Sad Historical photos.
Russian spy laughing through his execution in Finland, 1942
The last Jew in Vinnitsa, 1941
A picture from an Einsatzgruppen soldier’s personal album, labelled on the back as “Last Jew of Vinnitsa”. It shows a member of Einsatzgruppe D just about to shoot a Jewish man kneeling before a filled mass grave in Vinnitsa, Ukraine, in 1941. All 28,000 Jews from Vinnitsa and its surrounding areas were massacred at the time.
German soldiers react to footage of concentration camps, 1945
Georges Blind, a member of the French resistance, smiling at a German firing squad, 1944
In the end, this turned out to be a mock execution intended to make him talk. Also it was staged for intimidation of other resistance fighters. He was forwarded to a concentration camp, where he was selected for termination on arrival, dying some time in late November 1944.
German soldier returns home only to find his family no longer there, 1946
The photo of a German prisoner of war returning to his home town of Frankfurt to discover his house bombed and his family no longer there, shows the kind the depressing moments of dejected subjects we associate with images of war.
A Japanese boy standing at attention after having brought his dead younger brother to a cremation pyre, 1945
Joe O’Donnell, the man who took this photo at Nagasaki, was sent by the U.S. military to document the damage inflicted on the Japanese homeland caused by air raids of fire bombs and atomic bombs. Over the next seven months starting September 1945, he traveled across Western Japan chronicling the devastation, revealing the plight of the bomb victims including the dead
The face of war: The first press pictures of dead U.S. soldiers that was presented to the public, 1943
At a time when censors used a heavy hand to keep the American public from knowing and seeing the carnage in the Pacific during World War II, this ground-breaking photograph of dead American soldiers confronted the American public for the first time with the real face of the war.
Defiant until the very end, a German Communist being executed in Munich, 1919
Job hunting in 1930’s
During the Great Depression, millions of people were out of work across the United States. Unable to find another job locally, many unemployed people hit the road, traveling from place to place, hoping to find some work. A few of these people had cars, but most hitchhiked or “rode the rails.” A large portion of the people who rode the rails were teenagers
The priest and the dying soldier, 1962
Navy chaplain Luis Padillo gives last rites to a soldier wounded by sniper fire during a revolt in Venezuela. Braving the streets amid sniper fire, to offer last rites to the dying, the priest encountered a wounded soldier, who pulled himself up by clinging to the priest’s cassock, as bullets chewed up the concrete around them.