Read Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying Online
Authors: Sonke Neitzel,Harald Welzer
Wildermuth was no doubt well informed on the topic of war crimes as he had served on practically every front and had good connections to the German resistance. At the very least, he had witnessed Wehrmacht crimes in
Serbia in 1941.
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But the conclusions he drew were the exception to the rule. Most Wehrmacht officers simply denied that their troops had ever been involved in crimes of such serious dimensions.
In so doing, some even partially defended the SS. When
Colonel Meyne, as a POW, was confronted with stories about the
Waffen SS
burning down
villages, he replied: “They don’t do that sort of thing, they are purely fighting troops, there is nothing against them. It must have been those S.S.
Security Divisions, or something like that, about whom those stories were told.” A bit later, he added: “Of course there has been a lot of dirty business there, but it is quite clear to us that the Russians actually murdered all Germans there. There’s no doubt at all about it.”
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According to Meyne’s logic, the SS may have committed some crimes, but they were justified as a response to the
Red Army killing German prisoners. Meyne was one of the few POWs who saw little difference between the Waffen SS and regular army soldiers. To support this view, he needed to differentiate between those who fought on the front line and the Security Service men in occupied territories. The distinction was specious, but that’s not the point. It’s more interesting to take a closer look at Meyne’s perspective.
Meyne’s only experience with the Waffen SS came, as far as we can
tell, at the beginning of
Operation Barbarossa. As the commander of an independent artillery division, his men and the SS division
“The Reich” were both subordinate to the Wehrmacht
2nd Armored Group. The SS men fought side by side with regular Wehrmacht forces against the
Red Army, carrying out the same orders and sharing the same experiences. From the perspective of an army officer, it was probably nothing extraordinary that civilians were killed in this phase of the war, especially as the Eastern Front was witnessing a general eruption of brutality. In July 1941,
war crimes were occurring in practically all army divisions. The SS division “The Reich” was nothing special in this regard.
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Thus, in Meyne’s eyes, this group was more like a regular infantry division than, for instance, the
SS Cavalry Brigade, who murdered thousands of civilians in the Pripet swamps. That was why Meyne saw the
Waffen SS as examples of normal “fighting troops,” who had not dramatically violated any ethical lines.
Up until now, we have only discussed the recorded conversations of Wehrmacht POWs, and it may be questionable whether they are a reliable source of information about war crimes perpetrated by the Waffen SS. Perhaps SS men were a screen onto which regular army men projected their own crimes.
Navy private Lehmann, for instance, described how his unit discovered a secret
radio transmitter at the home of an elderly French gentleman near
Canisy, whereupon they “put him up against the wall and knocked him down.” Lehmann also claimed that
Germans were popular among the occupied French people, and that it was only the SS who had made “a mess of things” so that “people didn’t like this very much.”
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Lehmann clearly uses the idea of unacceptable SS behavior to excuse himself from any blame for French people’s hostility toward their German occupiers. Yet according to official Wehrmacht policy, the elderly French gentleman would have to have been tried by a military tribunal and not simply gunned down.
Most reports about Waffen SS atrocities are so general that it is impossible to confirm them. Given the countless crimes committed by Wehrmacht members, doubts can exist as to whether the Waffen SS was even uniquely brutal. So it is a stroke of luck that the British devoted considerable energy to listening in on the inner thoughts of Himmler’s political soldiers. In conversations with other SS men as well as members of the Wehrmacht, they chatted about the war crimes they had committed with what appears today to be astonishing ease.
Excerpts like this from the protocols give us a rare interior look at the mind-set of the
Waffen SS.
For example, an SS Untersturmführer recounted the following from his time on the Eastern Front:
K
RÄMER
: I have experienced it in R
USSIA
at
O
REL
. An MG 42 was set up in the main aisle of a church. Then the Russian men, women and children were made to shovel snow; then they were taken into the church, without knowing at all what was happening. They were shot immediately with the MG 42 and
petrol was poured on them and whole place was set on fire.
