Waffen-SS: Introduction

At the height of the Nazi Blitzkrieg across Europe in World War II, the Nordic runes of the SS spread terror and fear among the enemies of Adolf Hitler's Germany. From the west coast of France to the Russian steppes, the SS was in the vanguard of Hitler's effort to create a racially "pure" zone, where all other races would be the slaves of the German people. From the early days of Hitler's self-proclaimed "Thousand Year Reich", the SS had a special place in his plans for global conquest. At first it was seen as the guardian of Hitler's rule within Germany, acting as a brutal enforcer against his political opponents. The SS rapidly took control of many police and internal security organizations in Germany in the 1930s. It also had responsibility for ensuring the racial purity of the German people and, bizarrely, boasted an élite corps of genealogists to trace family "blood-lines" to purge those tainted with non-German blood. Once Hitler's rule was secure in Germany, he began to view his élite group of ultra-loyal henchmen as a key instrument to enforce German rule over Europe. SS men were eventually used to hunt down any resistance to German rule in occupied countries, massacre racial minorities and ensure the loyalty to Hitler of other German military units.

Hitler's creation

As his plans for this "state within a state" were taking shape in the mid-1930s, Hitler also began to envisage the SS as having an élite combat force to ensure no group in Germany could challenge his rule (the SS provided the guards for the concentration camps, where "state enemies" were incarcerated). This force would eventually be known as the Waffen-SS. Hitler devoted increasing resources on what in effect was the Nazi Party's private army. By the start of World War II in 1939, the SS was able to put a division's worth of troops into the field to fight alongside the soldiers of the German Wehrmacht (armed forces).

As the fortunes of war turned against Germany, Hitler began to lose faith in his "defeatist" generals and their demoralized armies. He turned to the Waffen-SS in the hope that it would keep fighting against impossible odds. By the end of the war more than a million men had been recruited into the Waffen-SS, and over a third of them had been killed in action.

In the aftermath of World War II, the SS as a whole was judged to be a criminal organization by the International Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg war crimes trials. All members of the SS were declared to be war criminals who had participated in war crimes, or in the planning of crimes against humanity. This ruling covered all branches of the huge SS organization, including the Waffen-SS, much to the consternation of its veterans. They claimed to be "simple" soldiers, just doing their duty like other soldiers.

Controversy raged during the 1950s and 1960s as Waffen-SS veteran groups fought high-profile legal battles in the newly founded West Germany to overturn the Nuremberg ruling, and win pension rights for their members. The judgement of Nuremberg could not be overturned, but in the ensuing refighting of history, many of the former enemies of the Waffen-SS appeared to question the old black-and-white assessment of Hitler's élite troops.

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