SS und Polizei: Myths and Lies of Hitler's SS and Police

by J. Lee Ready

  There are credible reports that Professor Werner von Braun demanded the SS WVHA provide him with more slaves, as the ones he had kept dying. Yet after the war he was recruited by the American space program and he became a great schoolboy hero!

  As late as 2010 former members and hiwis of the SS were on trial for war crimes, including Ivan Demjanyuk and Samuel Kunz.

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  However, the greatest hypocrisy of all is that thousands of SS members continued to fight World War Two long after 1945. True they no longer took orders from the SS, and no doubt they no longer believed in Hitler, and probably never had, but it was the same war as far as they were concerned. In Yugoslavia veterans of the SS fought on against the Titoists. In Estonia 50,000 veterans of the SS and other pro-German units went underground as the ‘Brethren of the Forest’ and they continued to ambush Soviet military convoys and assassinate Communist apparatchik. In Latvia 60,000 veterans of the SS and other pro-German units fought on as guerillas, denying the Soviets a peaceful occupation of their homeland. In Lithuania the ‘Activist Front’ had 120,000 partisans, most of them veterans of pro-German units, though few were ex-SS. They too battled against Soviet troops.

  The Polish NSZ had fought the Nazis bitterly and had struggled against Communist partisans. After May 1945 they concentrated on attacking the Soviet Red Army, NKVD and Polish [Communist] Army, and they also tried to finish Himmler’s campaign against the Jews. In the twelve months following May 1945 they murdered at least 800 Jews. In fact the NSZ expanded by recruiting Poles who had worn German uniform, including Volksdeutsch. The WIN, another Polish anti-Communist guerilla unit, also expanded.

  The UPA - Ukrainian Insurgency Army - had about 200,000 troops by May 1945, having been expanded by taking in a good number of ex-SS and ex-hiwis of the SS and other veterans. Their battlefield was huge, encompassing the old Soviet Ukraine, Galicia [the Polish Ukraine] and Ruthenia [the Czecho-Slovakian Ukraine].

  Some of the columns of these partisans were large, hundreds of men wearing bits of uniforms from a variety of sources including the SS and armed with artillery and armored vehicles. Initially their weaponry was German, but over time they began switching to captured Soviet stocks owing to a shortage of ammunition.

  Throughout this period of guerilla warfare the partisans in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine and Yugoslavia prayed that the Americans and British would attack the Soviets and liberate them. Secretly British and American intelligence operatives urged them on, but gave little practical help. In the immediate post-war years only in Greece and China did the Americans offer any true aid to overcome the Communists, and were only successful in Greece. The French were busy fighting Communists in Indo-China [Vietnam] and as of 1948 the British began fighting Communists in Malaya.

  The Soviets consistently denied these partisan wars were going on, referring to them as small-scale police actions, but in reality the Soviet forces had a major headache on their hands throughout Eastern Europe for several years.

  It was summer 1946 before the Titoists destroyed the last of the Axis guerillas and Cetniks. Only in 1948 did the Soviets finally crush the Polish, Estonian and Latvian partisans. In 1950 the British and Americans chose to wage war against Communists in Korea. The Eastern Europeans could not understand why the Anglo-Americans had forsaken them.

  In 1953 the Lithuanian partisans were finally destroyed. The Soviets now admitted that it had cost the lives of 20,000 soldiers to crush the Lithuanian partisans 1944-53.

  In 1956 the Hungarians rose in revolt against the Soviet occupation. Many an Hungarian SS veteran walked the streets of Budapest proudly for a few days, but then the Soviets brought in reinforcements, tanks and aircraft and crushed the revolt mercilessly, while the Americans and British stood by and did nothing.

  Only now did the UPA realize they were on their own and that they had to leave the Ukraine if they were to survive. During the winter of 1956-57 these surviving Ukrainian partisans fought their way through Czechoslovakia to the West German border, where they sought sanctuary under the protection of the US Army and the Bundeswehr - the new [West] German Army. Some of these fighters had joined the SS as a hiwi or the German police as a schuma in 1941 and were now laying down their arms for the first time in sixteen years.

  In 1959 in Munich, West Germany a Soviet KGB [NKVD] agent assassinated Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian nationalist leader. It was the Soviet Union’s way of reminding everyone that World War Two was finally over and that they were the ones who had won it.

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