Odd WW2 factoids.

Max Heiliger was the fictitious name the SS used to establish a bank account in which they deposited money, gold, and jewels taken from European Jews.

And another funny one:

The original abbreviation of the National Socialist Party was Nasos. The word “Nazi” derives from a Bavarian word that means “simple minded” and was first used as a term of derision by journalist Konrad Heiden.

Last one:

80% of Soviet males born in 1923 did not survive World War 2

@Axistiger13:

Last one:

80% of Soviet males born in 1923 did not survive World War 2

That’s crazy!

@Omega1759:

@Axistiger13:

Last one:

80% of Soviet males born in 1923 did not survive World War 2

That’s crazy!

You have to understand… even by the end of the war the kill to death ratio on the eastern front was 7 Russians to 1 German.

Bodies were throw on the fire to keep communism alive.

That said - think about it… If 10 armed soldiers broke into your house to kill you, do you think you could waste all 10 before they got you? Probably not likely.

But if you got 7 out of 10 before it was over… that’s respectable. :)

In the battle for Moscow, the ratio was around 20:1

@Makoshark13:

In the battle for Moscow, the ratio was around 20:1

One of the reasons we didn’t try to race to Berlin. High command decided it would be way too high a price to pay for a prestige victory that we’d have to turn over half of anyway.

The age pyramid still shows effect of world war 2, the “lost generations” produced less kids and the echo continues…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Population_Pyramid_of_Russia_2009.PNG

Churchill once referred to Mussolini as “Hitler’s utensil”.

Hitler was also known as the “carpet eater” to some of the internal staff/party leaders who secretly despised him…

After an incident/nervous breakdown he had when dealing with the annexation of upper Czechoslovakia.

-From The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich-

“Teppichfresser!” muttered my German companion, an editor who secretly despised the Nazis. And he explained that Hitler had been in such a maniacal mood over the Czechs the last few days that on more than one occasion he had lost control of himself completely, hurling himself to the floor and chewing the edge of the carpet. Hence the term “carpet eater.” The evening before, while talking with some of the party leaders at the Dreesen, I had heard the expression applied to the Fuehrer — in whispers, of course.”

@Gargantua:

Hitler was also known as the “carpet eater” to some of the internal staff/party leaders who secretly despised him…

This sounds like it’s the inspiration for the scene in the 1943 Daffy Duck cartoon “Scrap Happy Daffy” in which (if I recall correctly) an enraged Hitler chews his way across the full length of a carpet like a high-speed lawnmower.

Amid the chaos and carnage of the Battle of Berlin in April 1945, 16-year-old Hitler Youth member Armin Lehmann was saved from almost certain death by the fact that his superiors – who had no reservations about sending kids into combat against the advancing Russians – could not tolerate breaching regulations by putting an underage driver at the wheel of a truck.  Lehmann was one of the youngsters decorated by Hitler on his birthday, April 20th, an event memorably reproduced in the movie Downfall.  Moments after the ceremony, the whole group was piled into trucks to be sent off to the front.  Lehmann was assigned to drive one of the vehicles, but at the last moment an officer discovered that he didn’t have a drivers’s license.  Lehmann was pulled from the group (whose members, as far as he knows, were later all killed in battle) and was reassigned to serve as a messenger between nearby government offices and – of all places – Hitler’s underground bunker.  Over the next ten days, Lehmann got to see or meet various members of Hitler’s entourage, including Heinrich Himmler, Martin Bormann, Joseph Goebbels and Eva Braun.  Lehmann was one of the last people to make it out of the bunker and he lived to the ripe old age of 80.  He passed away in 2008, four years after finally publishing the memoirs he had long hesitated to write.

Project x-ray was a plan that the US came up with to drop bombs filled with bats on Japan. The bats were fitted out with incendiary devices that would set fire to Japanese cities. Fortunately for the bats, the plan deemed too expensive, and the project was dropped. On a side note, escaping bats set fire to an air base in New Mexico.

