Soldiers, $7 a Head

"To all German youth--Warning!"

Splashed in red letters on the walls of West Germany last week, these words halted many a German in his tracks. The warning: beware of Kopfjaeger (headhunters), i.e., recruiting agents of the French Foreign Legion who get a bounty of 30 marks ($7) a head for every man they enlist. According to the opposition German Social Democratic Party, which put up the posters, more than 90,000 young Germans, the equivalent of seven divisions, have enlisted in the legion for service in Indo-China, and 10,000 have lost their lives. "Absurd," answered the French.

Ever since the French Foreign Legion was formed (1831), Germans have provided its largest national group. After World War II, many German prisoners of war in North Africa signed up for a five-year stint in the legion rather than return to shattered Germany. Legion service protected some from trial as war criminals.

But the German Social Democrats (with an eye on this year's general elections) now charge that the legion is "kidnaping" youngsters in their teens, who are "as often as not drunk." French agents station themselves around employment offices, and job applicants, say the Germans, frequently find themselves in the legion instead of in a job. Last month the Swiss government also charged that French Legion agents were recruiting Swiss minors, despite a law which prescribes jail for a Swiss serving in any foreign army except the Pope's Swiss Guards.

Germans first got stirred up over the recruiters last November, when German border guards were roughly handled by French gendarmes as they tried to stop a bus load of legion recruits crossing from Germany into France (others are ferried across the Rhine by night, or flown over by air ferry). Last week the West German Bundestag voted to jail anyone "recruiting or attempting to recruit" Germans for service in a foreign army outside Germany. The vote was unanimous, a rare event in the Bundestag. The only hitch is that the law will apply only to Germans, for the French under the occupation statutes cannot be tried in German courts, except with their permission.

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