American Free Corps

The American Free Corps, also called the George Washington Brigade, was a unit of the Waffen-SS. It was composed of recruits, mostly United States prisoner of war.
History
In reality, the German authorities made no effort to create an exclusive unit of American volunteers, although a plan to do so was on the drawing board. Nevertheless, it is certainly the case that a small number of United States nationals did serve in the German Armed Forces in various units, including the Waffen-SS. Information about them remains fragmentary and no real effort was made by the US authorities to investigate the matter and trace the volunteers after the war, as opposed to the efforts by other countries like Britain. It is documented that around eight Americans serving in the German armed forces were killed in action by May 1940.
The most famous propagandist associated with the American Free Corps was Second Lieutenant Martin James Monti, who defected from the US Army Air Corps on 13 October 1944, and worked as a broadcaster under the pseudonym Martin Wiethaupt, his mother's maiden name. After the war he was sentenced to 25 years for treason but was released in 1960.
Pierre de La Ney du Vair, a Frenchman born in Holcomb, Missouri, was a Captain in the French anti-Bolshevik Légion des Volontaires Français contre le Bolchevisme. He arranged for Monti to be released from jail by the Germans. He was killed in an allied air-attack on a train bound for Mehltheur, Vogtland, Germany on April 11, 1945.
American Free Corps in popular culture
This unit was cited by the author Kurt Vonnegut in his novels Slaughterhouse Five and Mother Night. Vonnegut had been a prisoner of war in Dresden and had seen, or heard of, recruiting efforts by members of the British Free Corps who were based in the city at that time. The unit also appears in the novels The Eagle Has Flown and The Valhalla Exchange by Jack Higgins.

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