AfricaMaat: La revue "History Today" consacre un dossier aux soldats Juifs d'Hitler

Un résumé dossier disponible dans la revue History Today, nov 2007.

Hitler’s armed forces included many thousands of men of Jewish origin. How did this come about, and what were their military experiences like ? Josie Dunn and Roger Morgan have studied the letters sent home to Germany by Medical Orderly Kurt Herrmann, who was one of these men, an unusual and reluctant young soldier who was a part of the army that invaded Russia.

he experiences of Kurt Alfred Herrmann during his short life (1922-43) were in some ways not unusual for a German of his generation. In 1940, aged eighteen, he was conscripted into the national Arbeitsdienst (Labour Corps), and a year later into the Wehrmacht.

His application to serve as a medical orderly was accepted (his father was a chemist in Berlin, and he had a good knowledge of pharmacy), and in February 1942, after a few months of basic training, his medical unit was ordered to the East to support ‘Operation Barbarossa’, the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

His unit was part of Army Group South, which drove rapidly through the Ukraine and round the Black Sea. When this force was divided in two in the summer of 1942, he was fortunate not to become part of the army under General Paulus, which was sent eastwards to capture Stalingrad, and which had to surrender, after suffering horrific losses, early in 1943.

Instead his unit became part of the army whose mission was to push southwards, through the town of Rostov at the mouth of the River Don, and to capture the oil-wells of the Caucasus Mountains, between the Black Sea and the Caspian. By August 1942 the Caucasus had been reached, ....