by J. Lee Ready
SS und Polizei
Myths and Lies
of
Hitler’s SS and Police
by
J. Lee Ready
SS und Polizei
Myths and Lies
of
Hitler’s SS and Police
Copyright 2011 by J. Lee Ready
Cover/Product Image Art by Richard P. Christensen
Acknowledgements:
To Carla for her kind patience, to Louise and her understanding, to Dave Charnley and those history discussions over a pint, to Robert Ready, who showed me what true pride in military service really means, to Bob Snider, who was always there at the right moment, to Rick Christensen, who often played ‘devil’s advocate’, to Herb, whose inquisitive mind offers inspiration, to Jerry Kirk, who reminded me that military historian is a noble profession, to Dr. M. Lowe, who saw the historian in me before I did, and to Stephen G. Luke, a walking cultural oasis, who taught me the meaning of the word ‘dignity’.
J. Lee Ready
Contents:
Acknowledgements
World War Two Rank Equivalents
Forward
1 Versailles: The End is the Beginning
2 Legitimacy
3 In Government Service
4 An Independent SS
5 The Police State.
6 On the March
7 A Real War
8 Blitzkrieg Perfected
9 A New Europe
10 Himmler’s Crusade
11 Hitler’s Crusade
12 New Recruits
13 A New Kind of War
14 The Yugoslavian Headache
15 The Final Solution to the Jewish Question
16 The First Russian Winter 1942
17 Russian Spring 1942
18 Yugoslavian Cauldron
19 The Other SS War
20 The Anti-Partisan War 1942
21 The Endless Crusade
22 The Second Russian Winter
23 Himmler’s Army
24 Rebellions
25 The Anti-Partisan War Spring 1943
26 Kursk: The Turning Point
27 Yugoslavia Spring-Summer 1943
28 The Partisan Nightmare 1943
29 Himmler in Western Europe
30 Himmler’s Empire
31 Retreat from Russia
32 Himmler’s War in Italy
33 1944 Year of Decision
34 June 1944: A Two-Front War
35 July 1944
36 August 1944
37 September 1944
38 October 1944
39 November 1944
40 December 1944
41 January 1945
42 February 1945
43 March 1945
44 April 1945
45 May 1945: War without Himmler and Hitler.
Summary
Bibliography
World War Two Rank Equivalents.
For rank comparisons note the code in the left margin. But remember there are never exact equivalents.
SS
Commissioned Officers General Grade.
O12 Reichsfuehrer
O11 Oberstgruppenfuehrer
O10 Obergruppenfuehrer
O9 Gruppenfuehrer
O8 Brigadefuehrer
Commissioned Officers Field Grade
O7 Oberfuehrer
O6 Standartenfuehrer
O5 Obersturmbannfuehrer
O4 Sturmbannfuehrer
Commissioned Officers Company Grade
O3 Hauptsturmfuehrer
O2 Obersturmfuehrer
O1 Untersturmfuehrer
Non-Commissioned Officers.
E8 Sturmscharfuehrer
E7 Hauptscharfuehrer
E6 Oberscharfuehrer
E5 Scharfuehrer
E4 Unterscharfuehrer
Enlisted Men/Other Ranks.
E3 Rottenfuehrer
E2 Obersturmmann
E1 Sturmmann
German Army
Commissioned Officers General Grade
O12 Generalfeldmarschal
O11 Generaloberst
O10 General [der artillerie etc]
O9 Generalleutnant
O8 Generalmajor
Commissioned Officers Field Grade
O7 [none]
O6 Oberst
O5 Oberstleutnant
O4 Major
Commissioned Officers Company Grade
O3 Hauptmann
O2 Oberleutnant
O1 Leutnant
Non-Commissioned Officers
E8 Hauptfeldwebel
E7 Oberfeldwebel
E6 Feldwebel
E5 Unteroffizier
E4 Obergefreiter
Enlisted Men/Other Ranks
E3 Gefreiter
E2 Oberschutz/Obergrenadier
E1 Schutz/Grenadier
German Police [1936-45]
Commissioned Officers General Grade
O11 Generaloberst
O10 General
O9 Generalleutnant
O8 Generalmajor
Commissioned Officers Field Grade
07 [none]
O6 Oberst
O5 Oberstleutnant
O4 Major
Commissioned Officers Company Grade
O3 Hauptmann
O2 Oberleutnant
O1 Leutnant
Non-commissioned Officers
E9 Meister
E8 Hauptwachtmeister
E7 Revierwachtmeister
E6 Oberwachtmeister
E5 Wachtmeister
Other Ranks/Enlisted Men
E3 Rottwachtmeister
E2 Unterwachtmeister
E1 Anwaerter
Note how detective ranks differed:
O6 Reichskriminaldirektor
O5 Oberregierungs
O4 Kriminaldirektor or Kriminalregierungs
O3 Kriminalrat
O2 Kriminalkommissar or Kriminalinspektor
O1 Kriminalobersekretaer
E9 Kriminalsekretaer
E8 Kriminaloberassistent
E6 Kriminalassistent
E5 Kriminalassistentanwaerter
British Army
Commissioned Officers General Grade
O12 Field Marshal
011 [none]
O10 General
O9 Lieutenant General
08 Major General
O7 Brigadier
Commissioned Officers Field Grade
O6 Colonel
O5 Lieutenant Colonel
O4 Major
Commissioned Officers Company Grade
O3 Captain
O2 Lieutenant
O1 Sub-lieutenant
Non-Commissioned Officers
E9 Regimental Sergeant Major [CWO]
E8 Company Sergeant Major [WO]
E8 Quartermaster Sergeant Major [WO]
E7 Platoon Sergeant Major [-1940]
E6 Staff Sergeant
E5 Sergeant
E4 Corporal
Other Ranks
E3 Lance Corporal
E2 Private
E1 [none]
US Army
Commissioned Officers General Grade
O12 General of the Army
O11 [none]
O10 General
O9 Lieutenant General
O8 Major General
O7 Brigadier General
Commissioned Officers Field Grade
O6 Colonel
O5 Lieutenant Colonel
O4 Major
Commissioned Officers Company Grade
O3 Captain
O2 1s
t Lieutenant
O1 2nd Lieutenant
Warrant Officers
