The 5 Creepiest Stories in the History of War
Even those of us who have never worn a uniform outside of a Burger King kitchen know that serving in combat is hell. We saw Saving Private Ryan, just like everyone else. But while all war is awful, sometimes it gets truly weird. Like ...
The Nazi Baby Factories
Let's ease you into this list of creepy war stories with this image of a specially bred Aryan baby being christened in a Nazi ceremony, in which an SS officer holds a freaking dagger over his body while the mother swears allegiance to the Nazi party:
Here, let us make it weirder: That infant was one of thousands and thousands of "Lebensborn" babies, some of whom were not bred, but were kidnapped and raised in Nazi baby factories.
The Nazis were always worried that not enough blonde-haired, blue-eyed Aryans were being born into the world. So, the same guy who orchestrated the Final Solution came up with the Lebensborn program, in which the purest Aryan stock could be taken and raised as pure Nazis in a luxurious network of homes furnished with the stolen goods of murdered Jews.
It started with simply encouraging SS soldiers invading Europe to mingle with the locals. And by mingle with, we mean "fuck." Provided, that is, the parties on the receiving end were of good Nordic stock. Should their girlfriends get pregnant, Lebensborn houses were there to provide a safe, nurturing home for unwed mothers in which to give birth and raise their babies. Thanks to these welcome arms of love, between 16,000-20,000 babies were born and Nazified during the war.
And when they couldn't breed enough babies this way, they just started abducting the bluest- or greenest-eyed blond babies they could find. To be fair, some of the kids stolen for the program were actually orphans. Not that getting conscripted into Nazism by virtue of one's paleness and dead parents is awesome, but at least the kids had food to eat while the world was falling apart.
Others were "voluntarily" surrendered by their parents, sometimes just to keep them from the gas chambers. And still others, probably the ones with the bluest eyes of all - like, Daniel Craig blue -- were straight up taken from their parents. There was no genetic testing done or anything -- the poor kids just looked the part. The ones who fit in were either kept in the program or adopted by German families. The ones who didn't fit in were sent to concentration camps. Poland thinks they lost as many as 200,000 kids to the Germans this way, but we'll never know for sure, since so many were absorbed by good German families. Sleep tight, friends! Maybe you come from a line of Nazi babies and you'll never even know!
The Angel Makers of Nagyrev
Not that the Nazis have a monopoly on bizarrely creepy wartime horror or anything. Hell, not all of the perpetrators are members of any army at all -- for instance, here is a story about some nice Hungarian women on the home front who secretly and systematically poisoned 300 fucking people.
It all started when, during World War I, some lonely Hungarian wives in the small village of Nagyrev started screwing some strapping Allied POWs imprisoned nearby. Fair enough. Ladies get horny, too. But when their husbands came home from war, something sinister started happening: Returning soldiers started getting a case of the deads, one after another. Which was why the village became known as "the Murder District." Well, that and the crows.
The whole murder-thon started when a mysterious midwife moved into the village in 1911. When the lonely wives of Nagyrev got pregnant with their lovers' Allied spawn, it was Midwife Fuzekas who put the kibosh on the pregnancies. And when the lonely wives' husbands returned home from war, it was also Midwife Fuzekas who suggested they poison the men by boiling flypaper, skimming the arsenic off the top of the brew, then serving it to the husbands on a pizza or doughnut or something.
Oh, and just to make sure that they could do this again and again and again without ever getting caught, they had the cooperation of the village clerk (the midwife's cousin) who, when a death report came in, was sure to mark "NOT MURDER" on the official records.
It was so easy, that every little problem came to be solved with arsenic soup (a fact that you'd think the local flypaper salesmen would notice, if nobody else). By the time neighboring towns figured out what was going on, as many as 300 people were poisoned by 50 different women, with the victims including parents, lovers, aunts, uncles, neighbors, and even children. All because in this one little town, in this one short stretch of time, murder by poison became a straight-up fad. Like Hammer pants.
American Soldiers Collected Human Body Parts as Trophies
Before we tell you that our WWII-fighting great-grandparents collected severed Japanese heads as trophies (too late!), we need to provide a little context.
