Utterly beyond belief the French SS volunteers..madness!

Yes! I was thinking of that--I attended a thesis workshop last year where a PhD candidate was talking about it. But if anybody think that was bad, in Germany there was the Spartacus League uprising.

 

I was alluding to the occasion when De Gaul told the allies to get out of France after the war,asked if that included all the war dead..he had no reply for. I thought that was pretty unsavory. As I say it pales to the awfulness of Petain and Vichy.

 

He was doing nothing but claiming the military independence of his own country back .

Let us now go back to the topic and not talk about post war events .

 

There wouldn't have been military independence for the French or De Gaul if those war dead and the troops on French soil hadn't been there..That was all I was trying to say. Even if those comments were made after the war they were a direct result of the war that had just ended.

 

Got your point , btw : It's De Gaulle. Let's move on now

 

Thanks for spelling his name right for me..never realized about the le on the end of his name even after years of reading about him. Do you feel Petain was a patriot?.Was he really just an old man who got manipulated by Hitler or a willing puppet? Argument rages as to his role in Vichy. It's hard to tell if he was telling the truth when he said he did it for France and not for his own benefit at the end of the war . I recently read a book that paints a damning picture of Petain and I wonder how much is true.

 

it is all very ambiguous and nothing is black or white. Petain was the winner of Verdun and represented the man who defeated the Germans during WW1 . When he was called back in power, he was old and tired and it was actually after he had already retired. It was considered that he would be the man of the situation. This was a big mistake because the Petain from WW1 and the one from WW2 were like Dr Jeckill and Mr Hyde.

Petain was sometimes depicted as an old senile man , manipulated by both the Germans and Laval, but he knew damn well what he was doing when he signed his Vichy bills. On one hand he truly believed that he would ease the suffering of his people, but at the same time he signed the death warrantof so many to keep in power . He is also the man of honor who offered himself as a hostage in 1941 to be shot instead of 50 hostages (to the great embarassmnent of Abetz) .
He is still admired for his WW1 acts , including having soup with his men in the first line trenches and sparing as many lives as possible on the front.
Yet, at the same time he incarnates collaboration and treason during the Vichy period. Quite Freudian and one should remember that many of the LVF officers joined because they admired Petain, some of the older ones had even fought under his orders. Remember this famous Signal picture of a LVF recruit joining the Ostfront with Petain's portrait under his arm.

 

Why all the bad press for De Gualle? We are referring to a man whose very existence and inspiration was the other side of the coin minted in 1940. De Gualle was like a government in exile, even though his parent nation had disapppeared behind the swastika motif on the curtain of the European stage. Remember, Churchill trusted De Gualle more than any other French politician or military man of his day. Winston could communicate in Charle's own language, no doubt had him as a guest for dinner at his private residence. Why co-operate with Vichy when De Gualle represented something far more honourable for dis-affected and stateless French servicemen to rally around?

The fact that there were French volunteers for the SS is paralelled by most, if not all occupied territories. Many occupied peoples also sent workers to German industry and agriculture, as France did, so nothing special there either. The very fracturous nature of occupied Europe was bound to produce groups of people that wanted to play along with the new status quo, so no suprises there as well.

Contemporary people had no idea how long the Nazi regime was going to sit in power, and like all humans, they have an over-riding concern to eat and put clothes on their backs.

French volunteers ending up defending the Reichstag was a cruel trick of fate, but, it could have been any of the European foreign units that ended up in Berlin.

I wonder how the SS 'Kossackien' divisions in the South would have felt about defending the building?

 

many of the French workers were French pows who were kept by the Germans, after the surrender, so they were not volunters.

 

In fact forced labour wa sinstaured later when then the "Releve" (two workers vs. one pow ) did not work due to a lack of volunteers. The force labour (called Service du travail obligatoire) drove many young man into the Resistance. The police were searching them to send them to Germany , so they they did not have much to loose .

 

I even heard stories of the Russians taking up arms to fight for the nazis, but their reason was most likely to defeat the Communists that took their country and their Tzar away from them. Some Cossack divisions also joined the Germans, but that was out of theri anti-semitism.