A 600-foot wharf built during WWII at the Royal Navy base at Lyness, on the edge of Scapa Flow, had a construction cost reputedly so enormous that it came to be known as the “Golden Wharf.”  The sarcasm behind the name wasn’t entirely fair because most of the money involved was actually spent on tunnelling into some nearby hills to build huge underground tanks in which fuel oil for the fleet could stored.  These tanks were meant to supplement the existing above-ground tanks, which were considered too vulnerable to enemy air attacks.  The millions of tons of earth and rock excavated for the project had to be disposed of in some manner, so the Royal Navy decided to put the stuff to good use by dumping it in the water to extend the shoreline and create a deep-water wharf at which ships could unload.  So the Golden Wharf, rather than being a end in itself, was a kind of bonus which the Royal Navy got out of a project whose main purpose was to build secure fuel storage facilities.  The wharf handled about 100,000 tonnes of stores during its first year of operation – coincidentally, a figure identical to the capacity of the underground oil tanks to which it owed its existence.

After the Bismarck had escaped from the Royal Navy cruisers which had been tracking her on radar following the Battle of the Denmark Straight, and after eluding for the next 31 hours the many British vessels and aircraft that were searching for her, the German battleship was finally spotted by a farmer’s son from Lafayette County, Missouri: Ensign Leonard B. “Tuck” Smith, a U.S. Navy officer who was serving as a “special observer” on a Royal Air Force Catalina seaplane, even though the United States was officially not yet at war with Germany.

@Zooey72:

The Sturmgewehr (the first operational assault riffle) was rejected by Hitler for production.  Hitler thought it was a waste of resources (coming from a man who wanted to make the Mause and Ratte tank).  The smarter people in the Reich made it anyway, they just classified it as an uzi.

I don’t think they would have classified it as an Uzi for a number of reasons… first being that the first Uzi was not created until the late 1940s and secondly (and perhaps just as important), the Uzi was created by a Jew: Major Uziel Gal of Israel.

Don’t think Hitler would have been cool with that.

I think what he means is that they classified it as a “sub-machine-gun” as opposed to an “assault-rifle” or “primary-rifle”.

@Gargantua:

I think what he means is that they classified it as a “sub-machine-gun” as opposed to an “assault-rifle” or “primary-rifle”.

That’s what I figured… but it was not a very good choice of moniker for a couple reasons.

Maybe he meant that the German developers/generals called it a machine pistol (during production), as in the MP 40; which is closer to an Uzi anyway. As opposed to calling it Sturmgewhehr, which literally means “assault rifle”. It would have been better to say that they developed it as an Uzi-type weapon, but even that would not be very accurate considering it wasn’t invented yet.

Either way, Uzi was a particularly poor comparison. That was all I was getting at.

@Zooey72:

The Sturmgewehr (the first operational assault riffle) was rejected by Hitler for production.  Hitler thought it was a waste of resources (coming from a man who wanted to make the Mause and Ratte tank).  The smarter people in the Reich made it anyway, they just classified it as an uzi.

Developing weapons under a misleading designation to hide them from disapproving leaders on your own side (or from suspicious foreigners on the other side) is a handy trick that’s been used now and then.  In the inter-war period, American tanks were sometimes billed as “armored cars” to mislead Congress about the use to which its military appropriations were being put.  And in the 20s and early 30s, experimental German tank designs were called “Traktoren” (tractors) because Germany was prohibited from having tanks.

First,the StG- 44 was called a Carbine MKb 42 but in the process of becoming a Sturmgewehr - assault rifle it`s name was changed a couple of time.

The MP-43 was invented and built for a shorter version of the Gewehrpatrone Mauser 7,92 x57 mm.
The Walther company had the first Prototype of MKb-42(W) - Maschinenkarabiner-42. (Karabiner is the german word for Carbine)
Other names are and versions: MK 43, MP-43, MP-44, StG-44P (capable of shooting arround corners),StG-45(M) ,StG-44V,