How Did Austrians React to the Red Army in 1945? #ww2 #shorts

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]In the spring of 1945, as Soviet troops advanced deep into Austria, the spearhead units encountered an unexpected reaction from the local population. Along the roadsides of liberated and occupied towns, thousands of civilians stood watching the passing columns, their faces frozen in an unfamiliar look of profound shock.

[00:00:23]The reason for this behavior lay in years of total isolation and the heavily manufactured narrative of Joseph Goebbels' propaganda machine.

[00:00:32]Until the final days of the war, Nazi broadcasts assured citizens of the Third Reich that the Soviet Union's resources [music] were completely depleted and that the Red Army no longer existed as an organized force.

[00:00:45]Instead of broken and [music] exhausted remnants, a colossal, highly mechanized war machine was rolling westward. An endless stream of heavy armor, artillery, and thousands of trucks poured down the Austrian highways.

[00:00:59]Communication between yesterday's enemies was crippled by a total language barrier, causing both sides to initially view each other with caution, but also with immense curiosity. The raw reality of life near the front lines quickly stripped away years of bitter confrontation, exposing a simple human truth.

[00:01:18]The authentic atmosphere of those days on [music] the roads of Austria was captured in the memoirs of World War II veteran and frontline soldier Vladimir Alexeev.

[00:01:28]Quote, "Once we bypassed Vienna and pushed out there, through Austria to the west, people would come out and just stand by the roadsides. Their eyes were huge. The Germans had been telling them that it was all over, that the Red Army was gone, and they had already won. The Germans lied to them the whole time, and suddenly these giants come rolling through. A massive number of trucks [music] and so many troops. I mean, how else were they supposed to take it? They didn't know our language and we didn't know theirs. For the most part, we didn't talk to them, but if a weird guard unit halted somewhere and stayed in a village for a few days or maybe weeks, they lived there and there were women and anything could happen. At the end of the day, people are only human.