# British Free Corps



## Foxbat (Sep 11, 2020)

I’ve been reading a book on the history of the SS and came across a chapter on the British Free Corps. It was formed from British POWs persuaded to join the SS. It appears the membership never got above 27. This is significant because it needed at least 30 members to become an activated platoon and be sent into action. Although some members were fervent believers, it seems that others joined simply to get a better quality of life than was found in prison camps,  but worked to keep the recruitment below the magic number (some were attached to other units and did see action in 1945). It’s something I’d never heard of before so I’ve hunted down a wiki piece for any that are interested.









						British Free Corps - Wikipedia
					






					en.wikipedia.org


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## .matthew. (Sep 11, 2020)

It's weird how treason adds an extra stink


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## CupofJoe (Sep 11, 2020)

Well... that sent me down a wiki rabbit hole....


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## HareBrain (Sep 11, 2020)

The SS also recruited quite heavily from several occupied countries to feed the Russian Front, pitching it as an anti-communist crusade.


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## Foxbat (Sep 11, 2020)

HareBrain said:


> The SS also recruited quite heavily from several occupied countries to feed the Russian Front, pitching it as an anti-communist crusade.


Yes. I knew about organisations like the Wiking Division and such but I’d never heard of the British Free Corps. We had  traitors like William Joyce (Lord Haw Haw) so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me but it did. There was even the Spanish Blue Division on the Eastern Front, made up from volunteer spanish fascists even though Spain never entered the war.

Another snippet that I learned: Wallis Simpson had an affair with von Ribbentrop when he visited the UK pre-war. What was really interesting was the time period because this affair overlapped her affair with Edward VIII.


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## Toby Frost (Sep 11, 2020)

George Orwell had this to say in an essay about the political writer James Burnham:

_The question of morale, and its relation to national solidarity, is a nebulous one, and the evidence can be so manipulated as to prove almost anything. But if one goes by the proportion of prisoners to other casualties, and the amount of quislingism, the totalitarian states come out of the comparison worse than the democracies. Hundreds of thousands of Russians appear to have gone over to the Germans during the course of the war, while comparable numbers of Germans and Italians had gone over to the Allies before the war started: the corresponding number of American or British renegades would have amounted to a few scores_. 

To be honest, recruiting 50 traitors out of thousands of prisoners seems like a pretty low number. It doesn't surprise me that they got _some_ because (a) recruiting traitors was Nazi policy, and (b) you will always find people in a population who will take the opportunity to oppress and persecute others (especially if sold under some more virtuous pretext). There certainly were a few figures among the British "elite" who would have sold out their country for personal advancement... and I'll stop there.


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## Foxbat (Sep 11, 2020)

I think Orwell’s statement is misleading when it comes to Russian numbers when comparing it to others.  The German and Italian defectors moved from totalitarianism to democracy. The Russian defectors moved from one totalitarian regime to another. Many ethnic groups in Russia went over to the German side, not because of totalitarianism or even political reasons but because of simple hatred born of years of persecution. The Cossacks being only one example. Thousands of them fought against the Soviets at Stalingrad, not because they saw the Nazi totalitarian regime was anything better  but because their true enemy was always Soviet Russia. It was seen as an opportunity to free themselves from Stalin. They would have sided with whomever had taken on the Soviets. Some of that anti-soviet feeling had originated from the civil war and some  of it was of Stalin’s own making.

It’s also why many  in the Ukraine saw the Germans as liberators, until the raping and killings started.


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## Danny McG (Sep 11, 2020)

I can't find it online but I got a really obscure memory of an article about Britain doing something similar.
They recruited amongst German P.O.Ws and started training them, I can't remember if they saw combat


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## CupofJoe (Sep 11, 2020)

There is this from The Grauniad.








						The German heroes who helped Allies against Hitler
					

A new book reveals the bravery of the men who joined the British forces to liberate Europe.




					www.theguardian.com
				



Not quite the same... but still...


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## BigBadBob141 (Sep 11, 2020)

As a Brit this is something to be proud of in a way, some nationalities probably joined up in their hundreds.
P.S. Interesting photo in history of WW2 book, there is a young solider in a German uniform standing in front of a desk, at the desk sits an American soldier with paperwork while behind the young soldier guarding him stands another American.
It is obvious the the soldier in the German uniform has been taken prisoner and is being processed, but the very odd thing is the German soldier has Asian features.
It turns out he was a Korean peasant, one day Japanese soldiers showed up at his village, rounded up all the young men and say, congratulations you've just joined the Imperial Japanese Army.
He was sent to fight the Russians and was captured, in the Russian P.O.W camp recruiters came around for the army, so he joined the Soviet Russian Army because I suppose conditions in the camp would not have been good.
So he's sent the fight the Germans and was captured again, rinse and repeat, in the German P.O.W. camp recruiters come around and he joins up again to get away from the bad conditions only to be finally captured by the Americans in Normandy!!!I
P.P.S. I think there were even Italian soldiers at the Russian Front, poor devils!


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## Brian G Turner (Sep 11, 2020)

Didn't Vonnegut's _Slaughterhouse 5_ feature an American unit recruited by the Nazi's? Not sure whether that was a fiction or not, but would be interesting to know if there was any truth to that.


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## mosaix (Sep 11, 2020)

As an aside, if The Nazis had invaded and conquered the UK I wonder how many British people would have ‘gone over’. 

