Read Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying Online
Authors: Sonke Neitzel,Harald Welzer
Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (50 page)
Two
Waffen
SS soldiers in camouflage uniform, date unknown. (Photographer: Weyer; BA 10 III Weyer-032-2BA)
RAVERY
AND
F
ANATICISM
Applying great effort and skill, Nazi propagandists promoted the image of the Waffen SS as a “
fanatic” fighting troop with an incredible
“capacity for sacrifice,” and these categories crop up regularly in the surveillance protocols. Wehrmacht soldiers generally agreed that SS troops were “bullish” extremists, heedless even of death, marching forward into the crossfire to the strains of “Deutschland über alles” and suffering “terrible,” “insane,” and “senseless” losses.
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“One regiment, the Standarte Germania, had 2500 men killed in three months,” reported a horrified Luftwaffe sergeant.
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A group of German soldiers in
Normandy in summer 1944. Their helmets and
uniforms distinguish them as paratroopers. (Photographer: Slickers; BA 101 I-586-2225-16)
Most of the generals interned at
Trent Park had fought on the Eastern Front in 1941 and ’42, which is where they first encountered the
Waffen SS. They, too, told of senseless sacrifices among SS units:
U
NKNOWN
: I will just tell you about one scene which I myself witnessed with my own eyes—otherwise I shouldn’t speak about it. That was during the winter fighting, when four Russian divisions, a Guards cavalry division, two Guards infantry divisions and one other division, broke through the neighbouring division on my left wing. I now formed a defensive flank. My front was like this, and the defensive flank projected like this, it formed an acute angle—ridiculous. I was right in the centre at a distance of 4 km. with my battle headquarters, at a distance of 2 km. from both fronts. In order to form the defensive
flank, I got as a second unit an S.S. battalion, that is, it wasn’t much more than a glorified company. The company consisted of about a hundred and seventy-five men, a few heavy machine
guns and two mortars. There was one Hauptsturmführer von
B
ENDEN
, a grand fellow who had also been in the World War. These fellows had been acting as a protective division in the rear and had engaged guerrillas. They were then withdrawn and sent up to the front. I gave them orders to take the village of
V
OLCHANKA
(?). As they hadn’t any heavy weapons, I gave them two light machine guns and three anti-tank guns, which I also immediately withdrew. The attack was begun. I couldn’t believe my eyes, how quickly the attack proceeded, it developed splendidly, we advanced against the village and met with fire. Suddenly B
ENDEN
stood up in his car and drove up to the head of his battalion and the battalion fell in and marched on in step against the village.
B
ÜLOWIUS
: … …. complete madness.
U
NKNOWN
: They had nine officers. Out of these nine, seven were killed or wounded. Out of a hundred and seventy infantrymen, about eighty were lost. They took (?) the village.… . Afterwards they held the village with eighty men for a whole week, or rather they had to leave it once and got back again. In the end they had twenty-five men left. Yes, it was an absolute scandal. I gave him a troop of quick-firing (?) guns, he didn’t fire a round, not a single round. (I said), “You must fire, von
BENDEN
.”—“Nonsense, we can take it this way too.” Utter madness.
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Most listeners reacted to tales like this in the same way as Lieutenant General
Karl Bülowius did, by declaring SS behavior completely senseless.
The truth of such narratives was never doubted. Everyone accepted them as plausible. But SS units weren’t the only ones who were imagined to have incurred horrendous and senseless losses. Upon hearing such a story from SS Hauptsturmführer Benden, Major General
Fritz Krause remembers one of his own:
K
RAUSE
: But I have had the experience with G.A.F. units … …. from both battalions, the only two which then
existed, they were G.A.F. field divisions. They arrived somewhere there at five in the morning after a 16 km. night march through snow and ice. Then they took the infantry—at that time it was the
Korps
KNOBELSDORF
—and sent it to the left wing of an assault group which was being formed. The attack commenced at five o’clock straight from the column of march, they didn’t even have time to take their greatcoats off. They went off to the attack without any anti-tank guns or machine guns, nothing at all. They set off and advanced about 1½ to 2 km., suffering only a few losses. A Russian tank attack developed and mowed the people down. And from those two battalions there were 480 killed, of which quite 300 had been squashed as flat as this book by the
tanks. And countless wounded. Both battalions annihilated.
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Many soldiers had tales of hair-raising operations that had cost hundreds of men their lives. Typically, though, heavy losses among Wehrmacht units were explained with reference to inexperience among the field commanders or the troops themselves, while losses among the SS were the result of “utterly misconceived recklessness.”
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Interestingly, the protocols don’t contain any stories about
Waffen SS units who suffered particularly light casualties. Although many soldiers, in particular navy and
Luftwaffe men, never had anything at all to do with the Waffen SS, they believed in the intimidating images of their rivals as elite hotshots, who had been specially selected and trained, and who had no fear whatsoever of being killed.
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At first glance, Himmler’s soldiers seem to have fulfilled his demands for the ultimate sacrifice. Himmler had decreed in 1941 that there should be no such thing as a “captive SS man.” They were the “keepers of honor, the keepers of the fighting power of the division. They have a duty to draw their pistol on a comrade, if necessary, and force him to overcome his fear even in the face of giant onrushing tank. It may happen that a regiment or battalion shrinks to a fourth or a fifth of its original size. But it is beyond the realm of possibility that this fourth or fifth finds itself unable or unwilling to keep attacking.… As long as there are 500 men in a division, those 500 men are capable of attacking.”
