I am not trying to be offensive but it seems to me like the Charlemagne Division was a terrible military formation that failed in all of it's appearances so was set to behind the lines duty hunting Jews/guarding ghettos to prevent Jewish escapes and fighting untrained partisans and the basis for thinking otherwise is the unsubstantiated boasts of Charlemagne veterans who gained sympathetic ears from fascists like Forbes.
Visual evidence produced to supposedly show Charlemagne in Berlin was proven to be pictures taken nowhere near Berlin labelled wrongly by a gaming website, and on top of that Charlemagne isn't mentioned at all by Russians.
Every SS veteran claimed his unit in Berlin was undefeated and killed hordes of Russians and knocked out a fleet of Russian tanks, the only difference the 90 Charlemagne veterans have is that being French made them traitors to their country as well as hardcore Nazis, and the evidence produced from Wermacht observations of them in their earlier battles has shown very clearly they were not good soldiers.
Even had they been heroic so what? The Nazi cause was so attractive to them they willingly turned traitor to their own occupied nation to fight for it.
I find the idea of glorifying them by depicting (non existent) heroic deeds to them to be deeply offensive, they spent the vast majority of the war as war crimes specialists because the Wermacht found them to be worthless as front line units.
Good Frenchmen and Frenchwomen ostracized these monsters after the war; there is extremely good reason.
An example from this thread that is clear glorification (and betrays zero training as a historian)
sandeepmukherjee196 wrote:HI Dennis....
One thing has been established here ... The Charlemagne unit went to Berlin, fought and died there, won the highest decorations and left a mark on events. They also did enough to impact public perception for decades to follow.
When a serious discussions is replaced by trivia, well, the only thing one can do is to look for more material..I for one would continue doing that about this subject.
Thanks again for your informed and thoughtful contributions.
Ciao
Sandeep
So the evidence you produced that Charlemagne did that being proven false beyond all doubt by being shown to not be a picture of French Nazi Soldiers or Berlin is trivia after it is dispelled? What if the museum had taken your side would actual evidence be important then?
Charlemagne soldiers guarded ghettoes, did "anti-partisan activity" (often a code word for massacres) and knowingly commited high treason to France for the explicit purpose of helping Nazi Ideology, I see no reason to believe anything any of their survivors have to say unless it is backed by another source.
For example the Russians who surely would have noticed if a unit of wonder super soldiers from France opposed them. Zero mention whatsoever from any Russian source is very damning towards the credibility of Charlemagne veterans claiming they posed significant difficulties for the Russian advance.
Also calling the Russians who we owe so much to for stopping Nazi Germany commies is an insult, so defending your home against an enemy who openly seeks enslavement of you, slaughter of your nations intellectuals and other upper class members of society, total and absolute destruction of your nation and who wouldn't even wait for the wars result to begin that program of mass slaughter makes you a Marxist? Has anyone told the ghost of Karl Marx that he has such an honor?
Russians fought because the forces of Nazi Germany put their insane racial ideals into practice, bad behavior by Russia after the war doesn't change that one bit.
