The Mysterious Photo of a Korean Soldier In a German WW2 Uniform

PO1 William "Chip" Nagel
..."It seems that the Koreans had been conscripted into the Japanese Army but after being captured by the Russians at the Battle of Nomonhan in the Russo-Japanese War (part II, the 1940’s one, not the 1904-05 one). They were pressed into service in the Russian Army. Captured by the Germans in a battle near Moscow, the Koreans were then pressed into service in the Wehrmacht. They were then captured by the Americans whilst they were engaged working on the Atlantic Wall. The Americans (mercifully) did not press them into service but rather held them as prisoners of war.

It seems that these poor souls never made it back home to Korea as apparently the Koreans were exchanged with the Soviets for American POWs liberated by the Red Army. This I find a little suspicious as at that time the Red Army and the US Army were on the same side and no POW exchanges should have been necessary. I could accept that they were returned to the Soviet’s however as at that time there was a largish Korean Diaspora under Soviet control and they therefore would have seemed like a Soviet problem to deal with.

The picture itself can be viewed at the WW2 Multimedia Database == World War II Multimedia Database, WW2 Talk the homepage of the Database being here at http://www.worldwar2database.com/. The book itself is written in Korean so I cannot read into it, however, the idea behind the book was appealing, doubly so as I have been doing some research into the Battle of Nomonhan anyway. I will post an article about that later when I get the research finished."

Certainly shows how much of life isn’t just up to you!