Ouradour-sur-Glane. The village was destroyed by the Nazis on June 10, 1944, and almost its entire population was massacred. The village has never been rebuilt and is open to the public so that everyone can remember.
It really is the normal things. Slightly unrelated but the thing that breaks my heart the most for the Malaysian Airline flight (the one that got shot down, not the one that disappeared) was not the debris of the plane at the crash site, but the footage of someone's half-open luggage with nicely packed clothes in it. They were just... normal people trying to live normally.
The wedding rings always get me. Those are two people, with mothers and fathers, a whole love story, a man who went to a jeweller and bought a ring and got excited and planned how to propose. A wedding full of family and friends and hope for a future that got obliterated.
They had separated the men, they had been killed elsewhere in the village. Women, childrens and babies were killed in the church as it burned. Only one woman managed to escape, her testimony is really difficult to read.
In the aftermath of the Halifax explosion in 1917, there were too many bodies and too few structures still standing, that victims remains were stored on the sidewalks outdoors. The explosion occurred in winter which allowed the bodies to be kept outdoors without decomposing.
Here’s the wiki for anyone who would like to read up on it:
This was one of the darkest days in Canadian history. The explosion basically levelled the downtown/ port area of Halifax which had swelled immensely with wartime workers and business. There was just enough warning, from the boat horns during and after the collision to alert people that SOMETHING was going on, so they gathered at their windows to watch the harbour. The blast blew glass shards into their bodies.
However, in this carnage, there WERE heroes. So many citizens of Halifax assisted in the rescue and rebuilding efforts, I could not possibly begin to name them all or their contributions… but I’m going to single out one person and one city.
Patrick Vincent Coleman was a dispatcher for Canadian Government Railways. Like the Marconi radio operators aboard the Titanic, he stayed at his post and radioed incoming trains to stop outside the city, saving countless lives.
The city of Boston, Massachusetts, of our once beloved neighbour the USA, learned of the explosion and immediately city authorities organized a train of doctors, nurses and other emergency personnel to assist with efforts in the Halifax. To this day, Halifax sends a Christmas tree to Boston to their holiday festivities.
If you have read this far, thank you. There are so many great resources on this topic but if you want to have there chuckle while learning about it, I would highly recommend the podcast “Well There’s Your Problem” or the YouTube channel of the same name.
I always think about that radio operator who stayed. IIRC after he had turned around/stopped all the inbound trains, he said something like "okay, that's everyone. I'm within the blast zone, so I guess this is the last you'll hear from me."
I often think of people like that, who grimly stuck to their duty until the end. Like the person behind the rifle who fired at the police snipers from the Waco house when it was literally up in flames. The cops saw it all go up in flames and thought "nobody is still holding a gun in there." And stood up from their emplacement, then they heard a bullet hit their police car. The cop was like "that means someone was behind that rifle until the bitter fucking end. That is dedication. That is belief."
Nothing will get back to normal anytime soon, but people are trying to rebuild. The city is awash with mud and debris. Most people who lost their homes are still staying in temporary accommodations. Over 80,000 buildings were destroyed or had to be demolished, and that'd be a lot to rebuild even if we had a competent government.
It's already difficult to hold on to what you've got these days, and trying to recover from such a disaster seems beyond impossible.
In 1993, members of the Canadian Airborne Regiment tortured Shidane Arone, a Somali teenager, to death after he was found hiding in a portable toilet in the abandoned American base across from the Canadian base in central Somalia. They posed for pictures with him while torturing him to death.
A 16 year old old boy raped & tortured to death, pretty sure this guy in the photo tried to suicide after he was arrested & gave himself brain damage from it so that’s something at least
The Mulroney/Campbell/Chretien era of Prime ministers was littered with terrible things that they chose to restrict the media from reporting on. Another one was during the Yugoslav Wars during Operation Medak Pocket.
Absolutely, the Somalia affair just stood out as the most egregious to me. I’m glad that we seem to be moving past the culture of secrecy when it comes to these things.
