An intact Eiffel Tower flies the French Tricolour in this rare colour footage from the Liberation of Paris, 25th of August, 1944.
Excerpted from: D-Day to Germany, 1944
From the series: Motion Picture Films Relating to the Invasion of Normandy (D-Day) and Commemorative Visits After the War, compiled 1944 – 1969. Collection LIEB: Jack Lieb Collection, 1944 – 1969
Dutch troops cycling to the front during the Battle of the Netherlands (10th-14th of May, 1940)
And ya’ll are wondering why we’re so obsessed with bikes…
Germany Around 1900: A Portrait in Colour
The turn of the 20th century seemed full of promise for Germany. The suburbs may have teemed with tenements to house the new industrial proletariat, but on spacious new avenues in the city centres, people strolled proudly past magnificent bourgeois residences. The economy was booming, the aristocracy and the military enjoyed unlimited social prestige, and most of the population revered the Kaiser.
Through some 800 color pictures, this book presents turn-of-the-century Germany as it liked to see herself: self-confident, glittering, patriotic but also with a belief in progress and – for those who could afford it – a cosmopolitan flair. As in the critically acclaimed An American Odyssey, the images are all rare examples of the historical photochrom process, a printing technique that allowed black-and-white photographs to be reproduced in colour.
In his exile in the Netherlands, William II cut down trees almost everyday – mostly to show his supporters back in Germany how strong he was and that he was ready to return to the throne. Perhaps he was frustrated too.
When reporters started to sneak onto the property to take pictures of the exiled Kaiser, William II started complaining – one of his servants told him, that it was his own fault. After all he had cut down all the trees that could have sheltered him from curious eyes.
@takingaspadetoasouffle how did Wilhelm take to being given this sort of reality check by the staff when in exile? Did it happen often?
@ladyaudleyssecrettumlbr As far as I know, it didn’t happen very often. I’ve read about this incident in the memoirs of a member of the household (Sigurd von Islemann I think), but he only said “well it’s your own fault” in the memoirs, not actually to wilhelm’s face. I do hope someone did in real life, though.
Exile was a strange “mini court” with a lot of the same etiquette (Wilhelm was addressed as “royal highness” instead of “imperial majesty”, and his second wife was also elevated in rank…but only in Doorn.) Most of the people would go by the old rules (particularly because a lot of visitors were people who’d known wilhelm before his exile), and not actually tell him unpleasant truths. HOWEVER, he did receive endless letters from all over the world telling him how awful he was; he had to put up with the “are we going to try him for war crimes?” debacle; he would have been aware of the ‘khaki election’ in Britain where David Lloyd George won with “Hang The Kaiser!” as one of his main slogans; and eventually he’d have realised that the monarchy wasn’t coming back in his lifetime. With all this in mind, I think he’d have been reasonably ok with people who weren’t his staff telling him things bluntly, but I think the old rules of the hohenzollern court would have remained for the staff. I have a feeling that von Islemann could get away with it sometimes (he was part of the entourage during the war, and followed wilhelm into exile), but I’m not sure how often he actually did it. I know that the exile entourage bitched about wilhelm in their memoirs, just like the pre-exile lot did too, so that may well have been a way to let off steam when all one wanted to do was shove the kaiser in a moat.
the assassination of franz ferdinand was actually the most hilariously botched assassination attempt of all time though like i can’t even explain to you how badly it went i mean there were six guys and the first one chickened out and the second one forgot to factor in the delay on a hand grenade so it exploded like three cars past the archduke’s so the guy took a cyanide pill and threw himself into a river, but the cyanide was expired and the river was six inches deep so the police just pulled him out and took him off to jail and then everyone else basically gave up and headed home, and then the driver of the archduke took a wrong turn and the car stalled next to the last of the six guys, and he was just like “what a crazy random happenstance” and started world war one
You forgot to mention that the last guy only happened to kill Franz because he had just come out of the sandwich shop where the car stopped
It is obvious to even the most casual observer that this particular event has been meddled with by at least two groups of time travelers trying to change history. Please, if you invent a time machine, leave the assassination of Ferdinand alone; the space-time continuum there is already showing obvious cracks from the strain.
the story of how ww1 was started by a bunch of incompetent children is my fave historical fact of all time – (and I do mean children, since all 5 of the initially arrested assassination conspirators were minors under austrian law at the time)
and the fact that some of them initially banded together to commit, like, just any unspecified act of terrorism,not necessarily assassinate the archduke,
as a sort of early 20th century assassination fandom, because they idolized a guy from their town who had previously tried to kill a high ranking bosnian official, meaning terrorism was just the major teen fad of their time
but my absolute fave little factoid that really shows these were just completely regular 19 year old boys in every way is that all of them took a virginity pledge so nothing would distract them in their revolutionary mission
except gavrilo princip had a gf called jelena, and on the night before the assassination he decided he really didn’t want to die a virgin, so he arranged a rendez-vous with jelena in a park and tried to explain that it’s vitally important that they have sex right then, but he couldn’t tell her why because he didn’t want to implicate her in the assassination
so obviously with it being 1914 she says no, he goes home, then goes on to start ww1 in the morning, but what makes the story for me is that when they later interviewed jelena about gavrilo and the assassination, after telling the story about them meeting in the park she said the following (i’m paraphrasing slightly)
‘i’m not surprised. gavrilo was so pissed that night (about them not having sex) he was ready to shoot god, let alone an emperor ’
tfw WWI was partially caused by tfw no gf/sex
Waiting for Winter 