Schutzstaffel
Content Warning: Lots of Holocaust and World War II related atrocities discussed along some pictures and Nazi iconography.
One day I am going to write a blog about puppies, or ducks, or something else pleasant, but it is not this day. Instead I am going to take a dive into a subject that sadly is all too familiar these days: Nazis, and specifically the SS. This is going to be a long and dreary look into some truly terrible people, so grab some tea, coffee or a glass of wine now and thank me later.
There is no ranking one horror from another, or saying that ‘Genocide A’ is worse than ‘Genocide B’. Pain of this type is subjective and personal; there is no sense in saying which is worst. What we can say is that the SS stands alone in terms of scale and efficiency in murder, and owing to the scale of their crimes, we know a great deal about them. Why discuss the SS any further? It’s important to know several things about this organization in order to understand how it came to be, and how it operated. These insights provide us many lessons from their sordid history, and in order to say “Never Again” we must know what happened. Furthermore, I have recently commented that the Ukrainian ‘Azov Regiment’ was similar to the Waffen-SS, a comment I stand by, but one I realized lacks the full context required of such a conversation.
The Schutzstaffel, ('Protection Squadron’), or SS, is one of the most loathsome organizations to have existed in human history. It is directly responsible for the death of some 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, and was also the primary organ of the Nazi German death machine that murdered upwards of 20 million people. Formed first as a bodyguard unit for Adolf Hitler in 1925, it expanded its reach massively after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. They were, in a very real sense, the armed wing of the Nazi party and inseparable from it, unlike the Sturmabteilung (SA) or Storm/Assault Detachment, the so-called ‘Brownshirts’. The SS was favoured over the SA by Hitler, who, fearing a coup attempt by the SA, ordered the SS conduct the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ in 1934. This action effectively decapitated the SA, during which many prominent SA leaders were rounded up and shot, and their influence shattered.
After the Nazis consolidated their power, the SS, under its leader Heinrich Himmler, became part of the apparatus of state. Law enforcement was one of the first domains placed under SS control. The actual police structures and organizations were left mostly intact, but overall command would be under the aegis of the SS. Following this, a myriad of organizations were created or taken over. The SS itself was divided into two distinct organizations which I will address separately: the Allgemeine-SS (General SS) and Waffen-SS (Fighting, or Armed SS).
Allgemeine-SS
The Allgemine-SS was the administrative and policing organization of the SS, which itself was the armed wing of the Nazi Party. Along with law enforcement, the Allgemeine-SS was responsible for the Totenkopfverbände (SS-TV) or Death’s Head units, the concentration camp personnel. Further, the Allgemeine-SS was responsible for its sister organizations in occupied nations, the Germanische-SS, (Germanic-SS). These would in one name or another form in Norway, Flanders, Netherlands and Denmark. Each were staffed by Nazis recruited from the right wing parties of these occupied nations, and would form, like the Allgemeine-SS, the manpower pool for their Waffen-SS comrades.
One of the new organizations created by the SS was the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), the unified Nazi police command. Under this were the German police forces, but also the new organizations: the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), or Security Service, and the Geheime Staatspolize (Secret State Police), better known as the Gestapo, the infamous secret police force. The SD in particular deserves some attention, as does its first director, Reinhard Heydrich, the “Butcher of Prague”. Notorious for his suppression of dissent in Czechoslovakia, he was author of ‘The Final Solution to the Jewish Question’ in 1941, as part of the so called Wannsee Conference. This plan would eventually be called Aktion Reinhard in his honour, as he was killed by Czech insurgents in Prague.
One of the many horrifying lessons of the Holocaust is that such horror can be done with a very small amount of perpetrators if the population is sufficiently disinterested in the truth. The SS had two distinct organizations that perpetrated the Holocaust, and I will explain each. There was the SD-run Einsatzgruppen (Task Forces) and the SS-TV. Each represented distinct periods of the Holocaust, and the latter replaced the former. In both phases, one common factor was the administrator Adolf Eichmann. He was in a sense the real planner of the Holocaust. Not a policy maker, nevertheless the energy and organizational talent this one man put into his activities makes him one of the most signally responsible actors in the Holocaust.
