One of the first trials to be completed was that of the Hitlerjugend’s Kurt Meyer. In a Canadian military court he was found guilty of inciting his men to commit murder and of being the officer in charge of the Hitlerjugend soldiers who had killed Canadian prisoners in cold blood during the opening phase of the Normandy campaign. Meyer was sentenced to death on 28 December 1945, although, on appeal, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. In September 1954 he was released from prison. Bernhard Siebken and Dieter Schnabel, Hitlerjugend officers during the summer of 1944, fared less well. Found guilty of the shooting of Allied prisoners, they were hanged on 20 January 1949.
A larger and more complex trial involved Waffen-SS men accused of killing U.S. prisoners around Malmédy during the 1944 Ardennes offensive. Some seventy-three defendants, mainly from the Leibstandarte Division and I SS Panzer Corps, stood before a U.S. military court. Among them were Sepp Dietrich, Fritz Kraemer, Hermann Priess, and Jochen Peiper, the latter having led the Kampfgruppe directly involved in the massacre. The court found them guilty on 16 July 1946, with forty-three sentenced to death (including Peiper) and the remainder to imprisonment, with Dietrich given life, Priess twenty years, and Kraemer ten.
During the trial the defendants protested at prior ill treatment, which, they claimed, included mock trials, torture, and forced confessions. Subsequent investigations by U.S. military authorities accepted that the pretrial investigations had not been conducted in a proper manner, and as a consequence all death penalties were commuted.10 By the early 1950s Allied attitudes toward the Waffen-SS softened, especially as the Cold War began to dominate the international political sphere, with West Germany now an ally against the Soviet Union. The convicted men were steadily released from prison, with the last—Jochen Peiper—let go in December 1956.
The French government’s attempt to bring to justice the perpetrators of the Oradour and Tulle Massacres from Das Reich Division were largely thwarted by the subsequent deaths of the main protagonists and the inability to extradite others living in Germany. Nonetheless, 2 military tribunals were held in Bordeaux in 1951 and 1953, and in the latter tribunal all but one of the twenty-one defendants present were found guilty of war crimes, the sentences ranging from death to varying terms of imprisonment.
Complicating matters at the trial was the Alsatian background of many of the subordinates involved in the killings, who, post-1945, were once again French citizens. They argued that they had been coerced into the division as malgré-nous (against our will), and following a wave of protest in Alsace they were released as part of a general amnesty in February 1953. The remaining convicted men were also subsequently set free. Heinz Lammerding, the Das Reich commander sentenced to death in absentia, lived openly in West Germany until his death in 1971, the French government unable to secure his extradition for lack of “incontestable evidence” that he had committed murder.
Of the massacres of British prisoners in 1940, Fritz Knöchlein of the Totenkopf Division was hanged in 1948 for his role in the Le Paradis shootings, while Leibstandarte’s Wilhelm Mohnke—considered by the British to be the officer most responsible for the Wormhoudt killings—was not brought to trial because of insufficient evidence. Mohnke denied having any involvement in the killing of British prisoners, and after release from Soviet imprisonment in 1955 he settled in the Hamburg region, where he lived until his death in 2001, aged ninety.11
Although many Germans accused the Allies of administering “victor’s justice”—with might triumphing over right—the Western Allies were, for the most part, scrupulous in their proceedings against the Waffen-SS, erring on the side of the defense when the evidence was uncertain. Such an approach was in marked contrast to the dealings of the Nazi legal system, an irony probably lost on the SS men in the dock. The inability to find evidence of a sufficient standard to guarantee a conviction was a consequence of many factors that included German witnesses’ understandable reluctance to condemn old comrades, the loss or destruction of incriminating paperwork, and, from around 1950 onward, the influence of an ever-increasing passage of time clouding memories and reducing the desire to enact retribution. By the mid-1950s the prosecution of former Waffen-SS soldiers declined rapidly.
