What’s your craziest WW2 story?

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1. My Grandfather escaped from a POW camp in Italy and travelled back to allied territory through occupied France. I never really spoke with him about it, which I regret now, because I know absolutely nothing about any detail apart from the fact it happened.

2. My grandma used to tell me stories about grand-grandpa who fought in the resistance. He was a train driver, and in the beginning used to drive suspicious trains filled with people towards Polish border. According to one story, one night he noticed that the guard inside his locomotive fell asleep, so he knocked him out, stopped the train and released everyone from the cattle wagons. He joined resistance right after that. At one point he got captured and held in some camp. Whole family though he was dead, and then one day after the war he just appeared at home. I have a medal that he received after the war at home, also his driver’s cap.

   Another, more grim story that happened before that – he was driving a train to some village and when he arrived, everyone was dead. Soldiers slaughtered the whole village, then piled up everyone in the middle, poured them with gas and set them on fire. He noticed the village priest, whom he knew personally, on the top of the pile.

   Fuck nazis and everyone who supports them.

3. My dads uncle was sent to a concentration camp possibly Neuengammen or Buchenwald simply because he was a police officer refusing to cooperate with the Germans.

4. My grandfather stole a typewriter from the russians when they released him from the POW camp.

5. My grandpa was Croatian/Yu partisan, got wounded (bullet went thru his calf), and somehow he managed to get home BY FOOT. About 300 km further!

   He often told me how nazis were “fearless”. He didn’t know about Pervitin, though.

6. I can’t tell this story in too-great detail because it’s very identifiable, but my grandfather was an artillery officer who was helping invade somewhere to liberate it from the Germans after D-Day. He was experienced with fairly old-school weapons, big guns, he was a good officer but he was less of a good driver. Especially not a good driver of tanks. The tank he was driving crashed through the priceless window of a grand historic building, probably the most important building in that city. I met a girl from that country when I was at university and she was like “that was your GRANDFATHER?!”

7. My grandparents’ families are from the North-East side of the country. Socialist. Anti-Nazis long before.

   My great-grandfather didn’t mess around. He was called up for the “Arbeitseinsatz”. Instead he went to their neighbour, who was a dentist. Unfortunately the dentist wasn’t at home, but his wife performed the procedure: she removed all his necessary teeth. However it worked: because he couldn’t chew, he would have needed special food if he was taken, so he escaped working for the Nazis

8. My granddad was transported by the Nazis at the end of the war for forced labour. He had very found memories of that time.

9. WW2 generally wasn’t as eventful as WW1 here, since the actual warfare was finished within a few weeks.

   My great-grandfather got captured during the Blitzkrieg and was imprisoned for a while. One day, an officer said to the prisoners that they had two choices: they could either say “Heil Hitler” and go home, or they could refuse and get executed. My great-grandpa chose the former and spent the rest of the war sitting at home. Although I’ve also heard that he smuggled margarine to the Netherlands during the occupation (his parents had a small margarine factory).

   From the other side of the family, my grandma is to young to actively remember the war and she says that her parents never mentioned it. However, when her dad got dementia, he was frightened of any loud noise because he thought the Germans were coming back.

10. Friend’s Grandpa was taken to Russia from middle of EU to fight for Germany. The whole train was unloaded into a huge river, to see if they can swim.
    He was climbing trough emptyness into light under the water, manny boys died that Day.

    After that, he and a friend escaped and took the train towards home and they jumped it 5km from home, where they got caught. They explained the situation at gunpoint to the local-controling German police officer who caught them, and he took it with understanding.

    Turned around and ordered not to be in sight after he turns around again.

    E: if this script is ever recognized in a movie, I will find you.

11. One of my great grandpa’s brothers got taken to frøslevlejren, why I have no idea, but he’s name is on the plate down there to honor the victims. And my great grandpas wife my great grandma was in the restistance group. She had one of those suicide capsules sewed into her dress.

    Edit: wording

12. My grandfather had two brothers (twins but not identical). One was shot in the right shoulder on the Balkans, the other one was shot in the left shoulder on the Eastern Front. Both survived with quasi identical injuries and disabilities just on different sides.

