Non-Aryans and Women

Back from the Normandy beachhead poured 15,000 prisoners wearing the Reichswehr green. Most of them were Germans but a surprising proportion was not. With the Aryan supermen came a polyglot sprinkling of at least 12 nationalities. Some of the slave peoples, it seemed, could be persuaded to fight for the Herrenvolk.

Prisoners taken in France included

Poles, Czechs, Yugoslavs, Hungarians, Italians, Belgians, Croats and onetime soldiers of Russia--Turkomans, Cossacks, Tartars, Armenians and Georgians. A unit of Axis Russians under White Russian Lieut. General Andrei A. Vlas-sov was reported swaggering around Vichy France with German uniforms, long sabres and red Cossack fur caps.

In Italy the 162nd Turkoman Infantry --former Russian prisoners officered by Germans--was fighting to help save Kesselring's army. Almond-eyed, some with pigtails, they had belonged to crack Red Army Siberian divisions, now were obviously helping the Germans for a meal ticket.

The Weaker Sex. Stranger still was a spate of stories about women snipers fighting for the Germans. Said General Sir Bernard L. Montgomery, commander of Allied Ground Forces in France: "There were a number of stout-hearted women snipers who were killed doing their stuff."

Many reports of hosts of women snipers boiled down to two concrete cases. One was a 29-year-old Pole called Myra, who was reported to have lured soldiers into smiling range of her revolver. Another was identified as Audette Chraud, a Frenchwoman who potted Allied troops from her bedroom window. Villagers explained that she had been their leading collaborationist and a frequent entertainer of German officers. Both were taken to England, the Frenchwoman wounded.

There Is Worse. . . . Prisoner interviews indicated that most of the soldiers fighting for Germany were not so much hired mercenaries as men under compulsion. For them it was fight--or die in labor battalions and prison camps. Many seemed brutish peasants, long trained as soldiers, used to obeying orders. Foreign elements were estimated at 15% to 20% of the German Army.

The Germans kept them in units no larger than a platoon, watched them carefully, used them to man prepared positions, where they did a generally tough job of fighting. A relative few were Nazi-indoctrinated, like the fanatically pro-German, anti-Allied quisling troops mustered in every occupied country.

Typical of the blown-in-the-bottle Herrenvolk was a captured, one-eyed German infantry captain who told interviewers that Germany would never give up, said he wanted to fight "until America realizes Germany must have Lebensraum." He admitted that the German Army contained criminal elements, explained "we have been fighting the Russians and we must fight very hard."

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