He once told me that in the campaign in the West they took no coloured prisoners whatever. They simply put up a machine-gun and mowed them all down. Perhaps those are the men who are now bringing the German soldier into disrepute. On the Western front, he said, they were really feared. The French didn’t realize that a difference was made between French and coloured troops, so that whenever the French caught sight of those “Death’s Head” units, they bolted before them in holy terror.796
The SS man appears to have boasted about his unit’s misdeeds in order to underscore the Waffen SS’s feared reputation, and the “Death’s Head” Division was the unit that committed the greatest number of war crimes during the campaign against France. Among them were the murder of 121 British POWs near Le Paradis as well as several mass executions of non-Caucasian soldiers from the British colonies. It was apparently standard practice in this division not to take any black prisoners.797
Wehrmacht POWs agreed that the Waffen SS had acted no differently in Russia. On the contrary, reports of SS crimes against civilians and POWs there were even more frequent:798
KÜRSTEINER: The SS dragged wounded Russians along with them during the winter campaign in RUSSIA, they thrashed and hit and beat them on the road with their rifles, ripped open all their clothes, undressed them, left them stark naked and shovelled snow over them; they shovelled the snow off again, plunged their bayonets in and out of their hearts. Those are things which nobody would believe if you told them; the SS did that! That was the SS!799
This excerpt exemplifies how Wehrmacht POWs used talk about Waffen SS misdeeds to imply that the regular army had nothing to do with any war crimes. Captain Alexander Hartdegen from the staff of the Wehrmacht 3rd Tank Division reported, for instance, that his division commander had explicitly prohibited any executions of prisoners, causing “trouble with [the SS division] ‘Viking’ because we didn’t shoot the PW.”800 The speaker in this case seems very eager to protest his own innocence: “I can tell you, quite honestly, that I have not taken part in any shooting throughout the whole war. Not in the regiments I was in either. No such thing occurred in AFRICA; we promised ‘fair play’ there, sometimes we even exchanged: tins of sardines for cigarettes with the English there. Thank God that sort of thing never occurred in our case.”801
We can no longer determine whether such statements were true. What is beyond doubt is that the fighting in Africa was relatively fair, and POWs were not executed. The clear contrast Hartdegen draws between the “good” Wehrmacht and the “evil” Waffen SS is one that we encounter often in the protocols, and it occurs with special frequency in stories about the fighting in France in summer 1944. Numerous army and Luftwaffe POWs recount Waffen SS war crimes during this time. Men from SS division “Götz von Berlichingen” were reported to have shot all American POWs,802 while the “Hitler Youth” Division was said to have taken no prisoners at all.803 Men from the division “The Reich” were described as shooting two American medics they captured with the words: “Well, one of them was certainly a Jew, he looked Jewish, and the other one was also.”804
Sergeant Voigt from the Army Signal Battalion told of “horrific” scenes he had witnessed as the German military retreated from France:
