or self defense.
The more interesting about this is that most of them survive to this day.
That only happened on the TV show. In interviews he says he kept that pistol as a prized possession.
And then was roughed up lol
"Curse you Wetherby Savings & Loan, I spit at you!"
-- Captain Ironsides.
Nazi officers had no honor and deserved no gallant treatment. Those with integrity died in July ‘44.
> Those with integrity died in July ‘44.
If they had integrity they wouldn't have fought the war in the first place. Stauffenberg and his buddies were perfectly fine with conquering Lebensraum in the east and enslaving the people living there or starving them to death. They only turned against Hitler when the war was irrecoverably lost.
I wasn’t going to get into that, but there were a variety of people involved in the conspiracy. Some were just dissatisfied with Hitler’s leadership, others felt it was a moral issue.
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