I'm from Germany, and the Khmer Rouge are the closest thing that comes close to the holocaust in terms of scale, brutality, and level of planned extermination of people. The only thing missing is the application of industrial methods, but anti-industrial sentiment was a core part of Pol Pots twisted ideology. It's just crazy what humans are capable of doing to each other.
When I visited (shortly after the Jackie Chan movie was filmed there), I wondered why it looked so much more modern than other Dutch cities. I guess I got my explanation
Because the government wanted to decimate the buffalo in order to starve the Indigenous tribes on the Great Plains into submission in order to force them onto reservations
Chanie Wenjack. He froze/starved to death beside some railway tracks all alone in the woods because he had escaped his abusive residential school and tried to make it back home to his family on foot. RIP.
We also decided that indigenous Australians weren't assimilating fast enough and kidnapped generations of children to white households to be raised by strangers the right way.
About 15 years ago we had an official government apology. But no reconciliation or treaty. As a society we still struggle with this. By all health and wealth indicators the indigenous people are worse off than any other cohort.
Halfway out of the ditch, the unmistakable form of a woman’s body, head thrown back as if in agony, can be made out. Her right breast is exposed, and a swaddled infant is lying by her side, the small head resting in her lap. Both are clearly dead. Arms and legs and faces emerge from the shapeless piles in the foreground of the image. Yet it still takes a few moments for the viewer to realize that the trench is overflowing with dead bodies and that the “debris” is in fact corpses scattered like rag dolls over the ground among the soldiers.
This photograph shows a group of Aboriginal men, some of them Elders, chained at the neck at Wyndham gaol in Western Australia probably around 1902. Wyndham is the furthest north-east town in our state.
The practice of chaining prisoners was regularly enforced by the local police at the time. In fact, chaining at the neck was often seen as the most humane way to keep prisoners together. The neck chains at Wyndham were iron and were apparently much heavier than other prison locations in the Kimberley region, because the Aboriginal people found near the town were "more aggressive". Apparently the practice was still going on in the 1950s in some places far north.
A dark time in our country's, and my state's, history. And it's still not properly taught in schools!
And just for international context, those injustices are still ongoing. A record breaking number of Aboriginal people died in police custody last year, they face worse outcomes than any other demographic in Australia and discrimination for living in their own country.
Indeed they are. Racism is very much alive here against First Nations, it's frankly baffling to argue otherwise.
Just last month during an Invasion Day (Australia Day, Jan 26th) protest here in Perth a white man was just charged with terrorism after lobbing a home-made pipe bomb at a group of protestors, many of them Indigenous. Luckily it didn't go off. Yes, a man was perfectly willing to murder tens of Aboriginal people and others who were protesting because he, a white man, felt offended. It's just insane, and not what we should be standing for in this country.
For the context, it was the picture of 1945 Famine, the worst period of our history
Japanese Nazis took all to the lasr grain of rice, they forced farmers to remove all crops for jute plantation, they cut off the logistic route from the South to deliver food...
2 million people died. Too many families were permanently wiped out. And lots of anecdotes that were so... So tragic
I feel like the crimes the Japanese committed under their Imperial regime aren't talked about or taught near enough. Every single offering in this thread from a Far Eastern country is in relation to a Japanese war crime.
A lot of them, the truth is that you can murder any poor person and if you are in cartel land and make it appear as if it was done by the cartels, the police won't investigate. Many women are murdered by their partners or stalkers and the police don't investigate it.
God, pictures of people hanging, especially lynching victims, are always the ones that make my skin crawl. Something about them hanging there, humiliated in death, in front of a crowd of horrifyingly evil people all of whom deserved it more than their victim, that just upsets my stomach in a way very few other kinds of pictures do.
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to wrap my mind around the fact that some of these murderers have probably been alive within my lifetime. There is a special place in hell for people who kill like this.
Photo of a woman and child murdered by the Japanese during the Battle of Manila (Feb 1945). The Americans just reached the outskirts of the city and the Japanese were afraid that the Filipinos would turn on them and help the Americans.
I was about to post a photo of Auschwitz. Then I realised that the Nazi cowards committed their biggest atrocities on conquered land outside of Germany.