Thousands did in every Nazi occupied country and my personal opinion is that the UK would have been no different - let’s not forget Oswald Moseley and the Brown Shirts.


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## Vladd67 (Sep 11, 2020)

Brian G Turner said:


> Didn't Vonnegut's _Slaughterhouse 5_ feature an American unit recruited by the Nazi's? Not sure whether that was a fiction or not, but would be interesting to know if there was any truth to that.








						US volunteers in the Waffen-SS
					






					www.axishistory.com


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## Mad Alice (Sep 11, 2020)

If anyone remembers that old prisoner of war show from the sixties, Hogan's Heroes, there were several episodes upon "flipping" soldiers from other armies and there were a few about the German attempts to conscript P.O.W. aid for the German forces. Very interesting reasons were given as to why a prisoner would work or labour for the enemy. Added food or access to medical care or improvements in living conditions were often given. Sometimes work or Labour was forced, the men were assigned and were not given a choice, excepting death, or torture or death by execution or death by exposure and so on and of course for the real trouble makers who wouldn't cooperate they would be sent to the death camps along with other undesirables.
Remember that the two maxims given upon capture  were to stay alive and escape, and to confound and confuse all enemy efforts if escape was not possible.
A seeming acquiescence could in fact be an elaborate escape attempt or attempt to infiltrate and confound enemy efforts.


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## The Ace (Sep 12, 2020)

Brian G Turner said:


> Didn't Vonnegut's _Slaughterhouse 5_ feature an American unit recruited by the Nazi's? Not sure whether that was a fiction or not, but would be interesting to know if there was any truth to that.



No, they were Prisoners of War used as labourers (perfectly legal)  we did the same with German POWs - mainly, but not exclusively, on farms (POW's often don't have a choice about such duties).  The title of the story comes from their billet (Schlachthof 5) and that they were taught the phrase if they were separated - it was the only German many of them knew.   Vonnegut drew on his own experience for this - taken prisoner at, "The Battle of the Bulge," he survived the bombing by hiding in a meat-locker.

Ironically, the prisoners were caught in the bombing of Dresden, the first, "Combat," experience for the BFC - they were  brought in as extra hands for rescue/recovery.

In the last, desperate days, the BFC were sent to the Eastern Front (at that time, just outside Berlin) where their commander ordered them to escort refugees West


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## Foxbat (Sep 12, 2020)

The Ace said:


> No, they were Prisoners of War used as labourers (perfectly legal)  we did the same with German POWs - mainly, but not exclusively, on farms (POW's often don't have a choice about such duties).


There’s a wonderful legacy on Orkney left by Italian POWs that were sent to work  there on the Churchill Barriers.








						The Italian Chapel | Orkney.com
					

Advanced booking essential for larger groups.




					www.orkney.com


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## CupofJoe (Sep 12, 2020)

BigBadBob141 said:


> As a Brit this is something to be proud of in a way, some nationalities probably joined up in their hundreds.
> P.S. Interesting photo in history of WW2 book, there is a young solider in a German uniform standing in front of a desk, at the desk sits an American soldier with paperwork while behind the young soldier guarding him stands another American.
> It is obvious the the soldier in the German uniform has been taken prisoner and is being processed, but the very odd thing is the German soldier has Asian features.
> It turns out he was a Korean peasant, one day Japanese soldiers showed up at his village, rounded up all the young men and say, congratulations you've just joined the Imperial Japanese Army.
> ...


I haven't seen it but there is this film...


> My Way (2011 film) - Wikipedia
> 
> 
> 
> ...


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## paranoid marvin (Sep 12, 2020)

There's a difference between accepting the ideology of the Nazi Party and putting on an enemy uniform and killing your own. side. They could at least pretend to agree with what the Nazis were telling them, even if they didn't agree with it, just to get an easier life; as I'm sure did some Germans. When you go into battle against your own side then there is no doubt you have 'gone over'.

But there was never any need for British soldiers to do so unless they were willing. Unlike POWs from some countries, the Germans treated captured British troops relatively well (although the Commando Order went completely against this). And Britain never really looked like losing. With either America, Russia or both in their corner, and with an air force, air defence, navy and an Empire that spanned the continents there was never really any danger that we would lose, certainly after 1941. 

We may not _win _, but - regardless of Hitler's bluster - there was never any realistic prospect of a successful invasion of Britain.  I guess this is in part due to the fact that we have been almost permanently at war for the last 1000 years and so were used to changing from a peace to war footing in an instant. It took until Germany looked like losing for them to get anywhere near a similar state in relation to manufacturing and mobilisation of the entire population.


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## Ambrose (Sep 12, 2020)

In one of his books Albert Speer wrote that the UK Defence of the Realm Regulations allowed the country to adapt itself to war needs far better than he was able to in Germany when he took over as production minster.  Even so, Speer's organisational abilities may have prolonged the war by some months.


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## Ambrose (Sep 12, 2020)

By the way the UK executed John Amery, a leader of the British Free Corps.  Johno was the brother of Julian, later a Conservative minister, and who served in the UK army while John was supporting the other side.


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## Foxbat (Sep 12, 2020)

Ambrose said:


> In one of his books Albert Speer wrote that the UK Defence of the Realm Regulations allowed the country to adapt itself to war needs far better than he was able to in Germany when he took over as production minster.  Even so, Speer's organisational abilities may have prolonged the war by some months.


