By Matthew Thomas
National Maritime Museum, London
In March 1942 a secret report by the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) commented on the German public’s perception of the Waffen SS: ‘by its achievements the Waffen SS has won its place in the popular esteem. Particular reference is made to the good comradeship between officers, NCOs and men’. However, ‘voices are heard saying that SS men are ruthlessly sacrificed. The Waffen SS is said to rush on regardless because it thinks it must get ahead of the Wehrmacht’. Worse still, ‘critical voices are heard to be saying that the Waffen SS is a sort of military watchdog. SS men are trained to be brutal and ruthless, apparently so that they can be used against other German formations if necessary’. The general impression: ‘the Waffen SS is the most ruthless force, it takes no prisoners, but annihilates its enemy’. This popular picture is an accurate one and demonstrates that the German people regarded the Waffen SS as a unique force, distinct from the army that it fought beside.
For the victorious Allies the Waffen SS was indeed different from the army. However, this was because it was declared to be an integral part of Himmler’s SS empire. At Nuremberg the armed SS was indicted as a criminal organisation alongside the Gestapo and camp guards. Since the war however, Waffen SS veterans, through the Association of Soldiers of the former Waffen SS, have argued that the formations that they served in were purely military bodies. They maintain that it is only through a misunderstanding of the structure of the SS that the Waffen SS can be shown to have had links with the rest of the organisation. The Waffen SS, they claim, knew nothing of the camps and murder squads, and those few Waffen SS men who did take part in atrocities, were not true SS soldiers, but criminals, who should not have been in the Waffen SS, and untrustworthy ethnic recruits. They even claim that the Waffen SS, with its foreign volunteer units, was an anti-Soviet forerunner of NATO. The veterans were not alone in the belief that the Waffen SS was a purely military organisation. In the Deutsche Soldatenzeitung of August 1956, Konrad Adenauer is reported to have said that ‘the men of the Waffen SS were soldiers, just like the others’.
Of more interest than the attempts of the veterans and of German politicians to rehabilitate the record of the Waffen SS, is the growth of revisionist historical work. Several authors have gone as far as claiming that the ‘SS soldier imbued with hatred was a rarity even during the war’, and that the Waffen SS ‘were not fanatical Nazis committing unsoldierly acts, but ordinary young men’. The majority of these men, ‘were not political at all’. Was the Waffen SS really a fine military body, whose reputation was spoiled by a few individuals, or an integral part of the SS and as such equally guilty?
The apologists also maintain that the Waffen SS was called upon to bear the heaviest burdens in the most testing crises in the war. Moreover, they claim that it fought consistently harder and longer than equivalent army units. We will therefore seek to assess the organisation’s combat role. Although the reputation of the Waffen SS as fighting units is second to none, we shall see that not all of its units were of the highest quality. Nevertheless, there were occasions in which the intervention of the armed SS did effect the outcome of important battles. The elite units were characterised by their ability to retain their fighting spirit and combat effectiveness in defeat as well as in victory.
They were also defined by their ruthless behaviour towards both enemy soldiers and civilians. The ‘enduring presence of these qualities, especially in the Russian conflict, raises one of the most basic questions namely what influences were decisive in producing such qualities and in moulding the Waffen SS into the political and military instrument that performed and behaved as it did’. This paper will seek to answer this question through an analysis of the organisation, its origins, ethos and behaviour.
I. Origins.
If we are to understand the war-time actions of the Waffen SS, we have to study its origins and question the motives behind its formation and growth. We will look at the three formations that were to make up the original core of the Waffen SS. These were the SS Verfügungstruppe (SSVT), the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler and the Totenkopfverbände concentration camp guards. The SSVT originally developed from the armed bands of SS men who were terrorising the opposition in the months after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in January 1933. One such political alarm squad or Politische Bereitschaft was the SS police unit Standarte Deutschland in Bavaria, later the core of the Das Reich division. Such armed units of political warriors from the Allgemeine (General) SS covered the country and practised terror in preparation for a civil war that many believed possible on 30 June 1934. Standarte Deutschland and other Politische Bereitschaften took part in the Night of the Long Knives and murdered party and SA leaders throughout Germany. Such actions by the future SSVT were important in sowing the idea of an armed force in Himmler’s mind.
