Edgar Puaud
SS officer
Edgar Joseph Alexandre Puaud (29 October 1889 – 5 March 1945) was a French army officer, who, in 1945, briefly became commander of the Charlemagne Division, a French unit of the Waffen-SS in the service of Nazi Germany.
World War I
Puaud was born in Orléans, and joined the French Army as a private soldier in 1909. By 1914 he was a sergeant, and was selected to attend the military academy at Saint-Maixent for petty officer training. On the outbreak of World War I, however, he and fellow "aspirants"
were immediately given commissions. During the course of the war he was
promoted from Sub-Lieutenant to Captain, and won the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honour. After 1918 he served with the French army of occupation in the Rhineland, then with the French Foreign Legion in Morocco, Syria and French Indochina.
World War II
By 1939 he was a major, based at Septfonds in the south-west of France, and as a result did not see action during the German invasion of 1940. Following the French defeat in 1940, he served in the much-reduced "Armistice Army" in Vichy France.
Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Puaud accepted the collaborationist argument that "Bolshevism" was a greater threat to French interests than the Germans. In October 1941, he joined the Legion of French Volunteers Against Bolshevism (Legion des Volontaires Français Contre le Bolchevisme, LVF) as a battalion commander.
The public source identifies “Edgar Puaud” as sS officer. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Edgar, Puaud and officer.
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This entry incorporates text from “Edgar Puaud” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.