One of the most astonishing paradoxes in modern military history is the fact that, during the Second World War, the extreme racist SS organisation engendered an army, which was possibly the most multi-ethnic and transnational army that the twentieth century ever witnessed. This was brought about by the establishment of a military branch of the SS, the Waffen-SS. During its existence, it expanded from a modest bodyguard at Hitler's disposal to a mass army through whose ranks passed more than a million men. Until the outbreak of war, the SS maintained high standards as to personnel, who were all volunteers. Not only did they have to meet tough physical and racial demands; by joining, they also entered a Nazi order of warriors demanding absolute faith in Hitler, unconditional subordination and profound ideological dedication as the pillars of their martial calling.

The head of the SS, the Reichsfu?hrer-SS Heinrich Himmler, envisaged an e?lite force of devoted Nazis, who would alternate between active duty in the field and other kinds of SS activities. They were not only to be soldiers but also role models leading a life as wholly dedicated SS men. They were to let their identity as members of the ‘order’ permeate all their doings including choice of spouse, reproduction, interior decoration of their homes, and celebration of red-letter days. Himmler hoped to create an elite of committed Nazis, welded together in a loyal brotherhood and hardened through war into merciless individuals, who would pitilessly annihilate the Third Reich's real and alleged enemies; be they hostile troops, Jews, mentally ill or any other so-called sub-humans.

While, until the outbreak of war, this order remained relatively homogeneous, the situation changed markedly during the war. Now, the SS began to moderate the demands on race and physical capability, introduced conscription and started to recruit from all over Europe. With these changes, the SS got new recruits, for example, from Norway, who were often as ideologically zealous as were the original German members. However, men who merely wished to avoid forced labour or were pressured into signing up also joined the ranks – individuals, who might not have heard of the SS before, now saw themselves in the uniform of this organisation. Additionally, there were hundreds of thousands of recruits from ethnic groups, whom the SS would never have admitted before the war.

In March 1945, an American interrogation officer asked Unterscharführer Kurt Kretschmer of Division Das Reich about his division's massacres and other atrocities in Southern France. He replied, ‘I do not know what happened, I was not there.’ The scope of the Nazi crimes made the investigation and prosecution gigantic tasks. In many cases ‘a perfect crime’ was at hand. Apart from the perpetrators, there were hardly any surviving witnesses. But even if evidence was extant it was uncertain that this would fall into the hands of the prosecutors and the judges. In the early processes, the war and the chaos of the times were still so close that the prosecution lacked a proper survey and the knowledge that later historical research based on archival material has been able to provide. Under these conditions, the perpetrators had an opportunity of lying their way out of their complicity in a way that would not be possible today.

Apart from being faced with an enormous burden of investigation, the Allies were hampered by big politics and the economic and military interests. In many cases, political-pragmatic considerations took precedence over the judicial processes. Therefore, the prosecution of the Nazi henchmen was imperfect in more than one way. First, because some sentences were passed on the basis of limited investigation and documentation. Secondly, because of limited resources or political consideration, many perpetrators were either not prosecuted at all, had very mild sentences or were granted amnesties.

The Sentence at Nuremberg

In November 1945, in the South-German city of Nuremberg, the Allies started the legal reckoning with the Nazi top tier. Over the following year, not only 22 surviving top Nazis but also the entire administrative and political system constructed by the Nazis, were being prosecuted. The tribunal had the authority to sentence whole institutions and organisations as criminals. The reason for this was to ease later prosecution of individual persons; hence the membership of such bodies would in itself become a criminal act. From 1 September to 1 October 1946, the sentences were passed: 12 death sentences, seven imprisonments and three acquittals, the NSDAP, the Gestapo, the SD and the SS were declared criminal organisations.

Along with other SS organisations, the Waffen-SS was dealt with in this sentence. In their testimonies, General Hausser and others tried to convince the court that the Waffen-SS was the fourth service of the Wehrmacht, completely separate from the SS.

It was far from all SS soldiers who were prepared to die for Hitler and Nazism. In March 1945, the western Allies crossed the Rhine, and the following month the Soviet offensive against Berlin was launched. No one doubted any longer that the downfall of the Third Reich was imminent. Thus, as a soldier of the Reich one might choose to go down with the regime or try to survive either by surrendering oneself to the Allies or by deserting.

During the last days of the war, the German SS men fought primarily in their own country and might hope to return to civilian life when the war was over. The foreign Waffen-SS soldiers’ situation was different; many of them would be facing trial in their home countries. Nonetheless, many perceived prosecution at home as preferable compared to falling into the hands of the Red Army, for example by seeking refuge in the remaining embassies in Berlin, such as the Danish and Swedish. These endeavours were not particularly successful, but many succeeded in avoiding capture in various other ways. From the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea, Baltic Waffen-SS soldiers got across to the Swedish coast or to Denmark and mixed with refugees. At the moment of surrender, other non-German SS men hurried into civvies pretending to be forced labourers, or they hid with friends, family, or girlfriends.

