Army of Evil: A History of the SS (30 page)

*
Von Galen’s status and popularity among the devout meant that the regime was wary of moving against him, but he was kept under virtual house arrest until the end of the war.

†
Brandenburg and Grafeneck ceased operation.

*
Some participants in the Holocaust, such as Eichmann, have claimed that Hitler did give such an order and indeed that they saw it on paper. But no documentary evidence has ever been found to prove these claims.

T
he combat history of the Waffen-SS—the armed military units of the SS—has been recounted in numerous books since the early 1960s. These have ranged from scholarly, exhaustively researched accounts at one end of the scale to schoolboyish hagiographies at the other. However, the background story of the Waffen-SS still remains shrouded in myth and misconception. For some, this organisation was nothing more than an integral part of the apparatus that murdered millions of Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Russians and others. On the other hand, there is a band of enthusiasts who argue that the Waffen-SS was a superb military elite, a fourth—superior—branch of the German armed forces that was barely related to the killers of the concentration camps, special task groups and extermination centres, with whom it merely shared administrative arrangements.

In part, this dispute stems from a continuing misapprehension about what the Waffen-SS really was and its complex relationships with the NSDAP, the state and the armed forces. Some of this misapprehension can be addressed fairly easily. The Waffen-SS was certainly not a military elite: in all, roughly 900,000 men served within
its ranks during the course of the war in some thirty-eight divisional-sized combat formations, many regimental- and brigade-sized units, and numerous smaller units and sub-units. The leadership, training, equipment and tactical effectiveness of these formations varied from excellent to abysmal. Some of its longer-established formations—primarily composed of native German volunteers and led by men who had been through officer training school—were of a very high standard indeed: the likes of the
Das Reich
and
Totenkopf
divisions were among the most effective field formations the Germans had, be it in the regular army or the SS. However, the Kossovar-Albanian
Skanderbeg
Division and the
Weissruthenisch
(Byelorussian) “volunteers” of the Waffen-SS 30th Grenadier Division were of such dubious loyalty and utility that they barely functioned as fighting units. Most German members of the Waffen-SS and some volunteers from the occupied territories saw themselves as part of a
corps d’élite
—as was expected within the SS’s ideological framework—but this was as much racial/political as it was military. Himmler was keen to establish an effective fighting force, but he was much more interested in the SS’s role in the rejuvenation of the Germanic/Nordic race. Consequently, racial and political criteria were given much more weight than military considerations in recruitment to the Waffen-SS.

Another myth is that the Waffen-SS did not participate in the Holocaust. During the war,
any
member of the SS could fulfil his obligatory national military service within the Waffen-SS
¹
—without joining the army, navy or air force—and thousands did just that. So a member of the Waffen-SS was just as likely to be a guard at Auschwitz as he was to be a grenadier in the
Das Reich
Division. For instance, Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz from May 1940 to November 1943, held his rank in the Waffen-SS, not in one of the other branches of the SS.
²

Occasionally, distinctions are drawn between the combat formations of the Waffen-SS and other parts of the organisation. For instance, one former Waffen-SS regimental commander wrote: “Formations such as the Dirlewanger unit and the Guard Battalions of
the Concentration Camps were not considered to be fighting troops and their inclusion in the Waffen-SS was [merely] a matter of administrative convenience.”
³
However, this is completely spurious. Waffen-SS formations serving in the front line came under the operational command of the
Wehrmacht
(German Armed Forces), but these same units were subordinated to the SS-Leadership Main Office when they were not in the combat zone. This was as true of the elite
Leibstandarte
Adolf Hitler as it was of a humble disciplinary unit like Dirlewanger’s. (see
Chapter 19
for details of Dirlewanger.) The difference was simply one of duration: the major combat divisions were in demand at the front in a way that the lesser units were not, and thus spent more time under conventional military command.

On the other hand, Waffen-SS units are often accused of committing more battlefield atrocities than their conventional army counterparts. This should be treated with scepticism, but that should not disguise the fact the Waffen-SS committed numerous war crimes, most notably against prisoners of war and civilians. For instance, in May 1940, members of the
Leibstandarte
Adolf Hitler—then a motorised regiment—murdered around eighty British Army prisoners near Calais. Around the same time, members of the Death’s Head Division massacred ninety-seven members of the 2nd Royal Norfolks. (see
Chapter 18
for further details of both of these war crimes.) These were terrible atrocities, but so were those committed by the German Army. For instance, 140 civilians were murdered by the 225th Division at Vinkt, Belgium, and hundreds of disarmed prisoners of war were killed by army units during the Polish campaign of 1939. Later, in September 1943, at least five thousand disarmed and defenceless Italian soldiers were murdered on the Greek island of Cephalonia by members of the army’s supposedly elite Mountain Infantry.
*

So how did the German Army retain its reputation for battlefield
decency while the Waffen-SS was deservedly castigated for all of its atrocities? The answer is fairly straightforward. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the army’s war crimes were downplayed and even trivialised by
all
sides for political reasons. The newly created Federal and Democratic republics (West and East Germany, respectively) both needed to establish functioning armed forces and both needed to recruit former officers and NCOs of the
Wehrmacht
to lead them. Under these circumstances, it was convenient to imply (if not outright declare) that the vast majority of war crimes had been committed by the Waffen-SS—an organisation that was already beyond redemption because of its involvement in the Holocaust. In reality, the Waffen-SS and the German Army were both guilty of war crimes, as each was a component of the National Socialist state’s machinery of war.

