Russians!

This is coolbert:

"shock, deafness, and hopelessness"

Here from the book: The Gulag Archipelago" by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a description of the tenacity, the determination, the implacable resolve to fight to the end on the part of the Hiwi!

"We soon discovered that there really were Russians fighting against us and that they fought harder than any SS men. In July, 1943, for example, near Orel, a platoon of Russians in German uniform defended Sobakinskiye Vyselki. They fought with the desperation that might have been expected if they built the place themselves. One of them was driven into a root cellar. They threw hand grenades in after him and he fell silent. But they had no more than stuck their heads in than he let them have another volley from his automatic pistol [a sub-machine gun?]. Only when they lobbed in an antitank grenade did they find out that, within the root cellar, he had another foxhole in which had taken shelter from the infantry grenades. Just try to imagine, the degree of shock, deafness, and hopelessness in which he had kept on fighting."

The Hiwi! Soviet citizens, soldiers of the Red Army, prisoners-of-war [POW] captured by the German, volunteering to fight ON THE SIDE OF THE GERMAN, against their own citizens.

[estimates suggest that about 1 million Soviet citizens in some capacity fought on the side of the German during World War Two!!]

The Hiwi, realizing that death on the battlefield was preferable to the slow and torturous death in a Soviet labor camp, if indeed you did survive capture and immediate execution!

coolbert.