Early German philosophy centred on Blitzkreig and didn’t see the need for a Total War footing, exemplified by the lack of winter clothing for the German army during the invasion of Soviet Russia, whereas the UK and other allies moved to a Total War footing pretty quickly. Speer  was banging his head against a brick wall for too long, and when others in the Reich finally realised he was right, it was too late. It didn’t help that weapons production in Germany was all about quality whereas allied production was focussed on quantity.
Here are some numbers to illustrate my point. In WW2 there were 8500 Panzer MkIVs produced compared to 50000 Shermans.

The T34 was not only one of the best tanks in WW2 but one of the easiest to build in great numbers (84000), whereas the King Tiger (arguably the best with 492  manufactured) was difficult to build, gas hungry and overcomplicated. Even the superb Panther could only manage 6000.


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## paranoid marvin (Sep 12, 2020)

Ambrose said:


> In one of his books Albert Speer wrote that the UK Defence of the Realm Regulations allowed the country to adapt itself to war needs far better than he was able to in Germany when he took over as production minster.  Even so, Speer's organisational abilities may have prolonged the war by some months.




Yes, if I recall correctly, Germany was producing more war materials in the latter years of the war than they were in the beginning, even though cities and facilities were under constant attack and more and more men were being drafted into the armed forces. A quick look on Wikipedia shows that more panzers were produced in 1943 than in the first 4 years of the war.

As I said in my last post, Britain has effectively been at a state of war-preparedness for the last 1,000 years and it was a relatively easy step to go from a peace to a war footing, which is what happened in WWII. Of course the fact that we had also maintained the best Navy in the world for the last 3-400 hundred years was almost certainly the reason why Hitler never attempted an invasion.


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## mosaix (Sep 12, 2020)

Hitler planned early on to reuse captured equipment from early blitzkrieg successes. 

A lot of equipment used by the Nazis on the Russian front, especially trucks, was French.


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## HareBrain (Sep 12, 2020)

mosaix said:


> A lot of equipment used by the Nazis on the Russian front, especially trucks, was French.



For which of course they didn't have adequate spares. (Not that they ever could have, for the literally hundreds of different commandeered truck types they were using.)


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## paranoid marvin (Sep 12, 2020)

HareBrain said:


> For which of course they didn't have adequate spares. (Not that they ever could have, for the literally hundreds of different commandeered truck types they were using.)




And a little realised fact was that much of the German army relied on horsepower. Film reels (from the German perspective) understandably concentrate on the Panzers, but in the background doing the transporting were horses. It certainly came as quite a surprise to me when I found out.


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## The Ace (Sep 12, 2020)

Foxbat said:


> Yes. I knew about organisations like the Wiking Division and such but I’d never heard of the British Free Corps. We had  traitors like William Joyce (Lord Haw Haw) so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me but it did. There was even the Spanish Blue Division on the Eastern Front, made up from volunteer spanish fascists even though Spain never entered the war.
> 
> Another snippet that I learned: Wallis Simpson had an affair with von Ribbentrop when he visited the UK pre-war. What was really interesting was the time period because this affair overlapped her affair with Edward VIII.


Joyce was an interesting character in some ways, but two points stand out to me;

*  He was an Irish Citizen, and therefore a neutral during WW2.  He lied to obtain his British Passport, but because he held it, he could be tried for treason, instead of being repatriated.  It was his own stupid fault he went to the gallows.

* The story goes that, during his arrest, one soldier, "Accidentally," discharged his revolver - the bullet entering Joyce's left buttock and exiting the right.  He literally had to stand trial, because he was unable to sit.


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## BigBadBob141 (Sep 12, 2020)

Later German (Panther, Tiger, King Tiger) tanks while fearsome in battle especially when fitted with the notorious 88 mm gun, but they were all over engineered and tended to break down a lot and were not easy to fix.
The Russian T34 while not the greatest was still a pretty good tank, it was very rough and ready, primitive compared to the Germans, but it had good sloping armour and would just keep going in all conditions and was easy to fix, it's 75 mm gun was later exchanged for a 85 mm. 
Probably the best western tanks were the Sherman Firefly, the British took an American Sherman, fitted a slightly larger turret and a 17 pounder anti-tank gun which was a really good weapon, in one action a single Firefly took out three Tigers with just four shots, killing a famous German tank ace in the process, but the best by far was the Churchill- Crocodile, this one was one of Hobart's funnies and terrified the Germans and was 95 per cent effective in battle, it was a Churchill Mk7 with six inch armour plate at the front, the hull machine gun was removed and a powerful flame thrower was fitted in its place, with an armoured trailer behind carrying the napalm, when they saw this coming the Germans would either run away or surrender, relatively few were actually killed by it.
P.S. A distant relative of mine was in the Italian Army when he was captured by the British, he had a good time as a POW and loved the British for treating them all so well!


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## Vladd67 (Sep 12, 2020)

Wasn't just French equipment that the Germans captured and reused.


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## BigBadBob141 (Sep 12, 2020)

Well Galland did say he wanted a squadron of Spitefire's!


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## Foxbat (Sep 13, 2020)

Vladd67 said:


> Wasn't just French equipment that the Germans captured and reused.


I once saw a photograph of a british tank crew manning a Panther. I can’t remember where I saw it and I’m sure I didn’t dream it 

One thing that amused me recently. Panzerkampfwagen simply means armoured fighting vehicle and I was watching a war movie when one GI says to the other something like ‘German tanks coming our way.’ Then he says, ’it’s worse than that, they’re Panzers.’


