Waffen-SS in popular culture

Book cover of The Myth of the Eastern Front that explores the image of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS in American popular culture; image adopted from cover art of electronic game The Last Victory: Manstein's Backhand Blow, February–March 1943. The game depicts the Third Battle of Kharkov, in which several Waffen-SS units took part.[1]

Waffen-SS in popular culture refers to the representation of the Waffen-SS, the paramilitary formation of the SS in Nazi Germany, via ideas, perspectives, attitudes, and images that are within the mainstream of a given culture, from the post-war period to the present time.

The portrayal of the force has been a subject of significant revisionist efforts, undertaken by HIAG, a lobby group founded by former high-ranking Waffen-SS men in 1951 in West Germany. The revisionist tradition continues to the present time, through popular history books, web sites and wargames.

Foundation

Post-war Waffen-SS lobby group (HIAG)

Main article: HIAG

HIAG, the lobby group and a revisionist veteran's organisation founded by former high-ranking Waffen-SS personnel in West Germany in 1951, laid the foundation for the post-war interpretation of the Waffen-SS in popular culture. The organisation campaigned for the legal, economic and historical rehabilitation of the Waffen-SS, using contacts with political parties to manipulate them for its purposes. Restoring the "tarnished shield"[n 1] was viewed by the leadership as a key component of the desired legal and economic rehabilitation, and thus no effort was spared.[2][3]

Ever since the Nuremberg Trials, the defenders of the Waffen-SS argued that it was a purely military organisation no different from the Wehrmacht. The prosecution at Nuremberg rejected that claim and successfully argued that the Waffen-SS was an integral part of the SS apparatus. The Tribunal found that "the units of the Waffen-SS were directly involved in the killings of the prisoners of war and the atrocities in the occupied countries" and judged the entire SS to be a criminal organisation.[4]

HIAG aimed to reverse that judgement through significant propaganda efforts in the service of its historical revisionism.[5][n 2] HIAG's rewriting of history encompassed multi-prong publicity campaigns, including tendentious periodicals, books and public speeches, alongside with a publishing house dedicated to presenting the Waffen-SS in a positive light.[3] This extensive body of work—57 book titles and more than 50 years of monthly periodicals—have been described by historians as revisionist apologia.

Always in touch with its Nazi past, HIAG was a subject of significant controversy, both in West Germany and abroad. The organisation drifted into right-wing extremism in its later history; it was disbanded in 1992 at the federal level, but local groups, along with the organisation's monthly periodical, continued to exist at least through the 2000s, possibly into the 2010s. While HIAG only partially achieved its goals of legal and economic rehabilitation of Waffen-SS, its propaganda efforts led to the reshaping of the image of Waffen-SS in popular culture. The results are still felt, with scholarly treatments being out-weighed by a large amount of amateur historical studies, memoirs, picture books, websites and wargames.

Foundational texts

HIAG's historical revisionism

By the mid-1950s, HIAG established an image that separated the Waffen-SS from other SS formations and shifted responsibility for crimes that could not be denied to the Allgemeine-SS (security and police), the SS-Totenkopfverbände and the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units). The Waffen-SS was thus successfully integrated into the myth of the clean Wehrmacht.[11]

The positive image of the Waffen-SS as an organisation indeed took root, and not only in Germany itself. In the era of the Cold War, senior Waffen-SS personnel were "not shy about the fact that they had once organised a NATO-like army, and an elite one at that", notes MacKenzie (emphasis in the original).[12] John M. Steiner, in his 1975 work, points out that SS apologists, especially strongly represented in HIAG, stressed that they were the first to fight for Europe and Western civilisation against "Asiatic Communist hordes".[13]

Quoting German political journalist Karl Otto Paetel in his 1966 book, the historian George Stein writes that the works produced by HIAG's circle were "trying to prove only what no tolerably informed person has ever attempted to deny, viz., that the soldiers of the Waffen-SS were brave fighters, suffered big losses and, as far as they served in the front line, did not run exterminations camps".[14] Stein notes that the apologists define the Waffen-SS "in the narrowest of terms" and are silent on the matter of war crimes. He notes that only a minority of men were implicated in known atrocities and that the most historically significant role of the Waffen-SS was in the battles for "Hitler's Europe". But "to recognise this is not to agree with the apologists who picture the overwhelming majority of the men of the Waffen-SS as idealistic, clean-living, decent and honourable soldiers", Stein writes.[15]

