I have read that the members of the Waffen SS (essentially a parallel army to the German Wehrmacht) were tattooed upon acceptance. Later, as Germany began to suffer defeat on the Eastern Front, there was a story that SS troops were removing these tattoos, as Russian soldiers were immediately killing captured SS troops.(Regular German Army troops were treated with some measure of respect). Is this true? I’m sure that removing the tattoos was done by cutting the skin-so you would have a scar there anyway. This sounds like another war rumor…is it true?
Pretty much true. The tattoo was their blood type.
Called the Blutgruppentätowierung, although not every Waffen SS man had one - Mengele for example. While SS men cut or burned away the tattoo this was still pretty conspicuous, so some SS men “steamed their tattoos with smoking nitric acid to fade the mark…others applied corn plasters to remove the top layers of skin one by one, thus leaving less of a scar. The blood-group tattoo proved the bane of SS personel trying to disguise themselves and Wehrmatch soldiers. At an American POW camp, Woltersdorf heard about a ‘German Army’ officer who was sent to the SS interment camp at Mauthausen. Unfortunately his only surviving limb just happened to be the one with the scar of his burned-off SS blood group.”
That’s not to say that the lot of the ordinary German soldier was that much better at the hands of the Soviets; hence why many surrendered in droves to the Anglo-Americans whilst fighting to the death against the advancing Soviets (much to Stalin’s annoyance), or in the case of some made suicide-murder pacts rather than be taken alive.
Very true, my father was sent out to forage food [he spoke German and had a much better success rate at trading for food that others in his unit that didn’t speak German] and almost always came back with a trailer of food and a trail of surrendered Germans. One time he was followed back by 44 surrendered Germans, each of them also carrying food that didn’t fit into the trailer. It helped that they would get a hot shower and food when they surrendered. Though I am sure that not sent to a gulag was a bonus.
I was reading a recent account of the end of the war and they were talking about an American platoon of thirty soldiers who “captured” over 350 Germans during a scouting patrol.