Army of Evil: A History of the SS (39 page)

O
ne of the most striking aspects of the SS was the extent to which non-German nationals were welcomed, and indeed co-opted, into its ranks. Robert Gelwick claims that “nearly half or more than half of the 910,000 men believed to have served in the Waffen-SS were not Germans or German nationals.”
¹
Initially, the recruitment of non-Germans was handled carefully, to tie in with Himmler’s vision of the SS as the wellspring for all “good blood” within Europe. However, as the war continued, the supposedly crucial racial element was put to one side, and non-Germans—particularly those from Eastern Europe and Asia—were recruited
en masse
to enhance
¹
the combat power of the Waffen-SS.

The first non-German nationals to join the SS were Austrians, who were recruited even before Hitler came to power. The Austrian NSDAP was, in effect, a subsidiary of the German movement, but, predictably, it placed special emphasis on the
Anschluss
—the legal and political union of Germany and Austria. From January 1933 onwards, the Austrian National Socialists stepped up their challenge to the government of Austria through demonstrations and acts of terrorism and
sabotage. The government, led by the authoritarian Engelbert Dollfuss, responded in June with a ban on the Austrian NSDAP and its subsidiary organisations (it had its own SA and SS). Consequently, many Austrian SA and SS members crossed the border into Germany as refugees, with around six thousand of them setting up an SA camp at Lechfeld, near Augsburg.
²
As we have seen, Adolf Eichmann was among their number:

Subsequently, in December 1933, the SS battalion was moved from Lechfeld to Prittlbach, and from there to Schleissheim. Meanwhile, in response to diplomatic protests, the Austrian Legion itself was formally dissolved. In 1934 the Austrian battalion was absorbed into the nascent Special Purpose Troops as 2nd Battalion, SS-Regiment 1 (which would eventually become the
Deutschland
Regiment).

In addition to the Austrians, a number of other non-Germans joined the SS in the 1930s. Probably the most important of these was the Swiss physician Dr. Franz Riedweg. Born in Lucerne in 1907, Riedweg was politically well connected in both Switzerland and Germany, in the latter through his marriage to one of Field Marshal von
Blomberg’s daughters.
⁴
He joined the SS in July 1935 and served initially as a doctor with the Special Purpose Troops, but by mid-1943 he had risen to become chief of staff of the
Germanische Leitstelle
(Germanic Administration)—the branch of the SS-Main Office responsible for recruitment throughout occupied Europe and beyond. Riedweg was thus a key figure in the formulation of the SS’s unique policy towards foreign volunteers.

Howard Marggraff never rose anywhere near as high as Riedweg in the SS hierarchy, but his case is intriguing in another way—because Marggraff was an American, from Milwaukee. Born on 16 October 1916, he apparently came from a relatively well-off family. He visited Europe in the summer of 1936, during which time he watched some of the Berlin Olympics and spent three weeks in the Soviet Union. He evidently decided that he preferred fascism to communism, because he returned to Germany in February 1938 and joined the
Reichs Arbeits Dienst
(Reich Labour Service) for seven months.
*
In September, he began a course at Berlin University.

Marggraff later claimed that he was invited to join what he termed either the “Free Legion of Volunteers” or the “
Freischar
” in early 1939.
⁵
He characterised this as a branch of the SS for foreign volunteers. However, aside from his account, there is no evidence that this organisation ever existed. It is possible that he invented it simply for exculpatory reasons, because by July 1939 at the latest, Marggraff was a full-time member of a Death’s Head unit—the Danzig Home Guard. By his own account, he served with the Home Guard during the German invasion of Poland in September, when the unit was subordinated to the 207th Infantry Division. Which means he would have been with it on 8 September, when it executed thirty-three Polish civilians in the Pomeranian village of Ksiazki (Hohenkirch).
⁶
On 29 September, with the Polish campaign won, the Home Guard paraded
through its “home” city before being transferred to Dachau, headquarters of the Death’s Head units.
⁷
From there, Marggraff and the rest of his unit participated in the invasion of France in May and June 1940.

The following February, Marggraff was released by the Waffen-SS to work as an English-language propaganda broadcaster for the German Radio Service. However, two years later, he skied through the Alps to neutral Switzerland and presented himself to the US Embassy.
*
He received a distinctly uncordial reception,
⁸
and never revealed what had prompted him to join the SS four years earlier.