[Outranked British warrant officers]
W2 Chief Warrant Officer
W1 Warrant Officer
Non-Commissioned Officers
E8 First Sergeant or Master Sergeant
E7 Tech Sergeant
E6 Staff Sergeant or T6
E5 Sergeant or T5
E4 Corporal or T4
Enlisted Men
E3 Private First Class
E2 Private
E1[none]
Forward
“there exists in the breasts of people of educated and Christian communities wild and ferocious passions, which in a day of peace are dormant and slumbering, but which may be aroused and kindled by war and injustice, and become more cruel and destructive than any that live in the breasts of savage and barbarous nations.”
John Sanborn 1886.
First a disclaimer. It is my intention to explain the SS and Polizei [police] of Hitler’s Third Reich, not to glorify them. An historian who writes about an organization that performed evil deeds should not be confused with the perpetrators of such deeds, any more than someone who writes about cholera should be assumed to be glorifying disease, nor a criminologist be assumed to be glorifying crime.
I feel that this disclaimer is necessary, because now that the twentieth century is over the title ‘SS’ still conjures up an absolute horror in the minds of English-speaking people, (including this author’s mind), whereas the titles NKVD, Khmer Rouge, Viet Cong, Ustaci, Baath or Kempai Tai do not. Yet each was responsible for sheer butchery on a horrific scale.
It is not that we, the English-speaking people, are simply unfamiliar with these other formations. In fact the British, Americans, Australians, Canadians and New Zealanders all fought the Baath and the Kempai Tai. British and Canadian soldiers ‘argued’ with Ustaci troops, hoping to prevent genocide. The Americans, New Zealanders and Australians fought the Viet Cong for sixteen bloody years and the Khmer Rouge on and off for years. The Americans and British also fought against the NKVD in its nucleus form and successor form KGB. And all of this within living memory.
It is not that these horrific organizations were not as cruel as the SS. The bayoneting of prisoners tied to trees as a sport sponsored by the Kempai Tai was surely brutal, as were such atrocities as the burying alive of political enemies by the Viet Cong, or the torture of the children of political enemies by the Baath, or the ethnic cleansing by the Ustaci and the shooting of anyone who would not or could not leave, or the depopulation of entire cities into the killing fields by the Khmer Rouge, or the forcible migration of entire ethnic groups into slavery by the NKVD.
So if it is not our familiarity that invokes more horror at the sound of the word ‘SS’, nor the fact that they were alone in dispensing cruelty, is it the scale of the atrocities that makes us react the way we do? Perhaps not, for the NKVD outdid the SS in the numbers of corpses it produced. The Khmer Rouge was responsible for a higher percentage of deaths within one nation than any other organization.
So if it is not the familiarity, nor the cruelty, nor the scale, is it our personal suffering that causes us to think in this manner? Again the answer is negative. Far more English-speaking people suffered horrors in person under the brutal treatment of the Viet Cong and Kempai Tai than under the SS jackboot.
So why is it that the SS stands out so? Some would argue that it is because the ethnic group which suffered the most at the hands of the SS was the Jews, many of whom fled to the USA after World War Two, and that Jewish-controlled media within the English-speaking world, especially the USA, will not let us forget. Nor should they let us forget. That is an answer, but not the answer.
Another answer is that the SS is such a complicated arena of research that the sheer confusion and secrecy creates the horror of the unknown. To an extent this is correct. After all, an organization like the SS, which could kill like robots running a factory, is more terrifying than a patrol of Viet Cong who simply shoot Vietnamese civilians at random in order to create fear. Yet the NKVD was just as emotionless running its death factories and did it for far longer.
It is this author’s contention that the English-speaking people are more horrified, because we expected better from the Germans. In other words our racism can be seen poking out below our coat of objectivity. Deep down in the English-speaking psyche the brutality of all the others can be expected, for after all they are ‘Asians’ or ‘Eastern Europeans’. What John Sanborn called the ‘savage and barbarous nations’. But Germans? Well, the English language is a branch of Germanic. DNA will not find much difference between an Anglo-Saxon and a German. And the Germanics produced Mozart, Schweitzer, Beethoven, Schiller, Duerer, Luther, did they not? How therefore could they also produce a Hitler, a Himmler, a Heydrich?
