Right. So you still avoid the main question, and have once again turned the premise around now to the last year of the war. The trouble with this premise is that its difficult to view the last year of the war in a vacuum. The SS already had a reputation before D-Day. So to try and explain more about the SS we have to take a trip back in time.
On 17 Aug 1938 Hitler wrote:
‘The SS Verfuegungstruppe is neither a part of the Wehrmacht nor a part of the police. It is a standing armed unit exclusively at my disposal.’
So we can definitely see here that the SS was not part of the Army. He also goes on to say the following relating to SS mobilization:
“In that case it comes completely under military laws and regulations, but remains a unit of the NSDAP politically.”
Politically then, the Party always retains control of the SS. Im sure there is no disputing this.
Leading on from this the SS were political soldiers, an extract from their recruiting pamphlet states:
“If you answer the call of the Waffen SS and volunteer to join the ranks of the great Front of SS Divisions, you will belong to a corps which has from the very beginning been directed toward outstanding achievements, and, because of this fact, has developed an especially deep feeling of comradeship. You will be bearing arms with a corps that embraces the most valuable elements of the young German generation. Over and above that you will be especially bound to the National Socialist ideology.”
There is no doubt that they were to be Nazis first and foremost. The formation of the Armed SS was to be around a core of Deaths Head SS which was to be used as a Skeleton of men to flesh out the coming SS Divisions. Again from the Aug 1938 edict by Hitler:
“The skeleton corps-which up to now were units of the two replacement units for the short time training of the reinforcement of the SS-Totenkopf Verbaende-will be transferred to the SS-Verfuegungstruppe as skeleton crews of the replacement units for that unit.”
Now I realise all this was before the war started and certainly not in the last year that we want to focus on. But it serves as the basis for looking ahead and establishes that the Armed SS were always meant to be an arm of the Party.
We now have to skip ahead to April 1943 and a speech by Himmler:
“One basic principle must be the absolute rule for the SS men : We must be honest, decent, loyal and comradely to members of our own blood and to nobody else. What happens to a Russian, to a Czech, does not interest me in the slightest. What other nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type, we will take, if necessary, by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only so far as we need them as slaves for our culture; otherwise, it is of no interest to me. Whether 10,000 Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an antitank ditch interests me only insofar as the antitank ditch for Germany is finished.”
“That is what I want to instill into this SS and what I’ believe I have instilled in them as one of the most sacred laws of the future.”
So says the head of the SS, the year before D-Day.
Now we can come to the premise that the Waffen-SS were largely unaware of the Holocaust. This was the original premise before it was slanted to read, In the last year of the War the allies committed as many atrocities as the SS in the West.
I just don’t believe it, the core of the SS certainly knew. Right up until the end of the war the SS were mainly volunteers imbued with Nazism. You cannot even attempt to separate the SS from the Party and therefore they are tarred with the same brush. To simply say that they were ordinary blokes is not true, they weren’t.
And therein, in my opinion, lies the differences between the fighting man of the Allied democracies and the SS. The SS were volunteers who were draw into the organization through a combination of means. They were party soldiers who genuinely believed in the Master Race and had been indoctrinated for years by the Nazi regime. As such they did not have the same respect for other societies that the Allies in the West did.
And finally
By 1944, with the Concentration Camps fully integrated with the Waffen-SS and under the control of the WVHA, a standard practice developed to rotate SS members in and out of the camps, based on manpower needs and also to give assignments to wounded Waffen-SS officers and soldiers who could no longer serve in front line combat duties. This rotation of personnel is the main argument that nearly the entire SS knew of the Concentration Camps, and what actions were committed within, making the entire organization liable for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Notice the word rotate! I fail to see why the majority could somehow not know!
It was for these reasons that the Nuremberg commission declared the whole of the SS as War criminals.
The Western allies did not hate other races, there were no political Armies, they just wanted to get the job over with. Unfortunately though, the SS will no doubt have brought some of the actions carried out by the Allies upon themselves, by their very treatment of the races they attempted to enslave, and it was to be enslavement.
In conclusion then, how can anyone admire this organization? I think it was particularly vile to be honest.
Of course now we have to jump to 1944. As Ive droned on for long enough here I will attempt to put that right in another post.
Sources: Various Nazi speeches, 1938 onwards and extracts from the Nuremberg trial files.
