Waffen Ss Quotes

A country cannot live in disorder, incompetence, irresponsibility, uncertainty, and corruption.

For hate dies, suffocated to death by its own stupidity and mediocrity. But grandeur is eternal.

They died out there, in countless numbers, not for government officials in Berlin, but for their old countries, gilded by the centuries, and for their common fatherland, Europe, the Europe of Virgil and Ronsard, the Europe of Erasmus and Nietzsche, of Raphael and Dürer, the Europe of St. Ignatius and St. Theresa, the Europe of Frederick the Great and Napoleon Bonaparte.

Then, abruptly, it was his turn to feel ashamed, not only for having extended, however momentarily, the consideration of his sympathy to a Nazi, but for having produced work that appealed to such a man. Joe was not the early creator of comic books to perceive the mirror-image fascism inherent in his anti-fascist superman - Will Eisner, another Jew cartoonist, quite deliberately dressed his Allied-hero Blackhawks in uniforms modeled on the elegant death's-head garb of the Waffen SS. But Joe was perhaps the first to feel the shame of glorifying, in the name of democracy and freedom, the vengeful brutality of a very strong man. [...] Now it occurred to Joe to wonder if all they have been doing all along, was indulging their own worst impulses and assuring the creation of another generation of men who revered only strength and domination.

Britain and France had made it a world war after Hitler invaded Poland. When Stalin did the same thing fifteen days later, no one in the Allied chancelleries took the risk of reacting.

The war in Europe was over. Germans called it die Stunde Null, zero hour. Cities lay in ruins. Allied bombing had destroyed more than 1.8 million German homes. Of the 18.2 million men who had served in the German army, navy, Luftwaffe, and the Waffen-SS, a total of 5.3 million had been killed. Sixty-one countries had been drawn into a war Germany started. Some 50 million people were dead. The Third Reich was no more. Heinrich

the Waffen SS revelled in the fight, it was part of their creed and some of Peiper’s battle group that were with him now had fought their way out of worse situations than this before, in the freezing wastes of Russia.

Four years later, the comparison worked in the opposite direction: after having looted the watches, the jewelry, the clothes from all of Eastern Europe, the Soviet soldier returned grumbling to the USSR, astonished at the comfort of the non-Communist countries and disgusted with his “paradise” of wooden spoons, tattered dresses, and muddy excrement stretching around his house-barracks.

There was only one photograph that may have been the Butcher of Lodz. It was, I thought, the most horrible photograph I had ever seen. It had been taken in November 1941 in the Baluty Marketplace in Lodz. Eighteen Jews were executed by hanging in that one day for trying to escape. In this photograph you could see three of them dangling by the neck from what looked like a child’s swing set. In the background, you could see the crowd somberly gathered—even children—forced to watch as a warning. And there, standing right next to the dead bodies, with his back to the camera, was a man in a Waffen-SS uniform. It was suddenly hard to breathe. I

He guessed the NKVD didn’t even know that Waffen-SS men could be identified by the blood-group tattoos on the underside of their left arms, usually near the armpit. Richter didn’t have one. He’d been classed as a non-combatant, as he’d said, at least for a portion of the war. He decided it could be weeks before they found out who he was. But Volsky’s confidence appeared to have been restored too, now. He said, ‘And the vat of incense?’ ‘I had the incense brought from the remnants of a Christmas smoker factory. Silly little hollow figurines invented by toymakers in the Ore Mountains. Cone incense burns down inside the figurines and the smoke emerges from the open mouths. There was a glut of them,’ Richter said, truthfully. ‘Berliners were shocked and saddened after Stalingrad. But they lost the will to celebrate after the Battle of Kursk. They knew the Red Army was coming. The puerile little incense smokers were redundant, together with the incense they were to hold. Except it didn’t go to waste. The vat was taken from a merchant’s house. It’s from Hong Kong, I think.’ Volsky leaned back in his chair. He said, ‘Why go to all the trouble?’ That’s a good question, Richter thought. He stifled a smile. ‘To mask the smell.