13. Story of my distant friend’s grandfather who was a Pole lived in a Polish town that belonged during WW1 to the German empire. He fought in the battle of Verdun on the German side and received the Iron Cross medal for bravery on the battlefield. When Nazi Germany annexed part of Poland in September 1939 and Wehrmacht soldiers entered his town mass killings of civilians began. That’s when he tied his Iron Cross with a classy black and white ribbon to the street cat’s tail causing a lot of fuss. As he was the only person with the Iron Cross on that street, unsurprisingly, the Gestapo soon came to his home intending to punish the joker. A German pilot living in the same building saw them and convinced them that this respectable citizen of the Third Reich would never be able to perform such a despicable stunt… and they left. Nobody knows what happened with the medal. Or the cat.

14. Nothing crazy, just that two of my great grandfathers became alcoholics after the war. Just really sad stuff.

15. My grandpa was first years of war in german army on eastern front where he was shot by russian sniper through both his legs. He was trying to jump over the road, when he got hit. He barely survive. He said that blood was ran in stream from his wounds when they picked him up and get him to some church for shelter and quick recovery. Then he was some time in hospital, after that he got a few days off to go home, where he joined partisans to fight germans.

16. My grandparents were small kids during WWII, and my great-grandparents died when I was little. So I don’t know any stories. But they were all farmers, so they probably just farmed and kept their heads down.

17. My relatives survived the “kidnapping” of Zamosc’s children and after all of these years they somehow ended up in the same house that my grandmother grew up in during WWII. Their parents unfortunately died in Auschwitz due to Aktion Zamosc, which not a lot of people know about outside of Poland (i.e., it was the first phase of the eventual murderous ethnic cleansing ahead of projected Germanization of the entire General Government territory).

    My direct line of ancestors weren’t sent to Auschwitz, but during the “Nazi racial category” test it was deemed that they’d be sent to a forced labour camp in Germany. After being liberated in 1945, they couldn’t get in touch with our relatives and assumed the worst (which was partly true), so they decided to emigrate to Canada for a “reset” on life.

    Two generations later, I’m moving “back” to Poland to learn more about the family history and maybe write a book about it.

18. My grandma’s village was occupied by the Nazis for a period she described as largely uneventful. The soldiers who stayed at her family’s house were even a little playful, particularly with one of her sisters who had blonde hair and blue eyes (so she recalls).

    *Then everything changed when the Soviet Union attacked.*

    After Romania turned against Germany and the Soviets invaded, the Reds reached that village and engaged the Nazis, my grandma’s parents being killed in the fight. The Soviets stayed a little while, raped and pillaged the village, then moved on.

    My grandma and her three sisters, now orphaned, were separated and taken by various relatives to Bucharest. They’ve led fairly normal lives since then (went to school, work, got married, had kids etc).

19. I heard that one guy in my great-grandfather’s village murdered two soviet soldiers when he caught them trying to rape his young wife and sister. He shot them dead and buried them outside near the water well. Obviously I wasn’t there to confirm the story, but I would like to believe it’s true and that these kind of badass people actually existed.

    Unfortunately my great-grandmother wasn’t this lucky, she was raped numerous times, as were hundreds of thousands of other women.

20. My grandfather fought in the Continuation War, part of World War II in Finland, in the late war. He was a machine gunner. By that point the war had been stuck in a state of trench warfare for a long time, with mostly immobile lines. He said that war wasn’t that bad, except for this: they were not issued good winter boots at all. So, they would sneak into the no man’s land, find frozen corpses of dead Soviets, and take their felt boots. This is something he said he really didn’t want to do, but had to, in order to survive. He was nevertheless injured in a Soviet artillery attack and spent a long time in the hospital, and eventually recovered and survived the war.

21. My grandpa was drafted in Italian fascist army. He was only 19 and didn’t have much of a choice.
    He was in Ljubljana and the order was to search every house for enemies, both soldiers and civilians, and shoot them on sight. The house he was assigned to looked empty but in the last floor he found a whole family, a good dozen people, hiding. He gestured them to shut up and came back to his superior saying no one was in there.
    It’s a simple story, but it’s great knowing he chose to risk everything to save some strangers. If anyone in his squad noticed something he would have been killed instantly as a traitor.
    I have other stories, such as when he was in Rome airport when it was bombed and saved two twin kids, or when he was not recognized when he finally got back home after a month of walking.

22. My granddad told me quite disturbing stories from the Winter War about how many guys would just lose their minds all of a sudden. He was one of those Finnish soldiers stationed on the front line who had to repel Soviet human wave attacks. The Soviets had a very brutal tactic where they would just throw waves of soldiers toward Finnish positions, and then the Finns had to take them down. They would just keep on coming and coming. Those Finnish soldiers were just normal people who would rather be home with their family instead of having to act as a meat grinder. As a result, many went completely insane and most likely never recovered from it.

