Reflecting on the “remnants of Auschwitz,” Giorgio Agamben submits that any examination of the Judeocide can only lead to an “aporia of historical knowledge” (12). That is, it can only lead to the identification of an irreducible discrepancy between our awareness of the “facts” on the one hand and our “comprehension” of those facts on the other (12). Agamben restricts his analyses to the aftermaths of the Holocaust, and the gap between knowledge and understanding that he describes is certainly most observable in the case of “Auschwitz,” because the event seems to resist any attempt at historical contextualization. Yet we may encounter similar though admittedly less profound gaps when we read books, watch documentary films, or listen to testimonies about other aspects of World War II, and have trouble apprehending why the participants acted the way they did. The presence of hundreds of thousands of foreign volunteers in the German army is a case in point. Nowadays, that presence can only produce, as Estes puts it, “both curiosity and consternation” (chapter 1, 1); the cause was evidently criminal, and why so many people chose to defend it on the battlefield, and to defend it to the end, appears incomprehensible in our time. The memoirs of the French who joined the LVF and the SS are most valuable in this respect. Indeed, they provide partial answers to a certain number of questions we may have about the volunteers' motivations, attitudes, and beliefs.