Of course, the desire to indoctrinate soldiers doesn’t mean that even all members of the Waffen SS were completely infused with National Socialist ideology. As historian Jürgen Förster has shown, the means needed for political indoctrination—from instruction material to qualified teachers—were often lacking.827 And results often lagged behind expectations:
RÖTHLING: We had a political lecture every Sunday, about the origin of the “Hitler Youth” movement and all that sort of stuff.
Our CO would arrive: “Look here boys, you know I haven’t got many magazines or books about political things. I don’t possess a radio, and I don’t feel much like it anyhow. I’ve got enough work to do during the week. ‘Heil Hitler.’ The session is over.”828
Political education, of course, is only one aspect of ideological conditioning. Indeed, lectures are but the smallest part of the latter. Far more important is the construction of an ideologically charged frame of reference. Practice is the most significant factor in forming attitudes. A young German did not become a committed SS man only by reading pamphlets. He had to be bound up in a network of common practices. This point is often overlooked when analysts draw conclusions about the ideologization of a group from the existence of political concepts and education. It is easy for individuals to maintain distance from mottos and rules they are forced to write out over and over. It is much harder for them to divorce themselves from things of which they have been a part. For this reason, National Socialist commemoration ceremonies and parties to mark the winter and summer solstices, the Party’s own judicial system,829 and the special rules applying to marriage830 played a far greater socializing role than education in organizations like the SS.
Röthling, in any case, had much more vivid memories of those sorts of events. He recalled that he had been instructed as to the appropriate marriage behavior and told that he should try to find an Aryan “girl” and ensure that there were “future generations.”831 An additional factor bolstering personal identification was the cult of hardness that was encouraged by brutal elements within young men’s SS training. An SS man named Langer from the “Hitler Youth” Division recalled: “In the Waffen SS you couldn’t do anything if an ‘Unterführer’ hit you during the training. The purpose of the training is to make you just as they are; it’s pure sadism.”832
Ideological conditioning helped create the sense that one was part of “the Führer’s elite troop” with a duty “to set a good example to the army.”833 The older generations of SS “Führer corps” made sure this spirit was transferred to the new recruits in 1943. Even if the armored grenadier divisions “Reichsführer SS” and “Götz von Berlichingen” were far from elite fighting units, their officers did succeed in molding an SS spirit renowned for its extreme brutality. The “Reichsführer SS” division made its name with a number of massacres in Italy,834 while “Götz von Berlichingen” left behind a trail of blood in France, when it executed 124 civilians in the village of Maillé on August 25, 1944.835 The division was also responsible for numerous other atrocities, including the execution of American POWs on the command of Oberscharführer Fritz Swoboda.
The Waffen SS was a heterogeneous institution, encompassing both the Dachau commandant and later general Theodor Eicke as well as the future Nobel Prize laureate author Günter Grass. There is evidence of internal criticism, particularly from the lower ranks, as well as occasional proof that SS officers refused to carry out particularly gruesome orders. Obersturm führer Woelcky was one example of the latter. Another was twenty-four-year-old Obersturmführer Werner Schwarz, the company commander of the 2nd Company of the SS Panzergrenadierregiment “The Führer.” As a POW, he told an army first lieutenant:
