Waffen-S.S. was Nazi Party’s 'Imperial Guard’

Press, 15 June 1979, Page 13

Waffen-S.S. was Nazi Party’s 'Imperial Guard’

It was revealed this week that Dr Karl Doering, the II est German Ambassador to New Zealand served with the Waffen-S.S. during the Second World War. The Nuremberg war crimes court labelled the Waffen-S.S. 'an army of outlaws ...”

By

STAN DARLING

Most members of Germany’s Second World War Waffen S.S. were not directly involved in murdering Jews and other “racial misfits,” but their fierce activities on the Eastern Front helped make the mass killings possible. “In many cases, Waffen S.S. units broke the rules of military eti.ics which those soldiers with any feeling for tradition were trying to preserve despite ail the bestialities of this war,” a German journalist, Heinz Hohne, said in his 1966 history of the S.S. A former head of the foreign desk of “Der Spiegel,” Hohne said in “The Order of The Death’s Head” that the Waffen S.S. had 560,000 men in 1944, 370.000 of them in field units.

In spite of arguments that both sides were brutal to prisoners during the, Russian campaign, “the brutal reprisals for Soviet crimes taken by Waffen S.S. soldiers were out of all proportion, and repugnant to many of their countrymen . , Hohne wrote.

He added that many senior Waffen S.S. commanders tried to prevent such reprisals against prisoners. Former S.S. memoir writers after the war tried to prove that the Waffen S.S. was purely a military force, he said, but that was an attempt “to prove the unprovable.”

Many S.S. commanders had “simply put into practice in the field the lesson they had learned in the cadet schools — that the soldier’s supreme duty Was to deal out and to accept death.”

The Waffen S.S. reached the Eastern Front battleground in 1941, and “the

real saga of the S.S. army was about to open,” Hohne said. “Before it did so, however, a shadow had fallen upon the Waffen S.S. of which it was never to rid itself.” Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsfuhrer-S.S. and head of the German police,

“issued an instruction indirectly linking all forces of the Waffen S.S. with the murkiest corner of the entire S.S. empire — the concentration camps.”

They did not protest at the insult. Instead, “they accepted Himmler’s order without a word,” Hohne said. “They fell into line, held thei>- t-mguer and remained dumb . , " Ai Later, tney accepted 50,000 men for new divisions who had been trained in the concentration camps and “had been standard-bearers of political terror throughout German-occupied Europe. “They remained dumb, as they did later in the war when many a sinister figure from the eerie empire of terror and mass extermination was transferred to the Waffen 5.5.,” including a liquidation commando that had killed 300,000 Jews in the Kulmhof gas ovens, and 2500 men from the Auschwitz extermination staff. Hohne said that the regular military “detected in this new force a fanaticism foreign to the military tradition, and directed not only against the enemy in the field, but also against ■ helpless prisoners and the civilian population.” Eventually, the author said, “stories of barbaric treatment of prisoners-of-war by S.S. units were as numerous as the tales of S.S. bravery.” As the war went on, there was “introduction of unsoldierly types drawn from the cesspool of political fanaticism,” Hohne said, including the exchange personnel from concentration camps, and “the Waffen S.S. became apt to use all types of inhuman methods of warfare.” A fortnight after the opening of the Russian campaign, the “Viking” division had shot 600 Jews

in Galicia as a reprisal for Soviet crimes. In the summer of 1943. the “Prinz Eugen” division killed all the inhabitants of a village because it was reported that troops had been fired upon from the church. Hohne said similar atrocities were seldom committed by the Wehrmacht. In parts of the Ukraine, “the Waffen S.S. behaved . with such savagery that the people deserted their villages and took refuge with the Soviet army.” Even some German army units protested against the inhuman warfare methods of S.S. divisions, saying they had “an injurious ■ effect upon German interests in the area.” The picture of all S.S. divisions as "a collection of political fanatics” was a distorted one, but one not put straight by former Wehrmacht officers after the war. At home, German attitudes became increasingly anti-Waffen S.S., and there were recruiting problems. Many later recruits were “pressganged or lured into service, and they soldiered with reluctance,” Hohne said. The anti-Christian campaign drummed into the Waffen S.S. had not worked as well as expected. and many joined without enthusiasm. By the end of the war. about 909,000 Jews had been rounded up and murdered behind German army lines in the Soviet Union alone, 28 per cent of that country’s 1939 Jewish population. In the final years, Waffen S.S. forces included about 200,000 non-Germans from occupied countries.