re: #116 lostlakehiker

One of those Jerries was Ratzinger, now Pope, but at the time, a child. One of the most improbable items in this vein concerns a construction battalion captured at Cherbourg by the Americans. It was under German command, working for the Germans, but it was not itself German. The rank and file consisted of Koreans! They’d been enslaved by the Japanese and employed in the Japanese “Khalkin Gol” Mongolian border incursion of 1938. The Japanese got royally thrashed by the Soviets under Zhukov, and this particular construction battalion had been captured, more or less intact.

The Soviets weren’t particularly intent on vengeance against those slaves, but they could come in handy some day…and they were sent to the front in 1941. There, they were captured again, this time by the Germans. Who took them slaves and put them to work at Cherbourg, constructing their Atlantic Wall.

Jeez—that’s a bunch of guys with some bad karma.