Did any Germans fight for the Allies in WWII?

Given the numbers, scope and scale of the conflict I’m sure the answer has to be ‘yes’, but I’m having a tricky time finding the details. Suppose you’re a German infantryman who wants an end to the war ASAP and figures the best - indeed only - way of doing this is bringing about the fall of the Third Reich. So you desert at the earliest opportunity to the Western Allies. What do they do with you?

Of course on the Eastern front you had von Seydlitz and his ‘National Committee for a Free Germany’, matched by Germany’s use of Vlasov and his ‘Russian Liberation Army’. I know the Germans recruited various SS formations from the French, Dutch, Belgians and Norwegians and there’s documentation of a minuscule ‘British Free Corps’ and of course Lord Haw-Haw on the propaganda front. I’ve read that in the PoW camps Germans attempted to recruit captured soldiers from the Western Allies to fight against the Bolsheviks, without success.

But how did/would the Western Allies use an anti-Nazi German?

Yeah,right at the end.

The screenplay of this writes itself. How is this not a movie?

There were also a lot of Germans who had left the country over the years who fought for the Allies (mostly from America, I believe). This included first-generation immigrants.

There were Germans who had left Germany as refugees before the war broke out, and who were in Allied countries on the outbreak of the war. Many of them were, of course, passionately anti-Nazi (though that didn’t necessarily save them from internment as enemy aliens). Some of these worked for the Allies, though I think not very often (if at all) as combat troops - more like intelligence work, translation, that kind of thing.

Fritz Kraemer

I can’t find the cite, but I recall a story about a couple of German prisoners who ended up assisting a British commando unit in North Africa. During a mission where the Brits were disguised as Germans, one of the former prisoners ended up betraying them.
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Does Albert Einstein count?

It’s in production.

The book is really good, by the way, well worth reading.

Canaris?

Some number of German deserters joined French resistance groups, too, once they had started to get themselves in a position to act more as a guerrilla army.

German civilian internees in Britain were allowed to join the Pioneer Corps (i.e., support labour rather than combat), and a fair number of captured German spies were turned to work as double agents, though that may well have been as much a matter of survival as conviction.

It’s too unrealistic. No one would believe that something like that could happen.

:stuck_out_tongue:

Depends on your definition of “Germans”. IIRC the biggest source for replacements for the Polish Armed Forces in the West were captured Wehrmacht conscripts.

I read once that some POWs being held in the US, after reading about Nazi atrocities, became anti-Nazis and volunteered to go back and fight alongside the allies.

Remember not every German soldier wanted or supported that war.

Not fighting, but the British employed German Jewish refugees to translate, process, etc. the recordings they were making from bugging the mansion that housed POW German generals. BBC artlcle Book blurb

I don’t suppose you could call it fighting for the Allies, but I had relatives in western Minnesota who had German POW’s as ‘hired hands’ on their farm during the war, who helped produce food for Allied soldiers. They were greatly appreciated, because there was a real shortage of fit young men to do farm work at the time. The farm owner paid the US military, and a portion of that (about 1/3) was paid to the prisoner in cash.

POW participation was voluntary, but many did so – it was less boring than sitting in a POW camp, and the money they earned allowed them to buy some small luxuries. Many of the POW’s had grown up on farms in Germany, and were fit in quite well on a Midwestern USA farm.

Often, in far rural areas, the POW was moved to live on the farm, rather than being transported back & forth each day (gas & tires were rationed). There was often an empty bedroom, because the sons were off in the armed forces, fighting Germans. The POW just had to report in to the POW camp each week or so. There wasn’t too much worry about escapes, being out in a rural area, with the nearest town 12 miles away, and that only 400 townspeople, all from about 25 families.

There was a case in the area where a POW working at one farm had a similar name to a German family in their church, that had immigrated about 25 years earlier, and bought a farm there. He turned out to be a second cousin or something to that local family.

Hitler’s nephew William Patrick was in the U.S. Navy and his piano player Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl
(Harvard class of 1909) would analyze his radio speeches and give intelligence assessments, although of what value anyone got from them is debatable.

There were POW camps in Arkansas where prisoners could work on farms.
I believe that POW camps were in Arkansas because it was a long way to the coasts if they escaped.

Thanks for the replies guys, particularly chacoguy’s fascinating link, how is this not more well known? Also forgot all about Hitler’s nephew, who if memory serves joined up with an army recruit called Hess.

Damn!