Wehrmacht

The Wehrmacht is a historical institution in the novel’s background, most concretely connected to the postwar recruitment of former German servicemen into the French Foreign Legion. The text places it alongside the Waffen-SS as a source of recruits for a force short of personnel, while keeping the distinction between those affiliations clear: Soldaten-Norbert is identified as a former Waffen-SS member, not as a Wehrmacht veteran.

Postwar Recruitment

In April 1945, Soldaten-Norbert was taken prisoner and moved directly from captivity into the French Foreign Legion. The Legion was then severely depleted in personnel, and its recruiters sought new members among prisoners from the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS. For those recruited, enlistment offered a way out of the prisoner-of-war camps. The account thus links the Wehrmacht to the immediate postwar conditions that made military service in a foreign force an avenue of escape.

Norbert’s Military Trajectory

Norbert’s own passage into the Legion followed his Waffen-SS service and capture; the novel does not say that he served in the Wehrmacht. From 1948 to 1953 he was deployed in Indochina. After his discharge, he never regained stability: he was successively dismissed from work as a stevedore, night watchman, and laborer, usually because of alcohol. By the time he took a job in refuse collection, the consequences of his military past and postwar displacement were visible in a life marked by precarious employment and drinking.

Historical Presence and Limits

The Wehrmacht’s part in this account is specific but narrow. It is named as one of the groups from which the French Foreign Legion recruited, but the narrative does not develop its command structure, campaigns, or operations. Nor does it assign Wehrmacht service to Norbert. That distinction matters: the organization’s significance here lies in the postwar category of former servicemen and prisoners, while Norbert’s stated route runs from the Waffen-SS through captivity to the Legion. The novel uses this compressed institutional history to connect the collapse of wartime formations with the unsettled lives that followed.