Andre’s Reviews > An der Seite der Wehrmacht: Hitlers ausländische Helfer beim »Kreuzzug gegen den Bolschewismus« 1941-1945 > Status Update

And over... yeah, I mostly regret wasting my time with this. Luckily, I skipped a lot of it or my regrets would have been worse.

There wasn't much substance in the rest either. Mostly something about recruitment and troop movements and not much else. Nothing really about motivations or wider politics. The latter part has some stuff about how Germany abandoned the racist recruitment politics in 1944 because of pure necessity but that was it.

Ok, I skipped the rest, it was dull, it was boring, it was a complete waste of my time and so I went to the eastern european section.

Oh, so there were French volunteers in the battle for Berlin. Small nuggets like these are the only highlight for me so far in this book.

So that was Spain. Considered how fascist it and Portugal were, I would have thought there would be more volunteers. Anyway, these shorter entries are a bit better of a reading experience but I am still tempted to put this book down.

This section on the allies was so superfluous to me, I skipped the rest and went straight to the chapter on volunteers from the occupied countries. Maybe that will be a better experience.

Jews as workers for the hungarian army... that was unexpected. However, apart from stuff like this. This book is pretty damn uninteresting so far. I really don't know anything substantive so far that I didn't know already, including Hitler blaming the foreign troops first and the Wehrmacht and SS becoming more lenient the more troops they needed.

And the chapter on finnland is over... hm, not that memorable. Pretty bland so far to be honest.

Oh right, thousands of sovjet citizens fled with the germans west to flee from Stalinism... not surprising.

This is so ironic, not only was Hitler a big obstacle to recruiting non-Germans as so many of the army wanted, but the more they needed those people the more did idiological barriers erode, And on the other side, the partisans in the occupied territories killed more countrymen than German soldiers because for Stalin they were mostly a means to control the population.