Comments by "vk2ig" (@vk2ig) on "German Wehrmacht driving in to surrender near Prague (1945)" video.

Some 76 years after he sent it, I'm reading the US armoured vehicle radio operator's traffic at 5:30: IELD PROMOTIONS BUT Then at 5:42 the camera switches to the whole-of-vehicle shot, so I don't know what was sent between when the close-up ended and this shot commenced: BT T <ERROR> (the eight dots ... it's not hard to make mistakes with one of those keys strapped to your thigh) TO S <BREAK> W The last character is a bit rocky as I didn't get to see if it really was W. It could've been J, P or 1 ... or a punctuation mark or prosign. Edits: I thought about the traffic being sent in the clear and watched the video again. Two things were obvious, viz. that vehicle has wheels so it's not a tank, and the second character being sent is an E not a T. So I assume he would've sent "FIELD", as that word fits in the phrase "FIELD PROMOTIONS".
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These people may well have been handed over to the Soviets when the Americans left Czechoslovakia. A fair bit of that occurred when the American forces retreated back to the lines agreed with Stalin at the Yalta Conference.
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@zemetrius The US and British forces handed over German POWs to the Soviets (not the Russians - the country was known as the USSR at the time), as those forces pulled back to the lines agreed at the Yalta Conference. So it's highly likely that any German POWs still in what's now known as the Czech Republic at the time of the US withdrawal would've been handed over to Soviet forces. I read about one instance of this in a book written by a former Wehrmacht soldier whose unit had surrendered to the Americans. They were hemmed into a big circle by American troops. That night they heard lots of noise on the perimeter, and awoke in the morning to find themselves surrounded by a ring of T34 tanks - during the night the Americans had handed over to the Soviets. The Germans were marched / cattle-wagoned to the USSR, and spent years in POW camps there. This particular soldier was released in the 1950s, and emigrated to Australia, which is where he published his book.
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@Martinko_Pcik Good observation. It stands to reason that the partisans would use that flag, and the official flag of the region at the time was that of The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, a German construct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectorate_of_Bohemia_and_Moravia.
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And his driver is wearing German uniform. Soviet troops would've had the flag of the USSR at the time. But maybe it was a means of indicating safe passage? There appear to be Soviets in the crowd at 3:28.
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I was wondering if it was the flag of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectorate_of_Bohemia_and_Moravia, but the colours are in the wrong order. Would the Russian flag have been flown anywhere in WW2, as the entire country was known as the USSR and had a very different flag? Perhaps the flag was a means of indicating safe passage, and there appear to be Soviet troops in the crowd at 3:28.
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It was the USSR, not Russia. Before the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR, Russia was just one of many Soviet Socialist Republics. Even the leader of the USSR during WW2 wasn't Russian - he was from Georgia (not the state of the USA).
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Under the Treaty of Versailles the Germans weren't allowed to build up significant military forces. However; once the economic collapse occurred (hyper-inflation in Germany) and eventually Hitler came to power, the rest of the world was too busy dealing with The Great Depression to have time to deal with Germany's rising military.
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