Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (51 page)

Further reports from other battles also suggest that Waffen SS men were not invariably prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice. General
Heinrich Eberbach opined that the
“Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler” regiment in Normandy fought “worse than ever before.”
⁷⁸⁴
That estimation is supported by Allied sources and by the relatively small number of decorations handed out.
⁷⁸⁵

Interestingly, one of the few POWs who admitted to
desertion in the British protocols was an SS man named
Reichheld from the division “Frundsberg.”
⁷⁸⁶
Moreover, a statement by SS Obersturmführer
Otto Woelcky from the “Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler” division reveals a striking lack of fanaticism from an officer who joined the SS early on. In September 1944, Woelcky’s unit was ordered to help defend the
West Wall of the Siegfried Line between Germany and France. In a village behind the line of bunkers, he was quartered at the house of a woman who asked him a question:

We have no way of knowing whether Woelcky’s tale was true or not. But the fact that he was taken prisoner a few days later near the village of Prüm in western Germany speaks for its veracity. Apparently, Woelcky felt little desire to fight “to the last gasp of breath.” Woelcky had joined Hitler’s praetorian guard in 1933. But by the final year of war, he divorced himself from the SS frame of reference, showing understanding for the war fatigue of a civilian and refusing to take action against her defeatism.

The surveillance protocols reveal that SS men maintained surprisingly heterogeneous views of the war. At the same time, there was an unmistakable
tendency
toward radicalism, which we will discuss shortly.

Another common explanation for heavy casualties among the
Waffen SS, in addition to their fanatic readiness for sacrifice, was their lack of professionalism. There are numerous complaints about this in official Wehrmacht files.
⁷⁸⁸
It is difficult today to evaluate whether they had any real basis, but their frequency suggests that they weren’t completely spurious. The Waffen SS, however, wasn’t the only target. Official Wehrmacht correspondence is full of griping about often absurd forms of alleged misbehavior by the army and the Luftwaffe as well. Moreover, there were countless instances in which Wehrmacht members praised the achievements of the Waffen SS.
Sergeant Grüchtel, who piloted transport aircraft to and from Stalingrad, reported about
the collapse of the southern wing of the Eastern Front in the winter of 1942
–43: “We were all convinced in January and February that things would go badly in R
USSIA
. The Russians were hot on our heels. We had already packed our bags in S
ABROSHI
(?), the Russians were 6 k. from the airfield, half of the
U
KRAINE
had already been lost. Then on the 19th (?) February A
DOLF
arrived in person. From then on things went well. Then the S.S. Leibstandarte arrived. I didn’t think much of them till then, but the fellows set about it damned well.”
⁷⁸⁹

With reference to the battles in Normandy in summer 1944, a primary group leader from the
Organisation Todt, the Third Reich’s corps of engineers, opined:

The Allies more or less confirmed these assessments, writing with “respect” of the SS division “Hitler Youth.”
⁷⁹¹
And the veteran armored division commander General
Heinrich Eberbach also regarded the SS group as “excellent” and “illustrious.”
⁷⁹²

All in all, in terms of fighting morale and professionalism, the
Waffen SS was a heterogeneous institution, as was the case for all other branches of the military. Its military achievements, even in the narrow sense, can by no means be reduced to the cliché “fanatic but unprofessional.” The Waffen SS fought in much the same way as other elite units. An occasionally greater willingness to follow orders to the letter and fight to the death is the lone, if significant, difference between SS men and regular soldiers.

Wehrmacht soldiers defined the difference between themselves and the Waffen SS not only in terms of defiance of death, but brutality as well. It is somewhat surprising how widespread this view was among army, navy, and Luftwaffe men.

“The difference between Waffen S.S. and other troops is that they are rather more brutal and that they never take prisoners,” said one
Luftwaffe gunner in January 1943.
⁷⁹³
A war correspondent agreed that this was the standard procedure:
“The S.A. troops, the ‘A
DOLF
H
ITLER
’ bodyguard and the ‘Death’s Head’ ‘Standarte’ never take prisoners, they shoot them.”
⁷⁹⁴
A navy radio operator offered a moral assessment: “In P
OLAND
it was all right for them to kill captured Poles, because the Poles had killed and burnt captured German airmen, but I think it’s wrong that the S.A. troops should have killed innocent French prisoners.”
⁷⁹⁵
The moral standard here was clear. There was nothing wrong with shooting captured soldiers in reprisal, but it was unjust to kill innocent civilians. It is unclear where this radio operator, who fell into British hands after
U-99 sank on March 7, 1941, got his information. It could well have been secondhand, which would be an indication how early the
Waffen SS accrued its ambiguous reputation.

