The Wehrmacht might be able to claim that defence, but I’m afraid the SS is far beyond it. The entire organisation stood for the ideals of the Nazi party, and all that involved e.g. genocide. It is not defensible or admirable in any way, shape or form.
The rest of…?
cripes, another ss debate. theres already an waffen-ss thread and an odessa thread about this. lets end it here.
i believe we have already been through this with you as you grandad was a heroic non-volunteer officer in the SS.
You still refuse after much evidence to even believe that the population of Germany knew of the persecution of the Jews.
I still refuse to accept your vision of the facts.
Tell me this, how did a civilised country renowned for its Arts, music, literature and science come to be governed by Nazis unless the general populace went along with it? After all the Nazis were voted in and didnt carry out a coup.
Well, the discussion is centred around an account of an SS atrocity. What was expected? Frankly, I find the entire organisation, it’s entire catalogue of deeds, and it’s entire concept repulsive.
And those are just the two I found on Wiki. Let’s be honest now. There is NO redeeming feature to any part of the SS.
well, firefly, i’ve been baited.
of course germans knew the jews were being presectued. its very obvious. but they didn’t know that the nazi’s were going to kill them all.
your whole issue about the waffen-ss,previously, is that you say that all 950,000 german soldiers of the waffen-ss knew about the holocaust extermination camps. I’ve never denied that the minority of troops knew for sure.
I don’t think the nazi party, before the war, told the german people that they were going to exterminate the jewish and slavic races for real, though.
It really does beggar belief that people such as that woman still exist - before making statements like that, you’d think that they’d just check a few facts? Rape on that scale was massively precedented - most notably by Genghis Khan’s men in Central Asia and by the German Forces when they invaded Russia a year or three earlier. What little information I’ve seen to give comparisons actually indicates that the Russians behaved far better than the German troops did in terms of Rapes, let alone the mass murders carried out by the German troops in Russia (not just the SS, the Wehrmacht was an enthusiastic participant).
I can think of one. The vast majority of them are dead. That’s about the only one though.
While I’m personally against the death penalty, I have rather a lot of sympathy for the Russian policy of shooting out of hand any members of the SS who tried to surrender.
So are you defending or condeming it?
I have quite a few German friends who wholeheartedly condem it, the whole thing, the whole nation was tainted with it.
Where do you think the German civilians thought all the Jews and Communists and Mentaly feeble were going then? To be resettled?
those pictures are men from the Einsatzgruppen.
They were NOT NORMAL WAFFEN-SS SOLDIERS.
These were select people with “special personalities and special training”. THey numbered 3,000 to 4,000 men.
The Einsatzgruppen
The Einsatzgruppen were four paramilitary units established before the invasion of the Soviet Union for the purpose of “liquidating” (murdering) Jews, Romany, and political operatives of the Communist party. Ultimately three of these groups (Einsatzgruppen A, B. and C) were attached to army groups taking part in the invasion. A fourth group (Einsatzgruppe D) was sent to the Ukraine without being attached to any army group. All operated in the territories occupied by the Third Reich on the eastern front. Most of the crimes perpetrated by the Eisnsatzgruppen took place in the Ukraine and the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania.
There were approximately 600 to 1000 men in each Einsatzgruppe, although many were support staff. The active members of the Einsatzgruppen were drawn from various military and non-military organizations of the Third Reich. The bulk of the members were drawn from the Waffen-SS, the military arm of the SS. In Einsatzgruppen A, for example, the breakdown of active members was:
Waffen-SS: 340
Gestapo: 89
SD (security service): 35
Order Police: 133
Kripo: 41
(Taylor, Anatomy, p. 510.)
Each of the Einsatzgruppen were further broken down into operational subunits known as Einsatzkommandos or Sonderkommandos
Are you a Nazi sympathiser/apologist?
… i’ve thought i’ve made it clear. I AM NOT A NAZI APOLOGIST.
the war in europe was sick abomination, unworthy of the german nation.
however, I know, objectively, that the majority of the soldiers of the Waffen-SS were soldiers only. thats all I’ve said.
