Put me in, Coach!
I’ll say “Damn Yankees” and it will even out.
I don’t think so. A number of children of people who lived through the war will still be sensitive about it. So, add at least one generation.
Also, WWII has more signifiance than WWI. The latter was a large scale tragedy, but didn’t have the same kind of implications.
Why? “The SS” could mean a number of things.
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that your relative was necessarily one of those blokes strutting round with a leather overcoat over his shoulders, slapping his gloves against his thighs and casually ordering women and children to be shot, just for the hell of it. I mean, he could have been, but the chances are he wasn’t.
Remember that back in the late 30s, the SS were seen as glamorous, dashing and heroic, they had the best training, the most up to date equipment, with very real prospects for promotion through the ranks for the talented - they really were the Elite, the guys to join…if they would have you.
SS tactics and innovation were instrumental in bouncing warfare out of the out-dated WW1 era, where men followed an officer’s direction. When that officer went down, that was that. SS troops were trained to take over, take the initiative, to follow through and achieve the objectives. Their elan and courage made them inspirational to Wehrmact troops facing superior enemy units, and their tenacity was one of the reasons the Allies hated and feared SS opposition. Unit cameraderie and loyalty was outstanding, right up to and beyond the end of the war.
If your relative did have the Blood Group tattoo, then he almost certainly was Waffen SS, the fighting man as described above. The other branch of the SS, the Allegemaine SS, was for administration etc. and was more the kind of place to find men who had never seen a shot fired in anger but were quite happy to pose about in their dashing uniform and soak up the glory - until the war started to bite, then they were seen as REMF ( as I believe the phrase is, as used in the US). Many Allegemaine men didn’t bother with the tattoos, they had no intention of being under fire, and this meant many could slip through the Allies’ net at the end of the war and distance themselves from organising, say, train departures from France to Poland, for example. It could be argued that these men had more to answer for than the trooper at the sharp end, fighting every step back from Russia to the gates of Berlin. The fighting man may be less inclined to deny his service record, despite it doing him no favours post-war.
Finally, in the last months of the war, SS divisions were padded out with transfers from other branches of the armed forces. One minute you might be in a Luftwaffe unit, (with no aircraft), the next in an SS division standing in front of the Red Army. You certainly weren’t asked if you fancied it. (Interestingly, these low grade troops were often said to assume the courage and spirit of their new division, despite having simply been given the cuff title, and fought with great bravery. Possibly, however, it was because they knew, as SS troops, they would be given little quarter if they surrendered or were captured )
So, don’t dismiss “the SS” out of hand, many brave and honest fighting men were criminalised for little good reason other than the organisation’s reputation. It is true that their tenacity sometimes led them to be “over zealous” and reckless, and some Waffen SS units were guilty of appalling war crimes, but to see them ALL as “the bad guys” of the Third Reich is to fail to learn lessons about the structure of a militaristic society in Germany at that time. The cartoon character villain as loved by Hollywood etc was not the typical SS man, any more than your Jewish relative was a grasping treacherous parasitic Fagin character. Judge a man on what he did, not on the post-war stereotype of the organisation he was assigned.
I guess this highlights the importance of speaking to our elderly relatives, to get the story straight from the horses’ mouths, and of course, paying attention when they talk! A great wealth of service information is now available, it might well be possible to find out exactly where and when your relative served his country. Admittedly there is always the possibility that you discover something unsavoury, but at least you will know for sure - you will see that men do terrible things to each other in war, not monsters. Their blood is the same as that which runs through yours…
Settle down, Beavis.
John Cleese said in an interview that when he was in Germany to see about making a German version of Fawlty Towers, a German businessman in the foyer of his hotel shouted over to him "John ! Don’t mention the war ! "
So yes, Germans do have a sense of humour .
What you’re describing was generally true of all German troops; it’s the manner in which they were trained and fought.
It’s absurd to credit the SS with bringing warfare out of the WWI era. Modern mechanized warfare was invented by other people and was first practised by the regular German armed forces, not the Waffen SS, and indeed before the Waffen SS was even a significant military force. The Waffen SS was not organized into divisional strength until after the invasion of Poland, and was a very small part of the invasions of Belgium, Netherlands and France, though they did manage to start their record of outrageous war crimes.
Well, without going too OT, let me clarify:
Firstly, I said that the SS were “instrumental” ie. “contributory”, not solely responsible for the way warfare developed. They capitalised on things that others were slow to see the benefits of - for example, their use of disruptive pattern camoflage smocks. They weren’t the first to wear them, by a long way, but the first to wear such battledress as standard issue on a large scale, rather than for just snipers or spotters. Such ideas at the time were seen as odd, but who today doesn’t wear camoflage print kit?