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## Foxbat (Sep 13, 2020)

Continuing my reading of this book, I’ve just finished a chapter on an interesting character that displays the very contrary  nature within the SS. Konrad Morgen was a lawyer that worked within the organisation to root out corruption, theft and arbitrary killing. His work resulted in 800 trials with 200 convictions. Many of the guilty faced the firing squad. He also worked to bring an end to the death camps but hit a brick wall. He could not manage to organise a meeting with Himmler, the sergeant helping him disappeared without trace and a building holding many of his files mysteriously caught fire. He did, however, still have enough evidence on some individuals that proved to be of great use to the allies after the war. 

I find it to be  very surprising that he should work to end the camps and yet be allowed to live. He died in West Germany in 1976, still a practicing lawyer.


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## Brian G Turner (Sep 13, 2020)

Foxbat said:


> Continuing my reading of this book, I’ve just finished a chapter on an interesting character that displays the very contrary nature within the SS.



That sounds really interesting - what's the book title again, please?


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## Venusian Broon (Sep 13, 2020)

Foxbat said:


> I once saw a photograph of a british tank crew manning a Panther. I can’t remember where I saw it and I’m sure I didn’t dream it


You might have seen a picture of 'Cuckoo'. But there were others:









						Repurposing German Vehicles by Allied Troops - Warfare History Network
					

Outright need and the perceived superiority of German armored fighting vehicles led to some very notable examples of their use—by Allied troops.




					warfarehistorynetwork.com
				



.


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## Venusian Broon (Sep 13, 2020)

Foxbat said:


> Continuing my reading of this book, I’ve just finished a chapter on an interesting character that displays the very contrary  nature within the SS. Konrad Morgen was a lawyer that worked within the organisation to root out corruption, theft and arbitrary killing. His work resulted in 800 trials with 200 convictions. Many of the guilty faced the firing squad. He also worked to bring an end to the death camps but hit a brick wall. He could not manage to organise a meeting with Himmler, the sergeant helping him disappeared without trace and a building holding many of his files mysteriously caught fire. He did, however, still have enough evidence on some individuals that proved to be of great use to the allies after the war.
> 
> I find it to be  very surprising that he should work to end the camps and yet be allowed to live. He died in West Germany in 1976, still a practicing lawyer.


I have not heard of this man, however surely he's an outlier rather than pointing to the 'contrary nature of the SS'. I would suggest they were more likely to be on the brutal/genocidal side, surely?

I thoroughly recommend TimeGhosts's World War Two Youtube channel which has a 'Crimes Against Humanity' series that is documenting a great deal of the terrible things that happened in excruciating detail. (Also I recommend the main series - WW2 in Real time, where they describe the history of the war week by week. If you haven't been watching it, they started two years ago, so you've got ~104 episodes to catch up! The historians running the channel were part of the team that covered the Great War week-by-week, so they have had plenty of practice.)









						World War Two
					

World War Two dives into the history of one of the most devastating wars in human history. Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson and their team of dedicated histori...




					www.youtube.com


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## Foxbat (Sep 13, 2020)

Venusian Broon said:


> I have not heard of this man, however surely he's an outlier rather than pointing to the 'contrary nature of the SS'. I would suggest they were more likely to be on the brutal/genocidal side, surely?


I think my natural assumption was that he would never have been allowed to even come close to attempting to close down the death camps and probably would have been killed for doing so. The very fact that he was able to (and did) investigate Rudolph Hoss (Auschwitz commandant) and  Maximilian Garber (Gestapo head and chief torturer at Auschwitz) amongst others, I find  quite bizarre and contrary to what I would have thought before reading this. It would have been my opinion that such was the importance of Hoss’s job in the eyes of the likes of Hitler and Himmler that a blind eye would have been  turned to any personal gains made during his time at Auschwitz and that Morgen would have been silenced one way or the other. Perhaps Himmler’s unavailability to Morgen was exactly the blind eye I assumed,  but Morgen was still able to pursue his targets relatively unmolested despite being ignored by Himmler.

 It seems to me  that perhaps his sergeant was silenced as a warning to him. If so, this was a warning he appeared to ignore and still managed to survive the war. I think this is what I was getting at by contrary nature...if that makes any sense.  

Thanks for the link. I’ll check it out


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## Venusian Broon (Sep 13, 2020)

Foxbat said:


> I think my natural assumption was that he would never have been allowed to even come close to attempting to close down the death camps and probably would have been killed for doing so. The very fact that he was able to (and did) investigate Rudolph Hoss (Auschwitz commandant) and  Maximilian Garber (Gestapo head and chief torturer at Auschwitz) amongst others, I find  quite bizarre and contrary to what I would have thought before reading this. It would have been my opinion that such was the importance of Hoss’s job in the eyes of the likes of Hitler and Himmler that a blind eye would have been  turned to any personal gains made during his time at Auschwitz and that Morgen would have been silenced one way or the other. Perhaps Himmler’s unavailability to Morgen was exactly the blind eye I assumed,  but Morgen was still able to pursue his targets relatively unmolested despite being ignored by Himmler.
> 
> It seems to me  that perhaps his sergeant was silenced as a warning to him. If so, this was a warning he appeared to ignore and still managed to survive the war. I think this is what I was getting at by contrary nature...if that makes any sense.
> 
> Thanks for the link. I’ll check it out



It's a complex issue. I have certainly seen and heard of examples of Germans, for example - senior members of the Wehrmacht, making complaints and reporting massacres and war crimes. But then their efforts clearly had little influence. 

