fujisan-ni-noboru-hinode: duxbelisarius: pentomic:fujisan-ni-noboru-hinode:A Japanese officer se
fujisan-ni-noboru-hinode: duxbelisarius: pentomic: fujisan-ni-noboru-hinode: A Japanese officer serving in the Wehrmacht I tried to find a source for this image but couldn’t. there doesn’t appear to have been a legitimate “Japanese legion” of the Wehrmacht, but the nearest I could find (apart from a Nazi website trying to prove that the Nazis weren’t racist by claiming literally every European and Asian ethnicity had a foreign unit in the Heer) was a forum post mentioning that these guys were probably Koreans who had been forced into service for the Japanese, been liberated from Russian prisoner of war camps and put to work as clerks in OKW. this would have been near the very very end of the war. There was some liaison with the Japanese during the war, though I believe this was mainly via submarine missions, ie Navy to Navy. Plus the long trip meant they were quite rare. After all of these years, he’s been identified!This is Major Zengoro Komori (1901 - 1959), from Fukuoka, Japan. He was not an IJA attaché or a rare flavor of SS Volunteer, rather he spoke German and actually gained an officer’s commission in the Wehrmacht. Komori was a medical doctor in the Imperial Japanese Army who was in Germany with several other Japanese Army doctors for medical training and research, and became the head internist at the main Japanese embassy in Germany. Once operation Barbarossa began, he and his Japanese colleagues were activated as officers in the Heer, Komori becoming a Major, with permission from the Japanese Military Command, and they were sent to the front lines of the Eastern Front to do “research on combat trauma” and report their findings and observations back to Japan for further study by the Japanese Military.Stationed with Heer infantry units until 1944, upon realization that Germany was losing the tide on the Eastern Front, he requested to be moved to Salzburg, Austria, where he was billeted in a medical role until sometime in early 1945. On May 11th, 1945, he surrendered to the US Army in Bad Gastein, and later returned to Japan, where he died in 1959, aged 58. -- source link