Waffen-SS

INTRODUCTION

THE SS HAS come to personify the evil at the heart of Nazi Germany, its sinister influence seemingly undiminished by the passage of time. Originally intended as Adolf Hitler’s bodyguard, the Schutzstaffel (protection squad) grew into a Hydra-like monster under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler, administering the concentration-camp system; controlling the Reich’s police, security, and intelligence agencies; as well as overseeing a sprawl of economic interests throughout Germany and its occupied territories. But, most significantly, it developed its own military force—the Waffen-SS—with more than 900,000 men passing through its ranks. The Waffen-SS fought in all the major European campaigns of World War II, earning a deserved reputation for aggression in attack and steadfastness in defense. It also became infamous for its cooperation with other perpetrators of the Holocaust and for the battlefield atrocities it committed against civilians and prisoners.

The Waffen-SS was always an organization in flux. Before the advent of war in 1939, the armed units of the SS were drawn from German volunteers, selected for their physical aptitude and appropriate Aryan background. As the war developed, so the Waffen-SS grew massively in size, an expansion that compromised its overall military quality and, through the recruitment of non-Germans, its racial integrity. By the end of the war it had been transformed into a partially conscripted multinational army.

The scale and nature of these changes seemed to fly in the face of Nazi racial doctrine, as well as running counter to Hitler’s original demand for an elite, ultraloyal German bodyguard. Himmler, however, saw things differently. Obsessed by racial matters, he looked beyond nationality to the concept of a Pan-Germanic Europe, where the countries of northern and western Europe, with their Germanic peoples, would eventually be incorporated into a Greater Germany, which in turn would rule over a new empire in central and eastern Europe.¹

Once the war was won, Himmler reasoned, he would use his Germanic formations as a template for a new army,² while the other units of lesser racial quality would prove useful in controlling the slave populations of the empire in the East and protecting it from external threat. Himmler also saw the advantage of possessing a powerful military force during the inevitable postwar struggles with other Nazi leaders. For these reasons Himmler accepted the myriad difficulties and contradictions that came with raising this multinational army, substantial parts of which were of poor quality and doubtful motivation. Hitler, while not sharing these Pan-Germanic racial enthusiasms, allowed Himmler a relatively free rein, thanks mainly to the exceptional battlefield performance of the German-recruited Waffen-SS panzer divisions.

Germany, of course, did not win the war, and post-1945 the Allies insisted on finding and punishing those they believed responsible for the destruction and killings carried out by Hitler’s regime. The Wehrmacht (army, navy, air force) was swift to transfer blame onto other Nazi organizations, insisting it had played no part in the Nazis’ genocidal policies. As a consequence of the friendly cooperation between senior German commanders and the Western Allies, the concept of the “clean” Wehrmacht began to emerge. This idea was supported in memoirs and other accounts from German officers, among them the influential voices of Heinz Guderian, Erwin Rommel, and Erich von Manstein. Their publications were critically and commercially successful and set the parameters for the understanding of the war among Western readers.³ The Wehrmacht had in fact perpetrated numerous atrocities, especially on the Eastern Front, and was fully aware of Nazi intentions toward its subject peoples. This knowledge was successfully hidden for several decades, until more recent investigations revealed the true extent of Wehrmacht complicity.⁴

The success of the “clean” Wehrmacht story left the Waffen-SS in a difficult position, especially when critics condemned the SS as a single monolithic entity. Waffen-SS veterans fought back, insisting that their force was an apolitical military elite—the “fourth branch of the Wehrmacht”—quite separate from other parts of the SS, who, with other Nazi agencies, were the ones responsible for the killings. They maintained that the Waffen-SS knew nothing of these events and, instead, was a corps of soldiers motivated by comradeship, patriotism, and a desire to protect Western civilization from the threat of communism. That this defense—or apologia—was fundamentally flawed did not stop the veterans from hammering home their argument. They were sufficiently successful to enlist a new generation of writers from North America and Europe, who adopted and further promoted the idea of the “honorable” Waffen-SS.⁵

In reality, thousands of Waffen-SS soldiers took part in the systematic killing of Jews, Slavs, and other civilians on the Eastern Front and in the Balkans, while smaller numbers of troops moved between the concentration camps and Waffen-SS field units and vice versa. Likewise, Waffen-SS troops engaged in the battlefield massacres of civilians and captured soldiers throughout Europe, on a scale sufficiently large that entire books have been written describing these atrocities.⁶ A few of the better-known incidents have been included in this work, if only to counter the fraudulently disingenuous nature of so many Waffen-SS apologias.