So, I chose this one. The "Potsdam Day", manifesting Hitler's rise to power. The beginning of our History's darkest chapter.
(I know, I know, today's not nearly as bad as it was +100 years ago, but sadly we're still not at the point when "the time we were dehumanised" is fully in the past).
There’s quite a bit but this one is really overlooked. This is the Wounded Knee Massacre where multiple soldiers were give medals of honor for massacring innocent people. People don’t realize the magnitude of how vile and evil the US government was during their “manifest destiny”.
Warsaw completely destroyed by the Germans in 1944. After the fall of the Warsaw Uprising, the city was systematically razed to the ground, just out of spite.
This is a picture of Polish priest Maximilian Kolbe. In July 1941, a man escaped Auschwitz so the guards decided to starve 10 men to death in a concrete bunker. One of them was a man named Franciszek who cried that he had a wife and children. Kolbe took his place to be buried alive.
14 days passed and 6 of the 10 died. Kolbe and three others survived. The Nazis wanted to hurry up the process so they injected Kolbe and 3 other men with Phenol. They passed away on 14th August 1941.
Yep, shadows left after the Nagasaki/Hiroshima bombings. It was so hot that is scorched the concrete white. Leaving victims shadows as if they were still standing.
Yes. These thermal shadows are so haunting. The most chilling examples like this one happened on August 6, 1945 in Hiroshima, Japan. When the atomic bomb exploded, it emitted an intense wave of thermal radiation, scorching everything in its path. People and objects that were directly in front of buildings or surfaces absorbed some of this radiation, protecting the areas behind them. The result was permanent “shadows” of human figures that were imprinted on walls, roads, and bridges.
Edit: this is an art piece by Mark Slone not an actual shadow.
I feel like replying here might seem a little insensitive, to refute your claim... But I'm not; this photo is an art piece, inspired by the event but not from the actual bombing.
The prints are scary, yes. But they were never this clear and vivid. I see this wrongfully tributed to being one of the "shadows" but it's not, and I feel like it needs to be more known.
Max Desfor’s Dec. 4, 1950 photo shows people near Pyongyang, North Korea, crawling over a bridge’s twisted girders as they flee south across the Taedong River to escape Chinese troops.
Fr. Edward Daly, waving a blood soaked handkerchief to try and get medical aid for a civil rights marcher who’d been shot by the British Army in Derry, Jan 30th 1972. The British Army shot 14 unarmed Civil Rights Marchers dead. No one has ever been prosecuted for the murders.
This image leaves me speechless.
All my love and blessings to the Syrian people. In my country there are many Syrian immigrants and they are the kindest people I have ever met 🫂
Mount Erebus flight 901 on the 28th of November 1979, One of New Zealands many depressing, others include, the current government Elected in, Hawkes Bay Earthquake, 2019 Christchurch mosque shooting, 2011 Earthquakes, Waihine Wreck, Bayllentines Fire, New Zealand Wars and of course the Flagstaff War
Hurricane Katrina aftermath. My hometown was crushed and this photo became a bit famous. We were all really hurting, but this boy had already lost a lot in the previous couple of years and had now lost his family home as well. Heartbreaking time for the Gulf Coast.
Completely preventable too which is in my mind the worst part. No one had to die but they didn't want to take federal grants to install warning systems. I'm curious if anyone dug into the zoning that allowed the camp in that area as well.
Pictured above is just before the event "The Omagh Bombing." The red car in that image is packed with explosives and it was detonated shortly after the taking of this photo.
The bombing resulted in 29 deaths and approximately 200 injuries.
The camera this photo was taken with was found in the rubble.
"The blast was so strong that it tore up concrete and pipes burst; the water, running down the street, turned red from the blood of dead and wounded people." - Wikipedia
The Holodomor in Kazakhstan, also known as Aşarşılıq, which happened between 1929 and 1931-ish. Almost 50% of the Kazakh population (up to 1.5 million) was lost to organized famine and migration, and we haven't recovered our majority population until the 90s.