First, everyone involved in the conflict had been thoroughly programmed to see their enemies as subhuman. Now add in the shock of Pearl Harbor and young men witnessing daily the horrors of war, and things start to get ... weird. We're not excusing them, we're just setting the stage. We're talking about some of the newly enlisted being issued "hunting licenses" at the recruitment office. One read:
Open Season
No Limit
Japanese Hunting Season
Free Ammunition and Equipment!
With Pay
Join the United States Marines!
So maybe it's not so surprising that the minute Japanese bodies started hitting the ground during the Guadalcanal Campaign, G.I.s started collecting ears for souvenirs. Ears were worn on belts, teeth were made into necklaces, skulls were mailed home as keepsakes for the folks at home. It got so bad that by 1942 the U.S. military had to issue a decree specifically condemning the practice of stealing body parts for trophies. But by then, it was too late. Servicemen had recipes for cleaning skulls.
As well as hilarious poses with skulls all worked out and everything.
The mindset of stealing Japanese bones for fun was already set in stone. FDR himself had to refuse a letter opener made from a leg bone. It's like the whole fucking country lost their minds. The only good news concerning the whole national disgrace was that American readers who saw the Life report were outraged -- not just at the thought of the pictures reaching the Japanese and spurring disgusted rage (which they did), but of just ... gross. Americans were supposed to better than that. Turns out, we weren't.
So among the topics you never ever approach with Grandpops, like gays in the military and Lady Gaga, be sure to never ever ask if he brought any souvenirs home from the Pacific. Okay? Okay.
WARNING: It gets much worse from here.
Irma Grese, the Hyena of Auschwitz
Knowing what you know about the Holocaust, you have to wonder what would qualify as "creepy" in the midst of a concentration camp. Would you even want to know?
Well, we're going to tell you anyway. This is the story of Irma Grese, the Nazi at Auschwitz who got sexually aroused by torture. A lot.
On the outside, Irma Grese was a teenage Aryan dream -- pretty by Nazi standards, dedicated, beefy. On the inside, Irma Grese was a time bomb waiting for a chance to explode. Picture this ...
... but with a bejeweled whip, pistol and a set of half-starved dogs who would attack on her command. Imagine this woman shooting people on a whim, using her belt to whip prisoners, then kicking them when they were down. And getting off on it the whole time.
Irma Grese loved her job like a white woman loves Oprah. She got off on torturing people, like when she used her whip to slash female prisoners' breasts. Then when the cuts became infected and required surgery -- without anesthesia, we should mention -- she watched the procedure in the operating room, enjoying orgasms so intense they "made saliva run down from the corner of her mouth."
By the time she was tried and hanged for her crimes, Irma was only 22 years old. At the same age most of us were trying to figure out what to do with our bachelor's degrees, Irma Grese rewrote what it means to be horrible.
The Chichi-jima Incident
During World War II, nine American servicemen were shot down over the Japanese-held island of Chichi-jima. One was picked up by the submarine USS Finback, while the other eight were captured by the Japanese. According to eyewitnesses, those eight were executed (some via samurai sword). That's fairly normal war stuff. What supposedly happened after that, is not.
As we have well established by now, war does weird things to a person's brain. It is entirely possible, and even likely, that everyone involved in this was a perfectly normal person before the war. Keep that in mind.
So, the story goes that the Japanese Army officers hosted a party for the Japanese Navy officers, and they ran out of meat. So the guy in charge told one of his subordinates to get some kimo from a fresh grave -- kimo meaning "flesh," specifically the liver. The subordinate did what he was told and the liver was fried up alongside the sake and all the other goodies of the night.
Oh, it gets better.
Apparently the Japanese Navy officers at the dinner were so impressed that they started executing and serving up their own American POWs ... just to show off and be fancy. And the crazy thing -- that still wasn't even the worst part.
Some of the POWs were executed before their bodies were cannibalized. Some weren't. As in, their limbs were amputated and their flesh was eaten on the spot -- on account of the islands not having enough refrigeration to properly store human meat.
Oh, one more thing. Do you remember that pilot who was spared from becoming an appetizer because he was picked up by a submarine?
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