At Dniepropetrovsk the Stalin regime had made great efforts in construction. We were at first impressed as we approached the suburbs of the city, where we saw outlined the large masonry blocks of the proletarian housing erected by the Soviets. Their lines were modern. The buildings were huge, and there were many of them. Undeniably, the Communist system had done something for the people. If the misery of the peasants was great, at least the worker seemed to have benefited from the new times. Still, it was necessary to visit and examine the buildings. We lived for six months in the Donets coal basin. We had plenty of time to test the conclusions that we had reached at the time of our entrance into Dniepropetrovsk. The buildings, so impressive from a distance, were just a gigantic hoax, intended to fool sightseers shepherded by Intourist [Soviet tourism agency] and the viewers of documentary films. Approaching those housing blocks you were sickened by the stench of mud and excrement that rose from the quagmires surrounding each of the buildings. Around them were neither sidewalks nor gravel nor paving stones. The Russian mud was everywhere, and everywhere the walls peeled and crumbled. The quality of the construction materials was of the lowest order. All the balconies had come loose, and already the cement stairways were worn and grooved, although the buildings were only a few years old.

I got back into my car and followed the trucks; at the end of the road, the Polizei unloaded the women and children, who rejoined the men arriving on foot. A number of Jews, as they walked, were singing religious songs; few tried to run away; the ones who did were soon stopped by the cordon or shot down. From the top, you could hear the gun bursts clearly, and the women especially were starting to panic. But there was nothing they could do. The condemned were divided into little groups and a noncom sitting at a table counted them; then our Askaris took them and led them over the brink of the ravine. After each volley, another group left, it went very quickly. I walked around the ravine by the west to join the other officers, who had taken up positions above the north slope. From there, the ravine stretched out in front of me: it must have been some fifty meters wide and maybe thirty meters deep, and went on for several kilometers; the little stream at the bottom ran into the Syrets, which gave its name to the neighborhood. Boards had been placed over this stream so the Jews and their shooters could cross easily; beyond, scattered pretty much everywhere on the bare sides of the ravine, the little white clusters were multiplying. The Ukrainian “packers” dragged their charges to these piles and forced them to lie down over them or next to them; the men from the firing squad then advanced and passed along the rows of people lying down almost naked, shooting each one with a submachine bullet in the neck; there were three firing squads in all. Between the executions some officers inspected the bodies and finished them off with a pistol. To one side, on a hill overlooking the scene, stood groups of officers from the SS and the Wehrmacht. Jeckeln was there with his entourage, flanked by Dr. Rasch; I also recognized some high-ranking officers of the Sixth Army. I saw Thomas, who noticed me but didn’t return my greeting. On the other side, the little groups tumbled down the flank of the ravine and joined the clusters of bodies that stretched farther and farther out. The cold was becoming biting, but some rum was being passed around, and I drank a little. Blobel emerged suddenly from a car on our side of the ravine, he must have driven around it; he was drinking from a little flask and shouting, complaining that things weren’t going fast enough. But the pace of the operations had been stepped up as much as possible. The shooters were relieved every hour, and those who weren’t shooting supplied them with rum and reloaded the clips. The officers weren’t talking much; some were trying to hide their distress. The Ortskommandantur had set up a field kitchen, and a military pastor was preparing some tea to warm up the Orpos and the members of the Sonderkommando. At lunchtime, the superior officers returned to the city, but the subalterns stayed to eat with the men. Since the executions had to continue without pause, the canteen had been set up farther down, in a hollow from which you couldn’t see the ravine. The Group was responsible for the food supplies; when the cases were broken open, the men, seeing rations of blood pudding, started raging and shouting violently. Häfner, who had just spent an hour administering deathshots, was yelling and throwing the open cans onto the ground: “What the hell is this shit?” Behind me, a Waffen-SS was noisily vomiting. I myself was livid, the sight of the pudding made my stomach turn. I went up to Hartl, the Group’s Verwaltungsführer, and asked him how he could have done that. But Hartl, standing there in his ridiculously wide riding breeches, remained indifferent. Then I shouted at him that it was a disgrace: “In this situation, we can do without such food!

It was interesting to us in the Waffen SS that the American army, fighting as they claimed for their ‘democracy,’ should segregate its black men and white men into separate regiments, with no black men being allowed to use the white Americans’ facilities! The young men from Mississippi and Alabama experienced more equality as prisoners of the Reich than they did serving in the US Army, that is a fact.

