Wochenbild #5

At least the chap on the right appears happy!

As I have said before, many of the photographs in my archive have, on the reverse, notes giving information about the location and/or the unit depicted.  Sadly this picture has nothing of use.

In the foreground we see two men sawing logs for firewood.  The younger of the two wears what appears to be a Red Army greatcoat and the kneeling fellow is wearing the extremely effective "Telogreika" winter outfit issued by the Red Army.  My guess would be that both of these men are "Hiwis" performing manual tasks for the German military.

The background shows a rather dejected looking German sentry guarding an 88mm FlaK which is deployed in anti-tank mode.  Although a very large weapon with an extremely high profile, it can be seen that when properly emplaced only a small portion was visible above ground-level - the gun barrel must be less than a foot from the snow's surface.  Note what appear to be kill rings on the barrel - clearly the crew has had some degree of success!  In my opinion, such an emplacement would look very attractive on the table-top.

If forced to speculate I would go for winter 1941/2 as the gun is not whitewashed - by the second winter of the war this was in fairly plentiful supply.  However this is far from conclusive.  The location is anyone's guess - as no buildings are visible.  Though the flat terrain may indicate "Somewhere in Ukraine"!