The extent to which the former SS soldiers managed to hide may be illustrated by the case of the 1st SS brigade. During post-war legal processes in West Germany, almost 1,000 former members of the unit were asked about their spell as prisoners-of-war, and it turned out that 10 per cent had completely avoided incarceration. Considering their war record as continuous participants in genocide it comes as no surprise that former members of the 1st SS brigade would do whatever it took to evade captivity. Those who, like the 1st SS brigade, belonged among the very worst henchmen of the Holocaust, were of course especially tempted to try to assume new identities during their imprisonment or simply lie low vis-à-vis the victors. Through listening to radio, Allied broadcasts, or the Nazis’ own propaganda, there was an awareness that the Allies had an ambitious agenda of bringing Nazi culprits to justice and that SS men were very much in the allied spotlight.

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.

After the defeat in the First World War, Germany was marred by considerable polarisation and by the presence and activities of para-military organisations. Economic chaos and extensive poverty together with street fights, political assassinations and coup-d’etat attempts characterised life in the Weimar Republic of 1918. Shortly after the foundation in 1920 of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) Hitler became leader. It was one of the political parties, which employed violence in its political struggle most determinedly. In the beginning, the NSDAP engaged various paramilitary organisations to protect their own meetings and harass those of other parties. However, gradually the party developed its own body of Nazi street bullies, the SA. Perhaps the most important sub-division of this organisation was the Stoßtrupp Adolf Hitler. At the same time, Hitler had a small number of men for his personal protection – the Stabswache (staff close protection team). The Stoßtrupp and the Stabswache would guard the party meetings and bully gate crashers, and the roots of the Schutzstaffel can be traced back to these units. Like the general SA and other Nazi organisations, these entities were dissolved in the wake of the Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923.

After Hitler's release from prison in the spring of 1925, his bodyguard was re-formed under Julius Schreck. This Munich-based team of merely eight men was soon to be re-designated the Schutzstaffel, and Schreck would become the first in a succession of SS leaders. Although, generally, the Nazis were very inspired by the inter-war paramilitary organisations, using the word Staffel was original. The word originated with the German army which used it to designate minor mounted, motorised or flying detachments. In September 1925, Hitler ordered Schreck to raise, and assume command of, a network of similar detachments all over Germany. Each Staffel should consist of ten men selected among the most trustworthy local party members. These were raised in a number of German cities, and in 1926 there were 26 such SS units in Germany.

Schreck was a devoted Nazi, but his organisational and political skills were mediocre and the newly formed SS units were weak. Thus, as early as 1926, Hitler dismissed him from his post. The new boss was the founder of Stoßtrupp Adolf Hitler, Joseph Berchtold, who soon replaced his title as Oberleiter (senior leader) der SS by Reichsführer-SS. Berchtold was considerably more activist than Schreck.

The year is 1944, a section of Waffen-SS soldiers of SS-Panzer-Grenadier Regiment 24 ‘Danmark’ are on patrol in the Oranienbaum Pocket. All of them are clad in SS uniforms and armed with rifles or machine guns. It is twilight and everything is calm. Prepared for action, the SS men steal forward searching for partisans. But wait a minute – there is something entirely amiss in chronology and geography. In fact, these are young men in a forest in Northern Zealand, and the year is 2013. They are re-enactors, members of Fronthistorisk Forening Danmark (the Society for Front History, Denmark) claiming to be re-enacting history.

Today, most SS veterans have passed away, but the Waffen-SS survives in the cultural practices through which we commemorate and understand the past, such as the above-described re-enactment episode. In the contemporary world, Himmler's black corps simultaneously serves as an important signifier among extremist right-wing groups, as a rallying point in the nation-building processes in certain east European countries, as an ingredient in pop-culture and as a symbol of the darkest sides of twentieth-century history. In mainstream political culture Nazism and its symbols, especially the swastika and the SS runes, have come to represent the antithesis of democratic values. The story of the Third Reich and the SS in the words of Alec Ryrie thus serves an important role in contemporary western society:

While this observation is valid regarding the overall political culture of western societies, there are important undercurrents where wholly different perspectives on the Waffen-SS live on. This chapter offers an introduction to the diverse ways in which the history of the Waffen-SS is used today.

Notions of the Waffen-SS

During the war, in the occupied countries, there was a general impression of Nazi collaborators as pathological deviants. The early post-war literature reinforced this notion by demonising the SS as the hub of Nazi crime. At the same time, there were many who attempted to delimit the SS, and by implication, the Waffen-SS, from the German population per se, in order to save the latter from accusations of complicity in war crimes.