Poles In The Wehrmacht
The history of Poles in the Wehrmacht, the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany, began with the German invasion of Poland in 1939. More than 225,000 citizens of the Polish Second Republic served in the Wehrmacht, and some in the Kriegsmarine and Waffen SS. The majority of these Polish citizens were of German extraction, the so-called "Volksdeutsche", or members of ethnic minorities, such as Silesians, Kashubians, and Masurians whom the Nazis considered to be almost Germans. The Waffen SS on the Eastern Front contained a sizable number of non-Germans, but no Polish-based unit was ever formed, partly due to Adolf Hitler's refusal to create such units until the later stages of the war; though there were some Polish citizens of Ukrainian, Belarusian, Russian, and Lithuanian origin, both in the Wehrmacht and Waffen SS.
Read more about Poles In The Wehrmacht: German Stance, Volksliste, Volunteers and Non-volunteers, German-Soviet War, The Polnische Wehrmacht, Wehrmacht Affair
Famous quotes containing the word poles:
“War and culture, those are the two poles of Europe, her heaven and hell, her glory and shame, and they cannot be separated from one another. When one comes to an end, the other will end also and one cannot end without the other. The fact that no war has broken out in Europe for fifty years is connected in some mysterious way with the fact that for fifty years no new Picasso has appeared either.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)