Never forget that the first European fell in the ranks of the Waffen-SS, that those killed after the war mostly came from our ranks. It only became open season on them because of their belief in the indivisible unity of western society. Consider the evidence of their blood. Don’t take half measures. The idea of Europe is the only political ideal that is still worth fighting for today. Never was its realization closer. Strangle lies, punch slander in the nose, help your neighbor and the war widow. When everyone goes back to simple values, gives up egoism, makes a virtue of poverty, and once more feels himself responsible to all, then once more we will get the carts out of the mud; the dams will be ready when the storm tide comes.

This time the war was really over. We were alive. God had saved us. My injuries themselves were a blessing. I spent months in a hospital bed, but I had kept my strength and my faith. I hadn't experienced the bitterness of falling uselessly into the hands of my enemies. I remained, a witness to my soldiers' deeds. I could defend them from the lies of adversarie~ insensible to heroism. I could tell of their epic on the Donets and the Don, in the Caucasus and at Cherkassy, in Estonia, at Stargard, on the Oder. One day the sacred names of our dead would be repeated with pride. Our people, hearing these tales of glory, would feel their blood quicken. And they would know their sons. Certainly we had been beaten. We had been dispersed and pursued to the four corners of the world. But we could look to the future with heads held high. History weighs the merit of men. Above worldly baseness, we had offered our youth against total immolation. We had fought for Europe, its faith, its civilization. We had reached the very height of sincerity and sacrifice. Sooner or later Europe and the world would have to recognize the justice of our cause and the purity of our gift. For hate dies, dies suffocated by its own stupidity and mediocrity, but grandeur is eternal. And we lived in grandeur.

a confirmed fascist and of Anti-Bolshevik and Anti-Jewish ideas.’ In 1945, Freeman joined the Waffen SS. He was prominent on a MI9 ‘British Renegades Warning List’ and was captured at the end of the war. Back in the UK he was court-martialled by the RAF in September 1945

The European SS saw the new Europe in the form of three great components; central Europe as the power house of Europe, western Europe as the cultural heart of Europe and eastern Europe as the potential of Europe. Thus the Europe the SS envisioned was alive and real. Its six hundred million inhabitants would live from the North Sea to Vladivostok. It was in this span of 8,000 miles that Europe could achieve its destiny. A space for young people to start new lives. This Europe would be the beacon of the world. A remarkable racial ensemble. An ancient civilization, a spirtitual force and the most advanced technological and scientific complex. The SS prepared for the high destiny of Europe.

First, it was by now clear that thousands of suspects shared direct responsibility for some atrocities. Contemporary estimates concluded that there were about 250,000 to 300,000 members of the SS (this includes the militarized Waffen-SS units), 70,000 full-time Nazi party executives, 15,000 in the party intelligence service Sicherheitsdienst (SD), 15,000 in the Gestapo, and as many as 1.5 to 2 million in various brownshirt paramilitary and militia units.

Waffen-SS prisoners were conspicuous by their rarity, either because of their determination to go down fighting, or from being shot on sight by their captors. One

In Waffen-SS units especially, the excitement and impatience were clearly intense. A member of the 12th SS Panzer-Division Hitler Jugend wrote to his sister on the eve of battle. ‘Dear Ruth, My daily letter will be very short today – short and sweet. I write during one of the great hours before an attack – full of unrest, full of expectation for what the next days will bring. Everyone who has been here the last two days and nights (especially nights), who has witnessed hour after hour the assembly of our crack divisions, who has heard the constant rattling of Panzers, knows that something is up and we are looking forward to a clear order to reduce the tension. We are still in the dark as to “where” and “how” but that cannot be helped! It is enough to know that we attack, and will throw the enemy from our homeland. That is a holy task!’ On the back of the sealed envelope he added a hurried postscript: ‘Ruth! Ruth! Ruth! WE MARCH!!!’ That must have been scribbled as they moved out, for the letter fell into American hands during the battle.

