Soldaten полностью

Hitler and Himmler would have used pretty much identical formulations. Lingner’s and Meyer’s attitudes are in many respects typical for the perspective of the Waffen SS as a whole. It was no accident, for instance, that two regular army POWs in February 1945 expressed their belief that the SS would battle to the last and withdraw to the Alps to fight “a kind of partisan war.”⁷⁷⁷

Nonetheless, historian Rüdiger Overmans has shown that the percentage of Waffen SS who fell in battle was not significantly higher than that in the regular army.⁷⁷⁸ Indeed, when we take a closer look at the numbers, SS casualty figures are nearly identical to those for Wehrmacht tank divisions or Luftwaffe paratroopers. As long as the front remained intact, there seems to have been little difference in behavior between various elite units. So why did Wehrmacht soldiers perceive the Waffen SS as a fanatic fighting force that had suffered disproportionate casualties?

If we analyze reports of losses, it emerges that in phases of German retreat and defeats, such as in France in August 1944, significantly fewer Waffen SS soldiers were taken as prisoners of war than members of regular army or Luftwaffe units. The fact that the Allies tended to simply execute SS men does not fully explain this phenomenon.⁷⁷⁹ Apparently members of certain SS units did more often prefer to fight to the death rather than try to save themselves by capitulating.⁷⁸⁰ This was only a tendency, and not an absolute rule—otherwise, the percentage of fatalities among the Waffen SS would have been markedly greater than within the regular army. Still, the tendency did partially confirm the image of the fearless SS warriors from Nazi propaganda and established it, in simplified form, in Wehrmacht soldiers’ frame of reference. Yet ironically, regular soldiers’ fixation upon the putatively high losses among the Waffen SS allowed them to question the SS units’ supposed bravery. While regular army men did not doubt the daring of SS troops, normally a positive quality in their system of values, they also believed that the SS provoked “unnecessarily” large numbers of casualties. In this way, regular army POWs could avoid taking a purely positive view of SS soldiers. There were battles, of course, in which SS troops had achieved successful results without inordinate numbers of casualties,⁷⁸¹ but stories of this sort did not fit in with the predominant Wehrmacht narrative and were thus left untold.