This book focuses on the soldiers of the Wehrmacht, but we shouldn’t forget that the Nazi Party had an army of its own, the Waffen SS, of which there were some 900,000 members over the course of the war.750 One interesting question is to what extent the perception and interpretations of Waffen SS fighters differed from those of regular soldiers. Himmler was always at pains to stress the special character of his men. Nonetheless, it’s impossible to overlook the fact that shared experiences of frontline fighting created tighter and tighter personal relationships and tended to erase differences. By November 1944, an SS Brigadeführer in a tank division, Kurt Meyer, would state: “I don’t believe that there is any difference at all today between the SS and the army.”751 How much truth was there to this statement? Did the war truly override Himmler’s best efforts at forming an elite National Socialist troop that not only wore different uniforms than the regular army, but also had a different mind-set?
At the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, prosecutors had no doubts as to the special status of the Waffen SS, declaring it a criminal organization. Prominent SS generals like Paul Hausser, Wilhelm Bittrich, and Meyer vehemently protested against this ruling, which had far-reaching consequences for their own fates. In contrast to regular army servicemen, former Waffen SS men were denied pensions, and a number of avenues for advancement in postwar society and the military were closed off to them. An advocacy group founded in 1949 named the Mutual Assistance Association of Former Members of the Waffen SS (HIAG) spared little effort in trying to show that SS men had been “soldiers like all others.” (A former SS general published a book with this title in 1966.) This argument fell flat because even in the immediate postwar years it was well known that the Waffen SS had committed a multitude of war crimes and had remained an integral part of the SS, whose role was not limited to doing battle on the front lines. Moreover, the Waffen SS was an excellent scapegoat for absorbing blame for crimes against humanity, in particular ones associated with the Holocaust, so that the Wehrmacht itself could be exonerated. We have now known for some years, of course, that the Waffen SS was not the sole perpetrator of war crimes. Considering that historical research, especially in the past ten years, has cast considerable blame on the Wehrmacht, the question has become even more pertinent: Was there any difference between the two entities?752 Was the Wehrmacht perhaps not every bit as fanatical, radical, and criminal as the Waffen SS? Was the postwar debate perhaps not just part of a carefully staged diversion intended to create a myth of the “clean” Wehrmacht? Were the Waffen SS and the Wehrmacht not both components of one and the same fighting community, in which differences in mentality were quickly smoothed over by the common experience of battle?
In summer 1934, then commander in chief of the German military Werner von Blomberg accepted the creation of SS military units as a way of repaying Hitler for emasculating a dangerous Wehrmacht rival, the SA. Initially, Waffen SS men were few in number and had little military significance. With the beginning of World War II, however, they unmistakably began to compete with the Wehrmacht. The relationship of the two organizations at that point was especially tense. Regular army men, officers as well as ordinary soldiers, looked down their noses at the newly formed fighting troop. A conversation from July 1940 between an army sergeant and an SS Rottenführer illustrates the subjective feelings of competition experienced by men serving in the two organizations:
