Germanyās famous unit of immortal soldiers pose with their heads in their hands, 1921. The Immortals, ordinary men resurrected from death by a process as yet unknown, served with honour in the First World War until they were liquidated (by being burned to death, the only way they could be killed) by the Weimar Republic in 1924.
What the fuck what the fuck SOMEONE EXPLAIN THIS TO ME
The description basically says it all.Ā
The man on the far left is Oberleutnant Hans von Pommen, the commander of the unit. In the last month of the Battle of Verdun he was stabbed 18 times, shot twice by French snipers and stepped on a land mine. The land mine was the hardest thing for him to recover from, but he eventually grew back his missing legs.
Third from the right is Feldwebel Ulrich Mannstein, who single-handedly (ie both by himself, and with only one arm) stopped a charge of Mk V Females on the Somme.
Iām sure there are some other famous ones there. The description doesnāt mention that the French eventually had dedicated flame units to deal with the Immortals. The unit was originally 150 strong.
some pertinent quotations regarding the Immortals:
āComing back is like waking up from a deep sleep, a sleep that fills you like quicksand. When you wake up itās like breaking the surface of a scummy pond. Iāve never felt as energized or strong as after Iāve come back.āā Oberleutenant Hans von Pommern, Belgium 1914
āI feel good. I feel fine. After a few times you donāt even notice the pain anymore.ā ā Gefreiter Georg Steinbrenner, after having his spine broken in three places and one arm severed by a shell impact. France 1916.
āWe donāt need weapons anymore! We donāt need tools of any sort, we are invincible, weāre fucking gods on Earth!āā Unteroffizier Wilhelm Eichelberger, France 1915
āHow did I do it? Focus, thatās all. Focus is really all you need.āā Feldwebel Ulrich Mannstein, on how he knocked out four Mark V Females with nothing but a sharpened shovel and grenades
āI canāt do this anymore, please donāt wake me up Iām not going back IāM NOT!āā unidentified Immortal, German aid station, 1917. The words were recorded in the war diaries of Hauptmann Friedrich Ritter von Sternberg, the attending surgeon, who later wrote that āsuch plaintive screams, coming from a man whose entire face was a wet and bloody pulp, cut me to my very coreā
āTheir demeanour was strange, almost cheery, as we started up the flamethrowers. Quite unsettling were their guttural cries as they burned, strange animal shouts of pleasure and joy. We had all heard the stories of how they became unhinged towards the end. I hope the government has the good sense not to re-start a project like this.āā unidentified Provisional Reichswehr officer who witnessed the burning, 1925
āThe jerries walked right through our lines. Canāt have been more than a platoon. I saw only one of them fall, an FT had blasted him with its cannon and took the top half of his body off. If I hadnāt known better Iād say he kept crawling. It was then that I noticed the French were bringing up some guys who had the weirdest apparatus attached to their backs. Looked almost like they were wearing some sort of deep sea suit. Heavily armoured with two tanks on the back, carrying a pipe which had a cable streaming out from the tanks. I donāt know what was more terrible, the Germans who didnāt die, or the weapons the French usedā¦ Iām still haunted to this day.ā - Corporal Alan Michael, American Expeditionary Force recounting an incident in 1918
I call bullshit. Theres no way that this is real.
look up āThey Wouldnāt Die: Memoirs of An Investigation into Germanyās Most Secret Military Unitā published 1931 by CPT Jacob Klemenz, USMC. Klemenz came face-to-face with members of the Immortals during the Great War, and afterwards embarked on a decade-plus research project to find out why and how they existed. his account is for sure on Project Gutenberg, itās a little dry but makes for fascinating reading
Waitā¦ so zombie Nazis are real?
not zombies technically, and not nazis either (Reichswehr) but yes
To the FĆ¼hrerāsĀ infamousĀ Geisterbeschwƶrergruppe, the distinction betweenĀ āzombieā andĀ āghoulā was academic; battlefield dominance was all that mattered.
Okay, first off, the mention of the Geisterbeschwƶrergruppe is pointless. The Immortals- the Unsterblichsoldaten, if you want to use the accurate term for the German unit- predated the establishment of the Geisterbeschwƶrergruppe by over two decades. Donāt mix them up. Also, how has no one mentioned āFinal Judgement in Belleau Wood: Immortals, Hounds of Hell, and the Fight for the Soul of Europeā by Dominick Ledford? I donāt know if thereās a better depiction of how the Immortals fought, or what the US Marine Corp did to stop them. I donāt think the Vatican has ever officially revoked that missive damning the entire corp.
Guys, Iām a historian, and this is all legit. Although Iām a little sad that nobody has mentioned the execution of Hans Zwerfel in 1939. Although he was merely a medical student with a side interest in the occult at the time the Immortals were created, he was granted permission to view the lab in which they were created, and interview them at regular intervals throughout their service, as they were invaluable to his thesis on the intersection of medicine and the occult.
However, in 1939, Hitler asked him to divulge information regarding the Immortals, as he believed a similar battalion would be neccessary now that he had broken his pact with Stalin. However, Zwerfel, seeing the immense psychological toll repeated resurrections took on the immortals, refused to tell Hitler what he knew, leading to his execution. He has been posthumously honored by the British, Polish, and American governments for his role in preventing Hitler from forming another Immortal battalion.
Truffles, you know I have a lot of respect for you, but I really donāt understand why youāre describing this without considering the religious aspects of Hitlerās quest. The Nazi view of themselves as inheritors of Norse mythos made him desperate for a working occult replication, and warriors from Valhalla, like the immortals could appear to be, would have been a powerful sign.
It actually gets a little bit more interesting.Ā
So, itās fairly widely recognized among modern historians that some of the theory or basis or somethingĀ for this came from Hungary. The best arguments for this before the fall of the Soviet Union come from Klemenz, and itās done a lot to explain this weird, rambly letter written by Kaiser Franz Josef to Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1909, where (among other things) he accuses Kaiser Wilhelm of being too focused on war and not focused enough Ā on war in the same sentence, but mostly talks about his dead wife and Empress (murdered by a terrorist in 1898).Ā
Itās a wierd letter, and it coincides with some stuff going on, and also this brief, massiveĀ buildup in the Austro-Hungarian cavalry forces which has no other good explanation.Ā
Anyway, apparently thereās this roughly 70-year-old sorta folk legend among Austrian civil servants ofĀ ādie alten schƶnen Frauenā Ā ā they are women, all very beautiful, and generally with a sort of old-fashioned sort of beauty and way of dress, and always seem to have lost their papers in some kind of accident ā house fire, or something. But, their eyes are very old and even though everything checks out, they always seem really suspicious.Ā
And there are these legends of the invincible hussar who couldnāt be killed by machine-gun fireā¦.Ā
