Execution of 13,000 Nazis who Killed 1000s in Russia: Hard to Watch

By World History

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The 1st Mountain Division—also known as the Edelweiss Division—was one of the most notorious units of the German Wehrmacht in World War II. Formed in 1938 and originally trained for alpine warfare, the division gained infamy not for its military achievements but for a trail of brutal atrocities that spanned from Poland to Greece. Initially part of the invasions of Poland and France, its soldiers were involved early on in the killing of civilians and prisoners of war. But it was during the campaigns in the Soviet Union and the Balkans where the unit became synonymous with mass murder and revenge killings. In the Soviet Union, the division took part in the destruction of Soviet armies and was involved in pogroms against Jewish civilians in places like Lviv. Starving Soviet prisoners of war and systematic shootings followed. But the worst crimes came after 1943, when the Edelweiss Division was redeployed to the Balkans. There, in Greece and Albania, they were no longer fighting armies—but

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