The German historian Karsten Wilke, who wrote a book on HIAG, Die "Hilfsgemeinschaft auf Gegenseitigkeit" (HIAG) 1950–1990: Veteranen der Waffen-SS in der Bundesrepublik ("HIAG 1950–1990: Waffen-SS veterans in the Federal Republic"), notes that, by the 1970s, HIAG attained a monopoly on the historical representation of the Waffen-SS. Its recipe was simple and contained just four ingredients:

Historians dismiss, and even ridicule, this characterisation. Picaper labels it as a "self-panegyric",[17] while Large uses the words "extravagant fantasies about [Waffen-SS's] past and future".[18] MacKenzie refers to HIAG's body of work as a "chorus of self-justification"[12] and Stein as "apologetics".[19] The historian James M. Diehl describes HIAG's claims of the Waffen-SS being the so-called fourth branch of the Wehrmacht as "false", and HIAG's insistence that the force was a precursor to NATO as "even more outrageous".[20]

German accounts, and HIAG's contributions among them, were embraced by the US military people as they prepared for an armed conflict with the Soviet Union. The narrative also found its way into popular culture, with many works translated into English. The historians Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies write:[21][n 3]

Paradoxically, these post-Cold War books thrived despite two decades of German, Israeli and American scholarship that convincingly portrayed the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS as part of the killing machine in the East. (...) Little if any sentiment has been extended [by the Americans] to the families of the 8 million Red Army soldiers who died fighting the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS, or the 22 million civilians killed by these military organisations and the killing squads, the Einsatzgruppen.

As a "crucible of historical revisionism" (in Picaper's definition),[17] HIAG achieved remarkable success in its rewriting of history, unlike in its goals of economic or legal rehabilitation of the Waffen-SS. The results are felt to this day in public's perceptions and popular culture.[23]

Waffen-SS groups in 21st century

Der Freiwillige was still being published in the 2000s. At some point, Der Freiwillige and the Munin Verlag publishing business had been taken over by Patrick Agte, a right-wing author and publisher.[24] Regional HIAG chapters continued to exist through the 2000s, at least one into the 2010s.[25] These groups worked to maintain momentum through the recruitment of younger generations and through outreach to foreign veterans of the Waffen-SS, aided by the continued publication of Der Freiwillige. "[Its] acclaimed aim, today [2014], is to link older and younger generations in a common cause," note the historians Steffen Werther and Madeleine Hurd. The publication's predominant theme continued to be "Europe against Bolshevism", with several editorials devoted to the idea that the Waffen-SS laid the foundation for the unification of Europe, expansion of NATO and "freedom of Fatherlands", as stated in one of the issues.[26]

HIAG's informal successor was the international War Grave Memorial Foundation "When All Brothers Are Silent" (Kriegsgräberstiftung 'Wenn alle Brüder schweigen'), formed with a stated goal of maintaining war graves. In the 1990s and 2000s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it worked on arranging new commemorative sites for the Waffen-SS dead in the former Soviet Union, including one in the Ukraine.[26]

Contemporary revisionist tradition

HIAG was instrumental in creating the perception in popular culture of the Waffen-SS being "comrades-in-arms engaged in a noble crusade" (according to MacKenzie). These notions were questioned by West German researches, but German society overall, wanting to forget the past, embraced the image. MacKenzie highlights the long-term effects of HIAG's revisionism:[27]

As older generation of Waffen-SS scribes has died off, a new, post-war cadre of writers has done much to perpetuate the image of the force as a revolutionary European army. The degree of admiration and acceptance varies, but the overall tendency to accentuate the positive lives on, or has indeed grown stronger.

The historian Bernd Wegner observes that any survey of the literature on the history of the Waffen-SS would show "an immense discrepancy between the veritable avalanche of titles and the quite modest yield of credible and scholarly insight".[28] James Pontolillo, who studied war crimes of the Waffen-SS, notes that the majority of books that have the force as their topic fall into three groups: amateur historical studies that focus solely on the military aspects of the Waffen-SS; apologetic accounts by former Waffen-SS men; and works by a multinational group of admirers who judge Waffen-SS to be unfairly associated with the crimes of the Third Reich.[29]

Popular history

One of the better known authors who was closely associated with HIAG is Patrick Agte. He wrote Jochen Peiper: Commander Panzerregiment Leibstandarte and Michael Wittmann and the Waffen SS Tiger Commanders of the Leibstandarte in World War II; the first book was referred to as a "hagiography" by Parker,[30] while Agte himself was described as a neo-Nazi by the Swedish scholar Catharina Raudvere.[31]