Hitler rewarded Himmler for his work during the purge by allowing him to raise the SS to an independent arm of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), no longer subject to the control of the Sturmabteilung (SA). Also, in conjunction with General Blomberg, the defence minister, he allowed Himmler to set up the SSVT from the various Politische Bereitschaften then in existence. In a decree of September 1934 Hitler outlined the main task of the new force. Trained on military lines, it was to be ready for a fanatical war of ideology that would occur within Germany should the regime’s opponents rebel. The force was to remain as part of the SS and therefore of the NSDAP. Only in the event of war would it be employed for military purposes, in which case only Hitler could decide how and when it would be used. It was stressed that 25,000 Allgemeine SS men could be mobilized into this political police force to allow the army to concentrate on any external foe. The high command intended to confine the SS units to internal tasks, but if Hitler decided to give them a role outside the Reich, their military deployment was unavoidable. This meant that in wartime the army would have to aspire to their integration into the army, giving credence to Paul Hausser’s claim that the Waffen SS was always seen as part of the army.
However, at this time, the SSVT was clearly intended to be an armed state police, not a crack combat unit. Blomberg would never have agreed to the establishment of the SSVT had he thought it would become a new army that would rival the Wehrmacht. He saw the SSVT, as did Hitler, as a police force. After all, he would not have supported the removal of the SA threat to the army if he thought that the SS would replace them. The decree was an early attempt to limit the military ambitions of the SS and served to mollify the army. At the same time however, it showed that the existence of armed SS units had been accepted by the army high command.
One of the units involved in the purge of June 1934 was the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, a squad of SS men that formed Hitler’s bodyguard under the leadership of Sepp Dietrich. Like its counterpart, the SSVT, the Leibstandarte was not envisaged as a military unit, but as a political force which in addition to guarding the Führer and carrying out ceremonial duties, could be used against internal enemies. As Hitler’s personal guard, the Leibstandarte was answerable to him alone. It was the most elite formation of the most elite order of the Reich. Hitler had created a unit under his sole command, one day he could use it as a military force, the next as an instrument of terror. The Leibstandarte demonstrated this use of terror on 30 June 1934. Two companies of the bodyguard arrested and shot the SA leaders at Bad Wiessee. The purge had the effect of making the bodyguard a criminal organisation from the very outset.
In December 1934 Himmler issued a directive re-organising the Bereitschaften and amalgamating them with the bodyguard, which became part of the SSVT. However, the Reichsführer realised that his new force would require arms and military training if it was going to carry out the tasks that the Führer demanded. The arms question was solved when, on 17 June 1936, Himmler was appointed head of all police units in Germany. With this development the SSVT was amalgamated into the SS police empire. Himmler was therefore able to plead his case with the army to arm the SSVT, claiming that it was indeed a police unit and not an attempt to replace the Wehrmacht.
The military training of the Reichsführer’s new force would require men with army experience. Soldiers, however, were unlikely to join an organisation that was in effect indistinguishable from the police. Himmler was therefore forced again to conceal the true purpose of the SSVT. His deceptive picture of a new imperial guard succeeded in attracting ex-officers to the SSVT. There ‘can be no other explanation for the fact that even today Waffen SS commanders seriously believe that from the outset they were serving in a normal military force’. Ex-officers like Hausser and Felix Steiner began training the SSVT as a military organisation. Hausser became Inspector of the SSVT in 1936.
Whatever Steiner and Hausser may have believed, the SSVT was to remain part of Himmler’s state protection corps. The Reichsführer was determined that the armed SS, under Hausser’s military inspectorate, would not become independent from the rest of the SS. The inspectorate was therefore subordinated to the SS central bureau and Hausser’s military emphasis was kept in check through the indoctrination of the SS Race and Settlement Office (RSHA). The men of the SSVT were accordingly told that they must be ready at all times to act ruthlessly against any enemy within Germany. The type of function that the SS head office thought suitable for the SSVT before the war was evident during the ‘Kristallnacht’ of 9 November 1938, when the SSVT in Vienna helped burn down the synagogues.
Prior to the ‘Kristallnacht’, on 17 August 1938, Hitler decreed that the role of the SSVT was not purely as a police force or as an army unit, but as a party political unit at his personal disposal. In the field the army would control it, but it remained part of the NSDAP. Hausser later claimed that this was kept secret from his men, suggesting that Himmler’s deception that they were serving in a normal military force was well planned. The Reichsführer however, envisaged the SSVT as a new form of political soldiery, combining the internal police role with military training. This would allow it to take part in what he saw as the ultimate mission of Nazism, to fight the enemies of the Reich in the east. After all, why would Himmler have recruited men like Hausser if he did not intend his force to be used outside Germany? The true purpose of the SSVT was revealed in September 1939.
