SS-men of SS-Sturmbrigade Dirlewanger
IV. ‘Normal Soldiers’?
It has been suggested that as it expanded in the latter years of the war the Waffen SS grew to become more like the army that it fought beside. During the second half of the war, every third SS General and every fifth Colonel had come to the Waffen SS straight from the Wehrmacht. The Waffen SS was beginning to lose its specific SS cohesion as many of these men had had little contact with the dogma that was drilled into the early Waffen SS. The military tasks that the Waffen SS was asked to perform induced its commanders to conform to codes of conduct prevailing in the army. Much to Himmler’s annoyance, there was a tendency to use army rather than SS ranks. Likewise, the colour of uniforms and equipment was often assimilated with those of the army.
Differences between the armed SS and the army declined with the experience of front line combat, while the estrangement from the non-military SS grew. In October 1941 for example, it was reported that Sturmbannführer Loh, the Waffen SS garrison commander at Nuremberg, refused on principle all contacts with General SS and SD officers. Among the officers around Steiner in the Deutschland Regiment, opinions could be heard that ran counter to those of the party, according to Himmler. There were demeaning remarks about the General SS, as well as a willingness to criticise the decisions of superior SS agencies. In November 1942 Himmler complained to Hausser that ‘everything and everyone’ was being criticised from ‘military measures which originate with the Reichsführer, to political measures taken in the police sector’. There is certainly plenty of evidence that Waffen SS commanders were suspicious of their fellow SS officers, the Senior SS and Police Chiefs (HSSPF). In March 1942 Himmler asserted that the HSSPF were ‘allowed to help the Waffen SS, but otherwise these bothersome outsiders are not to be heeded’. It is worth stressing however, that although the SS commanders of elite units may have let their men criticize the regime and its agencies, in Steiner’s Viking Division, the most rebellious unit, criticism of Hitler himself was out of the question. It was only the policies of the regime that were questioned, the correctness of Hitler’s vision was accepted. The question was how to implement the Führer’s ideals.
Nevertheless, Himmler certainly believed that there was a danger that the armed SS would lead its own existence and withdraw into its own world, pleading exigency of war. On 23 November 1942, Max von Herff, head of the SS Personnel Office told the Reichsführer that there was ‘a circle around [Hans] Jüttner [of the Waffen SS Head Office] which must be watched. Neither their thoughts or desires are those of the SS. They simply wish to be an imperial guard, anything else is a side issue in their eyes’. To what extent the ideological chains linking Jüttner’s army to the SS parted as the war progressed is unclear. Certainly leading Waffen SS officers began to despair of final victory and felt handicapped by second rate replacements. The most interesting manifestation of this estrangement can be seen in the contacts between SS Generals and the resistance. If we are to believe those involved, it appears that both Sepp Dietrich and General Willi Bittrich, commander of II SS Panzer Corps, expressed dislike for the regime to Rommel, while Hausser stated the same to Colonel von Gersdorff. Their comments awakened hopes among the plotters that at least some of the SS units would remain neutral should the regime be overthrown. Fritz von der Schulenburg, a key resistance figure, attempted to establish contacts with Steiner and Hausser in 1943. Steiner was certainly involved in a conversation with him, even if there were no concrete results.
It is highly doubtful that leading SS Generals were involved in planning a revolt. A minority, though, were distancing themselves from the regime when the war took a turn for the worse. The majority however, remained loyal to the bitter end. Indeed, the notion that the Waffen SS was becoming like the army needs to be qualified. As late as 1944 two thirds of senior Waffen SS officers had been members of the General SS before joining the armed SS. Every second higher Waffen SS officer had been a party member before joining. Equally revealing was the fact that 25% of Waffen SS Generals in 1944 had been from the ‘old guard’ and joined the SS during ‘the time of struggle’ prior to 1933. It is doubtful that such men changed their views much as the war progressed. Many of the officers from the army without an SS background were ex-Freikorps men, so a consensus on Nazism would have remained. This kept the militarized formations under the same ideological roof as the rest of the SS. In the final years of the war many places in the Waffen SS were filled by the fanatics of the Hitler Youth. The vast majority of Waffen SS men had thus been exposed to Nazism in one way or another. Therefore, joining the Waffen SS for these men was likely to have been more than a question of military ambition. The armed SS would have served to strengthen Nazi convictions due to its status as the Führer’s ‘imperial guard’. Men like Hausser may not have been revolutionary racists like Eicke, but they held a set of beliefs that made a career in the SS possible. Although their views were similar to those held by most Wehrmacht generals, they joined the Waffen SS as they saw it as a distinctive force with its own characteristics.
As we have seen, these characteristics included its political status as an arm of the party and its fighting spirit in adversity. However, it also differed from the Wehrmacht in the extent of its barbarity. Our analysis of SS ideology has demonstrated how atrocities could be justified in what was defined as a war of annihilation, one where the existence of Germany was at stake. At the same time, the close organisational links with the rest of Himmler’s empire meant that the Waffen SS was to be called upon to perform tasks that the army was rarely involved in.
