Well there is a precedence for this but a think that Werner Volkner was of more use militarly to his TA unit with all his experience fighting on the Russian front than some dodgy Albanian in the Rifles.
A superb account by a veteran of the Waffen SS Totenkopf (Deaths Head) Division. Werner Volkner was a working-class boy from Berlin and after joining the Division he fought on the Eastern Front, including Kursk. His account is very detailed and down to earth, and the reader soon feels immersed in the period. Although the unit had an earlier history that linked it to the KZ camps, by the time Werner joined in 1942 it was purely a military unit with a reputation for being tough and highly effective. Werner served in the Flak battalion and it was no accident that it was the best in the entire Wehrmacht. Discipline in the unit was extremely strict, and Werner gives examples of this.
Werner was wounded and also decorated with the Iron Cross. After recuperating from an illness in Munich near the end of the war he was enrolled into an ad-hoc Battle-Group ('Kampfgruppe') and later captured by US forces. He eventually ended up in a British POW camp. This may have saved his life as the Totenkopf Division was sent to Soviet POW camps and many did not return from captivity. In time Werner married an English girl, became naturalized and after WW2 incredibly served in the British Army where he passed on his extensive military experience to his compatriots. One of his sons followed in his military footsteps and joined the elite British RAF Regiment.
