Double standards

In the West, the crimes of the Waffen-SS are generally better documented than in the East. The survivors were often able to make accounts of their experiences public, whereas in the East the Soviet Government and their satellite allies in the Warsaw Pact were less willing to allow independent scrutiny of wartime events, including Nazi war crimes. The Cold War stand-off that developed after 1945 also meant that some elements in Western governments did not want to give "visibility" to war crimes conducted by people who were now key allies against the Soviets. This was particularly so in the case of refugees from the Baltic states and the Ukraine, who were leading lights in anti-communist movements. The fact that many of these people had been wartime collaborators with the Nazis and members of the SS was swept under the carpet. This policy came back to haunt the British and US governments in the 1990s, when evidence emerged after the collapse of the Iron Curtain that they had given refuge to former SS members who had participated in war crimes in Eastern Europe, even through their crimes were known to Western intelligence agencies.

SS atrocties in the West

Waffen-SS war crimes in the West fall into two distinct categories: the cold-blooded murder of prisoners of war and the massacre of civilians in anti-resistance reprisals. The massacre of US Army prisoners at Malmédy, Belgium, by the Leibstandarte Division in December 1944 is perhaps the most famous, but it is one of several. In 1940, Leibstandarte and Totenkopf troops participated in the murder of captured British soldiers in two incidents. The Hitlerjugend Division was also implicated in the killing of captured Canadian soldiers in Normandy in the summer of 1944.

These have been portrayed by Waffen-SS apologists as "heat of battle" crimes by tired and stressed soldiers, with the Normandy killings being excused because "both sides were doing it". Survivors of the massacres, however, have recounted how their Waffen-SS guards calmly gathered them up and machine-gunned them in cold blood after they had surrendered. In all these cases senior Waffen-SS officers were aware of what had happened and chose not to punish those involved. Most participants were promoted afterwards.

Reprisals against civilians

Waffen-SS units rarely participated in anti-partisan operations in Western Europe, but when they did the results were very similar to those experienced in the East. In September 1943, after two Leibstandarte officers were captured by Italian partisans, Peiper ordered a town full of civilians to be shelled in reprisal, killing 34 people. The most famous Waffen-SS reprisal operation was in June 1944, when the Das Reich Division was attacked by French resistance fighters as it moved towards the Normandy battlefield. Some 99 French civilians were hung in reprisal in the town of Tulle; the following day, 642 civilians, including 207 children, were killed when the village of Oradour was razed to the ground in a further reprisal.

The Reichsführer-SS Waffen-SS division was involved in a series of three reprisal operations in northern Italy during August and September 1944, in which more than 1000 Italian civilians were killed. A Waffen-SS man from the division later commented, "personally I am of the opinion that the majority of partisans killed were women and children".

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