The scope and intensity of the Wehrmacht’s involvement in the Holocaust are of course contentious issues. For example, in a number of cases, front-line units of the army killed Jews in Byelorussia. However, these were more or less spontaneous outrages, not organized and systematic massacres. In the army rear area in Byelorussia, a division of labour developed between the SS on the one hand and the army on the other. While the 707th Infantry Division carried out mass murders of Jews in small towns and rural areas, SS and Order Police cleared the major cities. Overall, the relationship between Wehrmacht units and the Einsatzgruppen seems to have ranged from amicable to tense.
What is clear, however, is that while the Wehrmacht’s crimes were spontaneous, the Waffen SS had to provide men for the Einsatzgruppen squads from the outset. Einsatzgruppen A’s personnel consisted of 9% Gestapo, 3.5% SD, 8.8% auxiliary police and 34 % from the Waffen SS, with the rest consisting of technical personnel. The Totenkopf in particular had close links with the Einsaztkommando. In October 1941, when the division’s losses became grave, the company from the battalion then serving with Einsatzgruppen A were transferred back to the division. A secret SD document of September 1941 documented the reliance of the Einsatzgruppen upon the Waffen SS men to do the actual shooting of Jews.
As the invasion of the Soviet Union continued, the first wave of Einsatzgruppen were followed by the SS and Police Leaders (HSSPF) who were engaged in ‘anti-partisan’ actions, a euphemism for killing anyone that the Einsatzgruppen had missed. Here too the Waffen SS helped out. SS Sturmbannführer Magill reported that the 2nd SS Cavalry Regiment had assisted the HSSPF in killing 6526 ‘Jewish looters, Communists and secret members of the Red Army’, during an action in the Pripet Marshes from 27 July to 11 August 1941. This officer complained however, that ‘the driving of women and children into the marshes did not have the expected success, because the marshes were not so deep that one could sink’. Another example of Waffen SS participation in extermination is the report by SS Brigadeführer and Major General of the Police, Jürgen Stroop, of the destruction of the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw during April and May 1943. Among the units involved were two Waffen SS battalions that came in for high praise from Stroop: ‘Considering that…..the men of the Waffen SS had been trained for only three or four weeks before being assigned to this action, high credit should be given for the pluck, courage and devotion to duty’. The selection methods and ideological education of Waffen SS men furnished such good grounding that a few weeks of practice was all that was required to turn them into excellent exterminators. This was not the only occasion on which the armed SS was engaged in a savage act of reprisal in Warsaw. On 1 August 1944 the Polish resistance rose up in revolt in an attempt to liberate their capital before the Russians arrived. The revolt was put down by Waffen SS Obergruppenführer and General of the Police Erich von dem Bach-Zalewski, a former Einsatzgruppen commander, who was ordered by Himmler to raise the capital and exterminate its population. Over 200,000 civilians died in what was the largest single atrocity of the war.
Hausser and Steiner had to accept in their ranks men like Bach-Zalewski, Stroop and Haupstürmführer Bothman, an equally unsavoury character who had served at the Chelmno death camp where he helped operate the gas vans. They had to serve alongside Oskar Dirlwanger, a convicted child molester. His brigade was eventually designated as the 36th Waffen SS Grenadier Division and consisted of convicted criminals. When Dirlwanger’s unit was involved in the reduction of the Russian ‘Partisan Republic of Pelik’ some 15,000 ‘partisans’ were wiped out. The unit reported, however, that only 1100 weapons were found. A horrified civilian propaganda officer complained that some of the partisans had been burnt alive and their half roasted bodies eaten by pigs. The Eastern Waffen SS was equally brutal. In the Balkans, the racial Germans behaved with such barbarity that Sturmbannführer Reinholz of Einsatzkommando 2 protested against their inhuman methods which had begun ‘to have an injurious effect upon German interests’. On 28 March 1943, for example, a battalion from the Prinz Eugen Division murdered 834 civilians at the villages of Dorfu Otok, Cornj and Dola Delriji in Dalmatia. During their retreat from an area near Poporaca in Bosnia, the division’s 1st Mountain Brigade shot every civilian they came across, maintaining that it was impossible to distinguish the local people from partisans.
The SS military commanders may have believed that they were separate from murderers like Dirlwanger and the Eastern SS, but the elite units themselves were often responsible for atrocities. In 1941 a detachment from the Viking Division shot 600 Jews in Galicia as a reprisal for ‘Soviet crimes’. In October 1941 the Waffen SS were engaged during a civilian state of emergency in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. They took part in shootings and supervised the hanging of 191 individuals in Prague and Bruenn. In July 1944 Das Reich, searching for an SS officer captured by the Maquis, destroyed the village of Oradour-sur-Glane near Limoges in France and murdered 642 civilians.