Secondly, I didn’t mention mechanised warfare, where does that come into it?
I was talking, primarily, about the way SS troops all went through basic training together, creating a body of men who had a fierce sense of loyalty to their comrades. Officer candidates were then picked from these men, on talent.
The rest of the German army were still adhering to the old-school Prussian Junkers system of appointing officers through their family connections, or class, rather than ability, who were aloof and distant to the men they commanded. SS officers ate, trained and lived with their men, meaning that when under pressure, they could act, react, adapt in a more fluid and less formal manner, vital in fast moving situations. More like a modern army than WW1 era forces, I would say…
Wow…so much praise for the Waffen SS!
Under Gen. Sepp Dietrich, SS troops (Battle of the Bulge) committed numerous acts of atrocities-including the murder of US Army POWs. They also had a habit of shooting civilians who tried to help wounded US soldiers. Yep, real heroes, those SS troops…too bad they all were not hung.:mad:
I’m sure it would have been perfectly moral, legal, and practical to hang several hundred thousand soldiers (many of whom were conscripts and the majority of whom weren’t Germans for that matter). Although you’re right about the Malmedy massacre-a Senator named Joseph McCarthy managed to get Peiper and his gang off the hook by arguing they were “tortured” while in captivity. Sound familiar?
Who said anything about the (few) Waffen SS soldiers who behaved like civilized soldiers?
Of course, on the Eastern Front, the Russians didn’t entertain such niceties-a lot of SS men sliced their tattoos off (in a vain attempt to hide their affiliations).
That particular incident involved 75 soldiers. Should the rest of the Kampfgruppe involved (4800 men) hang for their crimes too? The entire 6th Panzer Army under Dietrich? Or perhaps just those proven guilty of the criminal action, or ordering it?
During that battle, American troops were executing POWs, following General Patton’s “no prisoners” order. Is it right to execute men who have laid down their arms and surrendered? Of course not, no matter which side you are on. History is written by the victors though…
Don’t think I’m trivialising, dismissing W-SS war crimes, or claiming that the Allies were just as bad - nothing of the sort. Members of many SS divisions, a greater proportion than one would expect from just over-enthusiastic men getting the red mist, DID carry out horrific acts that are inexcusable.
However, save for obvious, terrible examples like Oradour-sur-Glane, persecution of civilian populations and the evil of the Holocaust was not a product of the elite W-SS - they were soldiers, good soldiers, too busy trying to grasp victory in the East, and then to stem the tide of the Allied advances on all fronts.
The non-Germanic SS divisions from the East were mostly responsible for the large scale, prolonged Crimes Against Humanity, for “anti-partisan” operations, happy to join up and wear German uniform and continue their centuries of ethnic conflict, as in the Balkans. They weren’t even good soldiers, as shown when they had to face the Red Army and were rolled up in no time (or deserted). They bear no relation to the “Elite” Germanic W-SS formations - who, I accept, were far, far from being squeaky clean.
My point, to the person who said they would not be happy about their relative being a member of the SS, stands.
You shouldn’t dismiss every SS recruit as a war criminal, they have been convenient whipping-boys for the horrors of WW2 for nearly 70 years. Nearly a million men were under the SS banner at the end of the war - a lot of men to condemn for the actions of a minority, whose crimes will evermore overshadow the average, ordinary soldier in SS uniform. These crimes must never be forgotten or downplayed, but life, let alone war, isn’t black and white,and there were good, honest men and absolute evil scum on all sides.
War is hell, and brings out the worst in some men…
While it’s common for Western observers to concentrate on incidents involving POWs, the fact is that such incidents are a miniscule part of the horror inflicted on conquered territory by the SS. The rates of murder, rape and pillage that occurred whereever they went almost defy belief; their perspective, as noted in firsthand accounts written by the SS themselves (and, to be frank, it wasn’t uncommon among the regular Army) was that they were dealing with subhumans and could do as they pleased, which was usually to shoot people. SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler earned a reputation for massacring civilians within weeks of the invasion of Poland. Anywhere the Waffen SS went, civilians were murdered, raped, and left to starve. The level of suffering caused in the USSR was on a scale of inconceivable proportions.
Yes indeed, a VERY high percentage of Waffen SS soldiers were war criminals. It was not a small number of them; they were the vanguard of Nazi ideology and they treated civilians in a manner so digusting that anyone who was a member of such a formation should be deeply ashamed. The notion that most of the crimes were committed by non-German units is complete nonsense. Who was doing the shooting at Babi Yar?