The Einsatzgruppen were ad-hoc units comprised largely of police battalions, with SD and Army personnel supporting. Ostensibly for rear area security tasks, these groups were actually expressly constructed as death squads. These formations would be attached to an Army (later, Army Group) and would arrest, and usually murder those they deemed enemies. The harshness of these actions restricted their usage to the eastern non-Germanic nations, and would usually target Jews, Communists, and the ‘Intelligentsia’ (teachers, priests, doctors, etc). They would be heavily augmented by local auxiliaries raised from local Fascists, collaborators, police and Volksdeutsche (German People), the ethnic Germans that lived in many Eastern European nations prior to World War II.
The Einsatzgruppen usually murdered by hanging or shooting. They would use their local auxiliaries to identify Jews for arrest, or they would have them assembled for ‘deportation’. Massacres such as Rumbula, Babi Yar, and others were colossal, with the latter involving the murder of some 33,000 people near Kyiv. In other instances the Nazis simply empowered local anti-semitic gangs to do their work for them. In the case of the Lviv pogroms, the local anti-semite was one Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian “Nationalist” figure, along with the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), of which he led a radical branch, the OUN-B.
By 1942 the Einsatzgruppen leadership was reporting morale problems associated with the mass murder. Many, if not most of the members were not actually SS men, but rather police officers and some army soldiers. In Army Group South they also used Romanian Army units that were fighting alongside the Nazis. The Einsatzgruppen members were not forced to take part in the actual shootings; those that refused or displayed troubling signs of mental distress were moved to other jobs. Nevertheless, formations started to see issues with widespread alcoholism and suicide. Furthermore, German Army commanders were complaining about the use of resources and personnel. Due to these factors, and the inherent in inefficiency of the process, the SS elected to start Aktion Reinhard, using extermination camps run by the SS-TV. It should be noted that at most levels, German Army command were aware of the Einsatzgruppen activities. Post-war apologia of the German Army in the form of the “Clean Wehrmacht” myth therefore holds no justification. At all but the lowest levels the Wehrmacht (German Army) knew what they were doing.
The Death’s Head units running concentration camps were at first purely jailors, albeit sadistic ones. The extermination camps, such as Sobibor and Treblinka, came later as part of a drive to make the murder more efficient and less psychologically damaging on the soldiers performing the tasks. This took the form of the death camps, the worst of course being Auschwitz. These have been examined at great length, and there are frankly far better sources at easy reach (like all of this, but especially this) than me.
Something that is less known about the Holocaust, and the SS specifically, has been causing a great deal of controversy in Poland: the camps were small, and manned mostly by Hilfswilliger (Eastern Auxiliaries). These men, known to the Nazis as “Trawniki men” were recruited from among the millions of Soviet POWs in German hands, as well as among collaborators in Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltics. The Trawnikis were Hilfswilliger who volunteered to become camp guards and named for the Polish concentration camp they were trained in. The survivors of the camps referred to the Trawnikis as “Ukrainians” but in reality all nations of Eastern Europe were represented. Many volunteered to escape the brutality of their own conditions in POW camps, but many others, especially early on, were Fascists who eagerly collaborated with the Nazis. In spite of the distrust the Germans showed their Hilfswilliger, they represented the majority of camp guards and personnel in the Poland-based extermination camps. In the factory camps, this ratio was significantly different. These Hilfswilliger were not led by their own officers, a distinction we will see later with the Waffen-SS formations.
The reach and power of the Allgemeine-SS was massively expanded after the invasion of Poland. The SS seized land, property, and entire industries in Poland, especially targeting the Jews. The SS, via the SS-TV, was the beneficiary of the seizures of all Jewish property and businesses throughout the war. In Poland entire industries were seized and placed, either directly or indirectly, under SS influence. By 1945 the SS had acquired monopolies across all of Occupied Europe in everything from wood furniture to camouflage uniforms. Furthermore, industrial concerns across Germany relied on the supply of slave labour from concentration camps, in effect placing them under SS influence, if not jurisdiction.
The Allgemeine-SS was, in intent and purpose, the violent and administrative arm of the Nazi Party, an organization whose purpose was responsible for carrying out objectives specific to the Nazi Party and Nazi state. It acquired massive reach and capital in the process of accomplishing its genocidal aims. It expanded into conquered nations to created regionalized versions of itself. While the SS began as the Adolf Hitler’s personal bodyguard, as it expanded it changed into the armed wing of the Nazi Party, with subsequent administrative and industrial expansion following in its wake. This was not a planned process, but rather one of constant expansion and growth. The same can be said of the fighting arm of the SS, the Waffen-SS.