THE TRAUMA OF defeat left its mark on the soldiers of the Waffen-SS, made worse by the accusations leveled at them by some former comrades in arms in the Wehrmacht and from sections of the West German civilian population. In the years after the surrender the veterans kept their heads down, but a renewal of confidence was evident in the late 1940s, witnessing the emergence of local support groups. In 1951 this led to the official formation by Otto Kumm of HIAG: Hilfsgemeinschaft auf Gegenseitigkeit der Angehörigen der ehemaligen Waffen-SS (Mutual aid association of former Waffen-SS members).12 The organization proved an immediate success: 376 branches were established, and leadership was provided by Waffen-SS luminaries that included Paul Hausser, Felix Steiner, and Herbert Gille. It soon saw itself as representing the interests of all Waffen-SS veterans.
By its stated aim, HIAG provided material assistance to former Waffen-SS soldiers. It also campaigned for the overturning of the criminality clause assigned to the Waffen-SS—not least to enable veterans to enjoy the same legal and pension rights as the Wehrmacht—and for the release of the remaining captives. These included Sepp Dietrich and Kurt Meyer, who, once out of prison, became leading figures in the organization. At its peak in the late 1950s, HIAG membership reached 20,000, and with the charismatic appeal of men like Meyer and Dietrich, it enjoyed wide publicity throughout West Germany, but as a lobbying group it failed to translate influence into governmental action in favor of the Waffen-SS.13
HIAG was always a controversial organization, not least because many in West Germany’s new government feared that it might operate as rallying point for a possible Nazi revival. With this in mind, Hausser wrote to all the political parties in the West German parliament in December 1951, reassuring them that HIAG was “firmly committed to the new democratic system” and that its role was merely to encourage “comradeship” within its membership and look after its “legal, social, and economic rights.”14
Shortly after its establishment, HIAG developed the idea of holding mass meetings—Suchdiensttreffen—nominally to exchange information about Waffen-SS soldiers lost in action but also to strengthen the cohesion of the organization and provide an opportunity for old soldiers to reminisce over the war. The first such meeting, held in 1952, was carefully stage-managed as leading ex-officers declared their loyalty to the West German government. Their good work was undone, however, by a surprise intervention from their guest speaker, former paratrooper general Hermann Ramcke. Deviating from the HIAG script, Ramcke set about lambasting the government and accusing the Western Allies of being the “real war criminals”—his outburst greeted with resounding applause by the veterans.
Wider public reservations about the true nature of HIAG seemed to be confirmed by reports from other meetings where veterans marched in torchlight processions, openly wore (banned) SS insignia, and sang their old wartime songs with undiminished enthusiasm. Hausser was sufficiently worried by the damage done to HIAG’s image that he issued a warning not to use “words and images that can be falsely interpreted.”15
During the 1960s membership of HIAG began to decline, while its political affiliations moved toward the Far Right. A journalist from the magazine Stern infiltrated a gathering of veterans from I SS Panzer Corps in 1985 and revealed that attitudes had not changed over the years, the SS veterans making rabid anti-Semitic remarks and sarcastically denying the existence of the Holocaust.16 But no matter how odious their views, the veterans posed no political threat to Germany; they were merely a small rump of old, unrepentant Nazis speaking in their cups. Rejected by mainstream Germany and rent by internal divisions, HIAG was disbanded as a national organization in 1992, although local groups remained in existence.
While HIAG lobbyists experienced mixed fortunes in their attempt to improve the reputation of the Waffen-SS
, they were more successful in their publishing program. After HIAG’s formation in 1951, a newsletter-journal, organized by Otto Kumm, was issued to members and called Der Ausweg (The Way Out), soon followed by Wiking-Ruf (Viking Call), the latter published by Herbert Gille. Both were superseded in 1956 by a new magazine, Der Freiwillige (The Volunteer), a long-term venture that included news for SS veterans and positive articles on their military actions, while attacking those critical of Germany’s role in the war. The magazines were useful in keeping the membership together and publicly waving the Waffen-SS flag, but of greater significance were the book-publishing ventures that reached a larger and more varied readership.
The first significant work was Paul Hausser’s Waffen-SS im Einsatz (Waffen-SS in Action), published in 1953, which, as well as extolling the bravery and honor of the Waffen-SS, made the superficially appealing yet false argument that the Waffen-SS was a multinational force of idealists fighting for a common European destiny. Hausser and his publisher persuaded Heinz Guderian to write a glowing foreword to the book. This represented more than a straightforward endorsement by an eminent soldier; it was a public declaration that the Wehrmacht was extending a hand of friendship to the Waffen-SS, suggesting that the differences between the two were perhaps not so great after all.
