Among the many prisoners taken by the Allies in Normandy during June 6 were men of quite a few different origins, some quite exotic. Among those of eastern European or Asian extraction was a particularly interesting group of volunteers: the so-called Osttruppen (Eastern Troops).
Once the invasion of the Soviet Union took off, Soviet citizens started to voluntarily enlist in the German Armed Forces. The exact number will never be known but it is estimated that up to 1,5 million Soviets served the invaders in some capacity.
Initially formed on a basis of ‘private enterprises’ by German unit commanders, the bulk of these ‘Osttruppen’ were recruited from non-Russian nationalities of the USSR: Balts, Ukrainians, Caucasians, Cossacks, Tartars, Georgians, etc. Such a case happened in August of 1941 when an entire Cossack regiment of the Red Army, led by its officers, deserted to the German side ending up fighting with the ‘Heer’ as the 5th Don Cossack Regiment.
One of the reasons -there were several and this one might not even be the most important- behind these men's willingness to fight alongside the German invader was simple: they were helping the Germans defeat a common enemy. The immense USSR was made of many ethnic groups, most of them being relentlessly persecuted and oppressed by the Soviet Regime for decades. ‘Mother Russia’ and Stalin meant little, if anything, to these people since most of them had nothing in common with the Russians and saw them as the true invaders.
By the end of 1941, the first units, called ‘Legions’, were created. Each Legion was composed of men from the same region/ethnicity and was identified by an armshield and cockade in the national colors of that particular region/ethnicity.
In this photo, freshly captured by US troops in Normandy on D-Day, we see a dusty private from a battalion of the Georgian Legion with its distinctive armshield and ‘Osttruppen’ collar insignia. After the Russian revolution of 1917, Georgia had been briefly an independent state until it was invaded and annexed by the Soviet Union in 1921. It regained its independence in 1991.
The Georgian Legion sent more than a dozen battalions to the front, both East and West: one, in particular, the 823rd Ostbataillon, ending up in garrison on the British island of Guernsey.
For this man and his countrymen, there will be no peace or happy ending: with the war over, many members of the ‘Eastern Legions’ captured by the western allies were handed over to Stalin and his regime.
