THE WAFFEN-SS ON THE EASTERN FRONT.pdf

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INTRODUCTION
ased on Waffen-SS are often hailed as an elite fighting
force. However, while it is true that this force fought
exceptionally well in military terms, in social and
humanitarian terms the reputation of the Waffen-SS, the armed
political wing which grew out of the Schutzstaffel or Nazi party
protection squads, will always be tainted by the war crimes they
committed in the East and West. Their litany of crimes in the
Soviet Union included the killing of those the Nazis designated
as untermenschen or sub humans – Slavs, Jews and Marxists.
B
The Waffen-SS was one of the weapons in the Nazi arsenal
which was used to wage the unlooked for war which was to lead
its architects to the courtroom at Nuremberg. These men you see
here were the Nazi idealists who had bought into the Nazi creed
of expansion to the east in search of Lebensraum.
The Lebensraum ideology proposed an aggressive expansion
of Germany and the German people. The Nazis supported
territorial expansionism to gain
Lebensraum
as being a law of
nature. The Nazi creed espoused the idea that it was necessary
for all healthy and vigorous peoples of superior races to displace
people of inferior races; especially if the people of a superior
race were facing overpopulation in their given territories. The
hierarchy of the Nazi Party believed that Germany inevitably
needed to territorially expand because it was indeed facing an
overpopulation crisis which Adolf Hitler described as follows:
“We are overpopulated and cannot feed ourselves from our own
resources.” It was on this basis that expansion eastwards was
justified as an inevitable necessity for Germany. From 1939 to
1941, the Nazi regime gave the outward appearance of having
discarded plans to annex Soviet territories, this deceptive stance
was strengthened by the improved relations with the Soviet
Union via the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and the public claims
that central Africa was where Germany sought to achieve
Lebensraum.
Hitler publicly claimed that Germany wanted to
settle the
Lebensraum
issue peacefully through diplomatic
negotiations that would require other powers to make
concessions to Germany; at the same time however Germany
prepared for war in the cause of Lebensraum, and the potential
clash between the peoples of Germany and the Soviet Union.
In 1941, it was the stated policy of the Nazis to kill, deport,
or enslave the Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, and other Slavic
populations, whom they considered inferior, and to repopulate
the land with Germanic people drawn primarily from the ranks
of the Waffen-SS. The urban population was considered
disposable and could potentially be exterminated by starvation,
thus creating an agricultural surplus to feed Germany and
allowing their replacement by the population of warrior farmers
who were to be rewarded with grants of land in recognition for
their service in the ranks of the Waffen-SS. The policy of
Lebensraum
implicitly assumed the superiority of Germans as
members of an Aryan master race who by virtue of their
superiority had the right to displace people deemed to be part of
inferior races. The Nazis insisted that Lebensraum needed to be
developed as racially homogeneous to avoid intermixing with
peoples deemed to be part of inferior races, with its strict entry
requirements the Waffen-SS was the prime instrument in
Hitler’s vision The man who was to give concrete form was
Heinrich Himmler and it was he who was the real driving force
behind the Waffen-SS in practical terms. The vague rhetoric
spouted by Hitler had to be translated into practicality by
Himmler. Hitler, as always had no concrete plan, as a result,
those peoples deemed to be inferior races living within territory
selected for
Lebensraum
were subject to arbitrary expulsion,
enslavement or destruction.
Hitler gave a speech to his Waffen-SS troops just three weeks
before the start of Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi code name for
the attack on the Soviet Union. He said, “This is an ideological
battle and a struggle of races. Here stands a world as we
conceived it – beautiful, decent, socially equal and full of
culture; this is what our Germany is like. On the other side
stands a population of 180,000,000, a mixture of races, whose
very names are unpronounceable and whose physique is such
that one can only shoot them down without mercy or
compassion. When you fight over there in the east, you are
carrying on the same struggle against the same sub-humanity,
the same inferior races, that at one time appeared under the
name of Huns, another time of Magyars, another time of Tartars,
and still another time under the name of Genghis Khan and the
Mongols. Today they appear as Russians under the political
banner of Bolshevism.”
When he launched operation Barbarossa Hitler expected the
Wehrmacht
(the German armed forces) to conquer the Soviet
Union and the Waffen-SS to carry out the goals of the party. To
the
Wehrmacht
Hitler ordered the job of “kicking in the front
door so the whole rotten Russian edifice will come tumbling
down”. To the Waffen-SS therefore fell not just the job of
combat but also waging a race war to create Hitler’s long
cherished dream of
Lebensraum,
the much-anticipated living
space for the German people in the East. However, as events
spiralled out of control, the war in the east became the most
titanic struggle in the history of human conflict. From the
opening moves the scale of the struggle was truly colossal. On
one side were over three million well trained, equipped and
battle hardened German troops including the Waffen-SS and half
a million of their Axis allies. In total the Germans deployed 153
divisions including 21 Panzer and 14 motorised divisions
containing over 3,400 tanks and 3000 aircraft. On the other side
was a Soviet army of over five million men in 180 divisions
with over 10,000 tanks and 20,000 aircraft.
This was a genuine life or death struggle, during operations
in the East the Waffen-SS grew from just six divisions
comprising 160,000 men at the start of Barbarossa until, by the
end of the war, it represented a huge force of 38 combat
divisions comprising over 950,000 men. Under the command of
Heinrich Himmler, the Waffen-SS received privileged treatment
in terms of weapons and supplies. As a consequence they
attracted only the most committed recruits who were willing to
fight and die for the cause. Not surprisingly with their
advantages which sprang from highly motivated recruits,
excellent equipment, cohesive background requirements and an
all-embracing ideological indoctrination, the Waffen-SS soon
earned a fearsome reputation in combat.
In the East Waffen-SS divisions were placed under the
operational control of the
Oberkommando des Heeres
or the
Supreme High Command of the Army although in practice they
often acted independently. Initially the Waffen-SS was
numerically insignificant when compared to regular Germany
Army, however the Waffen-SS brought to Barbarossa an
ideological fanaticism out of all proportion to their numbers.
This sense of racial and military superiority, which was
encouraged by Himmler and maintained through better pay, food
and equipment, was central to the Waffen-SS philosophy. It was

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