SS "special duties"

It has been estimated that at the height of the war, some 10,000 Waffen-SS men were serving away from their combat divisions on "special duties", supporting SS murder campaigns in the occupied East. The Waffen-SS also benefited from the huge SS slave labour empire, with weapons, uniforms, supplies and other equipment being provided direct from SS-controlled factories and warehouses in the main concentration camps.

Senior Waffen-SS officers had a hard time trying to deny they knew anything about the Final Solution. The ultimate Waffen-SS combat soldier, Joachim Peiper, served as Himmler's adjutant for a time, organizing meetings between the SS chief and heads of the concentration camp system. At least six Waffen-SS generals also at one time or another in the war held command appointments in the concentration camps, overseeing the mass murder of Jews and the use of millions of other prisoners for slave labour. One Waffen-SS general, Karl Wolff, boasted, "special joy now that 5000 members of the Chosen People [the Jews] are going to Treblinka [a death camp] every day". After the war Wolff was sentenced to four years in prison by a de-Nazification court in Germany. He served one week of his sentence before being released.

War crimes in the Balkans

Waffen-SS crimes in the Balkans were of the same order as those in Russia, but had an added element because of the large number of local troops recruited into Waffen-SS ranks. Croat, Albanian and Bosnian Muslim units of the Waffen-SS treated the anti-partisan campaign in Yugoslavia as an extension of their age-old ethnic feuds, and were responsible for a series of horrendous massacres that the German High Command tried to pass off as battles. German Waffen-SS commanders let their acolytes do their worst because it suited their purposes of keeping the ethnic communities in Yugoslavia fighting each other, and reducing the number of German troops required for occupation duties. In one incident in Greece, the Waffen-SS Polizei Division achieved the dubious distinction of being condemned by the Red Cross, a very rare occurrence. The condemnation followed an anti-partisan sweep and an ambush in which Waffen-SS troops were killed. The Polizei Division troops then staged a reprisal in the nearby village of Distrimo, which involved mass rape, looting and the summary execution of partisan suspects. Some 300 civilians were killed, and this outraged even the pro-German puppet government in Athens and the Wehrmacht. They invited the Red Cross to visit the village and several days after the event found corpses hanging from trees. The Waffen-SS tried to wash its hands of the incident by convicting an Waffen-SS captain of falsifying a report, even though the reprisal was deemed "justified" for "military reasons".

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