Without a name

A soldier in a broken helmet, killed by a sniper in the back of the head. Symbol of war - places of impersonal death

Iron seems to be solid and durable to a person, and therefore a person believes the gland. He puts a helmet on his head and walks in it even in the heat. The sun heats iron on his head, sweat flows through his temples, a pot on the belt knocks on his back, the portup interferes with the breath and live, but the person still does not remove the heavy helmet, because this is a war and he believes that it will protect it.

The bullet breaks through the helmet and leaves a hole in the gland with uneven edges. Iron can not protect anything, cannot save. It breaks and breaks from the blow of another iron - a small bullet flying at a speed of a thousand meters per second. With a brutal, mocking, geometric accuracy, the bullet enters exactly in the middle of the back of the head. The back of her head is soft as oil. Instant death.

He lies, in the heat, in his uniform made of dense gray cloth, chopped with leather belts, which had just tightly tightened his shoulders, back and chest, and now, when he fell, went silent and went limp on a faceless figure. A blade of grass clung to one of the straps. He has white protruding ears, a thick neck and a shaved nape. This is all that we see, and all that we know about him. Death took away all the details of his life.

We do not know anything about the Wehrmacht soldier, presumably killed by the Soviet sniper with a shot in the back of the head. From the Mainz or from the Cologne? Did he go in adolescence with pleasure to classes at the Hitler Youth or evaded from them, experiencing disgust for degenerates in short pants, adopted love for the Fuhrer and patriotism? Did he go into the army with enthusiasm, because he dreamed of going to the parade, lifting his legs high, or with his heart, realizing that the war, which the demoniac shake, would not end in anything good? It is not known by the name, nor the surname, nor the city, nor the family, nor education, nor habits, nor plans, and therefore, seventy -seven years after his death, a photograph in which he lies face to clay and dry grass and with a hole in the back of the head, turns into a symbol of war as a place of depersonalized death.

We do not know anything but the name about the photographer, who, spreading his legs and raising the camera above the body of the murdered, made this frame. His name is Leo. What did he shoot with a professional camera or a cheap soap of the forties? It is also unknown. The Bundesarchiva contains eight shots made by this unknown, deprived of the face and biography of Leo, seven of them are the most ordinary, on which the Wehrmacht people are captured in 1942, when the gloomy doom was not yet visible in their faces. One, fair -haired, in a cap, standing on a barrel, with a huge ramrod cleans the Messerschmitt gun, from which a camouflage network hangs from the wing; Two are at an anti -aircraft machine gun, which seems to be glistening from machine oil; Three officers-the lieutenant and Lieutenant Luftwaffe and the infantry officer-bent over the papers on the plank table, a saddled horse approached them and also looks at the papers, and there are two loafs of bread on the table on the table. A hay hangs from the roof, an officer tablet hangs on a nail drive into a log. And so we notice the raw air of early spring and the smell of bread on this frame and even its black hard crust.

Two more footers Leo show women who collect shells on the coast in northern France. The sea came, the sand was blurred and it was gone, and now women with dark shawls on their heads, in long dark skirts, in black, rather male, than female shoes, collect shells and collect shells. You can’t even say about these personnel made in November 1941 that this is the work of a military or at least a professional photographer - they made a photographicist who captured the customs of the customs and classes of people of another country.

So, at the end of 1941 he was in France, and in the spring and summer of 1942 in the USSR. Nothing else is known.

After 1942 there are no photos of Leo.

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