Waffen-SS
When the Nazis seized power in 1933, the SS became an organ of the state, and the SS bodyguard of Adolf Hitler became known as Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler (LSSAH) or Life-Regiment SS Adolf Hitler, named in a manner similar to that of Royal Household Guard regiments. This first SS regiment would be expanded to a division, eventually becoming the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler. As noted above, the Waffen-SS expanded in fits and starts, and many units were formed from others, or were ad hoc units. Many were formed as smaller units and expanded later, so I will refer to them henceforward in their final state.
At the start of World War II, the SS had only the LSSAH and the brigades that would become 2nd SS Division Das Reich in the field, and were entirely under Army command. At this point in the war the SS was very small, and induction was held to an extreme racial purity requirement. The wealth acquired by the SS in Poland saw them expand, adding the 3rd SS Division ‘Totenkopf‘ and the 4th SS Polizei (Police) Division. The former was constructed out of volunteer SS-TV personnel, and their reputation as vicious war criminals predictably preceded them. The Polizei Division, while an SS unit, was made up of militarized German police officers with attached Wehrmacht support elements.
The further expansion of the Waffen-SS became a fight for manpower. Unlike the Wehrmacht the SS was entirely reliant on volunteers for their manpower, made worse by the racial purity requirements. The latter were quickly loosened but this was not sufficient to allow for expansion. The immediate solution, as proposed by head of manpower Gottlob Berger, was to recruit from outside of Germany. Berger pictured the Waffen-SS as a pan-European Germanic military force controlled by the Party. The first such unit was the 5th SS Division ‘Wiking’, a formation that recruited from the Nordic nations and Low Countries. Before the invasion of the Soviet Union in summer of 1941, the the Waffen-SS numbered six divisions, with the 6th SS Division ‘Nord’ being formed from German SS-TV personnel in occupied Norway.
The other source of recruits for the SS was the Volksdeutsche people of occupied Europe. As residents of an occupied or allied nation they were ineligible for conscription so therefore, as far as the Wehrmacht was concerned, available for recruitment by the SS. Conscription was introduced for the SS in 1943 but they continued in their creation of collaborationist combat formations. Himmler eventually consolidated all foreign units in the German military into the Waffen-SS. By 1945 the Waffen-SS comprised some 38 divisions. Some of the later war divisions existed only in training camps, while others never expanded beyond brigade size. The late war German SS divisions were similar to those that preceded them, and like the earlier ones, were mechanized or tank formations.
Foreign SS units were formed in almost all occupied nations. The 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS ‘Handschar‘, was led by a mix of Croatian Officers and Volksdeutsche, while the rank and file were Bosnian Muslims. This unit mutinied during training, and was primarily employed in counter-partisan fighting in Yugoslavia. This was the only even moderately successful unit recruited from the Balkans: the 2nd Croatian and 1st Albanian Divisions were failures and existed only briefly. Several other units were recruited from Volksdeutsche, such as the 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division Prinz Eugen, and the 22nd SS Volunteer Cavalry Division Maria Theresia. These operated with other formations such as the Handschar in Yugoslavia as well as fighting the Soviets. All three divisions that fought there are implicated in brutal war crimes conducted in support of the Ustaše regime.
After 1942 the German position on the Eastern Front became increasingly grim. The nationalist formations—15th SS Division (1st Latvian), 19th SS Division (2nd Latvian), and 20th SS Division (1st Estonian)—were recruited from nationalist organizations. While these recruits were not explicitly Fascists themselves, they were mostly volunteers, and were well-motivated and led by their own officers. 14th SS Division (1st Galician) was recruited from among Ukrainian nationalists. As Ukrainians were seen as ethnically inferior to Germanic peoples the SS insisted on referring to this unit as “Galician”, in reference to a Gallic tribe that migrated to Ukraine in the Roman period. The members of the division were not allowed to refer to “Ukraine” until the Ukrainian Liberation Army was formed (at least in theory) in March of 1945.
In 1944, losing ground on the Eastern Front, Russian collaborators under German command were coalesced into the Russkaya Osvoboditelnaya Narodnaya Armiya (RONA), the Russian People’s Liberation Army. These were mostly defectors from POW camps and led by Adrey Vlasov, a former Soviet general who had been turned by the Nazis. Initially so-called ‘Eastern Units’ had been deployed in individual battalions, some of which were the first units to engage the allies in Normandy. These were unmotivated units led by German officers and NCOs, prone to mutiny and badly equipped. It was hoped by Himmler that these units, under a unified command and deployed to fight the Soviets, would prove more motivated. The 29th SS Division RONA (1st Russian) started as the Kaminski Brigade, an ad-hoc Russian anti-communist militia. The 40th SS Division (1st Belarusian) was also added to the RONA from POW recruits.