But then, as the war was reaching the end - and ignoring a few madmen trying to snatch victory from defeat, most would have recognised it - it seems clear that a great many German commanders had an eye on what was going to happen afterwards. So they worked to obfuscate anything that could incriminate them, treated prisoners and civilians much better*, remove evidence etc. 

Could Morgen have been set up by his commander to provide an alibi after the war? 

-----------------------------------------


* Would the SS have recognised the Poles in the Warsaw uprising in 1944 as military combantants and taking the survivors as prisoners, if the uprising had taken place a year earlier? Or would they have treated them as partisans - i.e. mass executions?


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## Foxbat (Sep 13, 2020)

Venusian Broon said:


> Could Morgen have been set up by his commander to provide an alibi after the war?


After the war, he refused to testify to the allies against Ilse Koch (aka The Bitch Of Buchenwald), even though he suspected she was guilty,  because he had not been able to gather enough evidence against her. I find it astonishing that such a hard headed man, so obviously driven by rules, could 
a) survive the entire war without an SS bullet in the back of his head or 
b) that he would allow himself to be manipulated beyond the rules he  adhered to.

I suspect any commander guilty of crimes of any nature would not be able to count on Morgen to save their skin.

Merely my unqualified opinion of course


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## Ambrose (Sep 13, 2020)

Lawyers are mysterious beings?  Some are almost aliens.  Or are they?


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## Foxbat (Sep 13, 2020)

Ambrose said:


> Lawyers are mysterious beings? Some are almost aliens. Or are they?


Reminds me of a scene from Young Sheldon where he ponders a dark future: ‘I could end up a drug addict or a lawyer.’


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## CupofJoe (Sep 13, 2020)

I don't know the person and I haven't read about him... but...
He might not have tried to close the camps on ideological or compassionate grounds. Or at least not for the residents.
He might have seen them as an unnecessary drain on scarce resources.
One of the driving forces for the establishment of extermination camps was that soldiers were becoming too stressed by shooting people all-day.
A more humane way [for the soldiers] had to be found for killing people.
First came the Gas wagons and then the extermination camps [where many of the soldiers were not involved in the direct killing all that much*** - but they got the inmates to do most of the dirty work].
An ardent Nazi might have not liked the way people were using the system for their own advantage.
*** Brutality, rape, coercion, murder and a whole host of other things certainly.


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## Foxbat (Sep 13, 2020)

Motivations are never made clear regarding Morgen but I’m left with the impression that he was a real stickler for the rules and the processes around them.....almost obsessively so. I do actually wonder if he might have been autistic...


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## paranoid marvin (Sep 13, 2020)

He could only prosecute in relation to legal and illegal activities under German law. It's beyond comprehension, but at that time (under German law)  the a camp commandant could be found guilty of illegal killings and embezzlement but not managing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children. Presumably the reason he didn't disappear' is that he (according to Wiki) was ordered to carry out the investigation by Himmler himself.


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## paranoid marvin (Sep 13, 2020)

Foxbat said:


> Motivations are never made clear regarding Morgen but I’m left with the impression that he was a real stickler for the rules and the processes around them.....almost obsessively so. I do actually wonder if he might have been autistic...




It seems that he did his job, in that he prosecuted those who broke the law. He couldn't do anything about the death camps ; if he had tried to he almost certainly would have ended up dead or disappeared.


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## -K2- (Sep 14, 2020)

Vladd67 said:


> Wasn't just French equipment that the Germans captured and reused.
> View attachment 69303
> View attachment 69304




You might want to recheck these. No pilot of any 'established' air corps would trade their own nations aircraft they have long trained in for another nations. But, every established nation had similarly marked (their own), other enemy nations (and in the case of the Japanese, German...Soviet, U.S.) aircraft, if they could get them.

What you most likely have there are captured aircraft used for testing to determine EXACTLY how capable and more importantly what were the flaws and limitations of enemy planes. They'd re-mark them so the plane would not be mistaken for an enemy craft, flying them if possible. In many cases, they'd have to re-assemble aircraft from many others that were cannibalized for parts. Unfortunately, when they did that wrong it ended up with either disastrous results or perhaps worse still, they underestimated the enemies capabilities.

For fun, look up why the German, Italian, and Japanese liquid cooled engines (like from the Bf-109, MC.202/205, Ki-61) are almost identical to British versions--but--are upside down.

K2


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## CupofJoe (Sep 14, 2020)

The British had RAFwaffer aka No. 1426 (Enemy Aircraft) Flight RAF
and the Germans had Zirkus Rosarius [Rosarius' Circus?]
I'm sure the Japanese and Americans did something similar.


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## -K2- (Sep 14, 2020)

CupofJoe said:


> The British had RAFwaffer aka No. 1426 (Enemy Aircraft) Flight RAF
> and the Germans had Zirkus Rosarius [Rosarius' Circus?]
> I'm sure the Japanese and Americans did something similar.



Yes, everyone did. Besides testing _capabilities_ (of which you can find extensive test-to-failure declassified data), they would often use other designs to drive their own developments (although, the German's much less so, "Es ist perfekt," a common phrase used by German designers and engineers to this day, hehe).

As to making use of enemy trucks, tanks and so on...When forced to walk hundreds of miles carrying a lot of gear, every nation's soldiers made use of what they could find to ease the journey (carts, bikes, motorcycles, cars, trucks, tanks, horses, mules, oxen, camels, goats, dogs...etc.). The only trouble being, making them keep pace with those without (slower) and being willing to 'walk away from it' when it ran out of fuel or broke down.