I’m sorry, but you are wrong. This was a feature of the regular German army, and always had been; it was in no way a feature unusually true of the SS, which if anything was actually more authoritarian than the regular Heer.
The concept you’re referring to is expressed in pseudo-German as “Auftragstaktik,” (like “Blitzkrieg,” it is a German word not actually invented by Germans) which sort of translates as “mission-oriented leadership.” Basically, it was the German approach that junior and intermediary officers and NCOs be assigned tasks as mission and asked to carry them out without being told how in the form of direct orders; of course, this relied on an unusual degree of drilling and commonality in training in fundamental doctrine, so officers could predict how each other would probably act. It also requires that officers giving such orders are very, very good at giving orders in as clear and unambiguous a manner as possible.
Such concepts long predated the war, of course and weren’t restricted to Germany; Ulysses S. Grant was a master of it, and understood and applied the concept brilliantly. But the Germans took to Auftragstaktik **before the Nazi party even existed, much less the SS. ** The concept was dreamt up as early as the Napoleonic Wars, and really got underway immedaitely after World War I, under Von Seeckt’s reorganization of the Wehrmacht. Whatever of the doctrine the SS had, they learned it from the Wehrmacht.
In the same way that anyone who was a member of the USMC should be deeply ashamed over their conduct in Iraq? Or just the ones who allowed/participated in the documented atrocities, like, say, Haditha in 2005? (And before I get lit up, no, I’m not saying the two conflicts are in any way comparable, it’s merely the example I’m using of assuming guilt for the crimes of others, for simply being in the same organisation).
Yes, if someone was there at the scene, or participated in atrocities, they should be deeply ashamed (or hanged), but W-SS troops were divided up across whole Heer Army Groups - it is quite possible to have been nowhere near, and have no knowledge of, the actions taken by a sister company who were miles away.
Am I my brother’s keeper?
In such a brutal conflict, even being aware of such things going on around you is not a reason to condemn someone, IMHO, we will never know what it is like to be in the centre of such a maelstrom and how we would react. Intervene, and be killed? Or be a Wise Monkey? Thankfully, I doubt I’ll ever get to find out.
Well, certainly not any elite Germanic W-SS formations
A handful of SS-Polizei men attached to Sonderkommando 4a, Einsatzgruppen C did the shooting, assisted by Ukrainians who did the round-ups, but I know you aren’t suggesting that only those Germans who pulled the trigger were the criminals. Those Ukrainian Einsatzgruppen volunteers, to the layman, “SS troops”, who went about their work with gusto, uprooting their neighbours to be liquidated, are exactly the kind of people I meant.
I’ll say again, to the person who posted the statement about being unhappy about their relative’s membership - don’t condemn them before you know their past, some research will place you in a better position to make a judgement.
Rickjay, we’re just going to have to agree to disagree, you can’t convince me and we will go back and forth over and again, but it’s not going to keep me awake at night…
So what do the Southrons do, pretend they never fought for Sauron or something like that?
Stuff like hang the Confederate Kampffahne everywhere, or publish books like the South Was Right!. The Confederates wasn’t Nazi-level bad but clearly was on the morally wrong side considering they were rebelling against an established government for the purpose of perpetuating and expanding slavery.
I thought the SDMB would be the last place a Lord of the Rings joke would go over people’s heads.
Quite right. The SS troops in Russia took delight in burning down civilian houses-of course, this meant that the families would freeze to death and starve. This was SOP for much of the regular army as well.
When the tide of war turned, the Russian troops extended no mercy to the Waffen SS-many SS troops tried to cut off their tattoos-but it didn’t help them.
Soooooooo, if I post something disparaging about the Stalin-era KGB, or the murderous Pol Pot regime, or Charles Manson and his crazy-ass followers on this board, will someone appear to vociferously defend them?
Just curious.
The following smiley is directed at anyone who defends the SS: :rolleyes:
Ach du lieber and may I add - Oy Vey!
Yep that’s pretty much my experience. My parents were in the Hitler youth. It wasn’t their choice and they immigrated to Canada in 1953 in hopes of avoiding getting caught up in something like that again. I was born after the war (1947) but still feel a bit of guilt about it, although getting kicked around by my fellow elementary school students for my inadequate grasp of English and my lederhosen helped me get over it somewhat. 
Nothing like getting kicked around to incentivize one to quickly learn to speak English without a German accent. My daughter is Jewish, so she doesn’t feel any familial guilt, just bemusement that “My dad’s relatives tried to kill off my mom’s relatives but failed.”
I am sending over some comfort-bots to teach you about facetiae, son.