MacKenzie offers a list of authors whom he contends carry on the Waffen-SS revisionism tradition (quoted material is from his work Revolutionary Armies in the Modern Era: A Revisionist Approach):

Smelser and Davies have promulgated their contention of the current admirers; highlighting the role of "gurus". "Gurus", by their definition, are "authors popular among the readers who romanticise the German Army and, in particular, the Waffen-SS". Their list includes (quoted material is from The Myth of the Eastern Front):[34]

The historian Henning Pieper notes a "huge array of non-scholarly works which can be summarised as belonging to genre of 'militaria literature'" (quotation marks in the original). He includes books by Christopher Ailsby, Herbert Walther (writer), and Tim Ripley in this group.[40] The military historian Robert Citino offers a list of works that he argues "flirt with the admiration" for the Waffen-SS, with some "[going] farther than that":[41]

Websites and wargames

Smelser and Davies argue that the revisionist-inspired messages and visuals found their way into wargames, Internet chatrooms and forums and the popular culture of Waffen-SS "romancers", that is those who romanticise the German war effort.[42] They contend the following website are especially attractive to this group:[42]

Waffen-SS reenactment

Popular culture of the romancers also includes Waffen-SS reenactment. Although banned in Germany and Austria, SS reenacting groups thrive elsewhere, including in Europe and North America. In U.S. alone, by the end of the 1990s there were 20 Waffen-SS reenactment groups, out of approximately 40 groups dedicated to German World War II units. In contrast, there were 21 groups dedicated to the American units of the same timeframe.[45] The website of the U.S. Waffen-SS reenactor group Wiking was quoted by The Atlantic in 2010 as follows:[46]

Nazi Germany had no problem in recruiting the multitudes of volunteers willing to lay down their lives to ensure a "New and Free Europe", free of the threat of Communism. (...) Thousands upon thousands of valiant men died defending their respective countries in the name of a better tomorrow. We salute these idealists.

Historians quoted in The Atlantic categorically rejected this contemporary characterisation. According to Charles Sydnor, these groups "don't know their history" and have "a sanitized, romanticized view of what occurred". Citino went further and condemned the reenacting activities, stating: "The entire German war effort in the East was a racial crusade to rid the world of 'subhumans'. (...) It sends a shiver up my spine to think that people want to dress up and play SS on the weekend."[46]

References

Notes

  1. ↑ See the chapter "Tarnished Shield: Waffen-SS Criminality" in The Waffen SS: Hitler's Elite Guard at War, 1939-1945 (1966) by George H. Stein
  2. ↑ According to Large, HIAG attempted "to manipulate historical record or simply to ignore it".[5]
  3. ↑ Smelser and Davies: "Unfortunately, the scholarly writings remained confined to a small audience, whereas the readership of the German authors (and their English-language spin-offs) was considerably larger". The authors write that "with a forty-year head start", the predominance of the German account, and the related fascination by Waffen-SS romancers, "hardly remains a mystery".[22]

Citations

Bibliography

Books

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  • Cüppers, Martin (2005). Wegbereiter der Shoah: Die Waffen-SS, der Kommandostab Reichsführer-SS und die Judenvernichtung, 1939–1945 [Pioneer of the Shoah: The Waffen-SS, Kommandostab Reichsführer-SS and the Extermination of the Jews, 1939–1945] (in German). Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. ISBN 978-3-534-16022-8. 
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  • Pontolillo, James (2010). Murderous Elite: The Waffen-SS and Its Record of Atrocities. Stockholm: Leandoer and Ekholm. ISBN 978-91-85657-02-5. 
  • Raudvere, Catharina; Stala, Krzysztof; Willert, Trine Stauning (2012). Rethinking the Space for Religion: New Actors in Central and Southeast Europe on Religion, Authenticity and Belonging. Lund: Nordic Academic Press. ISBN 978-9187121852. 
  • Smelser, Ronald; Davies, Edward J. (2008). The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-83365-3. 
  • Stein, George (1984) [1966]. The Waffen-SS: Hitler's Elite Guard at War 1939–1945. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-9275-4. 
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  • Wilke, Karsten (2011). Die "Hilfsgemeinschaft auf Gegenseitigkeit" (HIAG) 1950–1990: Veteranen der Waffen-SS in der Bundesrepublik [HIAG 1950–1990: Waffen-SS veterans in the Federal Republic] (in German). Paderborn: Schoeningh Ferdinand GmbH. ISBN 978-3-506-77235-0. 

Journals

Websites and periodicals

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