English-speaking troops had fought the Germans in World War One 1914-18, but really they had focused their hatred upon one man, the Kaiser, rather than the ‘Huns’, as the Germans were nicknamed. At Christmas time both opposing sides would sing Christmas carols to each other across ‘no man’s land’.
Thus when the news of the brutality of the SS first reached our ears during World War Two, many simply excused this as typical wartime propaganda. The stories of German massacres in World War One had been proven to be false. Surely such rumors would prove to be equally false in this new war too. After all we were talking about Germans not Asians.
This is of course a terrible indictment of our own attitudes, but racism can be judged far more accurately by the victim than by the perpetrator.
So having come to an answer, and possibly the answer, as to why we still fear this German organization, we then ask what exactly was the SS? The reason why this book has been written is that all previous books have only dealt with an aspect of the SS, such as the death camps, the German-manned Waffen SS, or a feeble attempt to catalog the foreign Waffen SS, but never the totality of the whole SS. And certainly never in conjunction with the story of Hitler’s police, which was interwoven with the SS.
The reason for this omission is that the SS was an extremely complicated body, and it told lies about itself continually. In theory the SS was a militant arm of the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi Party), and all members were expected to toe the party line. Yet, as this book will show, hundreds of thousands entered its ranks without any knowledge of what that party line was. Indeed they had their own agenda. Theoretically, as it was a political organization, the only persons allowed to preach to SS members were Nazi political commissars. Yet the SS had clergymen of many different faiths, including Christians, Moslems and Buddhists!
In fact many of the leading SS officers never joined the Nazi party.
The SS was initially only to be recruited from racial Germans, and furthermore of the three declared ethnicities of ‘German’, namely Alpine Celtic (known as Black Dutch in the USA), Germanic and Nordic, only the latter two were acceptable to the SS. Racial purity was considered a selling point in the 1920s and 1930s in all ‘white‘ nations. The American FBI bragged that it did not employ Negroes, Jews or Hispanics. The irony is that neither Himmler nor Hitler, as Alpine Celtics, would have met the race requirements to enter the SS. But again, this book will explain that the race regulations were in fact purely for mass media consumption, and in reality all continental Europeans served in the SS plus Britons, Irish, Canadians, Americans, Asians and Africans and even people with Jewish ancestry.
The SS was a police force. Well, actually it was a spy and counter-spy formation. Well then again, it was an army. Well really it was a loose association of government agencies. This book will identify that the SS was in fact all of these. Its members had various duties: cops, spy-catchers, soldiers, prison guards, riot police, scientists, sentries and civil servants.
These members supposedly fought for Hitler, but as this book contends many of them looked upon Hitler with ridicule. They did, however, fight for Germany, unless they were not Ger
man in which case they fought for..... a host of reasons. All members were fanatics who volunteered, except for the ones who were conscripted against their will!
It was a working class organization, which prided itself on social equality, yet its leaders wooed aristocrats and industrialists.
One of the greatest myths is that the SS was Hitler’s elite from the beginning and that they deserved and received the best that he could provide. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact the SS remained subservient to the armed forces and other government agencies throughout, and had to beg, borrow and steal everything it needed, certainly until 1943, and even then it was only the Waffen SS that began to receive materiel adequate to its needs.
As a front line combat formation the Waffen SS quickly gained a reputation for expert soldiering under harsh conditions. This sets it apart from the other ‘evil’ organizations mentioned above, such as the Baath or Kempai Tai. Apart from some Viet Cong units, the vast majority of the above mentioned organizations were merely gangs of killers who butchered helpless prisoners and often were themselves cowards. However, the Waffen SS was different. When American soldiers fought a Waffen SS unit and survived, they bragged about it, as if this was somehow more difficult than defeating a regular German Army unit.
In fact everything about the SS was a lie. Even its motto: Deine Ehre Heisst Treue = Your Honor is named Loyalty; for what did it mean? Loyalty to what? Hitler? Himmler? The Nazi party? The German people? The SS itself? Its members did not remain loyal to any of these.
Then we come to the police of the Third Reich, which has got to be the most non-stick body of men ever to squeeze through a bloody series of events and come out the other end apparently with clean hands and smelling like a rose. This too is one of the Third Reich’s great lies. This empire was the police state par excellence, yet post-war no one ever thought to blame the police!
The intertwining of the SS and police was apparent from 1933 onwards and after 1939 it became obvious. But to western minds the concept of a policeman is generally that of the traffic cop, beat cop, murder detective or crowd minder. On occasion riot breaker is added to the concept. Under Himmler, however, police units might be ordered to climb into inhospitable mountains searching for guerillas for weeks at a time, or to arrest an entire village or to man the front line armed with machine guns and artillery against an onslaught of enemy tanks. In effect the German police became Himmler’s private army.