Given that the SSVT had been officially designated as having both an internal and external rule by Hitler’s decree, it had become the rival that the army had always feared. Accordingly, on 19 August 1939 the high command of the German forces, Oberkommamdo der Wehrmacht (OKW), sent the SSVT an order from Hitler: ‘The SSVT is placed under the commander in chief of the army. He will lay down their employment in accordance with my directives’. For one campaign at least, Hausser and Steiner could nurse the view that they were indeed normal soldiers. However, both the army and the SS command found the performance of the SSVT in Poland to be unsatisfactory. The SS leadership believed that they could not count on adequate equipment from the army. Himmler subsequently persuaded Hitler that the effectiveness of the SS would have been improved if its units had been allowed to operate as a single division with its own equipment instead of being distributed among army formations and dependent on the latter for supplies. Hitler agreed that in the forthcoming campaign in the west, the SSVT (with the exception of the Leibstandarte, which would remain an independent formation) and their support units would be grouped together as a single division, the SS Verfügungsdivision (later re-named 2nd SS Division Das Reich). Hitler also authorised the formation of two new divisions, the 3rd SS Division Totenkopf and the 4th SS Polizei Division.
Given that OKW, opposed as it was to any expansion of the Waffen SS, would not allow army draftees to join the SS, Himmler was forced to draw on outside sources of manpower. These were the men of the Totenkopfverbände concentration camp guards and the Ordungspolizei. Himmler agreed to the drafting of the Totenkopfverbände as he feared that the army would soon begin recruiting them since service with the organisation did not count as national military service. Rather than let the army poach the Totenkopfverbände guards, Himmler used them to expand the Waffen SS. In any case, the Reichsführer viewed the Waffen SS as an integral part of his SS order, so he saw nothing wrong in linking the two. Hitler’s acceptance of the expansion of the Waffen SS meant that the SSVT and Leibstandarte (also given divisional status in the reforms) were linked to the most notorious unit within the SS. The Waffen SS veterans who later claimed that they were ‘normal soldiers’ never protested however; they silently accepted Himmler’s decree.
The linking of the SSVT with the Totenkopfverbände poses important questions about Waffen SS criminality, since the former were responsible for the torture and murder of Jews and the regime’s political opponents. Their leader was Theodore Eicke, commandant of Dachau, inspector of the camps, murderer of Ernst Röhm and later General of the Totenkopf Division. With the invasion of Poland the Totenkopfverbände were called on to carry out ‘police and security measures’. What these measures involved is demonstrated by the record of SS Totenkopf Standarte Brandenburg. It arrived in Wloclawek on 22 September 1939 and embarked on a four day ‘Jewish action’ that included the burning of synagogues and executing en masse the leaders of the Jewish community. On 29 September the Standarte travelled to Bydgoszcz to conduct an ‘intelligentsia action’. Approximately 800 Polish civilians and what the SD termed ‘potential resistance leaders’ were killed. The Totenkopfverbände was to become one of the elite SS divisions, but from the start they were among the first executors of a policy of systematic extermination.
Waffen SS apologists have focused on the atrocities of the Totenkopf, pointing to their concentration camp origins and crimes during the Polish campaign, while maintaining that the SSVT and Leibstandarte were free from such dishonour. Our analysis of the origins of the formations that were to become three of the best SS divisions demonstrates that the Totenkopf certainly did have unsavoury origins, but then so did the Leibstandarte and the SSVT, participating as they did in the ‘Blood Purge’ and the ‘Kristallnacht’. Nor were they restricted to a purely military role in Poland. Members of the Leibstandarte, for example, massacred 50 Jews after they had been made to repair a damaged bridge.
Such atrocities demonstrate that the core of what was to become the Waffen SS was a repressive organisation from the outset. The armed SS was also closely integrated into the rest of the SS structure, particularly after November 1935, when the SS Central Bureau became responsible for the leadership functions, organisation and training of the General SS and Waffen SS. On 17 April 1940 this integration was complete when Himmler issued a directive outlining the units which he intended to regard as part of the Waffen SS. As well as the combat units and their replacements, it was to include the concentration camp guards, who were to wear the same uniform. At the same time, the Waffen SS Central Bureau became responsible for the equipping and training of the combat and guard units. The decree also stated that all transfers between the camps had to now pass via Waffen SS headquarters. From this period onwards, transfers between the camps and armed SS were to become common practice.
The April 1940 decree also stated that the SS Legal Main Office was to control the administration of court-martials and discipline within the Waffen SS. The Hitler order of 17 August 1938 had, it is true, provided that in the event of mobilization the armed SS should come under military laws and regulations. That provision was modified by the April 1940 decree and the earlier declaration of 17 October 1939 relating to jurisdiction in penal matters. These two decrees established a special jurisdiction for SS men, including members of the SS militarized units, in cases which would ordinarily fall under the jurisdiction of the Wehrmacht; and created special SS courts to handle such cases under the direction of the SS Legal Main Office. Thus, in the question of discipline and criminality, as well as in recruiting, administration, and supply, the Waffen SS was subject to the SS Supreme Command, not the army.
