Rolf-Dieter Müller is Professor of Military History at Humboldt University, Berlin; Scientific Director of theGerman Armed Forces Military History Research Institute in Potsdam; and Coordinator of the ‘The GermanReich and the Second World War’ project. He is the author of numerous publications on World War II.
When Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa with his attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, theWehrmacht deployed 600,000 troops to the Eastern Front. Their numbers were later swelled by a range offoreign volunteers so that, at the height of World War II, astonishingly one in three men fighting for theGermans in the East was not a native German. Hitler’s declaration of the ‘struggle against Bolshevism’reverberated throughout all of Europe - among convinced fascists as well as among non-Russian easternEuropeans seeking to regain their independence from the USSR. Many of these volunteers subsequentlybecame involved in the atrocities of the Wehrmacht and the SS. Vilified by Hitler for their supposedfailures, condemned and forgotten by their homelands for treason and collaboration, their involvement inthe war has been largely ignored or swept aside by historians. Rolf-Dieter Müller here offers a fascinatingnew perspective on a little-known aspect of World War II.