In defense of the Waffen-SS, they were far from alone in committing battlefield atrocities. All armies throughout history have behaved badly on campaign: raping and looting, murdering civilians and prisoners. While the Western Allies were swift to take the moral high ground during the war, crimes of this nature were committed by British, American, and French troops in Italy and northwest Europe. In one, albeit exceptional, instance, seventy-three Axis prisoners were shot by U.S. troops at Biscari in Sicily in July 1943, and although the American commanding officers (COs) were subsequently court-martialed, their punishment was minimal. To the Waffen-SS veteran, this was a typical example of the hypocrisy of “victor’s justice.”

There were, however, important distinctions between the battlefield crimes of the Waffen-SS and the Western Allies. The Waffen-SS certainly committed more atrocities and on a larger scale than their Western opponents. And in contrast to the Allied political leadership, Hitler and Himmler repeatedly demanded that their troops ill-treat and kill civilians and prisoners on the Eastern Front. These attitudes were passed down the chain of command, providing a sense of legitimacy to the men carrying out the actions.

A history of the Waffen-SS needs to go beyond just a listing of atrocities. It was one of the more intriguing organizations to come out of the Nazi system. For some of its officers it was a unique experiment in how to wage a new type of war, while to its political masters it was a means to ensure the ascendancy of the National Socialist revolution over the German establishment. And, of course, there was Himmler’s intention to use the Waffen-SS as military backing for his SS-controlled Europe.

Germany’s defeat in 1945 prevented the Nazis from achieving their goal of European domination, but the association of the Waffen-SS with some of the most terrible deeds of the war has inspired revulsion and fascination ever since. It has gained cult status, a popular subject for modelers, war gamers, and historical reenactment societies, as well as the general military reader. Much of this interest derives from its aura of toughness as an elite fighting force, the charismatic nature of its officers, and from more technical aspects, such as the early adoption of camouflage uniforms and, from 1942 onward, the use of some of the best weapons produced in the war. It was also fortunate in being able to call upon first-rate war photographers to provide a detailed visual record of its activities, which has subsequently filled many illustrated volumes of its soldiers at war.

The Waffen-SS has also become a subject of interest to academic historians, considering such factors as its ideology, structural development, social background, criminality, and transnational character. This book charts a middle course. Set within a narrative framework of the campaigns and battles fought by the Waffen-SS, it also examines its transformation as a military organization, from Hitler’s palace guard to Himmler’s mass army.

WHILE AWARE OF the dual military-political character of the Waffen-SS, the emphasis in this book has been placed on its military nature. Greater attention had been devoted to the units and formations that did the most fighting over the longest periods. As a consequence, divisions such as Leibstandarte and Das Reich are considered in some depth, while the ragbag of formations created toward the end of the war—of no military and little political significance—plays only a very minor role. Some basic information on all the divisions can be found in Appendix A.

Anyone writing on this or other German military subjects faces the dilemma of how much “German” to use in the narrative text. Some authors—presumably keen to identify with their subject—copiously use German words and terms. For the sake of clarity, I have tended to rely on English expressions, even though I have arguably broken this rule by using the distinctive SS rank system (see the Table of Comparative Ranks). Many place-names, especially in Eastern Europe, have changed in the years since 1945; I have used the versions most familiar to English-speaking readers, but with local names included where necessary. The (fairly) standard system of describing military units and formations is employed here: armies written out, corps in roman numerals, and the rest in arabic numerals (an exception is made for the German tradition of using roman numerals to describe battalions within a regiment).