Friday 3 April 2015

Wargaming honors European veterans

Hello warriors,

recently, several people from Minsk (WG RU) crew visited multiple cities creating the series of videos, the topic of which is the 1945 victory over fascism. The videomaking crew visited Poland, Czech republic and Germany. On the picture below, you can see them interviewing Czech WW2 veteran, colonel Přibyl.



Colonel (ret.) Václav Přibyl was born in 1923 in Kiev, Ukraine to the family of a Czechoslovak engineer, becoming an engineer in chemistry himself. When the war started, he was evacuated to Moscow, where he helped (as a civillian) defend the city against nazi invaders. After that, he joined the Czechoslovak forces in Russia and fought all the way through Sokolovo, Kiev liberation (as a machinegunner and supply officer) and the Dukla pass meatgrinder. He was wounded there and upon his recovery, he helped liberate the region of Moravia, where he ended the war.  He was also a part of the unit that uncovered the mass graves of the Jewish victims of nazi terror in Ukraine and even after all these years, it was clear he was deeply shocked by what he saw on the front.

He was kind enough to share his memories of war and the operation with Wargaming representatives, who in turn disclosed that they were interviewing other veterans like this (from Poland and Germany). His Russian was fluent even after all these years and thus the communication was not a problem. On the photo, he is showing the way his unit traveled on his map.

Sadly, this video series is a Russian thing and it is not sure, whether it will be localized to Europe at all. When asked about this, the Minsk crew replied that WG EU meaning is that players from EU server nations do not care about the veterans and they do not want to see them in videos. It's a shame, I am sure the players would appreciate seeing a piece of their history.

20 comments:

  1. "players from EU server nations do not care about the veterans and they do not want to see them in videos"?
    Band of Brothers, the arguably most popular WW2 series on this _planet_ (yes, that includes Europe) started out with interviews with veterans, and hearing these people talk about how they lived through the war at the start of each episode was an amazing part of that.

    The wording is a bit ambiguous (...WG EU meaning is that...) but I assume it was WG EU that made this strange decision?

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    1. Certainly in the Anglo-sphere never really been too bothered about the history of the Eastern front. For us, the Americans heroically won the war after D-day.

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    2. At our home we never celebratedt the end of the war..

      ( Maybe becourse my grandfather fought withe the waffen SS at the eastern front)....

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    3. Night Train: Hardly, the only place that sentiment probably still prevails is on the other side of the big pond ("we saved your asses!"). The problem is that you can't dumb down one of the deadliest conflicts in human history to good guys vs bad guys, yet this appears to still be happening both in the US and Russia.
      In fact, I would argue that most of eastern Europe being part of the EU now and the subsequent flow of people has made people across the continent _more_ aware of dealings on both sides of the iron curtain.

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    4. Check at least Wikipedia to see where is the Eastern Europe...
      I don't see in EU Belarus, Ukraine nor European part of Russia.

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    5. Do read well before you respond... "_most_ of eastern Europe". And if you had done so, you'd also picked up on the Russia currently being a special sort of place remarks.

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    6. I did read your "most of...", that's why I replied. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are to small for being the most of Eastern Europe. Maybe for you Eastern Europe is a land on east of The Iron Curtain, but it isn't...

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    7. Why on earth would you ignore EU members Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Croatia, Albania, Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro etc etc etc etc etc etc? And while we're at it, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are in some divisions considered 'northern europe'.
      These divisions are somewhat fuzzy terms in the sense that different entities use different sets of countries, but for some reason you keep insisting on misunderstanding details instead of responding to the actual content of the message.

      I'll do you a tl;dr so we won't have any more confusion: "Contrary to what WG EU apparently claims, people across europe are not only aware of but also interested in their shared WW2 heritage". Do you agree with this?

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    8. I agree, people are interested in the history.

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    9. Now all we need is for Minsk to kick WG EU arse on this (amongst many, many other things) :)

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  2. Sadly, that's probably what WGEU is telling Minsk...

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  3. So i am very interested! Dont they dare tell me what i want to see. Both my great-grandfathers died in that terrible war.

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  4. " the Minsk crew replied that WG EU meaning is that players from EU server nations do not care about the veterans and they do not want to see them in videos. "

    Top lol
    888246 ceramic poppies at the Tower of London last November sure does prove that we don't give a fuck.
    WG plz.

    Even if WG EU told you this, you *must* know that's it's complete fucking bullshit. I mean here in France, we used to bring out all the surviving WWI vets every 11th of November and place them infront of the tomb of the unknown soldier. Filmed, interviewed and venerated.

    Seriously, more horrendous PR for EU please. More.

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  5. I'm sure there are some idiots that don't care, but i think most EU people would be interested. Having two grandfathers that fought in the war I would certainly be interested.

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  6. "players from EU server nations do not care about the veterans and they do not want to see them in videos" is WOT EU code for " we can't be bothered in getting off are fat arses as usual". Oh Dear.

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  7. yes, lets memorate the european veterans, going to fight useless wars, who killed tens of people. lets memorate the fact that germany got humiliated by losing the only 2 world wars, kinda ruining their "we are better" idea.

    lets memorate the cruel adventures of stalin the hun and hitler the queer, by playing world war 2 games, where we can virtually kill the millions of people that once died during all those wars.

    so yea...thank you hitler for allowing us to play world war 2 games. good job! wish you were still alive, so we could honor you as a veteran...

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  8. Sure, we do not care in the slightest about our WW2 vets - oh, wait. We do.

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  9. If you don't know where you're coming from, you don't know where you're going. Apparently WGLEU suffers from this, which is a shame. I would like to hear those stories!

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  10. *WGLEU has to be WG EU of course...

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