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Krämer was one of two thousand officers transferred in 1943 from the
“Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler” to the newly formed
“Hitler Youth” Division, and they had an enormous influence on the character of that unit.
A young SS man named Röthling fought in an armored grenadier regiment, where he came into contact with the veterans of the “Leibstandarte” Division:
“Our ‘Zugführer’ said that in R
USSIA
they always assembled about a hundred Russian PW and then made them march ahead over the mine-field. They made them blow up their own
mines.”
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In France, they had been forced to make do with cows, Röthling then joked. Discussing his experiences in Normandy, Röthling described his superior to a fellow POW, a regular army private first class:
R
ÖTHLING
: If the people here know what we have done to their PW we shouldn’t live much longer either. [The PW] was first interrogated a bit. If he said anything that was all right; if he didn’t say anything, that was all right too. They would let him go, and then fire fifty rounds with the MG when he was ten paces away, and that would be the end of him. Our CO always used to say: “What am I to do with the swine? We haven’t got enough to eat for ourselves.” Our CO had to pay dearly for all his sins against us. He died a miserable death by being shot in the stomach on the last day.
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Röthling did not see himself as a perpetrator of
war crimes. On the contrary, he says that his superior had sinned “against us.” This curious
narrative moment can perhaps be explained by the fact that war crimes were usually not carried out by seventeen-year-old new recruits to the
“Hitler Youth” Division, but by the veteran officers.
Röthling’s stories are not the only narrative evidence of the crimes of the “Hitler Youth” Division in Normandy. Even by Waffen SS standards, this division had a reputation for being not only particularly courageous, but especially brutal. “These were boy-scout types and the sort of swine who think nothing of cutting a man’s throat,”
Lingner remarked in February 1945.
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Even more explicit were descriptions of fighting partisans in southern France, as told by an SS man to an army paratrooper:
F
ÖRSTER
: They had it in for us, “Division Das Reich,” because in the
T
OULOUSE
(?) region we had killed more partisans than we took prisoner. We may perhaps have taken twenty of them prisoner and they were only for interrogation. Then we tortured these twenty too, so that they died.
Then when we marched up north, we marched via T
OURS
. They completely wiped out a “Wehrmachtskompanie” (?) there … … we caught one-hundred-and-fifty at one go and hanged them in the street.
B
ÄSSLER
: But then I can’t understand how they could kill off one-hundred-and-fifty at once.
F
ÖRSTER
: We saw them lying there with their eyes poked out and their fingers cut off. With those one-hundred-and-fifty partisans, whom we hanged, the knots were tied in front, not behind. If the knot is behind, the spine is broken immediately, but in this way they suffocate slowly. That tortures them.
B
ÄSSLER
: The SS know everything; they have already tried everything out.
F
ÖRSTER
: Just think of it. If they kill one-hundred-and-fifty of our fellow soldiers, then we know no quarter. That was the only time that I was in favour [of killing anyone]. We don’t do anything to anyone, but if anyone does anything to us, then we are …
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Förster is happy to chat about atrocities committed by his unit. When Bässler criticizes the number of partisans executed and the gruesome nature by which they were hanged, Förster claims that it was done out
of solidarity for fallen comrades, and this was the only time he had been in favor of such reprisals. The event Förster is probably describing was the execution by the division
“The Reich” of ninety-nine men in the southern French village of
Tulle, after the SS men had discovered the
bodies of sixty-nine Wehrmacht soldiers killed by the French resistance.
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As we have observed before, the trope of
retribution is used to justify acts of inhumanity, indeed barbarity. It is interesting that Förster exaggerates the number of victims. This is a typical means of making a story more interesting. It also shows that numbers of dead were a way of impressing listeners with one’s story. Figures were part of the narrative aesthetic of violence.
The surveillance protocols conclusively illustrate the nonchalance with which
Waffen SS men spoke about war crimes. Historical research explains this attitude as the result of ideological indoctrination and
brutalization during training, both of which were also closely connected to the concentration camp system.
