VOIGT: In the end there were twenty-five of us left, and we had a few SS men with us. If you don’t keep them in check they will kill anyone. We went into a French farm at night to get some food. Those fellows (SS) wanted to take away practically all that the farmer had left. Then later we run across a few French and they (SS) completely smashed in the skull of one of them.805
War crimes in France are attributed almost exclusively to the Waffen SS. There is scarcely any mention in the surveillance protocols of comparable abuses by Wehrmacht soldiers.806 This conforms to the picture emerging from the latest research, which has found little evidence of Wehrmacht or Luftwaffe war crimes on this front and attributes responsibility for the most grievous abuses to the Waffen SS.807
It is hardly surprising, then, that the Waffen SS never shed the reputation for extreme brutality that began to coalesce in 1939–40. Alleged eyewitnesses repeatedly connected SS men with the murder of women and children, which was nearly always condemned as violating the military ethos.808 While a POW, Major Hasso Viebig met the first general staff officer of the Wehrmacht’s 58th Armored Corps, under which the SS division “The Reich” served for a time. Conversations with a Major Beck opened Viebig’s eyes:
VIEBIG: Because of his activities in FRANCE, Major BECK (PW) knows how the SS behaved. He knows of several cases, which of course he didn’t mention here. I was told here that the SS shut French women and children up in a church and then set the church on fire. I thought that was just propaganda but Major BECK told me: “No, it’s true. I know they did it.”809
Viebig’s narrative refers to the massacre of Oradour, in which a company from the division “The Reich” murdered 642 men, women, and children.
Few Wehrmacht POWs tried to maintain differentiated views when it came to war crimes. In April 1945, Franz Breitlich was conversing with his bunkmate Helmut Hanelt in the American POW camp Fort Hunt. Breitlich tells of how Russian civilians had been mowed down by tanks and machine gun fire. “Our troops really carried out some business,” Breitlich generalizes. “The vanguard of the Wehrmacht not so much, but when the SS arrived, they really did some business.”810
It is interesting that Breitlich initially speaks of “our” troops, only to immediately qualify his statement by saying it was the SS, and not the Wehrmacht, who really got down to “business.” Very few soldiers went so far as to imply there was little difference between the Wehrmacht and the SS. One was Colonel Eberhard Wildermuth, who came from a relatively left-wing political background:
WILDERMUTH: In carrying out the mass executions the SS did things which were unworthy of an officer and which every German officer should have refused to do, but I know of cases where officers did
We dissociate ourselves in that way from these people, but they could immediately confront us and say: “But if you please, in this instance the German Hauptmann So-and-so, or the German Oberst So-and-so did exactly the same thing as the SS.”811
Wildermuth was no doubt well informed on the topic of war crimes as he had served on practically every front and had good connections to the German resistance. At the very least, he had witnessed Wehrmacht crimes in Serbia in 1941.812 But the conclusions he drew were the exception to the rule. Most Wehrmacht officers simply denied that their troops had ever been involved in crimes of such serious dimensions.
