Punitive unit
Punitive unit was and is an umbrella term for military units in which men performed military service or war service who had previously been sentenced to a penalty.
commitment
Mostly they were sentenced to this by a court ( military court or civil court ). Known terms for such units are penal company and penal battalion . Sometimes they were given the choice of “ parole or prison ”. Sometimes death sentences were also softened in a criminal unit service. It is not uncommon for such people to be deployed in the front line for a long time in the course of a so-called suicide mission.
During the Second World War , so-called probation battalions were formed in the Wehrmacht as well as in the Waffen-SS , in which civilians previously “unworthy of defense ” or convicted soldiers were assigned. In the Soviet-Afghan war , the Soviet army deployed a special detachment of Afghanistan pioneers to which soldiers who had previously committed criminal offenses were drawn. The French Foreign Legion had a punitive battalion in which soldiers deserted from the Legion served.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Bertrand Michael Buchmann: Austrians in the German Wehrmacht: Soldiers' everyday life in World War II . Böhlau Verlag, Vienna 2009, ISBN 978-3-205-78444-9 , pp. 103 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
- ↑ Viktor Baum, Der Sowjetrunenstern , Volume 3, ISBN 3-8334-0723-9 , Books on Demand, Norderstedt, pp. 118f. (accessed on March 9, 2013)