What percentage of Nazi soldiers were volunteers?


 It occurred to children as young as 17 years of age who had no choice at all.

As early as 1935, Germany reintroduced the draft. Had you been a healthy guy, you had to appear because of a notice. By 1939, the regular army (Heer) was mostly made up of these draftees. Only about 90% of the army was volunteers but that was just men who did what the law required or they were going to shoot them as deserters.


Even the Waffen-SS that initially worked as an elite volunteer formation evolved rapidly. By 1944 they became short of men and began forcibly drafting people in. They picked up Navy and Air Force guys and forcibly hurled them into SS equipment. An excellent example is a renowned author Gunter Grass. He was drafted at 17 in 1944. He did not choose the SS, the govt simply placed him there since they required bodies.


By the war end, more than 50per of SS were not even German. They belonged to an occupied nation or stolen out of prison camps. They even included old men and young boys in the Volkssturm in the last months. The bulk of those foxholes was not in politics. These people were simply caught in a system that they could not get out of.

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