We Never Expected THEM on That Mountain | Slovakia 1945 Real Footage | Ep.5

Part of a series following one machine gunner of the German 3rd Mountain Division, from Nikopol to the end of the war. SUPPORT THE CHANNEL: ▶BUY ME A COFFEE - buymeacoffee.com/documentaries ▶JOIN TO PATREON + 200 Videos -   / shadowsofconflicts   ▶ Full series, in order:    • The German Retreat from Ukraine to Hungary...   ▶Previous episode: Ep.4 — We Trapped the Army That Trapped Us    • We Trapped the Army That Trapped Us | Hung...   January 1945. A mountainside in Slovakia. The men climbing the slope toward Franz Moser's gun are not Russians. They speak a language close to his own, and they know these mountains, because they grew up in them. They are coming home. Winter 1944–45. Franz now leads his own section. Soviet ski troops in a blizzard. A country that had risen against the Germans and been crushed. Telephone wires cut every night. Christmas Eve under mortar fire. Thirty degrees below zero. Then the January offensive, the retreat beneath the High Tatras, and the train north to a Germany already at war on its own soil. Franz Moser and his comrades are composite characters, created to represent the soldiers of the German 3rd Mountain Division in Slovakia. The battles, dates, places and conditions are historical. December 1944 to February 1945. PRIMARY SOURCES Svoboda, Ludvík: Z Buzuluku do Prahy. First published 1960; ed. Praha: Mladá fronta / Naše vojsko, 1985. Memoir of the commander of the Czechoslovak army corps that fought alongside the Red Army in the Carpathians and Slovakia. Hruboň, Anton: "Nové zistenia o represáliách POHG a Einsatzkommanda 14 v Nemeckej v správach agenta ŠtB." Vojenská história 16, no. 4 (2012), pp. 82–96. Edition of 14 documents from the archive of the Nation's Memory Institute (Ústav pamäti národa), Bratislava, on the reprisals after the Slovak National Uprising: https://www.vhu.sk/data/att/202/19056... Klatt, Paul: Die 3. Gebirgs-Division 1939–1945. Bad Nauheim, 1958. Divisional history by the division's commander in 1944–45. Hartinger, Andreas: Until the Eyes Shut: Memories of a Machine Gunner on the Eastern Front, 1943–45. 2019. Memoir of Hans Kahr, an Austrian mountain-troop machine gunner, written with his grandson. FURTHER READING Lakowski, Richard: "Der Zusammenbruch der deutschen Verteidigung zwischen Ostsee und Karpaten." In: Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, Vol. 10/1. München: DVA, 2008, pp. 491–681. Support this channel to gain access to the following benefits:    / @shadowsofconflicts   Music By: 'Decoherence' by Scott Buckley - released under CC-BY 4.0. www.scottbuckley.com.au