Americans in the SS

TANK1867 said:
I have the book, it's one of them reads that if it's not true it should be. Diem Bien Phu books "Hell in a very small place" and "The Last Valley" also mention the ex-German soldiers fighting for the FFL in some detail.
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Not far fetched is it ?

You are a SS Soldier, in a French Prison camp, in 1945.

You are at risk of being shot or hung at any time, or maybe handed over to the Russians.

A friendly French Officer tells you that there is a way out : sign up, fight for France, and get a fresh identity, plus French citizenship at the end.

Not a bad deal.
 
mozambique technique said:
Got this book for $2 recently. Interesting to see all the foreign SS, including Indian!

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the 13th handschar was mostly composed of muslim from bosnia at the time annexed by the ustaze ...
 
Speaking of weird Nazi shiite, Hitler's personal physician was an undercover Jew lol... talk about self-loathing...

htt ps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Morell#:~:text=Theodor%20Gilbert%20Morell%20(22%20July,Germany%20for%20his%20unconventional%20treatments.
 
superbee said:
I remember when the first gulf war started.They said it was the largest multi national force ever assembled, not true, the wafen SS had a much larger force, about 200000 foreign volunteers.A lot of countries in Europe had their own divisions.Not many know that the last hold outs in the Reichstag were French volunteers in the "Charlemagne" division.About 15000 Ukrainians served in the "Galicia" division, they managed to surrender to the british at the end of the war instead of being shot by the Russians like so many others, a lot of them later emigrated to Canada.
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Some divisions weren't very division-sized.
 
wojnar said:
Hungarian yes but a Jew not an Nazi
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his mother was jewf rom france, his father is from catholic ancestry in hungary he escaped red army when they invaded hungary ... arrived in france he joined the french foreign legion and never reached the combat zone in southern asia.
the ones that escaped red army and joined foreign french legion had something to hide ...
 
QM 86 said:
WWII was complicated on a large scale. General Eisenhower admitted summer of 1944 that 25,000 armed deserters from Canadian, American and Brit armies. Daily attacking both axis and allies, across Europe, robing, blowing up trains, raiding depots,hijacking convoys, even setting up their own private looting armies. I worked with an old OSS soldier from Virginia who was ordered in 1947 to track down 18 American art and gold looters. Caught 1 in Italy owning a million dollar estate but he made buck fifty a day U.S. army pay. Following year the OSS had him go after SS looters too. So George Washington unit sounds possible.
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That story rings true for Canadians in Italy. I met an old Vandoo who'd fought his way up the Italian peninsula. I asked casually which battalion. He laughed, and asked back - which one? The one fighting, the one in hospital with VD, or the one of deserters?
 
maple_leaf_eh said:
That story rings true for Canadians in Italy. I met an old Vandoo who'd fought his way up the Italian peninsula. I asked casually which battalion. He laughed, and asked back - which one? The one fighting, the one in hospital with VD, or the one of deserters?
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I have never heard of these large scale Allied desertions and “Kelly’s Heroes” type actions before?!

I would love to learn more! Who knew that Oddball was real!? :)
 
TheTooner said:
Some divisions weren't very division-sized.
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True, and by the end they existed more on paper than in real life.

That said, the German Forces of WW2 were quite a multi-national thing.

Recruitment from pretty much every country occupied, from all the Axis, and even from ostensibly neutrals like Spain and Sweden.

One of the largest, if not the largest, groups were Russians.
 
And just to complicate things, what about the hundreds of thousands of Spanish Republican refugees from Franco's Monarchists and Nationalists?

Imagine being Spanish, having politics left of the winning side's rightist politics, veteran or related to someone who fought against the authorities, or simply coming from the wrong region of Spain, then having had to Get Out of Dodge across the Pyrenees. Sitting in a camp in an unwelcoming country because your side lost. That would make anyone wonder what they had to do to survive.
 
Desert_Fox said:
I have never heard of these large scale Allied desertions and “Kelly’s Heroes” type actions before?!

I would love to learn more! Who knew that Oddball was real!? :)
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There were a couple of significant official histories of WW2 and Canada. Your best start is to get the electronic copies of CP Stacey's campaign histories, or the biographies of outspoken commanders like Chris Vokes or the good ones like Bert Hoffschmidt, or maybe in the regimental histories by guys like Strome Galloway. The answers will be in the margins of the central narrative.

No commander would cheerfully admit that his troops were anything less than stellar examples of stalwart boys doing their civic duty. Vokes for example got punished for suggesting his division needed its own brothels; the MPs would do security and cut out the organized criminals, the MOs would make sure the prostitutes were disease free (or at least more healthy than not) and the troops get their penicillin shots, and the Civil Affairs officers could make sure the proceeds were going towards reconstruction and not some criminal gang. It would have been a generous acknowledgment of the VD and absentee problems, but Oh No! it was represented as immoral and a distraction.
 
IIRC, there was an SS officer in the US forces in Vietnam. Originally Finnish I think...but I'm in a lineup at the grain elevator and can't get all the goods on him
 
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