In so doing, some even partially defended the SS. When Colonel Meyne, as a POW, was confronted with stories about the Waffen SS burning down villages, he replied: “They don’t do that sort of thing, they are purely fighting troops, there is nothing against them. It must have been those S.S. Security Divisions, or something like that, about whom those stories were told.” A bit later, he added: “Of course there has been a lot of dirty business there, but it is quite clear to us that the Russians actually murdered all Germans there. There’s no doubt at all about it.”813 According to Meyne’s logic, the SS may have committed some crimes, but they were justified as a response to the Red Army killing German prisoners. Meyne was one of the few POWs who saw little difference between the Waffen SS and regular army soldiers. To support this view, he needed to differentiate between those who fought on the front line and the Security Service men in occupied territories. The distinction was specious, but that’s not the point. It’s more interesting to take a closer look at Meyne’s perspective.
Meyne’s only experience with the Waffen SS came, as far as we can tell, at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa. As the commander of an independent artillery division, his men and the SS division “The Reich” were both subordinate to the Wehrmacht 2nd Armored Group. The SS men fought side by side with regular Wehrmacht forces against the Red Army, carrying out the same orders and sharing the same experiences. From the perspective of an army officer, it was probably nothing extraordinary that civilians were killed in this phase of the war, especially as the Eastern Front was witnessing a general eruption of brutality. In July 1941, war crimes were occurring in practically all army divisions. The SS division “The Reich” was nothing special in this regard.814 Thus, in Meyne’s eyes, this group was more like a regular infantry division than, for instance, the SS Cavalry Brigade, who murdered thousands of civilians in the Pripet swamps. That was why Meyne saw the Waffen SS as examples of normal “fighting troops,” who had not dramatically violated any ethical lines.
Up until now, we have only discussed the recorded conversations of Wehrmacht POWs, and it may be questionable whether they are a reliable source of information about war crimes perpetrated by the Waffen SS. Perhaps SS men were a screen onto which regular army men projected their own crimes. Navy private Lehmann, for instance, described how his unit discovered a secret radio transmitter at the home of an elderly French gentleman near Canisy, whereupon they “put him up against the wall and knocked him down.” Lehmann also claimed that Germans were popular among the occupied French people, and that it was only the SS who had made “a mess of things” so that “people didn’t like this very much.”815 Lehmann clearly uses the idea of unacceptable SS behavior to excuse himself from any blame for French people’s hostility toward their German occupiers. Yet according to official Wehrmacht policy, the elderly French gentleman would have to have been tried by a military tribunal and not simply gunned down.
Most reports about Waffen SS atrocities are so general that it is impossible to confirm them. Given the countless crimes committed by Wehrmacht members, doubts can exist as to whether the Waffen SS was even uniquely brutal. So it is a stroke of luck that the British devoted considerable energy to listening in on the inner thoughts of Himmler’s political soldiers. In conversations with other SS men as well as members of the Wehrmacht, they chatted about the war crimes they had committed with what appears today to be astonishing ease. Excerpts like this from the protocols give us a rare interior look at the mind-set of the Waffen SS.
For example, an SS Untersturmführer recounted the following from his time on the Eastern Front:
KRÄMER: I have experienced it in RUSSIA at OREL. An MG 42 was set up in the main aisle of a church. Then the Russian men, women and children were made to shovel snow; then they were taken into the church, without knowing at all what was happening. They were shot immediately with the MG 42 and petrol was poured on them and whole place was set on fire.816
Krämer was one of two thousand officers transferred in 1943 from the “Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler” to the newly formed “Hitler Youth” Division, and they had an enormous influence on the character of that unit.
