Hitler's Foreign Fighters

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 an…