The ideological SS universe helps us better understand the actions of the SS men, including the way they rationalized their war crimes and atrocities – a theme we will return to in a later chapter on Waffen-SS atrocities. The question of how ideology influenced and shaped practice at the front is, however, broader and even more complex as we shall see in the following.

Racial Differentiation at the Front

Moving eastwards, the soldiers of the Third Reich faced various ethnic groups which caused countless ideologically motivated reactions among the Waffen-SS men. In October 1941, for example, a Norwegian soldier in the Wiking division informed in a letter that he had lately been guarding POWs, most of whom were Ukrainians. Among these, he found that there was “much strangeness to behold” and continued:

A report from the second SS Cavalry Regiment August 1941 on the massacre in the Pripet Marshes also made a point of distinguishing different groups from each other. Here, the Ukrainians made a relatively good impression: ‘although they were small, they all were of a harmonious figure and build and had a clear look’. As was the case in the Pripet Marshes, such race evaluations could have drastic consequences for the locals. An order from Himmler's personal command staff stated that areas populated by völkisch Germans or Ukrainians, where they did not like the Poles and the Russians, were to be protected. Conversely, where the population was friendly towards the Poles or were ‘racially and humanly inferior’ everyone under suspicion of supporting partisans should be shot and their villages torched. Thus, in this and similar cases a racial distinction was made between the so-called sub-humans and those who might not be Volksdeutsche or Germanic, but were deemed racially acceptable to a degree where their lives were preserved.

Naturally, racial differentiation also applied to the SS internally. In the summer of 1943, for instance, general Steiner instructed his armoured corps to place emphasis on racial and physical appearance when selecting officer material.