Tanks, planes, guns, and so on can be argued from now till doomsday...What cannot be, is the ability to move troops and materials en-masse to keep combat troops supplied (logistics). To that end, it's easy to understand why the lowly _Jimmy_ or _Deuce and a Half_ is credited with American successes:












K2


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## CupofJoe (Sep 14, 2020)

I remember a quote about the 2.5 ton truck being the most important military vehicle on the Western Front.
And it is a thing of beauty, for a certain point of view


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## paranoid marvin (Sep 14, 2020)

CupofJoe said:


> I remember a quote about the 2.5 ton truck being the most important military vehicle on the Western Front.
> And it is a thing of beauty, for a certain point of view




On the Eastern Front what really hindered the Germans at the beginning of Barbarossa were supply lines. It's incredible just how similar it went to the French invasion of Russia  a century earlier. Invade with a massive army, drawing further and further in, extending supply lines to breaking point and constantly moving forward. Suddenly you find that your hundreds of miles inside Russia, you've no supplies, Winter is coming in and suddenly you're being encircled by the Russian army.


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## Venusian Broon (Sep 14, 2020)

paranoid marvin said:


> On the Eastern Front what really hindered the Germans at the beginning of Barbarossa were supply lines. It's incredible just how similar it went to the French invasion of Russia  a century earlier. Invade with a massive army, drawing further and further in, extending supply lines to breaking point and constantly moving forward. Suddenly you find that your hundreds of miles inside Russia, you've no supplies, Winter is coming in and suddenly you're being encircled by the Russian army.


Essentially they had little petrol/diesel - even early in the war - so having fleets of trucks build even a simple logistics system was more-or-less impossible. They were banking on being able to use the Russian rail network so they could use their more abundant coal, but 1) it was a different gauge to the German one, so adapting it would take a long time and/or 2) the Russian did a great job in destroying stock and infrastructure so they couldn't really even use captured Soviet equipment. 

However it should be pointed out, that even the Allies that were swimming in oil - the US and UK - had pretty severe problems trying to get petrol and supplies from Normandy after the breakout and that was France. Tanks can get pretty far in attacks, a couple of hundred kilometers say, but when they run out of petrol, it's always difficult to get enough to the tip of the advance.


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## Foxbat (Sep 15, 2020)

Once again this book has surprised me. I had no idea there was a muslin Waffen SS division. I’ve found this web page that some might find interesting








						Muslims in the SS I
					

Commander of the 13th SS Division, SS-Standartenführer Desiderius Hampel confers with a Chetnik commander in the summer of 1944. The SS also recruited thousands of Muslims into its ranks. In fact, …




					weaponsandwarfare.com


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## Montero (Sep 15, 2020)

I've tried looking for it and can only find a reference to Cary Grant in a film, however one of the PoW stories I read years back, I'm sure had a story in it about one British PoW agree to make a propaganda broadcast on behalf of the Nazis. He got top notch travel to Berlin, best food in a hotel and then repeated all their propaganda putting a big finish on it of "I want you to tell everyone what I've said. I want you to tell it to the Army, tell it to the Navy, but above all tell it to the Marines."


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## BigBadBob141 (Sep 15, 2020)

Odd thing really, saw a documentary recently about the way the British gathered intelligence, if they captured a high ranking German officer they would put him up in a very nice country house where he would get all the comforts of home. 
He would be free to roam the house and talk to other prisoners, but unknown to them the house was completely bugged, in the cellars teams of German speakers, a lot of them German Jews, recorded on discs and wrote down all that was said.
But the odd thing to me was among the information gathered was a lot of evidence about the Holocaust and war crimes that had been committed and who had committed them, but instead of using this info for war crime trials at the end of the war it was all hushed up because, and I do not really understand this, they were worried that people would find out that they were bugging private conversations among prisoners, as if this was somehow shameful, they would rather let war criminals escape then have this method of intelligence gathering reveiled to the world, even thou Churchill wanted to go ahead and try them even if the bugging was reveiled!


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## Montero (Sep 15, 2020)

Not the done thing, old chap. 

These days, well, social media, cameras everywhere........


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## paranoid marvin (Sep 16, 2020)

BigBadBob141 said:


> Odd thing really, saw a documentary recently about the way the British gathered intelligence, if they captured a high ranking German officer they would put him up in a very nice country house where he would get all the comforts of home.
> He would be free to roam the house and talk to other prisoners, but unknown to them the house was completely bugged, in the cellars teams of German speakers, a lot of them German Jews, recorded on discs and wrote down all that was said.
> But the odd thing to me was among the information gathered was a lot of evidence about the Holocaust and war crimes that had been committed and who had committed them, but instead of using this info for war crime trials at the end of the war it was all hushed up because, and I do not really understand this, they were worried that people would find out that they were bugging private conversations among prisoners, as if this was somehow shameful, they would rather let war criminals escape then have this method of intelligence gathering reveiled to the world, even thou Churchill wanted to go ahead and try them even if the bugging was reveiled!




Perhaps the important thing was more the gaining of information rather than the prosecution of  individuals. Let everyone know how you find out your secrets and suddenly everyone shuts up and you get no more intelligence.  Then there was still the 'not the done thing among gentlemen'  attitude at that time that war had to be 'played' by gentlemanly rules, especially between officers and probably moreso if they were Wehrmacht (rather than SS etc.)

