Old, but still an interesting article here.
"At first the intelligence officers at the headquarters of the French Foreign Legion in Sidi Bel Abbès, Algeria, were puzzled. The Legion had always had a large complement of Germans in its ranks, but now, in spite of the Nazis' widespread campaign to discourage Germans from enlisting, even larger numbers were pouring in.
In the late 1930s, as more and more young Germans were joining that famous fighting force, the German press was violently attacking it, and the Nazi government demanded that recruiting be stopped. Books about the Legion were publicly burned in Germany, and the violence against Legion recruiting reached comic heights when Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels' department claimed that innocent young Germans were being hypnotized into joining. In 1938, a professional hypnotist named Albert Zagula was actually arrested in Karlsruhe and charged with the offense.
Still the Germans kept joining–until half the privates and 80 percent of the noncommissioned officers in the Legion were German. Eventually, it became evident that this influx had been orchestrated by German intelligence, the Abwehr, to destroy the Legion from within. The new German legionnaires came close to achieving the Abwehr's objective…"
Full article here
link
Hope you enjoy!
Amicalement
Armand