    Also he told me they witnessed many times that the Soviets had guys would shoot at their own soldiers if they tried to retreat during these human wave attacks.

    Also, I remember him telling me a story from the Continuation War (1941-1944). The Germans were supplying us with a lot of weapons at that time. During the Battle of Tali-Ihantala in the summer 1944, Finland received great help from Junkers Ju 87 dive bombers provided by the Germans. You may know these planes are famous for the ‘Jericho-Trompete’ diving sound they make when they start dive bombing. My grandad told me that the first time they appeared in the battle, everything would just stop as both Finnish and Soviet soldiers looked to the sky and wondered what the hell is happening when they made that terrifying sound and I guess most had not heard anything like that before. These planes must be one of the most clever psychological warfare machines ever made.

23. Great grandfather was shelled at Dunkirk, but he was rescued. He survived and lived to tell the tale. I never got to meet him as he died probably about 2 decades before I was even born.

24. My ex’s grandma (Polish) had a German soldier crying on her lap saying he doesn’t want to go to the USSR eastern front when he was going to be sent there; probably they had a romance or something, I always thought that story adds a bit of human touch to some of the most horrific and depressing times in history. No clue what happened to the guy but if I were to guess he was right to have a bad feeling about going East (killed, captured, gulag’ed).

25. North East Italy. My mom’s grandma used to hide partisans in her barn, give them food and a place to rest.

    One day a lady that lived in the same town snitched on her to the local fascist militia. One of the fascist official of that area had always been in love with my great-grandma since they were kids. He warned her in advance about an inspection to her house by the militia, so in this way she made sure to not have any partisan in her property for that day (and for another two weeks, just to be sure).

    Fast forward 65 years, me and my parents move to that town. Our neighbor turns out to be that same lady who reported my great-grandma, lol.

26. My grandpa’s sister was in labour and gave birth to a daughter while she and her family (so my grandpa’s family) was hiding in a forest for avoiding to be deported to Siberia during the Soviet deportations in the Baltics in 1941. We are still not sure on which day exactly is her birthday – my great-grandmother said it was a Tuesday when she was born, other say it was a Monday. So she celebrates two birthdays then 🤷🏼‍♀️

27. My grandfather fought in [Battle of Kadinjača](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kadinja%C4%8Da?wprov=sfti1#), he was 18 at the time and had no experience using guns. When Germans started advancing he fired his gun and knocked himself out, once he woke up he realized so many of his friends died and fled into Jelova Gora mountain.

28. My grandfather told me (drunk) several times of the mine clearing of airfields in northern Norway. One day four (4) members of his squad was blown up by mines. They were norwegian paratroopers under soviet command and they had russian body collectors back then (unlike today). This one russian collected all the bodyparts and sat on top of this pile and ate his lunch. I was served this story through age 6 to 15.

29. When I was a child I asked my grandpa multiple times to tell anything about the war. He didn’t tell me a single story, only stroked my head and said that war is a terrible thing. He volunteered for the war at 17 y.o., survived battle of Kursk and battle of Konigsberg, killed 5+ people but was one of the kindest men I ever know.

    So, no crazy story.

30. Honestly, I was a complete miracle that nobody in my family died in the war.

    Like, once a bomb fell into their home but didn’t explode.

31. My grandma is Polish and they had a farm near the German border. When the Russians came they chased and killed the polish too since they were just defenseless farmers who could be “plundered”. So grandma’s mum took herself and 10 of her 11 children and ran on foot, across Germany to where grandma lives now, the very west, 1h from Netherlands border. They ran on foot, without shoes as they left everything behind. They ate berries out of the forest and occasionally random bits of bread they begged for on the streets. Grandma later found out her father and oldest brother died in the war. The father was quite high ranked too and they got some kind of “grief payment” from Germany or Poland(not sure on which country). She struggled to learn the language but eventually met this dashing German boy(my grandfather” and the rest is history. Interestingly I’ve never met a single one of her siblings as all the women except grandma died of breast cancer(mum and I were tested, we don’t have the genetic predisposition for this luckily) and all the men disappeared all across Germany before I was born. She’s not been able to find them but believes they are probably no longer alive as she was the youngest of the bunch.

