Fremdenlegion, die Hölle im Regenwald (360° - GEO Reportage)

French Guiana is Europe's outpost in South America. Located between Brazil and Suriname, the country has been part of France as an overseas department since 1946 and is almost the size of Portugal. More than 90 percent of its area is covered by tropical rainforest. At 30 degrees Celsius in the shade and 90 percent humidity, almost 2,000 soldiers, including around 800 French Foreign Legionnaires from all over the world, are trained here every year. Most of them seek a break from their old lives by joining the Legion. In their new homeland, the motto is: toughen up to the point of total exhaustion. 360° GEO Reportage visited the Foreign Legion training camp. A film by Stefan Richts © 2011, Licensed by MedienKontor / ARTE Season 12 - Episode 17 Subscribe to wocomoTRAVEL: https://goo.gl/tIk2Qc Follow us on Facebook:   / wocomo   Press release: The French Foreign Legion, founded in 1831, has always been a refuge for people who wanted or had to leave their homeland. Numerous celebrities fought in the infamous Legion: including the American jazz singer Cole Porter, the controversial German author Ernst Jünger, and a descendant of Napoleon, Prince Louis Bonaparte. In World War I, 44,000 legionnaires from 100 nations fought together; more than 9,000 men from this unit died in World War II alone. In the late 1960s, the French government stationed the first Foreign Legionnaires in French Guiana to secure the spaceport in Kourou. Since the 1980s, the Legion has maintained a training center near the village of Régina, where legionnaires are trained to become rainforest warriors. Canadian Sebastien Terrot and Russian Nikolay Potapov have only been with the force for a few months – for the two junior legionnaires, deployment in the South American rainforest is a tremendous challenge. Together with 15 other legionnaires, they are completing a training course designed to toughen the men up – physically and mentally. Their goal is to be deployed for two years for good pay on the green border between Brazil and French Guiana. There, they will be tasked with fending off illegal immigrants and gold prospectors attempting to escape the poverty in their homeland. Sebastien Terrot and Nikolay Potapov are among the rookie members of the group. Will they survive the rigors of the rainforest?