Foreign units of the SS came from different and often contradictory backgrounds, united almost entirely in their anti-semitism and especially their hatred of communism. In Western Europe this was almost entirely represented in the far right parties already in existence prior to the war. The 33rd SS Division Charlemagne was a French unit whose membership was largely Action Française, the French Fascist-Monarchist party. These would be some of the last defenders of Berlin as the Soviets conquered the city in 1945. The Ukrainian and Russian Liberation Army personnel came from a mix of collaborators, pre-existing fascist/anti-communist parties, and POWs who enlisted to save their lives from the appalling conditions in which they were housed. The Estonian, Latvian and Finnish foreign units were seen as distinct non-collaborator units by the post-war Allies, who saw them as nationalists who were stuck between two malign powers.
As Nazi Germany collapsed, so did the SS. Many fought to the death, and many others fled. SS personnel, especially Foreign SS, attempted to surrender to the Western Allies in the hopes of lenient treatment—something they all knew did not await them in the Soviet Union. Eastern European Foreign SS men were caught in between the two sides of the emerging Cold War. Many of the Estonian and Latvian soldiers, a significant number of whom were conscripted by the German authorities, were executed or imprisoned upon return to the Soviet Union. The Ukrainian Division successfully claimed they were Polish ‘Galician’ anti-communist fighters, ironically using their title that had just been repudiated. This was successful, and many were settled in Canada and the USA after the war. The Russians and Cossacks in German employ suffered a fate similar to that of the Estonians and Latvians.
After World War II the SS was declared an illegal organization, and soldiers who served in it would be unable to collect pensions. Many prominent ex-SS soldiers were vocal against this, claiming that the Waffen-SS was not a genocidal organization, but an elite military unit, wholly separate from the Holocaust. This apologia would extend to Wehrmacht as well: the so-called “Clean Wehrmacht” myth stipulated that the majority of German forces in World War II were actually honorable opponents, akin to the perception of the Imperial German Army of World War I. This is, as I have already mentioned, transparently false. Most levels of the Wehrmacht were aware of the Holocaust, and the SS in particular was the chief beneficiary. The lobby group Hilfsgemeinschaft auf Gegenseitigkeit der Angehörigen der ehemaligen Waffen-SS (HAIG) or, Mutual Aid Association of Former Waffen-SS Members, formed and led by Paul Hausser, claimed that the Waffen-SS was unrelated to the war crimes conducted by the state.
Contrary to HAIG claims, all Waffen-SS Division were implicated in war crimes, with some standing out as particularly horrific. The Das Reich, LSSAH, Hitlerjugend, and Totenkopf, each are implicated in mass murder of POWs and civilians on both fronts. The Hitlerjugend became infamous for their conduct during the Normandy campaign. In that campaign, the Canadian Army and Hitlerjugend were engaged in vicious fighting in which POWs were routinely shot, with the worst instance being the Ardenne Abbey massacre in which some twenty Canadian soldiers were murdered following their surrender. On the Soviet front these sorts of murders were widespread and routine. In fact all the Waffen-SS divisions that fought on the Eastern Front are known to have committed such massacres of both POWs and civilians. The only Waffen-SS division that wasn’t implicated in such murders was the Götz von Berlichingen, which served its whole career on the Western Front. Ironically, this unit was the victim of an Allied POW massacre in which some 200 Götz von Berlichingen men were shot after surrender.
The worst excesses by the SS were perpetrated on the Eastern Front. Routine murders of civilians, expulsion of civilians from houses in winter (basically a slow murder), shooting of prisoners, and rape would follow the Waffen-SS wherever they went. The Dirlewanger Division and the Kaminski Brigade acquired a reputation as the worst offenders during the Warsaw Uprising. Both units became infamous for their drunken acts of serial rape, mass killings and torture such that even hardened Wehrmacht officers were horrified (though not enough to stop them). The violence was so pervasive that it extended to Germans, and included the rape and sadistic murder of German hospital nursing staff.