 

They were called Ostlegionen , not to mention the Hilfers (Hiwis)






many more Ostlegionen volunteer pics here!

.: Asuult Sambar Maximus :. • View topic -

other countries represented included Galicia (Lemberg /Lvow ) ,Croatia, Latvia, albania only to mention a few.

There was even the Hazad Hind (Frei Indien Legion) with Indian volunteers. In fact most occupied countires sent volunteers and others came from countires that weren't even at war.

 

Them boys ain't Chechen's. They are 13th SS Mountain Division Handschar. Croats and Bosnians.

 

Handschar was the most unreliable unit in the Waffen SS. It was disbanded before reaching combat status. spent most of it's time massacreing Christian civilians.

 

thanks lads , it wasn't me who put the caption there. I supposed they used "Chechen" instead of "chetniks"

 

I would like to sugesst to the poster above citing anti-semitism as the prime-motivation for Cossack involvement on the German side. Not true.

Revolutionairy general Semyon Budyenny was tasked, in the 1920's, to eliminate the Don Cossack nation as a center of resistense to the new regime. This task Budyenny performed with great zealotry, and the Cossacks never forgot this.

Small wonder that they went across wholesale in their old Cossack units, (complete with a horse for each soldier). The Cossacks were some of the most reliable, if not controllable, foreign soldiers that fought for the Nazis; that very reliability was guaranteed by the brutality of their Russian overlords. I don't think anti-semitism had much of anything tpo do with the decision of the Cossack nation as a unit to throw it's lot in with the invader.

Budyenny's campaign served to remind the Cossacks that they were no longer the privelaged people with a special status any longer, as they were under Czarism. Their longstanding animosities with their Russian cousins had been festering for quite some time.

Cossack units were present at the end of the war, still loyally fighting. They even managed to secure Vienna, before being thrust out of the city by vastly superior Soviet troops. By Gum, they would have fought the Russians tooth and nail by that time. To have them handed over to their old enemies must have been terrifying for them.

I wonder what survives of Cossackdom today? Stalin did his best to wipe them from the facw of the earth, but these reilient people must have found a way to move with the times, as I have met people in Australia who claimed Cossack roots.

 

I haven't found much about kosackdom nowadays but they do exist . This is about a 2012 meeting.

Le blog de cosaques-de-france.over-blog.org

[TABLE="class: contentpaneopen"]
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[TD="class: contentheading"]In Crimea took place the meeting of representatives[/TD]
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"Since July, 27 till August, 3, 2012 the planned meeting of representatives of separations of IUCF of Russia, France and Armenia with the Supreme ataman of «International Union of Cossack Forces» and head of «military-cossack department of Ukrainian Academy of Sciences» general-colonel KITS’KO P.N., took place in Crimea In a cossack military sports camp in Sevastopol KITS'KO P.N. handed rewards to the cossacks of IUCF, and also certificates to the best young cossacks and officers from Russia, for taking military-cossack preparation here (72 young cossacks). Oleg SYTOV, the leader of detachment of young cossacks from Russia, was appropriated the rank of captain of IUCF for excellent cossack service. The Supreme ataman also rewarded priests with the cossack orders of « Holy Mother»– father Sergiy (Russia, Moscow) and father Leonid (Avignon, France).

 

Skip, I am sorry to say this, but you're wrong again. SS Handschar were Bosnian Muslims whilst Chetniks were Ortodox Christians.
The "chetniks" have long beards, like this (Duke Kalabich):

 

Uhh, except it wasn't me who mentionned they were Chechen. It's a caption written by some guy on a borrowed picture. The "Chechen" "Chetnik" comparison is second degree and related to the guy who wrote the said caption in post 52 . (Probably as close to what he thought to be the truth ). I did mention they weren't my words in post 55. Sorry if I didn't make myself clear enough and if you didn't get the irony.

 

Don't worry Skip, I just wanted to stress the diversity at the Balkans battlefield, or should I say, slaughterhouse!