"A Yank in the SS" Topic

"In the second episode of the acclaimed HBO miniseries Band of Brothers Pfc. Donald Malarkey questions a captured German sergeant in the liberated French village of Sainte-Marie-du-Mont. Malarkey is stunned to learn the enemy prisoner hails from a town in Oregon less than 100 miles from the GI's own hometown. When asked how he ended up wearing a Wehrmacht uniform, the young POW replies that before America's entry into the war his German-born parents had "answered the call" for "all true Aryans" to return to the Fatherland.

The encounter dramatized in the series actually took place and was not all that unusual. In fact, many German-born Americans returned to the Old Country in the years immediately preceding the 1939 outbreak of World War II—and more often than not the returnees took their American-born children with them.

After the war a folktale persisted that an entire unit in the German army—the so-called George Washington Brigade—comprised American defectors. While the brigade was a fiction created by the Waffen-SS for propaganda purposes, some Americans did serve Nazi Germany in uniform. Owing to poor records and scant postwar investigation, it is impossible to pinpoint an exact number. Of the handful of known individuals, however, none is more infamous than U.S. Army Air Forces fighter pilot turned SS officer Martin James Monti…"
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Amicalement
Armand

Read an article about him in Military History Magazine.

ok

Amicalement
Armand

A buddy of mine in college said three of his uncles from Missouri joined up in 1939. Dont know how that worked out for them, but I believe they returned to the US post war.

Lucky guys!… (smile)

Amicalement
Armand