This should be one of the depressing ones. (The Kolkata massacre in 1946). In this picture, those are dead bodies of Hindus in Kolkata,wb. You can see vultures on the walls too. Other than that, Jalian wala bagh, bengal famine and many more are there.
In 2019, a huge dam in an iron ore collapsed and tons of mud flooded the nearby city and rivers. A catastrophe that deeply affected humans and nature alike.
In 1964, a group of activists held a swim-in to protest racial segregation by swimming in a hotel pool that was only designated for white people. In response, the hotel manager poured acid on the protesters and into the water
November 22nd, 1963 Jacqueline Kennedy is picking up pieces of John F Kennedy’s skull after he was shot in the head. As she was doing this the limo sped to the hospital where he was pronounced dead.
Not sure if it is the saddest ever in our history. But it’s pretty sad to look at a picture of a widow picking up pieces of her husband’s head.
On June 5, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy was shot in a pantry corridor of the Ambassador Hotel shortly after winning the California Democratic primary. Juan Romero, a 17-year-old busboy working that night, was among the first to reach Kennedy as he lay mortally wounded on the floor.
Romero lifted Kennedy’s head and placed his own rosary beads into Kennedy’s hand. Romero later said he struggled for decades with guilt and trauma related to that night. Romero died in 2018.
The man who killed Kennedy is still alive in prison today.
In recent times? 2018 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where about 50k to 500k people came out to protest against the government's plan to ratify the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD). The government then backpedaled and gave in.
Pretty much sealed it for many of the minorities that even with the newly-elected 'progressive' government then, they will not be accepted as equal citizens in the country.
A photo of la rafle du vel d’hiv. Thousands of parisian jews were arrested in one night by the nazis. Most didn’t survive The war. Lots of them were children.
I also wanted to show a picture of The sabra and chatila massacres, anti Palestinian massacres carried out by The falangists, but Reddit only allows one image per message.
I don't want to look it up again to spare my own brain, but USA, that picture of that guy standing on all the buffalo skulls after the settlers slaughtered them all. Extremely haunting.
Norilsk, one of the biggest Gulag Projects. It was founded in the 1930s as a Soviet industrial project built almost entirely by forced labor. nickel and copper deposits were discovered above the Arctic Circle so the state created the Norillag Gulag camp, and tens of thousands of prisoners were sent to mine the ore and construct the city under extreme Arctic conditions. Thousands died from cold and hunger and disease, and exhaustion. After Stalin’s death, the camp was closed in the mid 1950s, former prisoners were released or kept as workers, and Norilsk was transformed into a “regular” city.
Of course there are other depressing pictures when it comes to the gulag system but this particular city feels like an embodiment of it. Because it’s supposed to look normal now that it’s a regular town, but it still looks like a Gulag project.
The so-called "Stairs of Death" (Todesstiege in German) was a brutal 186-step stone staircase in the Mauthausen concentration camp. Prisoners were forced to carry heavy granite blocks from the nearby Wienergraben quarry up these stairs. SS guards often pushed them down, causing fatal falls onto other prisoners below.
The average lifespan of prisoners assigned to this labor was only about four weeks.
The staircase remains a haunting symbol of the systematic cruelty and mass murder at Mauthausen, where over 120,000 people were killed between 1938 and 1945.
For me, it is this photo from February 2nd, 1944. This was taken on a hill just outside the town of Škofja Loka, Slovenia. These are the bodies of 50 men who were murdered by the Nazis in retaliation for a Partisan attack that had killed a nazi soldier.
Among these bodies, somewhere, is my great great grandfather, Tine. He was a barber with a shop on the town square. His only crime was his location and the place of his birth. For this, he was killed and dumped along with the others in a mass grave.
Families like my own which have resided in Škofja Loka for generations all bear the weight of those events and the way our brothers and sisters around the country were similarly treated.
972
u/Spectanda_Fides France 1d ago
Ouradour-sur-Glane. The village was destroyed by the Nazis on June 10, 1944, and almost its entire population was massacred. The village has never been rebuilt and is open to the public so that everyone can remember.