Waffen-SS: The Waffen-SS and the Partisan War

Background

The Waffen-SS war against anti-Nazi partisans in Russia and Yugoslavia was a complete disaster. Faced with an enemy that was both elusive and tenacious, SS units responded with ever greater use of terror. This only served to alienate further the indigenous population, creating an ever-larger potential pool of recruits for those waging war against their German occupiers.

At the height of the Nazi Blitzkrieg campaigns in October 1941, German rule stretched from the Bay of Biscay to the outskirts of Moscow. Hitler's soldiers did not bring freedom or liberation to the peoples of Europe, but oppression. Arbitrary arrests, torture and forced labour soon became commonplace across the continent. Yet although the Germans had defeated almost every army in Europe, they could not so easily break the spirit of resistance that was growing by the day.

Resistance to the Germans

Armed resistance to German rule took on many forms, ranging from localized acts of sabotage to large-scale guerrilla warfare. German strategy for defeating partisans was fatally flawed from the beginning, because of Hitler's racial views and his open contempt for the peoples of Eastern Europe, whom he regarded as untermenschen or subhumans. Conventional strategies of counter-insurgency warfare, involving winning over rebellious populations with rewards or political concessions, were rejected by Hitler, who only wanted to subjugate and then exterminate peoples who did not belong to his Aryan master race.

As German troops rampaged through Europe, anyone who showed any sign of resisting Nazi rule, or was even judged to be capable of acting as a catalyst for resistance, was dealt with ruthlessly. Thousands were executed in random shootings and others arrested, tortured and shipped out to concentration camps. The only attempt to enlist local allies involved the setting up of pro-Nazi puppet regimes in Western Europe. In the East, such a luxury was not attempted; even anti-Soviet Slavs were still untermenschen in Hitler's view and did not warrant any political role. Police auxiliaries were recruited in Eastern Europe, but they were only used at first to help SS Einsatzgruppen to massacre Jews and other "racial inferiors". This role tapped into the latent anti-semitism in the Ukraine and the Baltic states, and indeed many of these auxiliary forces outdid their German masters in brutality. In the long term, this did nothing to win over the population to the German cause, and only served to create more discontent and further stoked the fires of resistance in the occupied territories.

The German response

Once the partisan war was under way in earnest, German forces followed a policy of showing no mercy to anyone who engaged in partisan activity or was suspected of supporting them. Captured partisans were routinely executed, and whole villages were razed to the ground for providing comfort to enemies of the Third Reich (or even for being suspected of doing so).

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