Waffen SS personnel were even involved in medical experiments on concentration camp inmates. Oberführer Joachim Mrugowsky, Chief of the Hygienic Institute of the Waffen SS, took part in high-altitude experiments at Dachau for the benefit of the Luftwaffe. The experiments were carried out in a low-pressure chamber in which atmospheric conditions prevailing at high altitude could be duplicated. He also took part in tests to investigate ways of treating persons who had been severely chilled. In one series of experiments the subjects were forced to remain in a tank of ice water for three hours. Sturmbannführer Viktor Brack of the Waffen SS was engaged in sterilization experiments conducted by means of drugs, X-ray and surgery at Auschwitz and Ravensbrück.
It is not surprising that units of the Waffen SS, which had thus been employed for medical experiments, extermination actions and the execution of civilians, also violated the laws of warfare. Political fanaticism, combined with the fury of battle led to repeated breaches of the established codes of warfare. There occurred in Normandy, for example, between 7 and 17 June 1944, seven cases involving the shooting of 64 prisoners. The 25th SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment of the 12th SS Panzer Division were given orders stating that prisoners were to be executed after having been interrogated. Similar orders were given to the 3rd Battalion of the 26th SS Panzer Grenadiers and to the 12th SS Engineering and Reconnaissance Battalions.
However, it must be said that there were numerous cases of Allied soldiers shooting SS prisoners during the Normandy fighting. In the heat of battle, in the wake of seeing friends die, many men found it intolerable to send prisoners to the rear knowing that they would thus survive the war, while they themselves seemed to have little prospect of doing so. The difference however, was that the cases of Allied troops shooting prisoners were random and spontaneous, while the Waffen SS often held to a definite policy of liquidating prisoners. During the Ardennes offensive elements of the Leibstandarte murdered American prisoners at Malmédy after they had surrendered. Even earlier in 1940, the man responsible for this atrocity, Wilhelm Mohnke, had led the massacre of British prisoners at Wormhoudt in France. The killing of allied prisoners in the West destroyed the myth that the Waffen SS only reserved its excesses for the Eastern front, where the murder of Soviet POWs was a regular feature of the fighting.
VI. Conclusion.
It is more than likely that had a long war of attrition not intervened, the Waffen SS would never have become such a famous military machine. Instead, it would have remained a brutal paramilitary police force, as the Nazis originally intended. Our brief look at the origins of the Waffen SS demonstrates that it developed from the General SS and was not a separate organisation. Conversely, there is evidence in the military training and organisation of the armed SS before the war that it was planned as a combat formation from the outset as well. Himmler wanted his political soldiers to serve in the east as well as within the Reich. The transformation of a small emergency force into a vast army did not however result in any separation of the armed branch from the rest of the SS. Although tactically under the command of the Wehrmacht while in the field, it remained as much a part of the SS as any other branch of that organization. Throughout the war it was recruited, trained and administered by the main offices of the SS Supreme Command. Ideologically and racially its members were selected in conformity with SS standards.
The notion that the Waffen SS was almost out of SS control is incorrect. Despite disobeying orders, personality clashes and disputes, the armed SS fought on to the end for their Reichsführer. From the outset the armed SS was imbued with Nazi zeal, the only disputes were how to use the Waffen SS to further this ideology. All of Himmler’s principles may not have always been reflected in the Waffen SS, but the core belief in the ideal remained in the elite units, even if they did start to develop their own, at times rebellious, identities. At the same time, Hitler’s interest and thus his authority over the Waffen SS remained constant until the end, whether this was in decrees concerning its role or the posting of elite divisions to areas in crisis.
This discussion has documented the characteristics and beliefs of the men who organised, built, and served in the armed SS, and the various purposes for which they were used. The Waffen SS it seems, consisted of ‘heroes’ and ‘murderers’. Men like Steiner and Hausser were soldiers whose war-time record was unblemished. However, individuals such as Eicke, Stroop and Dirlewanger can only be described as murderers. The majority of Waffen SS men fell somewhere in between. It would be wrong to attempt to excuse the armed SS of its crimes as the post-war apologists have done, or to totally condemn all those who served in an organisation whose creation and development they did not control. Many soldiers served in the Waffen SS because they were conscripted or transferred. To ‘suggest that all these men were sadists, criminals and fanatics would be as ludicrous as the attempts by apologists for the Waffen SS to prove that the armed SS was not really part of the SS’.
Years of indoctrination and SS training had worked well and produced some of the most destructive forces in history. The combat records of many of the Waffen SS divisions was indeed remarkable. However, it was only the elite units that created this legend; the majority of the Waffen SS was moderate at best. Despite any admiration historians may have for the elite divisions’ fighting qualities, it does not justify the disregard of the Waffen SS for moral and humane codes of conduct. It is not that the Waffen SS exchanged personnel with the more sinister aspects of Himmler’s empire, nor that it included in its ranks organisations like the Dirlewanger Brigade, nor that Waffen SS units took part in acts like the repression of the Warsaw ghetto. It is rather the case that, willingly and in the normal course of action, the elite divisions, having adopted a different philosophy of war, were too often themselves the perpetrators of atrocity.
