Foreign soldiers in the Wehrmacht during WW2

One of the most amazing facts of the Second World war is that people of many foreign countries fought in the German army as Wehrmacht soldiers.

Turkish

Koreans


Jews. Mostly as guards of concentration camps. Jews of course were not foreigners. They were as German as anyone else.

It would be interesting to understand why a Jew would act as a guard in a a concentration camp; a place where his kith and kin were persecuted. The most opportunistic types. Those who prefer to survive without any principles, perhaps?

Japanese

What were the Japs doing here? They could have well served in their nation's army. Some kind of exchange? Or were there Japanese people in Germany in large numbers?

This Japanese is an officer in the German army

Indians. Efforts of Subhash Chandra Bose.

Bose was anti-British. He met Hitler in Berlin and raised the Indian unit in the Wehrmacht. Enemy's enemy is a friend, I guess.

Georgians and Azerbaijanis


Chechen

One can understand the Chechen in the German army. Their struggle against Russia continues till this day.


Bosnian Muslims



Africans

Hitler shrewdly maintained good relations with the Arab world

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Jews in Hitler's army

The August 26, 1940 Time cover on Erhard Milch

"Not every victim was a Jew but every Jew was a victim." --Elie Wiesel speaking of World War Two. "If there were Jews in (Hitler's) armed forces...who served knowing what was going on and made no attempt to save (lives), well then that is unacceptable and dishonorable." --Rabbi Marvin Hier, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Institute.

Thousands of men of Jewish descent and hundreds of what the Nazis called 'full Jews' served in the German military with Adolf Hitler's knowledge and approval.

Cambridge University researcher Bryan Rigg has traced the Jewish ancestry of more than 1,200 of Hitler's soldiers, including two field marshals and fifteen generals (two full generals, eight lieutenant generals, five major generals), "men commanding up to 100,000 troops."

Milch with Keitel and Brauchitsch

On the murderous road to "racial purity" Hitler encountered unexpected detours, largely due to his own crazed views and inconsistent policies regarding Jewish identity. After centuries of Jewish assimilation and intermarriage in German society, he discovered that eliminating Jews from the rest of the population was more difficult than he'd anticipated. As Bryan Mark Rigg shows in this provocative new study, nowhere was that heinous process more fraught with contradiction and confusion than in the German military. Contrary to conventional views, Rigg reveals that a startlingly large number of German military men were classified by the Nazis as Jews or "partial-Jews" (Mischlinge), in the wake of racial laws first enacted in the mid-1930s. Rigg demonstrates that the actual number was much higher than previously thought--perhaps as many as 150,000 men, including decorated veterans and high-ranking officers, even generals and admirals.

As Rigg fully documents for the first time, a great many of these men did not even consider themselves Jewish and had embraced the military as a way of life and as devoted patriots eager to serve a revived German nation. In turn, they had been embraced by the Wehrmacht, which prior to Hitler had given little thought to the "race" of these men but which was now forced to look deeply into the ancestry of its soldiers. The process of investigation and removal, however, was marred by a highly inconsistent application of Nazi law. Numerous "exemptions" were made in order to allow a soldier to stay within the ranks or to spare a soldier's parent, spouse, or other relative from incarceration or far worse. (Hitler's own signature can be found on many of these "exemption" orders.) But as the war dragged on, Nazi politics came to trump military logic, even in the face of the Wehrmacht's growing manpower needs, closing legal loopholes and making it virtually impossible for these soldiers to escape the fate of millions of other victims of the Third Reich.

In approximately 20 cases, Jewish soldiers in the Nazi army were awarded Germany's highest military honor, the Knight's Cross.

Milch with Albert Speer

One of these Jewish veterans is today an 82 year old resident of northern Germany, an observant Jew who served as a captain and practiced his religion within the Wehrmacht throughout the war.

One of the Jewish field marshals was Erhard Milch, deputy to Luftwaffe Chief Hermann Goering. Rumors of Milch's Jewish identity circulated widely in Germany in the 1930s.

ERHARD MILCH, THE JEWISH FIELD MARSHAL

Erhard Milch (March 30, 1892 – January 25, 1972) was a German field marshal who oversaw the development of the Luftwaffe as part of the re-armament of Germany following World War I. Milch was sentenced to life imprisonment at Landsberg prison. His sentence was commuted to 15 years imprisonment in 1951, but he was released in June 1954. He lived out the remainder of his life at Düsseldorf, where he died in 1972.

In one of the famous anecdotes of the time, Goering falsified Milch's birth record and when met with protests about having a Jew in the Nazi high command, Goering replied, ``I decide who is a Jew and who is an Aryan.''

Rigg's research also shed light on stories surrounding the rescue by German soldiers of the Lubavitcher grand rabbi of that time, who was in Warsaw when the war broke out in 1939.

Jews also served in the Nazi police and security forces as ghetto police (Ordnungdienst) and concentration camp guards (kapos).

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The Russian Front: WW2: Why Germans started to lose

This is not a history of the eastern Front of the Second World War. Given below are some pictures. Random pictures which tell a lot.

The German war machine ran smoothly in Russia in 1941. Till the winter came.

WHY GERMANY LOST IN RUSSIA?

The invading Germans were welcomed by many Russians. They hated Stalin, and had Hitler played his cards right many of these soldiers would have joined in the attack on Moscow. As it was the top German generals advised bypassing these surrounded Russian soldiers and marching on Moscow but Hitler insisted on smashing them than send in the SS. This delayed the attack on Moscow and put the Germans up against Russia's best weapon: mother winter. As it was they still could have taken Moscow but Hitler decided to take Leningrad at the same time and took vital divisions from the Moscow front.

Stalingrad was all Hitler's fault: sending Panzer divisions into a city was madness and what about Kurst? The Russians put everything thing they had into the battle after Stalingrad. Field Marshall Von Meinstein had the newly upgraded SS Panzer Divisions, he crushed the Russians. Stalin wrote that they were never closer to defeat, the only thing that stopped the Germans was the rain but the battle could have continued a few months later when the ground froze. Instead Hitler decided to wait till summer so the new Panther tank could be used. Von Mainstien called this military suicide.

The Germans were ill-prepared for the Russian winter. The Russians lived there so it was just another winter for them. For the Germans it was a nightmare. They were ill-clothed.

Motivation took the Germans till a point.

The Russians after the initial battering, were rallying.

Nothing showed this better than in Kursk. Russian peasants digging defensive holes. The Germans lost the Battle of Kursk and their last chance to win the war. After that it was all downhill.


The fact that the war went on for three more years shows the grit of the German soldiers.

The horrible Russian winter. Snow and rain made slush out of mud and the German war machines struggled to move

The Russians attacked hard

A German dispatch rider bathed in mud.

Some of the best German troops were sent to Russia by Hitler.


The Russians move in the snow

Russians attacking.


The Russian factories were churning out tanks.

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