Six famous (or infamous, if you prefer) World War Two generals have been murdered in six different countries leading to separate quiet but intense investigations. INTERPOL is finally involved because the police in each country come to realize that there has to be a connection, but no one knows what that connection is. Once links seem plausible, the Mossad joins the international police investigation and search; and the greatest manhunt in history is launched spreading over four continents and delving into secrets best left undisturbed.
Definitive account of French volunteers in the Waffen-SS Blow-by-blow retelling of battles on the Eastern Front, including the fight for Berlin Focuses on all French SS units, especially the 33rd SS Grenadier Division "Charlemagne" Impeccably researched, this book tells the story of the Frenchmen who, motivated by their hatred of Communism, chose to fight for the Third Reich in World War II, first in the regular army and then as part of the Waffen-SS. These unique soldiers participated in bitter combat, primarily against the Soviets, and returned home to an awkward peace.
The divisions of the Waffen-SS were among the elite of Hitler’s armies in the Second World War. But alongside the Germans in the Waffen-SS fought an astonishingly high number of volunteers from other countries. By the end of the Second World War these foreign volunteers comprised half of all Hitler’s Waffen-SS, and filled the ranks of over twenty-four of the nominal thirty-eight Waffen-SS divisions. So during the most brutal war that mankind has ever known, hundreds of thousands of men flocked to fight for a country that was not theirs, and for a cause that was one of the most monstrous and barbaric in history. Who were these men, and why did they fight? Hitler’s Gauls is an in-depth examination of one of these legions of foreign volunteers, the Charlemagne division, who were recruited entirely from conquered France. The men in Charlemagne, often motivated by an extreme anti-communist zeal, fought hard on the Eastern Front including battles of near annihilation in the snows of Pomerania and the final stand in the ruins of Berlin. This definitive history, illustrated with rare photographs, explores the background, training, key figures and full combat record of one of Hitler’s lesser known foreign units of the Second World War.
This presents a major re-evaluation of the standard view of revolutionary armies, the range of attitudes towards the role of heroic individuals, the formation and leadership of armies, and the differences and similarities between such armies. Beginning with an exploration of the New Model Army of the 1640s, a force whose name itself seems to denote its revolutionary credentials, the author presents ten case studies from around the globe, including the American War of Independence, The French Revolution, The Zulu-Boer War, the Waffen SS and the Viet-Cong. Through a detailed analysis of source material, he examines the images connected with these armies, both historical and recent, and assesses these images in their socio-political and nationalist contexts.
Kenneth Estes studies the 100,000 West Europeans who fought against Russia as volunteers for the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS. A retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel, Estes shows tremendous knowledge of combat and writes gripping battlefield prose. Two-thirds of the West European volunteers came from Spain and the Netherlands, yet Estes demonstrates wide range and covers Flemish, Walloon, French, Danish, and Norwegian combat units. Avoiding over-generalization, the author distinguishes carefully among the Danes and Flemings who fought competently with the SS-Wiking Division and later with Nordland, the courageous but poorly-armed Spanish, the ill-trained Dutch and French in Landstorm Nederland and SS-Charlemagne, and the Norwegians who after a first wave of enthusiasm held back altogether. Estes pulverizes the Nazi propaganda notion of a multinational European army defending 'Western civilization' against 'Bolshevism'. He shows that West Europeans, mainly of the urban working classes, volunteered from a mix of motives -adventure-seeking, ideology, hopes of personal advantage or material gain, a desire for better food, or a wish to escape a criminal record at home. He demonstrates that the best-performing foreign legions were trained and led by German officers and formed parts of larger SS units, and also that the Wehrmacht placed little value on foreign formations until its other manpower reserves ran out in 1944-45. This is a landmark work on a subject, which has been much written about, but rarely understood or described as perceptively as in the pages of this book.
This is the first systematic pan-European study of the hundreds of thousands of non-Germans who fought - either voluntarily or under different kinds of pressures - for the Waffen-SS (or auxiliary police formations operating in the occupied East). Building on the findings of regional studies by other scholars - many of them included in this volume - The Waffen-SS aims to arrive at a fuller picture of those non-German citizens (from Eastern as well as Western Europe) who served under the SS flag. Where did the non-Germans in the SS come from (socially, geographically, and culturally)? What motivated them? What do we know about the practicalities of international collaboration in war and genocide, in terms of everyday life, language, and ideological training? Did a common transnational identity emerge as a result of shared ideological convictions or experiences of extreme violence? In order to address these questions (and others), The Waffen-SS adopts an approach that does justice to the complexity of the subject, adding a more nuanced, empirically sound understanding of collaboration in Europe during World War II, while also seeking to push the methodological boundaries of the historiographical genre of perpetrator studies by adopting a transnational approach.
