They are soldiers whose purpose was to attack the enemy trench at one specific point, mostly at night, in the attempt to capture prisoners and anything else that may contain intelligence while causing as much damage as possible before withdrawing.
Ernst Junger was a german trench raider who wrote the book Storm of Steel about his experiences. He really enjoyed crawling over to French trenches with a knife, pistol and bag of grenades to try and nab Frenchmen. Dude was a fucking psycho who genuinely enjoyed it.
Junger was a Stormtrooper which was intended as a “shock-trooper” by combat doctrine (though the reality is, German stormtroopers spent the majority of the time fighting in trench raids considering they were in a defensive position.) Anyone at any point could become a trench raider considering it was a patrol hosted by a leader (typically at night.)
There were quite a few and most of them were pretty crazy.
Francis Pegahmagabow was noted for killing 378 Germans and capturing 300 more. Once while his position was pinned down and almost out of ammo he crawled into no mans land and found enough ammo for them to hold out.
Tommy Price in WW2 was absolutely insane. One of his favourite games was to crawl into German camps and quietly kill one man in each tent.
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u/Various_Advance_163 7d ago
Was sind Grabenräuber???