Still, no-one was involved in the atrocities should have gotten away with it.


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## sknox (Sep 16, 2020)

>It's incredible just how similar it went to the French invasion of Russia  a century earlier. 
I have a much-treasured copy of _War and Peace, _which I found in a used book store back when I was a kid. It was printed in 1942. Forward by the famous Clifton Fadiman. But the great bit is the interior pages. What's that called that isn't the cover but is on the paper on the inside? 

Anyway, there in the front is a map of Napoleon's invasion of Russia. And on the back end is a map of Hitler's invasion. Here's a picture of the book (mind is in about this condition)

and here's a picture of the Napoleon map.





Even as a kid I recognized how extraordinary this was. 1942. The maps were a kind of statement of hope.


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## Foxbat (Sep 16, 2020)

paranoid marvin said:


> Perhaps the important thing was more the gaining of information rather than the prosecution of individuals.


This is the way I see it too. We have to look at it in the context of the rising Cold War. Nazis could provide a lot of information on Soviet units, etc. Not only that but they also had knowledge of policing infrastructure in a country that was in ruins. I think keeping civil order in a starving and desperate population would have been important and the Nazis could provide a lot of help. There are stories of prominent local  nazis being kept in their positions after the war to provide such stability.

On the subject of ‘the gentlemanly thing’, it appears that Churchill wanted many of these individuals executed without trial and it was primarily Roosevelt that persuaded him otherwise.  I don’t know if this is true but it’s something I believe Churchill would have at least considered. For all I believe he was the right leader at the right time for the UK, many of his previous actions showed him to be a thoroughly ruthless man if necessary.


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## paranoid marvin (Sep 16, 2020)

Foxbat said:


> This is the way I see it too. We have to look at it in the context of the rising Cold War. Nazis could provide a lot of information on Soviet units, etc. Not only that but they also had knowledge of policing infrastructure in a country that was in ruins. I think keeping civil order in a starving and desperate population would have been important and the Nazis could provide a lot of help. There are stories of prominent local  nazis being kept in their positions after the war to provide such stability.
> 
> On the subject of ‘the gentlemanly thing’, it appears that Churchill wanted many of these individuals executed without trial and it was primarily Roosevelt that persuaded him otherwise.  I don’t know if this is true but it’s something I believe Churchill would have at least considered. For all I believe he was the right leader at the right time for the UK, many of his previous actions showed him to be a thoroughly ruthless man if necessary.




Yes I agree. Churchill was absolutely a 'war time ruler' a bit like Wellesley had been; what was needed in war time , but maybe not really the right man for the job diplomatically when it came to peacetime rule.


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## mosaix (Sep 16, 2020)

Regarding keeping sources of intelligence secret: The reason why the breaking of Enigma was a secret for so long is that Britain distributed captured Enigma machines to Commonwealth governments after the war assuring them that they were uncrackable. For years the U.K. was reading the diplomatic signals of multiple foreign countries.


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## Venusian Broon (Sep 16, 2020)

Foxbat said:


> On the subject of ‘the gentlemanly thing’, it appears that Churchill wanted many of these individuals executed without trial and it was primarily Roosevelt that persuaded him otherwise.



I seriously doubt this. 

There is a famous exchange from Tehran 1943 when the big 3 met that Churchill himself wrote (I believe this is from his 'History of the Second World War, Vol 4): 

_Stalin, as Hopkins recounts, indulged in a great deal of “teasing” of me, which I did not at all resent until the Marshal entered in a genial manner upon a serious and even deadly aspect of the punishment to be inflicted upon the Germans.

The German General Staff, he said, must be liquidated. The whole force of Hitler’s mighty armies depended upon about fifty thousand officers and technicians. If these were rounded up and shot at the end of the war, German military strength would be extirpated.

On this I thought it right to say: “The British Parliament and public will never tolerate mass executions. Even if in war passion they allowed them to begin, they would turn violently against those responsible after the first butchery had taken place. The Soviets must be under no delusion on this point.”

Stalin however, perhaps only in mischief, pursued the subject. “Fifty thousand,” he said, “must be shot.” I was deeply angered. “I would rather,” I said, “be taken out into the garden here and now and be shot myself than sully my own and my country’s honour by such infamy.”

At this point the President intervened. He had a compromise to propose. Not fifty thousand should be shot, but only forty-nine thousand. By this he hoped, no doubt, to reduce the whole matter to ridicule. Eden also made signs and gestures intended to reassure me that it was all a joke._


It should be noted that the British had by 1941 being picking up official German messages detailing massacres and thus by 1943 with even further evidence I assume they would have been partially aware of the genocidal nature of Nazi occupation of foreign lands and some inkling as to its scale.

I don't know who of Churchill and Roosevelt fully believed Stalin's similar liquidation of the Polish army by the killing of ~15,000 officers at Katyn forest, which had been broadcast by the Nazi's earlier in the year when they had discovered the grave site. I'd guess they probaby did believe it, so that was perhaps the reason Churchill was angry with the comment, he knew that Stalin was probably not joking as he'd done it already.


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## Montero (Sep 16, 2020)

Regarding Enigma, I hadn't heard that one, but I had heard that the Russians scooped up Enigma machines through Eastern Europe and we listened in on those until they were phased out, I think it was sixties.


