They were members of what was called the Ost (East) Battalions. The German army was constantly short of men, so men from countries like Poland, Czechoslovakia, Russia and even Korea were taken prisoner and forced to join the German army.
By June 1944, one in six German riflemen in France was from an Ost battalion. Men in these battalions became increasingly unreliable and they were also not as skilled as the SS soldiers. They were also not in the least as willing to die for the German cause as were the native-German soldiers.
"In general, Ost soldiers in Wehrmacht uniforms tended to surrender as soon as GI's got near them. They were mainly in the trenches. Ethnic Germans inside concrete fortifications tended to fight on" (Ambrose 424-5).
When the German army invaded the Soviet Union, it prided itself on its ‘racial purity’ but their need for replacements from other countries forced it to quickly abandon that policy.