News of
war crimes committed by the
Waffen SS in France apparently spread like wildfire. A Luftwaffe reconnaissance specialist told of a friend who was in the SS “Death’s Head” Division:

The SS man appears to have boasted about his unit’s misdeeds in order to underscore the Waffen SS’s feared reputation, and the “Death’s Head” Division was the unit that committed the greatest number of war crimes during the campaign against France. Among them were the murder of 121
British POWs near Le Paradis as well as several mass executions of non-Caucasian soldiers from the British colonies. It was apparently standard practice in this division not to take any black prisoners.
⁷⁹⁷

Wehrmacht POWs agreed that the Waffen SS had acted no differently in Russia. On the contrary, reports of SS crimes against civilians and POWs there were even more frequent:
⁷⁹⁸

This excerpt exemplifies how Wehrmacht POWs used talk about
Waffen SS misdeeds to imply that the regular army had nothing to do with any
war crimes. Captain
Alexander Hartdegen from the staff of the Wehrmacht
3rd Tank Division reported, for instance, that his division commander had explicitly prohibited any executions of prisoners, causing
“trouble with [the SS division] ‘
Viking’ because we didn’t shoot the PW.”
⁸⁰⁰
The speaker in this case seems very eager to protest his own innocence: “I can tell you, quite honestly, that I have not taken part in any shooting throughout the whole war. Not in the regiments I was in either. No such thing occurred in A
FRICA
; we promised ‘fair play’ there, sometimes we even exchanged: tins of sardines for cigarettes with the English there. Thank God that sort of thing never occurred in our case.”
⁸⁰¹

We can no longer determine whether such statements were true. What is beyond doubt is that the fighting in
Africa was relatively fair, and POWs were not executed. The clear contrast Hartdegen draws between the “good” Wehrmacht and the “evil” Waffen SS is one that we encounter often in the protocols, and it occurs with special frequency in stories about the fighting in France in summer 1944. Numerous army and Luftwaffe POWs recount Waffen SS war crimes during this time. Men from SS division “Götz von Berlichingen” were reported to have shot all
American POWs,
⁸⁰²
while the
“Hitler Youth” Division was said to have taken no prisoners at all.
⁸⁰³
Men from the division “The Reich” were described as shooting two American medics they captured with the words: “Well, one of them was certainly a
Jew, he looked Jewish, and the other one was also.”
⁸⁰⁴

Sergeant Voigt from the Army Signal Battalion told of “horrific” scenes he had witnessed as the German military retreated from France:

War crimes in France are attributed almost exclusively to the
Waffen SS. There is scarcely any mention in the surveillance protocols of comparable abuses by Wehrmacht soldiers.
⁸⁰⁶
This conforms to the picture emerging from the latest research, which has found little evidence of Wehrmacht or Luftwaffe war crimes on this front and attributes responsibility for the most grievous abuses to the Waffen SS.
⁸⁰⁷

It is hardly surprising, then, that the Waffen SS never shed the reputation for extreme brutality that began to coalesce in 1939
–40. Alleged eyewitnesses repeatedly connected SS men with the murder of women and children, which was nearly always condemned as violating the military ethos.
⁸⁰⁸
While a POW, Major
Hasso Viebig met the first general staff officer of the Wehrmacht’s
58th Armored Corps, under which the SS division “The Reich” served for a time. Conversations with a
Major Beck opened Viebig’s eyes:

Viebig’s narrative refers to the
massacre of Oradour, in which a company from the division “The Reich” murdered 642 men, women, and children.

Few Wehrmacht POWs tried to maintain differentiated views when it came to war crimes. In April 1945,
Franz Breitlich was conversing with his bunkmate
Helmut Hanelt in the American POW camp
Fort Hunt. Breitlich tells of how Russian civilians had been mowed down by
tanks and
machine gun fire. “Our troops really carried out some business,” Breitlich generalizes. “The vanguard of the Wehrmacht not so much, but when the SS arrived, they really did some business.”
⁸¹⁰

It is interesting that Breitlich initially speaks of “our” troops, only to immediately qualify his statement by saying it was the SS, and not the Wehrmacht, who really got down to “business.” Very few soldiers went so far as to imply there was little difference between the Wehrmacht
and the SS. One was Colonel
Eberhard Wildermuth, who came from a relatively left-wing political background: