Hitler's Foreign Fighters: Foreign Recruitment in the Heer and Waffen-SS 1939-1945

When the Second World War broke out, Nazi Germany was determined to present its struggle as a purely Aryan crusade.Yet as the conflict expanded and the human cost mounted, Hitler’s armies increasingly relied on non-Aryans to sustain the fight.By the war’s end, hundreds of thousands of foreigners had donned the uniform of the German Feldheer (Field Army).These men filled the ranks of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS.Their stories - stretching from Scandinavia to the Balkans, from France and Spain and North Africa to the Baltic States and the Soviet Union - reveal the extent to which the Third Reich was a multinational war machine, despite its own racist ideology. Hitler’s Foreign Fighters is a comprehensive study of these men, exploring who they were, the various reasons they ended up serving in the Wehrmacht or Waffen-SS, and how they were used by a regime that both despised and depended upon them.Some were convinced volunteers, persuaded by propaganda and anti-Communist zeal.Others wer