SS emergency courts

These reprisal operations cannot be whitewashed as battlefield incidents. They were all cold, calculated acts, carried out on the orders of senior Waffen-SS officers who knew what they were doing. Brutal reprisals for partisan attacks on German troops were the norm in the East, and the Waffen-SS was just bringing its tried and tested tactics to the West. The people of Western Europe must be thankful that Allied armies swept rapidly to the German border in the summer of 1944. The Waffen-SS divisions in France at this time were pre-occupied at the front, and had little time to turn their attention to dealing with the growing resistance problem behind their lines.

Ironically, when American, British and Soviet forces were inside Germany itself in early 1945, Waffen-SS soldiers turned on their own people. With his world crumbling around him, Hitler saw treachery and cowardice everywhere. He therefore ordered those still loyal to him to show no mercy to those who displayed "cowardice in the face of the enemy". Roving SS squads shot or hanged thousands of Germans for not fighting with fanatical determination. SS officers convened so-called emergency courts that dispensed instant justice to those brought before them, which usually meant death. Victims included an aged farmer who had disarmed a group of Hitler Youth who had planned to attack an American armoured column on bicycles. Even in Berlin during the last days of the war, fanatical Waffen-SS officers trawled the city searching for those guilty of cowardice, desertion or "resisting the war effort". German civilians suffered disproportionately as, when the Red Army approached, the citizens living in streets about to be attacked would hang white blankets from their windows as a sign of surrender (and in the hope that the Soviets would not blast their buildings with tank and artillery fire). However, German forces launched counterattacks and often recaptured said streets. The residents who had displayed the white blankets would then be hauled before the SS courts, to be either shot or hanged from lamp posts as a warning to others. Even after the fall of Berlin and the suicide of Hitler, SS officers still at large continued to shoot at Germans giving themselves up to the Red Army!

Despite the excuses of their apologists, the Waffen-SS was thoroughly tainted by its participation in Hitler's murderous policies of racial supremacy. Not only were Waffen-SS soldiers willing believers of this ideology, but they were also willing participants in the actual execution of Hitler's attempts to exterminate Jews and other people he considered untermenschen.

Individually, Waffen-SS officers and men were soon hardened to killing on behalf of their Führer and put a low value on human life, particularly on the lives of Germany's enemies. Civilians and enemy prisoners were regarded as a nuisance, and Waffen-SS officers had little compunction about ordering executions or reprisals. Although the Waffen-SS was embarrassed when some of its excesses were exposed during the war by the German Army High Command or the Red Cross, the perpetrators were invariably protected by Himmler. He had no time for such squeamishness

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