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In 1944 Himmler called for an attitude similar to that of Japanese soldiers, among whom only 500 POWs from a force of 300,000 had been captured.
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The voices of SS men in the surveillance protocols initially seem to confirm Wehrmacht soldiers
’ view of them as unswerving fanatics. Members of the
Waffen SS related how their superiors drove them forward at gunpoint or summarily executed Wehrmacht soldiers who tried to retreat.
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When the commander of the SS division “
Hitler Youth,”
Kurt Meyer, encountered a demoralized Wehrmacht general in
Trent Park, he boasted: “I wish a lot of the officers here could command my ‘Division,’ so that they might learn some inkling of self-sacrifice and fanaticism. They would be deeply and profoundly ashamed.”
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Meyer’s radicalism had already shocked Wehrmacht officers at a training seminar in fall 1943. One of the participants remembers him declaring, after a third glass of wine, that “the soldier must become a heathen, fanatic fighter who hates every Frenchman, Englishman and American (or whatever nationality the enemy has) so that he wants to jump at the enemy’s throat and drink his blood. The soldier has to hate every [enemy], every one must be his mortal foe. Only so can we win the war.”
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For Standartenführer
Hans Lingner, who joined the SS early on and fought on the Eastern Front and in Normandy, the will to fight was inherently linked with the greater meaning of sacrifice. Lingner told a fellow POW, a regular army captain:
L
INGNER
: We have all been brought up from the cradle to consider
L
EONIDAS
’ fight at
T
HERMOPYLAE
as the highest form of sacrifice for one’s people. Everything else follows from that, and if the whole German nation has become a nation of soldiers, then it is compelled to perish; because by thinking as a human being and saying “It is all up with our people now, there’s no point in it, it’s nonsense,” do you really believe that you will save the sacrifice of an appreciable number of lives? Do you think it will alter the peace terms? Surely not. On the other hand it is established that a nation which has not fought out such a fateful struggle right to the last has never risen again as a nation.
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Hitler and Himmler would have used pretty much identical formulations. Lingner’s and Meyer’s attitudes are in many respects typical for the perspective of the Waffen SS as a whole. It was no accident, for instance, that two regular army POWs in February 1945 expressed
their belief that the SS would battle to the last and withdraw to the Alps to fight “a kind of
partisan war.”
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Nonetheless, historian
Rüdiger Overmans has shown that the percentage of
Waffen SS who fell in battle was not significantly higher than that in the regular army.
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Indeed, when we take a closer look at the numbers, SS
casualty figures are nearly identical to those for Wehrmacht tank divisions or
Luftwaffe paratroopers. As long as the front remained intact, there seems to have been little difference in behavior between various elite units. So why did Wehrmacht soldiers perceive the Waffen SS as a fanatic fighting force that had suffered disproportionate casualties?
If we analyze reports of losses, it emerges that in phases of
German retreat and defeats, such as in France in August 1944, significantly fewer Waffen SS soldiers were taken as prisoners of war than members of regular army or Luftwaffe units. The fact that the Allies tended to simply execute SS men does not fully explain this phenomenon.
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Apparently members of certain SS units did more often prefer to fight to the death rather than try to save themselves by capitulating.
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This was only a
tendency,
and not an absolute rule—otherwise, the percentage of fatalities among the Waffen SS would have been markedly greater than within the regular army. Still, the tendency did partially confirm the image of the fearless SS warriors from Nazi propaganda and established it, in simplified form, in Wehrmacht soldiers’ frame of reference. Yet ironically, regular soldiers’ fixation upon the putatively high losses among the Waffen SS allowed them to question the SS units’ supposed bravery. While regular army men did not doubt the daring of SS troops, normally a positive quality in their system of values, they also believed that the SS provoked “unnecessarily” large numbers of casualties. In this way, regular army POWs could avoid taking a purely positive view of SS soldiers. There were battles, of course, in which SS troops had achieved successful results without inordinate numbers of casualties,
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but stories of this sort did not fit in with the predominant Wehrmacht narrative and were thus left untold.
Some of those whose views were recorded in the protocols do reveal a more differentiated picture of the Waffen SS, including doubts as to whether they truly were more willing to fight to the death. General
Cramer recalled the mood among three units of the Waffen SS during the defense of
Charchow Ksiezy in Poland in February 1943: “They are just as fed up. They were more or less compelled, too, they
didn’t … at all of their own free will. They took part in all the dirty work and they are just as fed up as we are.
”
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Whether or not this was a fair assessment of the three newly deployed regiments, “Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler,” “The Reich,” and “Death’s Head,” is an open question. The point is that there was more to the
Waffen SS than fanaticism and willingness to sacrifice, as is evidenced by the decision by these three units to defy a command by Hitler and withdraw from the Polish town. One of the units also attracted the ire of General
Erhard Raus six months later for operating “listlessly.” Raus even tried, unsuccessfully, to get the division leader, SS Brigadeführer
Heinz Krüger, stripped of his command.
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