32. The father of my grand-mother (father’s side) was one of the generals who negotiated the armistice of 11 November 1918 in the train coach in Rethondes.
    But…
    His son-in-law, my grandfather, spent the whole of WWII running after his company, who was moving very fast, and he never managed to rejoin it 🙂 so he never got to actually fight 🙂

    On my mother’s side in Provence, my other grandfather was a “maquisard”.
    He has done sabotage (only 2 times) and mainly was receptioning the Alsacians who were fleeing the obligatory work service of the Germans.
    All this, while he was “officially” in Germany at the forced labour himself.
    My grand-mother even received letters from him from “Germany”, with the post-marked stamps from Germany, that she could show to the police when they came inquiring. As she said, “the Maquis does things well”.
    When welcoming and hiding the Alsacians, he was also in the role of “sorting” them according to what the Alsacians wanted to do.
    = if they just wanted to flee and be safe, then he would gather info and have someone get them false papers.
    Or if the Alsacians wanted to rejoin the fight, then he would give them the contacts to other persons who would “check” them before accepting them somewhere else.

    As my mother was a toddler, they were afraid she might make blunders when the Germans or local police were asking her very nicely if she had seen her daddy.
    So my grandmother took a cat and gave the cat the same name as the “darling name” of my grandfather, and they taught their daughter to exclusively call her father by that darling name, same as the cat.
    That way if my toddler mom told the Germans in baby language “oh, Amour here” (when he was supposed to be in Germany at the STO), my grandmother could tell the Germans “Ah but ‘Amour’ is the cat, she is talking about the cat” and she would then proceed to call the cat to demonstrate.

    We have a nice photo of my mom as a very small girl in the maquis, all nice and clean and dressed in her nicest dress because she was visiting Daddy in the woods, and she is surrounded by the dirty, unshaved beardy Daddy Amour and his all his friends in their crumpled clothes.

    When my grandmother was coming back from seeing her husband 1-2 days in the Maquis, the neighbours would tell her mother to be careful about her daughter because they thought, seeing her unkempt, that she was having a post birth depression.

    My grandmother died this March at 104, and she was in a pension right next to the first hill where she would take her bicycle (with my mother seated in a wicker basket on the handle of the bike) and meet the first guy who would check, and tell her to go here or there to meet the second guy, and then second guy would indicate her where her husband was at that moment. So she was quite happy about her pension building (of course it is no longer “maquis” there now, there is a whole town and buildings, but she was happy nonetheless)

33. Russian soldiers that “liberated”* Prague allegedly broke into a school and drank alcohol that was used as a conservant for biology showpieces of tapeworms and such.

    I thought it’s an absurd and probably made up story but looking at their behavior in Ukraine nowadays, it seems pretty plausible.

    *raped local women and then installed a communist dictatorship

34. My mother told me when I was 18 that her two brothers had served as Dutch volunteers in the Waffen-SS to fight “godless” Bolshevism. Her youngest brother was an MG-42 machine gunner, the other a commander of a Sturmgeschutze. Both died early 1945. There were more of the family who had joined the SS. I met them many times in my youth. They were tough, silent people who, despite their collaboration with a criminal ideology, faced their surroundings with their heads held high.

35. Spain.

    My father had a Russian school mate. Apparently he was the son of a woman who cooked for the officers of the blue division (Spanish volunteers in the German army). She was killed during an artillery strike and noone new if she had family, so one of the officers who was returning to Spain brought the child back…

36. My grandpa was only a child when the war started so not a lot of cool stories but some noticeable: he watched the allies bombing Taranto from the coast, the allies using the small river in front of our town as a practice target for bombers and told me that when the school day ended, he and some of his friends used to go to a near abandoned US tank to cut his tracks in order to make soles for his shoes. He managed to only get one, it was kinda impossible to cut those things. Not a lot of other stories, my other grandpa’s brother was sent in Greece, but i don’t know a lot about him, while my great-grandpa was in the royal navy. [This](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_destroyer_Alvise_da_Mosto) was the first ship he served in. Then he found himself in the battle of Lero (after the armistice) where he was captured as prisoner by the germans

37. My aunt was on a Kindertransport in 1938. She was brought to safety and taken in by a lovely English family in Coventry. All of them were killed in the Blitz long before my family members who stayed behind were deported.

38. [Wojtek the Bear is pretty awesome ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wojtek_(bear))

39. My girlfriend’s French great grandmother killed by allied bombings on D-Day: yes, some of those bombs and cannons launched against the German defences hit French houses and this part of the battle was completely ignored by films such as Saving Private Ryan, which ignored a lot of important things about the Normandy landings.

    It wasn’t just a couple of houses either, about 20,000 civilians were killed in the battle of Normandy.