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## paranoid marvin (Sep 16, 2020)

mosaix said:


> Regarding keeping sources of intelligence secret: The reason why the breaking of Enigma was a secret for so long is that Britain distributed captured Enigma machines to Commonwealth governments after the war assuring them that they were uncrackable. For years the U.K. was reading the diplomatic signals of multiple foreign countries.




Really? That's incredible!


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## Vladd67 (Sep 16, 2020)

its mentioned in many books on Enigma so either its a well-known fact or all the author were quoting the same source.


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## paranoid marvin (Sep 18, 2020)

Montero said:


> Regarding Enigma, I hadn't heard that one, but I had heard that the Russians scooped up Enigma machines through Eastern Europe and we listened in on those until they were phased out, I think it was sixties.



This sounds quite plausible, and you can imagine that British intelligence helped for more Enigma machines to fall into the hands of the Warsaw Pact.


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## Ursa major (Sep 18, 2020)

Foxbat said:


> but I’m left with the impression that he was a real stickler for the rules and the processes around them


This wasn't necessarily confined to him.

I recall, though not in enough detail, watching the episode of _Who Do You Think You Are?_ concerning Marianne Faithful and the almost comical (if it wasn't so tragic) administrative process that one of her ancestors (or it might have been an associate of one of her ancestors, I can't recall which) went through while in Germany.

In any case, it's an episode of that series that's well worth a watch, as there's also relevant content when dealing with her ancestors in Austria (post-Anschluss).


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## BigBadBob141 (Sep 22, 2020)

The first Enigma machines were meant for purely commercial use, sending coded telegrams which your business rivals could not read, then the German military adopted them and made them far more complex.
The Polish Secret Service did a lot of the ground work in breaking their encryption (details of the machine were passed to them by a German officer for money) which they then passed on to the British and French just before the war, miraculously the Germans never found out about this, the boffins at Bletchley Park, including Turing developed even better ways of cracking the cipher, this worked out so good that towards the end of the war they were decrypting messages before the German high command did.
The only exception to this were the u-boat machines which had four rotors instead of three which made them much, much harder to crack, but even these succumbed in the end, the one fault that the Enigma machines had was they never encrypted a letter as itself, you could keep pressing the letter E forever and it would never be encrypted as E, it also helped that it's human operators could be lazy in the way that used it  and would  use the same opening phrase over and over.
An even harder cipher was developed called Lorenz based on teletype protocols, Alan Turing helped to developed one of the first programmable computers to decipher Lorenz which was then built by telecom engineer Tommy Flowers, just another unsung hero in the war.
The machine was code named Colossus and it worked with thousands of thermonic valves, the room it was housed in would get really warm, so it was not unusual to see the personal laundry (underwear) of the WRENS who operated it hanging up to dry in the heat, sadly after the war Colossus was scrapped with just a few small elements surviving.
And yes a certain amount of Enigma machines were passed on to what would become commonwealth countries for their use, so we could keep an open ear on them.
Other unsung heroes in this saga were the wireless interception service, some would have been army but a lot of them in Britain were volunteer civilian radio hams.
Also Bletchley did a lot of work along side the Americans breaking the Japanese codes and ciphers, amazing work by a great bunch of people!
P.S. Admiral Donitz head of the U-Boat arm of the German Navy realized that the Enigma code was being broken, but he always thought this was due to a highly placed spy somewhere in the navy ranks, he always thought that the machine itself was totally invulnerable.


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## Vladd67 (Sep 22, 2020)

When the British intercepted a ship etc using intelligence gained from enigma they went to a lot of trouble to make it look accidental, however when the Americans assassinated Yamamoto there was doubt he was located by radio intercept and the British worried the Americans had given the game away.


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## CupofJoe (Sep 22, 2020)

I didn't know that the Poles had recreated an Enigma pre-war...




__





						Polish Enigma double - Wikipedia
					






					en.wikipedia.org
				



I think I've see one of those that were given to the British... It was in a Library display case in the 70s in a university where my dad worked...


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## BigBadBob141 (Sep 23, 2020)

The Americans had a lot of luck breaking the Japanese codes and ciphers.
They knew the Japanese were coming at the Battle of Midway, the turning point in the Pacific war as the second battle of El Alamein as in the west.
At one point just to confirm the target they sent a clear message from Midway saying the were running short of fresh water and please send a tanker, the Japanese then signaled to their fleet in code that their target was running short of fresh water, thus confirming that American Intelligence was on the nose!


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## Dai (Oct 19, 2020)

Mad Alice said:


> If anyone remembers that old prisoner of war show from the sixties, Hogan's Heroes, there were several episodes upon "flipping" soldiers from other armies and there were a few about the German attempts to conscript P.O.W. aid for the German forces. Very interesting reasons were given as to why a prisoner would work or labour for the enemy. Added food or access to medical care or improvements in living conditions were often given. Sometimes work or Labour was forced, the men were assigned and were not given a choice, excepting death, or torture or death by execution or death by exposure and so on and of course for the real trouble makers who wouldn't cooperate they would be sent to the death camps along with other undesirables.
> Remember that the two maxims given upon capture  were to stay alive and escape, and to confound and confuse all enemy efforts if escape was not possible.
> A seeming acquiescence could in fact be an elaborate escape attempt or attempt to infiltrate and confound enemy efforts.


This book is worth a look if you are interested in pursuing this subject: Hitler's British Slaves: Allied POWs in Germany 1939-1945 (English Edition) eBook: Longden, Sean: Amazon.de: Kindle-Shop


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