Mike's Personal Photos

The Linz North Main Marshaling Yard in 2012, as seen from the highway overpass looking south.

The balcony above the Old Town Hall where Adolf Hitler addressed a huge crowd after entering Linz as its conqueror in March 1938.

The Linz middle school Adolf Hitler attended between 1900 and 1903 was abandoned for years but reopened in 2017 as a hotel. Mike Croissant decided to stop by and edit the manuscript of Bombing Hitler's Hometown in the hotel lobby during a 2019 visit to Linz.

A large air raid shelter under central Linz is now open for guided tours.

Austrian civilian Anna Oecker Studener was five years old during the Linz raid and took shelter in the cellar of her residential building. Decades later, she still suffered flashbacks at the sound of weekly tests of the Austrian civil defense siren system. “One who didn’t experience it can’t imagine it,” she told Mike in 2019.

The headquarters of the Gestapo—the German secret police—in Linz was struck and destroyed by an errant bomb during the raid. A new building has risen in its place, and a historical marker is displayed at the entrance.

The site in Muhlbach, Austria, where the tail section of B-17 "Old Folks" came to rest after the bomber broke apart over the village. The Flying Fortress sustained heavy damage over Linz, and half of its crew were wounded.

Franz Kropik, as an 11-year-old member of the German Youngsters in the Hitler Youth, was one of the first on the scene when "Old Folks" came apart over Muhlbach. In 2019, he led Mike to the crash site.

The Wall of Lamentations, just inside the main entrance of the Mauthausen concentration camp, where SS officers mistreated members of the Robert Sinton crew.