Notwithstanding this, in many respects, the Waffen-SS was unique. First and foremost, it was a primarily military force created out of a primarily political organisation. As we have seen, the SS was founded to protect the leadership of the NSDAP, and many aspects of its expansion after the National Socialists came to power can be viewed as logical extensions of this role. The creation of the Sipo, the concentration camps and central control of policing were all understandable adjuncts to the activities of a security-obsessed, violently inclined political organisation that had achieved absolute power.

However, the creation of a relatively small military force to operate in parallel to the conventional armed forces is less easy to explain. At the time, the government claimed that military intervention was inappropriate for many internal security tasks, so it needed a new, politically controlled force to deal with them. This is unconvincing: when the new units were set up, any physical threat from political opponents of the NSDAP was little more than a distant memory, while dissenters within the National Socialist movement itself had long since been purged. Furthermore, by then, the SS had acquired complete control over the regular, uniformed police. Equally, the armed SS units never rivalled the strength of the regular armed forces, so it seems unlikely
that they were established to counter the threat of a coup. Indeed, in 1944, when elements within the army did attempt to seize power, all agencies of the SS—armed and otherwise—proved powerless to intervene. Rather, it was left to other army units to come to Hitler’s aid. According to Gottlob Berger, the guiding force of the Waffen-SS towards the end of the war, the army originally treated the idea of an armed SS force with contempt. He quoted
Generaloberst
(Colonel General) von Fritsch, Commander-in-Chief of the Army, as remarking: “If the Reichs Transport Minister has his militarily trained Railway Police, why shouldn’t Himmler also play at soldiers?”
⁴
This is perhaps the most accurate explanation for why the military SS units were created: they gave Himmler the opportunity to indulge in the type of military career that had eluded him as a young man. He wanted the SS to take a pioneering role in the colonisation and “Germanisation” of the conquered lands in the East, but it seems he never seriously envisaged the Waffen-SS supplanting the army. According to Berger, the intention was to reduce the strength of the Waffen-SS after the war to seven full-strength divisions and five reserve, or “cadre,” formations. Three of the regular divisions would be formed from non-German nationals:
Das Reich
from ethnic Germans from South-East Europe;
Germania
from ethnic Germans from elsewhere in the world; and
Wiking
from other Germanic races.
⁵

No matter what Himmler’s future plans for the organisation may have been, the creation of a new, modern military force from scratch was a daunting task. However, he and his subordinates had the advantage of being able to use the proven and highly successful German military system as a template. Between 1934 and 1945, they created a parallel recruiting, training and logistics system, with its own officer-training schools, NCO schools and combat arms schools; hospitals; procurement, manufacture, research and development establishments; and even operational headquarters up to army level. All of this was separate from the established armed forces, and, to some extent, put the SS in competition with the regular army for funding and manpower.
As the Waffen-SS continued to grow throughout the war, it demanded resources that could have been utilised by the conventional armed forces. In so doing, it became an entirely self-imposed limitation on Germany’s ability to wage total war.

T
HE
W
AFFEN
-SS
HAD
its origins in the formation of full-time, armed SS units in the wake of the National Socialist assumption of power in January 1933. As we have seen, the Reichstag Fire Decree enabled Hitler’s coalition government to suspend human rights, and two months later the Enabling Act gave him the power to rule by decree without reference to the Reichstag. However, despite holding this unprecedented degree of power, Hitler remained anxious about his position. On 17 March 1933, he ordered Sepp Dietrich—who had been commanding the SS-Group North in Hamburg—to set up an armed SS guard unit in Berlin, similar to the troop that already protected him when he was in Munich. Dietrich recruited some 120 volunteers, primarily loyalists who were personally known to him from SS-Regiment 1 in Munich, to form what was initially called “SS-Staff Guard Dietrich” before being renamed “SS-Special Unit Berlin.” They quartered themselves in the barracks of the old cadet school at Berlin-Lichterfelde
*
and provided armed guard details for Hitler inside his offices at the Chancellery. (For the time being, members of the regular army remained on guard outside the Chancellery building.) Although a party organisation, from September 1933 they received their pay from the Prussian Ministry of the Interior and were under the disciplinary and administrative jurisdiction of the Berlin Police President. Immediate command authority for all of their activities outside the Chancellery came from the Lichterfelde garrison commander, Police Lieutenant Colonel Wecke.

During the Nuremberg National Socialist Party rally of September 1933, Hitler renamed the unit the
Leibstandarte
Adolf Hitler; and on the tenth anniversary of the Munich
Putsch
on 9 November, its members swore a personal oath of loyalty to him. By then, the unit had been granted the status of a special organisation, still separate from but with a comparable status to the army.
⁶
At the time, few people noticed that all of this had effectively created an armed force whose loyalty was not to the state, nor even to the head of state, but to the leader of a political party. Even Himmler, the National Leader of the SS, was cut out of this particular loop.

While the
Leibstandarte
was being formed in Berlin, local National Socialist organisations were mobilising their SA and SS contingents as auxiliaries. SS units of company strength and below—armed with privately owned weapons—acquired the status of
Sonderkommandos
(special units), while larger formations were termed
Politische Bereitschäfte
(political readiness units). These formed up in Hamburg, Dresden, Munich, Ellwangen, Arolsen and many other towns and cities,
⁷
where they operated as auxiliary police squads assigned to intimidate the National Socialists’ political opponents—notwithstanding the fact that, by then, almost all physical opposition to the ruling regime had already been eliminated. Meanwhile, other armed, full-time squads were created to act as guards at the newly established detention centres and concentration camps. The political readiness units were not particularly large at this stage: for instance, SS-Regiment 1’s political readiness unit in Munich could call on only two hundred men in 1934.
⁸
Nor were they particularly controversial in the context of 1930s Germany: as we have seen, squads of armed toughs had been doing the dirty work of the state ever since the end of the First World War.