Similar actions were carried out by Waffen-SS everywhere they were deployed. Mass murders of civilians happened in Italy (Reichsführer-SS), France (Das Reich), Poland (Totenkopf), USSR (all but Götz von Berlichingen), and Yugoslavia (Handschar, Horst Wessel, Skanderbeg, Karstjäger). The occupation/security formations like those in Belarus (Florian Geyer Cavalry Division) and Yugoslavia were known for their wide scale brutality in counter partisan warfare. The atrocities were widespread and often genocidal in nature. This extended to the front line troops as well. Joachim Peiper, commander of the 1st SS Panzer Regiment (LSSAH) and former adjutant to Himmler, was so famous for his brutal actions against civilians that his battalion was known as the 'Blowtorch Battalion’ for their deliberate use of tracers and incendiary weapons to burn the thatched roofs on Soviet civilian houses. He would stand trial for the Malmedy massacre, in which 84 US Army soldiers were murdered after surrendering.
This pattern of sadistic violence is indicative of the type of war they were fighting, and who the Waffen-SS was. This was a race war, and the Waffen-SS was the instrument of that race war. The violence was not a product of the war so much as an essential ingredient of it, and fundamental to their existence. Their perception as an elite stems more from Nazi propaganda and mythology than competence. In fact, the Waffen-SS was known for suffering higher casualties than it needed to in most of its campaigns, and when given independent command, performed especially poorly (Operations Wacht am Rhein, and Frühlingserwachen). The truly elite units such as LSSAH and other Waffen-SS mechanized units were indeed the spearhead that led them to several important victories, but even these units were often ground down to shells of their former selves, or totally destroyed, in some cases rebuilt and destroyed many times over. The Waffen-SS soldiers were highly motivated but often lacking in the competency required to survive the engagements they were thrust into. This was the case in Normandy with the Hitlerjugend. These soldiers were drawn from the Hitler Youth, the average age of soldiers in the division was 17, and they were issued candies instead of cigarettes. They defended fanatically, but were inexperienced in offensive warfare, and being fanatics, prone to foolhardiness that saw many of them killed. It was aggression, callousness to one’s own casualties, and violence that made the Waffen-SS what it was.
Post War - Today
The SS being what it was, many prominent members stood trial after World War II. Many such as Kurt Meyer, for example: the officer responsible for the Ardenne Abbey massacre was handed a death sentence for the murders, which was commuted first to life imprisonment, and again to time served in 1954. Many of the Foreign SS men were charged by their respective governments, either for specific actions or collaboration. Some very senior SS personnel became employees of the US government, such as Finnish SS soldier Lauri Törni, who became a US Green Beret, and Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon”, who fled to Bolivia and then was hired by the CIA to hunt Che Guevara. Others turned up in such places as Indochina fighting for the French Foreign Legion, and many more just went on with their lives.
In the 1950s the attitude towards the Nazis was somewhat softened. This occurred in the context of the Cold War: anti-communism in the West was ubiquitous to the point that anybody who was anti-communist could be redeemable. Regimes such as Francoist Spain were legitimized and violent nationalism in the name of anti-communism didn’t seem like a bad thing to many. The lobbying of HAIG never had the effect they wished it to have, but by the 1990s perceptions had changed. The Waffen-SS was rehabilitated enough that even if they were acknowledged to be fighting for an odious cause, they weren’t inherently worse than anyone else.
I build scale models, and while this is changing these days, there was a time that every other tank or soldier kit was SS, and another quarter were Wehrmacht, but none came with swastika decals. The popular game ‘Company Of Heroes’ used a stand-in, the “Panzer Elite”, a camouflage-clad group of tank-centric Nazis that weren’t called SS. Movies from Eastern Europe, such as ‘1944’ from Estonia show the Foreign SS units as nationalists fighting for Estonia, angry at the association with Nazism. Similarly most movies from Finland about their part of World War II display characters showing contempt toward their Nazi allies, while still centering on anti-communism.
This leaves us in 2022, in the position that people can reasonably (though incorrectly) say the Waffen-SS was an elite anti-communist fighting force worthy of respect. This I clearly disagree with, but it’s hard to argue that this feeling exists among “history buffs”. The Holocaust is irredeemable in the mainstream public eye, and thus is the Allgemeine-SS, but somehow the Waffen-SS, while not redeemed, has a sway over people who don’t wish to paint the whole SS with the same brush. I meanwhile cannot think of an organization in which painting with a wide brush is more appropriate. The notion that the Waffen-SS, the Wehrmacht and the Holocaust can be separated is at best a gross mischaracterization of history, and at worst, Holocaust denial. This brings us back to Ukraine and the Azov Regiment.
