Field training regiment (Wehrmacht)
The field training regiments were units of the army in the Wehrmacht , specifically infantry field training regiments or, after restructuring and renaming, from October 15, 1942, grenadier field training regiments. They were installed in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union from autumn 1942 . They were recruited (only) from the compulsory workers of the units of the Reich Labor Service deployed there , whose six-month compulsory labor service ended during their deployment on the Eastern Front. The takeover into the army took place in such a way that the brown uniform was exchanged for the field-gray skirt during delousing.
The RAD conscripts who were taken over were exclusively members of the 1924 class who had previously been employed directly behind the front for digging, building roads (billet embankments, cutting aisles) and other militarily more or less useful tasks and who occasionally had contact with the enemy with high losses. For this case, the labor service agents intended for such a mission were trained more in handling weapons (including Czech rifles) than with shovels and spades, the symbol of the RAD.
The presence of the field training regiments served to stabilize the occupied rear areas, which were threatened by increasingly stronger partisan units .
One of these regiments, the infantry field training regiment 719, was in the Belarusian village Barawucha (Боровуха) near Polotsk on the railway line to Daugavpils placed another, the field training regiment 636, in likewise Belarus Chausy / Chavusy (Чауссы / Чавусы).
To distinguish it from other units of the Wehrmacht, an F was stamped into the identification tags of those recruited in this way - z. B. "Inf./ F / Aus. Rgt" - Infantry field training regiment.
literature
- Wolfgang Stadler: Hope homecoming - 3rd chapter, Swing-Verlag, Colditz ISBN 3-9807514-0-6 .
- Dankward Sidow: Ruki werch! - During the war - with the Reich Labor Service and with the Wehrmacht - self-published.