The Cold War—with the looming threat of the Soviet Union and the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—played perfectly into the HIAG narrative of the Waffen-SS as defenders of the West. Hausser’s book was followed by others that developed the idea further, notably Felix Steiner’s 1958 publication, Die Freiwilligen der Waffen-SS: Idee und Opfergang (The Volunteers of the Waffen-SS: Idea and Sacrifice). The notion of the Waffen-SS as a Pan-European proto-NATO encouraged foreign SS veterans to make their own contributions. Among them was Léon Degrelle, who issued several books from his hideaway in Spain that praised the European contribution to the Waffen-SS, with appropriate emphasis given to the author’s role in the struggle.
A few battlefield memoirs from leading SS officers followed, notably Kurt Meyer’s pugnacious and self-serving account of his experiences with Leibstandarte and Hitlerjugend Divisions. But it was not until the end of the 1990s that SS war memoirs came into their own, as works by junior officers and other ranks met the demand by a new generation of readers eager to find out more from firsthand sources. They were supplemented by illustrated histories that showcased the vast treasury of photographs of the Waffen-SS. Commercial success brought their exploits to a wider audience, not only in Germany but, through translation, to North America and Western Europe as well.
The publication of divisional and unit histories provided the heavyweight support in HIAG’s “battle for history.” They were serious ventures, which in some cases—notably the histories of the Leibstandarte and Das Reich Divisions—were vast, multivolume works. They made extensive use of combat reports within a detailed narrative of the unit’s or formation’s activities on the battlefield and, where available, included testimonies to SS valor from the Wehrmacht and opposing armies. They were typically silent on Waffen-SS shortcomings, whether in terms of combat performance or involvement in atrocities.
The traditional regimental history—from any nation—has rarely dwelled on its subject’s negative aspects, but the refusal of these books to address the fundamental question of Waffen-SS involvement in Hitler’s war of extermination undermined their veracity. In HIAG’s eyes, however, such criticisms were quibbles by enemies attempting to divert attention away from their story of heroic self-sacrifice.
From the perspective of ordinary SS veterans, this positive narrative was eagerly sought after and no doubt beneficial to their psychological well-being post-1945. To lose the war in such a crushing manner and to be widely condemned as mass murderers was sufficiently bad, but the idea that their efforts and the deaths of their comrades had seemingly been for nothing would have been all but intolerable. Quite understandably, the veterans looked for some level of meaning to justify the suffering they had endured, a meaning provided by the idea of their participation in the battle to save Europe from communism.
The old cliché that “history is written by the victors” proved wrong in this instance. The books sponsored by HIAG and written by the veterans filled something of a niche void in post-1945 historiography: they were the first on the scene, and in the wider publishing sphere they outnumbered (and outgunned) the critical, more nuanced works of academic historians.17 HIAG’s victory was confirmed by a succession of popular histories from younger writers—without direct connection to the war—who readily adopted the SS viewpoint with little, if any, further historical scrutiny.18 Their works became part of a new orthodoxy of the “honorable” Waffen-SS, although this viewpoint did not go unchallenged in other popular histories, which while admiring the prowess of the Waffen-SS in battle did not exonerate them from the charge sheet of war crimes.19
THE FALL OF the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe was seized upon by the old veterans and their supporters as further vindication of their part in Germany’s war against the Soviet Union. Henri Fenet, an officer in the Charlemagne Division and survivor of the final defense in Berlin, reflected the mood of self-congratulation in a speech reproduced in Der Freiwillige in 1998: “After a half-century, history has justified our mission. We have paved the way to independence and self-sufficiency, and now the Europeans are walking down the road that we, then, paved.”20
The differing attitudes of Eastern European countries toward Soviet communism and Nazi Germany also supported the Waffen-SS conception of recent history. These countries had suffered under both tyrannical regimes, and post-1989 there was a feeling in some of them—especially Hungary, Estonia, and Latvia—that Stalin was the more evil of the two devils. This chimed with a strongly held belief that any organization that even appeared to have fought for national sovereignty was to be applauded. The Eastern European units of the Waffen-SS were included in this category, ignoring the fact that Hitler and Himmler had rejected any notion of national self-determination and were using them for their own cynical ends.