So why not join the Army?
I still say, the majority of the SS were Nazi soldiers. A big diffrence mate, very big.
I agree that the majority of the waffen-ss were “NAZI” soldiers in the early war stage. 1939-1941. the waffen-ss were composed of just 3 divisions, around only 55,000 men.
the waffen-ss, in early war, was considered a select organization, (ie, you had to be at least above average height, racially pure, etc,etc,.) of only pure Germans, preferrably part of the nazi party.
the bloody battles in the early war-mid war stage killed off practically all the orginal SS-men. The orginal contingent of the 1st SS division had only a dozen survivors out of the orginal 22,000 men by the end of the war.
THen, the organization changed , in mid-war to late-war times. The organization expanded to 38 units, with more then half of the soliders being foreigners. The “racial, ideological” requirements were relaxed, as russians, ukranians, japanese, italians, etc. were part of this army. Majority were conscripted/transferred.
the main purpose of the enlistment propoganda abandoned the orgninal nazi principles and the whole thing became" join us, whatever race, and help us defeat the communist hordes from destroying europe!"
I don’t really know or care if they knew about the concentration camps. What they did in the field in Russia is enough to damn them for eternity.
both the germans and russians killed each other after they surrendered as practically a standard rule.
during the siege of budapest:
" some ivans came over and ripped my coat open. They saw the runes, and prepared to take my medals and shoot me. All of the sudden, a tall-dark haired russian officer came over and told them to get out of here. He said" you fought a hard battle. In our rear, there are as many swine that will value your life like grass. It would be prudent, if you got rid of your tunic and medals. And don’t give them to me, we don’t need your medals. We are Soviet Guards, the Russian Waffen-SS!"
Eventually, yes. Read up more on the history of it however and you’ll find a different story. The Germans (and I include both the Wehrmacht and SS in this) systematically and as a matter of policy set out to kill as many of the Russian prisoners as they could. I’ve mentioned several incidents before - the prison camp at Novo-Aleksandrovsk, where 18,000 men were held in a barbed wire cage with no shelter in the depths of the Russian winter with food sufficient for 1,200 at a stretch, or the plant at the Danzig Anatomical Medical Institute for turning Russian PoWs into soap. In the first six months of the invasion of Russia, the Germans deliberately starved to death 1.5 million PoWs. The total number of Soviet PoWs who died was approximately 3.5 million out of the 5.5 million taken by the middle of 1944 (I can’t find any decent figures for the whole war).
The Russian treatment of German PoWs was also reprehensible (roughly a million out of the 3.5 million captured died) but compared to what the Germans did to the Russians is relatively mild.
Good place to start reading about the treatment of Russian PoWs by the Germans in WW2: http://www.gendercide.org/case_soviet.html
well, most of the germans were killed on the field. half of german causalites died in ww2. the russians usually killed all the wounded after the war was over, less costly for maintenance, and their overstreched medical services, you see.
a lot of russian prisoners, were moved to concentration camps with the jews, etc., watched by death’s head units, and suffered accordingly.
To be fair a group of Brit POWs joined the SS. Although in true Brit fashion all they did was screw around and pass masses of information back to Britain!!!
Your claims that only the Todd Kopf units were the murders is rubbish. Many SS units were used to kill all manner of people.
The SS provided the men to machine gun the recaptured POWs from the “Great Escape” not the deaths heads.
Bergan Hohne claimed that it didn’t know Bergan Belson was there, or that thousands of jews were marched from the rail head (used today by the British 7th Armoured Bde) to the camp. The route went past the barracks and through a few houses.
how could they not know?
no the british frekorps didn’t pass any information. they were used for propoganda purposes and didn’t see combat. they weren’t even considered an important military force. a lot of them were lowlifes, and spent the war drinking.
totenkopft is part of the ss…
what I say is that the atrocities were committd by the 4,000 man ezantgruppen and the soldiers of the six concentration camp and anti-terrorist waffen-ss units.
nothing i say is “rubbish”.