He Heard Stories About His Nazi Great‑Grandfather-Then He Found the Photos

On Saturday May 9, President Vladimir Putin was in attendance as Russia held its annual Victory Day parade celebrating the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany in World War II.

Victory came at a heavy cost to both sides: an estimated 27 million Soviet deaths, both military and civilian, and 4 to 5 million German military deaths. Many of the Germans who survived Operation Barbarossa, the Wehrmacht’s doomed invasion of the Soviet Union, went on to spend time in prisoner-of-war camps before returning home.

One of those to return was Benjamin Krenn's great-grandfather Alexander Ferrari. He was a radio operator in the 4th Artillery Company of the 4th Gebirgs-Division, coordinating artillery fire between front line troops and the artillery batteries. He was just 19 when the war began.

His division saw action on the Eastern Front, participating in major battles at Uman, the Mius River, and in the Caucasus, before later retreating through Hungary and surrendering in Austria in May 1945.

Downfall

Krenn, from Klagenfurt in Austria, was only 8 when his great-grandfather passed away in 2002, aged 83. Up until that point, he was largely unaware of Ferrari’s role in the war.

“In school, we learned all about Adolf Hitler,” Krenn told Newsweek. “How he took power, destroyed democracy, and the Holocaust. But this felt a bit far away for me, until I saw the movie ‘Downfall’. Afterwards, my mother told me about my great-grandfather fighting in this war. This made the war feel much closer.”

Krenn learned that Ferrari never shied away from sharing the grim realities of Operation Barbarossa with his family and the brutal Russian winters that played a part in its failure. “He spoke about how extreme the cold was on the Eastern Front, and how he lost a young friend there during machine-gun fire,” Krenn said.

“He also talked about survival situations, like taking boots from the dead because they were sometimes warmer than what they had, and how, later, in a war prisoner camp, he claimed to be a trained cook, because he figured that, if he had to be there, it was better to be close to the food.”

Krenn says Ferrari “didn't make a secret” out of the fact he was a Nazi either. He was far from an outlier. By 1945, 8.5 million Germans were members of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) by 1945 and many millions more belonged to affiliated organizations.

Even so, upon his return to society, Ferrari sought repentance. “In his youth, he held Nazi beliefs, but he deeply regretted them later in life,” Krenn said. “After the war, he spent his life as a pastor, seeking forgiveness and preaching against his old beliefs.”

Long-Forgotten Photos

For decades, though, Ferrari’s experiences existed in stories shared between family members. Then, one day, Krenn was handed something that changed that: a collection of photos Ferrari had taken during his time on the Eastern Front. It is a collection Krenn never knew existed. He inherited them following the recent passing of his own grandmother, Ferrari's daughter. “I saw them for the first time this year,” Krenn said.

The pictures brought the 81-year-old conflict to life in a way mere words alone could not. There were pictures of Nazi soldiers operating heavy artillery, of tanks and infantry lining up in their thousands on the streets of unknown towns and cities reduced to rubble. There was something else, though: pictures of young men smiling together, riding bicycles; and an image of the makeshift graves made for former friends and colleagues.

Though the Nazi regime was responsible for unspeakable evil, the pictures offered up an alternative, largely overlooked, glimpse of the Eastern Front. It gave Krenn pause for thought. “They didn't really change my view on the war itself, but it does feel strange seeing those young faces, knowing many of them never came home,” Krenn said.

‘Makes My Own Struggles Feel Small’

Seeing these young men, some likely to be as young as 18, or 19 in his great-grandfather’s case, facing death, also helped put Krenn's own problems into some perspective. “I sometimes think of him at my age and what he went through in the Russian winter. It makes my own struggles feel small.”

The photos bring the conflict to life in a way that words alone simply can”t. An fMRI study published in the journal PLOS Onein 2013 found that showing someone pictures triggers a stronger emotional response in the brain than simply words.

Krenn is sharing these photos now in an effort to simply “preserve them” rather than make any larger point about the war. “I'd find it sad if they were lost or forgotten,” he said. They say that history is written by the victors. Ferrari's pictures will not change the narrative around World War II, and he doesn’t want that, but they do serve as a reminder of everything that was lost during that conflict.

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This story was originally published May 16, 2026 at 3:30 AM.