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Evidence for this view can be found in statements by SS men throughout the surveillance protocols.
Kurt Meyer, one of the most prominent Waffen SS officers in the camps, did not bother at all to conceal his political orientation from the Wehrmacht generals. He had adopted National Socialism like a religion from a young age and dedicated himself to the ideology, saying a person could only give his heart once in life.
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Lingner, on the other hand, tried to explain his beliefs:
L
INGNER
: National-Socialism is racial doctrine put into practice, that is, all those who by their character and also to some extent in their outward appearance promise to become people of value—the basic idea of these people is equivalent to National-Socialism, if unadulterated by education. It can only be a combative action-loving one, never an out-and-out selfish one. Those fellows are Germans and whatever they think or do will always be right as it is
for
Germany. No need to change that.
I am convinced there is hardly anything to be said against National-Socialism as such, against its basic idea. It represents a German tendency absolutely. That some so-called Nazis like
W
EBER
at
M
UNICH
and lots of others behaved like swine, is a different story. Who can tell whether a true cult of
National-Socialism wouldn’t have been able to prevent this war!
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Men like Meyer and Lingner were not just paying lip service to Nazi ideology. Along the lines of Himmler, they truly saw themselves as political soldiers, whose task it was to school their men in Nazi ideas:
L
INGNER
: I am of the opinion that an army must in some way be equipped politically, otherwise it isn’t in a position to withstand a mortal struggle like this one. If one lets the ordinary soldier get drawn into the war, and for several years, without pumping into him in the crassest way the necessity for the whole struggle, then one meets with no success. In that respect the Russian education is exemplary.
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There is considerable evidence that Lingner wasn’t the only
Waffen SS leader to attempt the sort of ideological indoctrination he felt was lacking in the regular armed forces. Beginning in September 1940, unit leaders were officially responsible for both the military
and
political training of SS soldiers.
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Of course, the desire to indoctrinate soldiers doesn’t mean that even all members of the Waffen SS were completely infused with National Socialist ideology. As historian
Jürgen Förster has shown, the means needed for political indoctrination
—from instruction material to qualified teachers—were often lacking.
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And results often lagged behind expectations:
R
ÖTHLING
: We had a political lecture every Sunday, about the origin of the “Hitler Youth” movement and all that sort of stuff.
Our CO would arrive: “Look here boys, you know I haven’t got many magazines or books about political things. I don’t possess a radio, and I don’t feel much like it anyhow. I’ve got enough work to do during the week. ‘Heil Hitler.’ The session is over.”
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Political education, of course, is only one aspect of ideological conditioning. Indeed, lectures are but the smallest part of the latter. Far more important is the construction of an ideologically charged
frame of reference. Practice is the most significant factor in forming attitudes.
A young German did not become a committed SS man only by reading pamphlets. He had to be bound up in a network of common practices. This point is often overlooked when analysts draw conclusions about the ideologization of a group from the existence of political concepts and education. It is easy for individuals to maintain distance from mottos and rules they are forced to write out over and over. It is much harder for them to divorce themselves from things of which they have been a part. For this reason, National
Socialist commemoration ceremonies and parties to mark the winter and summer solstices, the Party’s own judicial system,
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and the special rules applying to
marriage
830
played a far greater socializing role than education in organizations like the SS.
Röthling, in any case, had much more vivid memories of those sorts of events. He recalled that he had been instructed as to the appropriate marriage behavior and told that he should try to find an
Aryan
“girl” and ensure that there were “future generations.”
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An additional factor bolstering personal identification was the cult of hardness that was encouraged by brutal elements within young men’s SS training. An SS man named
Langer from the
“Hitler Youth” Division recalled: “In the
Waffen SS you couldn’t do anything if an ‘Unterführer’ hit you during the training. The purpose of the training is to make you just as they are; it’s pure sadism.”
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