57 Dark WWII Photos that Show the Harsh Reality of War

World War II is often framed through grand strategies, iconic leaders, and decisive victories, but the photographs from the era tell a far more sobering story. Behind every headline were civilians uprooted, cities reduced to rubble, and soldiers confronting the unimaginable.

Istvan Reiner, a four-year-old boy, smiles innocently in a studio portrait, unaware of the fate that awaited him at Auschwitz concentration camp. He didn’t survive.

This is a permanent shadow of a man at the exact moment the atomic bomb “Little Boy” went off over Hiroshima, 1945.

Women and their children, who were deemed unfit for labor, are pictured here. Unbeknownst to them, they were being led to the gas chambers at Auschwitz on May 27, 1944.

Photograph of British soldiers following their release from a Japanese prisoner of war camp in 1945.

A child gives another child a flower at Auschwitz whilst sat in a grove near gas chamber number four. May, 1944.

Nagasaki before and after the U.S. dropped a nuke on the city in August 1945. At least 74,000 people perished in Nagasaki.

German soldiers react to footage of concentration camps, 1945

American POWs getting freed from Japanese prison camps, 1940s

A U.S. marine gives a cigarette to an injured Japanese soldier, buried in the sand at the battle of Iwo Jima in 1945.

An overwhelmed US Marine is pictured while weeping among ruins during the Battle of Peleliu. September 26th, 1944.

Three Soviet POWs stand in their own grave moments before their execution by German Wehrmacht forces. Eastern Front, 1942.

A couple sleeping in a Morrison shelter in case of bombing in World War Il.

Leaflet dropped on Nagasaki before the Nuke.

German prisoners of war in the streets of Moscow, 1944.

German prisoners of war in the streets of Moscow, 1944.

A Soviet soldier, before and after 4 years of war. 1941-1945

This is Wojtek, the WWII bear who drank beer, ate cigarettes, & carried artillery shells at Monte Cassino. Drafted into the Polish Army, he was promoted to Corporal

August, 1944: Allied forces helping French woman during sniper fire during liberation of Chartres from the Germans, WWII.

At 4:31 AM, an unauthorized photo taken of Stalin inside the Kremlin shows the very moment he was informed that the Germans were about to take Kiev, 1941. The Soviet Union lost around 27 million people during the second world war.

The final moments of a Japanese dive bomber.

Image from 1945 shows German war criminals laugh at a translation mistake during the Nuremberg Trials.

The 10 Lysenko Brothers, all sent to fight in WW2 and all returned home to their mother. Circa early 1960s.

Finnish sniper Simo Häyhä at Kinkomaa Hospital, central Finland, spring of 1940, sometime after getting shot by a Soviet sniper with an explosive bullet in his lower left jaw during the Winter War

William Hitler, son of Adolf Hitler’s half brother Alois, is sworn into the U.S Navy by Lieutenant Christian Christofferson at a recruiting station in New York City 6 Mar 1944

The rescue of Benito Mussolini from the Hotel Campo, a ski resort high in the Apennine Mountains. He had been deposed and was kept under armed guard miles away from anywhere. Hitler sent “The most dangerous man in Europe” to break him out of his mountain top jail. 12th of September 1943

German soldier returns home to find his family gone. Frankfurt, 1946

All that was left of the Romanian cavalry after the Battle of Stalingrad. (1943)

Lyudmila Pavlichenko, the most successful female sniper in history photographed in 1941. Some called her Lady Death but to HItler’s troops she was known as “the Russian bitch from hell.”

A shell-shocked reindeer looks on as war planes drop bombs on Russia in 1941.

Some of the first American Soldiers in Higgins Boats approach Omaha Beach near Normandy, France on June 6th, 1944. Of the five beachheads, Omaha saw the heaviest fighting. More than 2500 died. Photo by Robert F. Sargent, US Coast Guard.

‘Mad Jack’ Churchill (second from right) leads his men, sword in hand, from a Eureka boat. Circa 1943. Churchill captured 42 Germans armed with only a sword, killed a Nazi with a longbow and escaped from a concentration camp, twice.

Children go to class at a damaged school in Stalingrad, shortly after the ferocious battle that killed over a million, 1943

A lone Soviet soldier walks away from a grave of his fallen brothers-in-arms on the banks of the Volga, Stalingrad. 478,000-675,000 Red Army troops died in the brutal fighting. February 1943.

Surplus military equipment left over from the end of World War II, USA, 1947.

Serbian Chetnik, World War II

June 6, 1944. US Soldiers heading to Omaha beach.

A U.S. soldier with a M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) peering across a snowy field in Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge, 1944.

A child serving in the Soviet partisans. Photographed 1942, Novgorod.

Collaborator woman wearing a German soldier’s uniform somewhere in France. Found on a German prisoner of war. 1940s.

German officer during the Battle of Kerch, 1942, giving orders to troops amidst fighting against Soviet forces.

Fire and fury: B-25s are pictured flying past Mount Vesuvius in Italy as lava and ash spews from the top of the volcano. The eruption killed 57 as it destroyed the village of San Sebastiano and San Giorg in March 1944 while Allied forces were battling for supremacy in the skies.

Free French soldiers burning a Nazi flag during the French advance in Southern Germany, 1945

German soldier mocking a Lenin statue, 1942

The ship “Queen Elizabeth” arrives at the port of New York. On board are soldiers returning from World War II, 1945

In the aftermath of the D-Day invasion, two boys watch from a hilltop as American soldiers drive through the town of St. Lo. France, 1944.

Sixteen-year-old Hitler Youth member Willi Hübner is awarded the Iron Cross Second Class after the heavy fighting around the Lower Silesian town of Lauba, March, 1945.

Panzer IV covered in a ridiculous amount of track applique armor.

Exhausted German soldiers sprinkled with water to cool off after a long training march in France

German Troops in Russia, 1941

A sniper from “C” Company, 5th Battalion, The Black Watch in position in a ruined building in Gennep, the Netherlands, 14 February 1945

German soldiers operate MG34 machinegun while taking cover under a railcar on the Eastern Front

Winston Churchill inspects a Tommy Gun, Hartlepool, 1940.

Heinrich Himmler visits Dachau with his 12-year-old daughter Gudrun, 1941.

An individual air raid shelter for a Queen’s Guard during The Blitz, London, 1940.

A German bomber attacks the American ship Robert Rowan off the coast of Gela, Sicily, causing it to explode, July 11, 1943.

A building collapsing during the Blitz, 1941.

Omaha Beach during the D-Day landings, 1944.

The citizens of Leningrad evacuate their homes, which had been destroyed by German bombing, 1942.

A German soldier poses a dog with a gun, 1940.

The atomic bombing of Nagasaki, 1945.

Garapan, Saipan, Mariana Islands. 3rd of July 1944.

Circus elephants moving a wrecked car from a bombed out garage in Hamburg.

A German paratrooper (Fallschirmjäger) with an MG 42 (Maschinengewehr 42) machine gun positions himself to fire on Allied forces.

M4 Sherman of ‘A’ Company 763rd Tank Battalion and troops from the 96th Infantry Division in battle at Okinawa, April 1945.

Flying Officer Philip Ingleby, the navigator of an Avro Lancaster B Mark III of No. 619 Squadron RAF based at Coningsby, Lincolnshire, seated at his table in the aircraft. February 1944.

British Paratrooper taking aim with an American M1 carbine from the first floor balcony of the Hartenstein Hotel in Oosterbeek, in The Netherlands. Sep 1944.