Historic views through the lens - a side effect to the German occupation

The fascination for military hardware, like tanks, aircraft or ships is definitely predominant in the blogs and websites covering WWII. Todays first posting takes another angle - the density of cameras amongst German soldiers was high - and without having definite numbers on this - it seems to have been much higher than in the general population in for example Norway during the 1930s and 1940s.

And like every other person travelling abroad and seeing new places thes soldiers took photographs of their immediate surroundings.

These photographs - often still going for low prices even at ebay.de due to the fact that the portrayed soldiers are ordinary non-Ritterkreuz personnel and any interesting snaps of military equipment have been sorted out and sold at higher prices - will make interesting additions to collections aimed at documenting the cultural history of a given location.

Today I would like to present two in my opinion interesting photographs showing parts of Ålesund on the western coast of Norway late 1940. These have been taken from an album of a soldier in the infantry regiment IR 334 stationed there. If you are interested in following the auction the article number on ebay.de is 221178260802.



Street view Ålesund November 1940



Street view Ålesund November 1940

A further part of this album showing the unit in Molde is also on auction, the building shown below was apparently used as the regimental headquarters, after they had been shipped from Ålesund on the steamer ULLASUND.

Transport on the steamer ULLASUND

Regimental headquarters in Molde