I meant it completely and sincerely that the Azov Regiment reminds me of the Waffen-SS. The pro-war lobby calls it a ‘far right nationalist’ regiment and a very small part of the overall military. This is true by the numbers, but not by structure. The Azov Regiment has a non-governmental organization, the “Azov Civil Corps”, and a political party, the “National Corps”. In spite of not receiving more than 3% of the vote in the last election, it possesses an outsized political power owing to its position as a self-declared elite force. This was such that Ukrainian President Zelensky was unable to withdraw from Donbass following his election after Azov, Right Sector and other far right nationalist movements threatened to overthrow the government and execute him were he to do so.
The structure of the Azov Regiment is similar to that of the SS in that it is the armed wing of a political movement—or put another way, a political party that is also integrated into the Army. This means that it’s not just one more elite unit, but a movement. Thus you can destroy the regiment, as the Russians have done in Mariupol, but the political ideology will remain and grow. Martyrdom is a seed that grows into fanaticism easily and just like SS, the political ideology here is Fascism. We should remember that the Azov Regiment is indeed small, but at the start of World War II so was the SS. This organization grew as reverence to it grew. It’s happening again.
Azov is an explicitly Nazi military formation. This places it alone in the world, contrary to the arguments of many that “all Western nations have Nazis in their militaries”. This is true, but it is an obvious mental evasion: the Azov Regiment is a Nazi regiment, as opposed to a regiment that contains Nazis. The fact it exists is an endorsement of its beliefs. The fact that so many have been shown to have Nazi tattoos when they were captured at Azovstal is a tangible sign of a deep-set Nazism. Show me a military that will, in 2022, tolerate open wearing of Nazi patches. Or another nation so confident in its fascism that it brings a Nazi to speak before a foreign government, as Zelensky did with an Azov member to the Greek Parliament. Be they endorsed in their true sentiment, or because the Ukrainian Government is held hostage by them, the results are the same.
As I said in my previous blog, ‘THIS IS NOT NORMAL’, the reverence for the Azov Regiment is becoming dangerous. I wanted to describe to you, the reader, what it is that I think is being created in Ukraine today, in the image of what came before it. The white-washing of the SS and Nazism more generally is now at the point where we in liberal democratic (in theory) nations will support the Waffen-SS reborn because it is fighting the enemy we want them to fight. Churchill was a proponent of using the Nazis to defeat Communism, now Biden uses them to challenge Russia. At least in 1939 we didn’t know what we know now.
Even among those who are not explicitly Nazi, the troubling fact remains that far too many (though not the majority of) soldiers and civilians in Ukraine are entirely comfortable with displaying Nazi and SS-specific insignia such as SS runes, Totenkopf and Sonnenrad in public. People there and in the West are content to look past it. This isn’t happening in isolation. We have white-washed our own far right, and even in Canada, where many of the 14th SS settled, we have a blind spot; we have several memorials to them in Alberta and Ontario. Further, Canadians, Americans and many other people of the nations using Ukraine as a proxy seem to believe that any amount of barbaric conduct in a war is justified simply by being in said war. This is the path one takes to all manners of horror, and to see it manifesting itself is deeply alarming.
I have always held a fascination with the SS, but this fascination has always been confined to the singular horror of this organization. We have come full circle, and it makes me sick to see it. To see the inherent evil of this organization be the one thing we have forgotten first makes me very concerned about the future—both for us, and for people in Ukraine who have suffered and will continue to suffer under the Nazis we helped create, and refuse to acknowledge.
Ian, May 25th 2022
* Some of the Divisions went through multiple naming protocols. I have simplified them for this writing.
Sources
Hitler’s Elite, The SS 1939–45 by Chris McNab
Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich by Robert Gerwarth
Hitler by Ian Kershaw
Pictures from Wikipedia
Additional online sources/pictures from: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/jewish-groups-call-for-removal-of-vandalized-ukrainian-wwii-memorial-1.6139297
https://mate.substack.com/p/siding-with-ukraines-far-right-us?s=r
https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-us-couldve-prevented-this-war?s=r
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/azov-fighter-video-overshadows-zelenskiys-address-greek-lawmakers-2022-04-07/