KRAUSE: But I have had the experience with G.A.F. units… … from both battalions, the only two which then existed, they were G.A.F. field divisions. They arrived somewhere there at five in the morning after a 16 km. night march through snow and ice. Then they took the infantry—at that time it was the Korps KNOBELSDORF—and sent it to the left wing of an assault group which was being formed. The attack commenced at five o’clock straight from the column of march, they didn’t even have time to take their greatcoats off. They went off to the attack without any anti-tank guns or machine guns, nothing at all. They set off and advanced about 1½ to 2 km., suffering only a few losses. A Russian tank attack developed and mowed the people down. And from those two battalions there were 480 killed, of which quite 300 had been squashed as flat as this book by the tanks. And countless wounded. Both battalions annihilated.768
Many soldiers had tales of hair-raising operations that had cost hundreds of men their lives. Typically, though, heavy losses among Wehrmacht units were explained with reference to inexperience among the field commanders or the troops themselves, while losses among the SS were the result of “utterly misconceived recklessness.”769 Interestingly, the protocols don’t contain any stories about Waffen SS units who suffered particularly light casualties. Although many soldiers, in particular navy and Luftwaffe men, never had anything at all to do with the Waffen SS, they believed in the intimidating images of their rivals as elite hotshots, who had been specially selected and trained, and who had no fear whatsoever of being killed.770
At first glance, Himmler’s soldiers seem to have fulfilled his demands for the ultimate sacrifice. Himmler had decreed in 1941 that there should be no such thing as a “captive SS man.” They were the “keepers of honor, the keepers of the fighting power of the division. They have a duty to draw their pistol on a comrade, if necessary, and force him to overcome his fear even in the face of giant onrushing tank. It may happen that a regiment or battalion shrinks to a fourth or a fifth of its original size. But it is beyond the realm of possibility that this fourth or fifth finds itself unable or unwilling to keep attacking…. As long as there are 500 men in a division, those 500 men are capable of attacking.”771 In 1944 Himmler called for an attitude similar to that of Japanese soldiers, among whom only 500 POWs from a force of 300,000 had been captured.772
The voices of SS men in the surveillance protocols initially seem to confirm Wehrmacht soldiers’ view of them as unswerving fanatics. Members of the Waffen SS related how their superiors drove them forward at gunpoint or summarily executed Wehrmacht soldiers who tried to retreat.773 When the commander of the SS division “Hitler Youth,” Kurt Meyer, encountered a demoralized Wehrmacht general in Trent Park, he boasted: “I wish a lot of the officers here could command my ‘Division,’ so that they might learn some inkling of self-sacrifice and fanaticism. They would be deeply and profoundly ashamed.”774 Meyer’s radicalism had already shocked Wehrmacht officers at a training seminar in fall 1943. One of the participants remembers him declaring, after a third glass of wine, that “the soldier must become a heathen, fanatic fighter who hates every Frenchman, Englishman and American (or whatever nationality the enemy has) so that he wants to jump at the enemy’s throat and drink his blood. The soldier has to hate every [enemy], every one must be his mortal foe. Only so can we win the war.”775
For Standartenführer Hans Lingner, who joined the SS early on and fought on the Eastern Front and in Normandy, the will to fight was inherently linked with the greater meaning of sacrifice. Lingner told a fellow POW, a regular army captain:
