Autograph Letter Signed. Dong Hoi, Indochina (now North Vietnam). February 15, 1948. 3pp.In German, to relatives in Michigan. With original mailing envelope, and two snapshot photographs of the writer, one in civilian clothes, Vienna 1946, the other standing in uniform beside a tank, Algeria 1947.
The writer, probably an Austrian, was a French Foreign Legion soldier of the “Premier Regiment Entranger de Cavalerie” (First Foreign Cavalry Regiment) the only tank regiment of the Legion, which was transferred from Algeria to Vietnam, receiving US and British tanks and armored cars weeks before this letter was written. The Regiment would actively fight Ho Chi Minh’s Communists for the next six years, until the French defeat in 1954. The text of this letter has not been translated, but the writer refers to the Russians and Communists and makes this statement about his Regiment, chilling even in loose translation: “The stock of officers and team is 80% German, partly…of the Afrika Korps, partly SS. The rest are French who fought with us as volunteers against the Russians.”
This is an amazing statement, because military historians now discount as fiction or Soviet propaganda the “Nazis in Indochina myth”. While acknowledging that ex-Nazi soldiers fought in the Foreign Legion against the Viet Minh, many historians believe the French began to “crack down” on ex-Nazi participation in the Legion after 1947 and that a popular novel about a Legion unit in Vietnam “composed solely of Germans” was “unsupported by the evidence.” Kozeny’s statement that a fifth of his unit were Frenchmen does not dilute his admission because French "volunteers" who fought with the Germans were Russians were probably soldiers of the Waffen-SS.
Since he was writing to “loved ones” who were American citizens, it’s not certain that Kozeny himself served in the Nazi Army during World War II. But whatever his own background, his letter is an important source of recent military history which would bear full translation and further research.