Waffen-SS veterans groups from Germany and the rest of Western Europe were invited to Eastern Europe to take part in celebrations otherwise banned in their home countries. HIAG had always wanted to publicly honor its fallen comrades with the construction of fixed sites as a focus for these commemorations.21 This had proved difficult to carry out in Western Europe, where even unofficial sites built on private land were regularly defaced or destroyed by protesters. Only in the extensive private grounds at Ulrichsberg in Austria—with tacit support from the Austrian government—were the veterans able to organize rallies with permanent memorials.
Hungary publicly acknowledged the Waffen-SS in its annual “Day of Honor” celebrations, first held in 1997, which commemorated the defense of Budapest in 1944–1945. In something of a festival atmosphere—complete with flying flags, martial music, and the laying of wreaths—veterans from the Waffen-SS marched alongside those of the Wehrmacht and the Hungarian Army, to the applause of an appreciative audience of right-wing and neo-Nazi groups.
Latvia and Estonia were also prominent in welcoming Waffen-SS veterans from across Europe, who in turn donated relief supplies and money to their hosts. Support for the Waffen-SS was somewhat more controversial in the Baltic States, however, with its large minority populations of Russian-speaking citizens opposing the erection of memorials glorifying SS troops as freedom fighters. Despite this, Narva in Estonia became a key site of commemoration, the former battleground where Waffen-SS units from the Baltic States, Germany, and Western Europe had fought together in the defense of the city in 1944.
During the war on the Eastern Front, the Wiking Division had established a cemetery and memorial at Uspenskaja in the eastern Ukraine. It was later bulldozed by the Red Army, but in 1993 a small group of former Wiking soldiers and their relatives established a wooden cross for their former comrades, which in subsequent years develope
d into a substantial memorial. This initiative was welcomed by Ukrainian nationalists, who were also determined to honor the contribution of their own people who fought for the Germans in World War II. The veterans of the Waffen-SS Ukrainian Division were lauded as heroes in the struggle against the Soviet Union, with graveyards to the dead carefully tended by volunteers and the division’s distinctive lion insignia publicly and reverentially displayed by young Ukrainians. Unsurprisingly, these celebrations irked many Russians and helped stoke the fires of ethnic antagonism between the two countries.
Support for the Waffen-SS within Eastern Europe has always been fiercely nationalistic, running counter to the Western European concept of a multinational Waffen-SS, but such differences seemed not to have upset the warmth of their mutual friendship.
A more pressing concern for the elderly veterans was to make sure their version of history continued into the future. As a defensive-minded self-help group, HIAG had steadfastly refused membership to those who had not served in the Waffen-SS. But as its members died off from natural causes and its political lobbying became less important, outside support to continue their legacy was looked upon more favorably.
When HIAG broke up as a national organization in the early 1990s, local old-comrades groups brought in younger members who subsequently took over the publication of Der Freiwillige. A looser successor to HIAG also came into being, the War Grave Memorial Foundation “When All Brothers Are Silent” (Kriegsgräberstiftung “Wenn alle Brüder schweigen”). As the twenty-first century progressed, the idea of “a passing on of the torch” to a new generation was promoted in Waffen-SS publications. These followers were a mixture of younger family members, various types of Waffen-SS admirers, and supporters of Far Right and Neo-Nazi groups.
The influx into Europe of migrants from Africa and the Middle East in the early twenty-first century also acted as an inducement for right-wing elements to reuse the SS fantasy that they were modern-day warriors defending Western Europe from external threat. At a commemoration in Estonia in 2005, a Swedish neo-Nazi described his meeting with a Belgian veteran: “I run into a gigantic old man from Léon Degrelle’s division. I am so eager standing over here with this two-meter man. He asks me, for the sake of their honor, to free Sweden from the foreign occupiers and explains that we Aryans will die if nothing happens. His stone-hard gaze softens a little at the thought of the perishing of the white peoples.”22 The fawning encounter, as described here, gave further support to the idea not only of the Waffen-SS as a chivalric order, but, more chillingly, that its work was not yet done and needed others to finish it.
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