This was just a curiosity that occured to me while listening to Sabaton's "Attack of the Dead Men", which is about the battle of Osowiec Fortress, where 7000 Germans, repeatedly unable to eliminate the Russian forces within, deployed mustard gas. However, when the Germans advanced on the fortress, under the belief they killed everyone, it turns out 100 Russians survived the mustard gas, and the surprise of so many surviving defenders whose faces were mangled horribly from the gas caused the 7000 Germans to rout.
This made me wonder, did an experience so horrifying have any effect on George Romero when he introduced the zombie into pop-culture? I don't know of any specific people before Romero who wrote about zombies, hence why I put his name in the text, but if there is a lesser known individual before Romero who created Zombie stories (even if they didn't use the Z-word) that were inspired by the events of Osowiec, I would love to hear about them.
The short answer is that I cannot find any particular evidence of Osowiec being an influence on the contemporary idea of the zombie. Part of this is very probably the timing: the battle happened in 1915, and zombies did not become popular in the United States until 1929 when William Seabrook published The Magic Island (although other books had been written about zombies, Seabrook's was a popular success and led to the 1932 film White Zombie). Revenants were not unknown in pop fictions, as detailed in the introduction to Zombies from the Pulps!, but it was unusual even in the 1930s to mix military adventure and weird horror together, and I haven't been able to find any particular stories directly referencing the Imperial German army and the undead before WW2.
Queue segue
The Encyclopedia of the Zombie lists the earliest reanimated Nazi revenants as the film Shock Waves (1977); the Zombie Movie Encyclopedia reserves that spot of honor for King of the Zombies (1941), although in that case it's more of a traditional Haitian voodoo zombie and the Nazi in question is a foreign spy. Of the two, Shock Waves decidedly uses Romero-style zombies, and the bulk of appearances of German military undead since 1940 in English appear to be Nazis by default.
I've done a quick scan of the usual pulp databases and there's nothing particularly jumping out at me; post-war the weird and fantastic pulps were in decline, and WWI was still a bit recent for the historic adventure pulps; I'd be surprised if Osowiec didn't show up in the men's adventure pulps, but those generally eschewed supernatural elements.
Comic books first appeared in the 1930s, and again, it's rare to find the explicit crossover of weird horror-and-military adventure; a scan of the few indices I have on hand isn't showing any promising candidates, and as with the pulps, the tide turned to actual Nazis once Hitler rose to power. Post-WWII, comics were largely hampered from dealing in this kind of thing explicitly due to the Comics Code Authority implemented in 1954, but Weird War Tales in the 1970s definitely used various forms of Nazi undead, and the Nazi vampire Baron Blood first menaced in Invaders #7 (1976).
Which is a long way to say...as far as I can tell, the battle of Osowiec did not particularly influence zombie horror.