Above photograph: Field Marshal Erwin Rommel inspects a column of Indian volunteers. This shot was probably taken during 1944 somewhere along the coast of France, as many Indian volunteers manned defences along the Third Reich’s Atlantic Wall.

Introduction

When most people think of the German Army during the Second World War, many probably imagine ranks of blonde-haired, blue-eyed German soldiers as depicted on recruitment posters at the time. However, in reality during the Second World War, the truth was quite different.

“One unique feature of the Waffen-SS was that it was a volunteer army, in which from 1942 European soldiers from many lands and peoples could be found: Albanians, Bosnians, Britons, Bulgarians, Cossacks, Croats, Danes, Dutch, Estonians, Finns, Flemings, French, Georgians, Greeks, Hungarians, Italians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Norwegians, Romanians, Russians, Serbs, Slovakians, Swedes, Swiss, Ukrainians, Walloons; as well Armenians, Byelorussians, Hindus, Kirghizes, Tartars Turkmen and Uzbeks served under their own flags…