It is easier to establish what motivated some other pre-war foreign volunteers. In July 1939, an Englishman wrote to Rudolf Hess, Deputy Leader of the NSDAP:

Himmler’s personal staff made enquiries about Murphy through the NSDAP’s
Auslandsorganisation
(Overseas Organisation), but these yielded no information about him. Then, with the outbreak of war, his application was not pursued.

One Englishman who did succeed in joining the SS was Thomas Cooper, a young Londoner. His father, Ashley Cooper, was a veteran of the Boer War who established a photography business in Berlin and married a young German woman, Anna Maria Simon. When the First World War broke out, Ashley was interned as an enemy alien in Berlin, while Anna remained free. Thomas was born exactly nine months after the armistice, back in England, where the couple had moved to try to rebuild their lives.

The Coopers eventually settled in Hammersmith, west London, and in due course sent Thomas to Latymer Upper School. He did well enough academically to be remembered by his headmaster as “a clever boy who was interested in foreign languages.” His “character appeared sound,”
¹⁰
too, but in December 1936 he was unable to follow the majority of his classmates into higher education because of lack of money. Instead, he went to work as a clerk for an importer of essential oils in Hackney. Cooper was soon disenchanted with this job, so he made a series of applications to more prestigious organisations. However, he was turned down by the Foreign Office, the Royal Navy, the Royal Air Force and the Metropolitan Police. (Both he and his parents blamed these repeated rejections on his mother’s nationality.) Finally, an embittered Cooper joined his local branch of the British Union of Fascists (BUF).

In July 1939, Cooper and his mother travelled to Chemnitz in Germany. They stayed with relatives and Cooper entered a student exchange scheme run by the Reich Labour Service. However, he soon left to find work teaching at a language school in the Taunus Mountains. He was still there when war was declared between Britain and Germany in September. This would normally have led to internment for the duration of the war because Cooper was an enemy alien of military age, but he had a trump card to present to the authorities: his mother had obtained a certificate that classified him as an ethnic German.
¹¹
This left Cooper in a kind of limbo: as a British national, he was treated with suspicion; but as an ethnic German, he was entitled to most of the privileges enjoyed by a German citizen. After taking a variety of odd jobs, he followed up a suggestion from the
Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle
(VOMI—Ethnic German Central Administration) to join the “German Army.”
¹²
However, on 1 February 1940, he reported for duty at 163 Finckensteinallee in Berlin-Lichterfelde, the training depot of the
Leibstandarte
Adolf Hitler.

By that stage, he was far from being the only non-German in the armed branch of the SS. Three months later, the Waffen-SS conducted an audit of its manpower.
¹³
Out of its 124,199 officers, NCOs and men, more than 40,000 had their origins outside the pre-1933 borders of Germany. The membership broke down as follows:

German citizens from:

Ethnic Germans from:

Foreign volunteers of “Germanic” blood from:

Howard Marggraff was probably classified as a Germanic volunteer, making him one of the five in that category from the USA, all of whom served in the Death’s Head Division. Thomas Cooper was probably included among the ten British ethnic Germans, three of whom were in Death’s Head regiments. (By May 1940, Cooper was serving in a Death’s Head training unit in Radolfzell, near the Swiss border.) The seven others were in the Police Division.

At this point, foreigners were not specifically targeted by the Waffen-SS for recruitment, and if any did find their way into the organisation, they were not segregated from the German members. However, both of these policies were about to change.

With opportunities for recruiting young German nationals restricted by the
Wehrmacht
, Berger hit on the idea of bringing in ethnic Germans from the rest of Europe. He calculated that there were up to 1.5 million ethnic Germans of military age in Central and South-East Europe, none of whom would be included in the
Wehrmacht
draft. Crucially, though, they did still meet the racial criterion demanded by the SS. Berger’s own son-in-law, Andreas Schmidt, was a leader of the German community within Romania. In the spring of 1940, he had smuggled more than a thousand young ethnic Germans out of the country and into the waiting arms of the Waffen-SS. Delighted by this, in August 1940 Berger proposed launching a recruitment campaign among the ethnic Germans of Romania, Hungary and Yugoslavia, “with or without the agreement of their Governments.”
¹⁴
Himmler gave Berger the green light to proceed, which he duly did, but with only limited success.