The questions about frontiers, about material affairs didn't interest us very much. Living ceaselessly face to face with death, we came to understand to an intense degree the importance of spiritual forces. The front held only because at the front there were souls, souls which believed, which burned with ardor, which radiated strength. Our victories were won not only with weapons, but with virtues. The problems of the post-war period would be identical. Economic victories would not be enough. Political reorganizations would not be enough. A great moral redemption would be necessary, which would cleanse away the blemishes of our time, which would restore our souls with the fresh air of passion and of unconditional service. National revolution, yes. Social revolution, yes. European revolution, yes. But above all else a spiritual revolution a thousand times more necessary than external order, than external justice, than fraternity in words alone. The world emerging from the killing and the hatred of the war would need, first, pure hearts, believing in their mission, dedicating themselves to it, pure hearts in whom the masses could believe and to whom they could devote themselves.

I loved the life of a soldier, simple as could be, free of worldly concerns, ambitions, and interests. It had been months since I'd received the least bit of news of the scuffle of the Forum. The viperous swarm of office seekers, the temptations and dishonesties of the political arena sickened me. I preferred my filthy isba to the ministerial palaces, my worn trooper's jacket to the stifling comfort of middle class mediocrity. As I looked at the pure eyes of my soldiers, cleansed by sacrifice, I felt rising toward me the wholesome gift of their ideal. I gave them, from my side, all that burned in my heart.

Pervitin

Seventy-five percent of our soldiers were manual laborers. Many among them had been susceptible, once, to Soviet propaganda. They stood with their mouths agape when they saw in what conditions of decay and exhaustion the Russian proletariat existed. They shook their heads, having to look twice at the scene before believing it.

In Zloczow the killers belonged first and foremost to the OUN and to the Waffen SS “Viking” Division, while Sonderkommando 4b of Einsatzgruppe C kept to the relatively passive role of encouraging the Ukrainians (the Waffen SS did not need any prodding).

Ehre verloren, alles verloren.” (“Honor lost, all lost.”)

A regime responsible for such a scheme of mass killings was corrupt to the core and did not deserve to survive. It’s a disgrace that we didn’t overthrow it, but left it to be eradicated by our enemies.

But a change of personnel — the capable Austrian Colonel-General Lothar Rendulic in place of Reinhardt, and General Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller for Hoßbach — could do nothing to alter the disastrous German collapse in the face of hopeless odds, in East Prussia as on the rest of the eastern front. This proved equally true in Hitler's replacement on 17 January of Colonel-General Josef Harpe, made the scapegoat for the collapse of the Vistula front, by his favourite, Colonel-General Ferdinand Schörner, and his ill-judged appointment on 25 January of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, in the teeth of Guderian's strident objections, to take command of the newly formed and hastily constituted Army Group Vistula which aimed to stave off the Soviet advance into Pomerania. The hope that 'triumph of the will' and the toughness of one of his most trusted 'hard' men would prevail rapidly proved ill-founded. Himmler, backed by courageous but militarily inexperienced Waffen-SS officers, soon found that combating the might of the Red Army was a far stiffer task than rounding up and persecuting helpless political opponents and 'racial inferiors'. By mid-February, Hitler was forced to concede that Army Group Vistula was inadequately led.

I felt the tears well in my eyes. “But your father was murdered. Mine died in an accident.” She lowered her eyes, and for a moment, I thought that maybe I could see the little girl under all those years. “When the war ended—when the world believed that I was dead—I searched for the Butcher of Lodz. I wanted to bring him to justice for what he did. I contacted groups that search for ex-Nazis.” I didn’t know where she was going with this, but I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. “Did you find him?” She looked off again, not responding to my question. “You see, sometimes I still see his face. I see him on the streets, or out my window. He haunts my sleep, even now, even all these years later. I still hear his laugh before he killed my father. Still. But mostly . . .” She stopped. “Mostly what?” I said. She turned and met my eye. “Mostly I remember the way he looked at me when my father asked him to spare me. Like he knew.” “Knew what?” “That my life, the life of a girl named Lizzy Sobek, was over now. That I would survive but never be the same. So I kept searching for him. Through the years and even decades. I finally found his real name and an old photograph of him. All the Nazi hunters told me to relax, not to worry, that the Butcher was dead, that he had been killed in action in the winter of 1945.” And then it happened. She turned the page and pointed at the photograph of the Butcher in his Waffen-SS uniform. I saw right away that he hadn’t died, that the Nazi hunters had been wrong. You see, I had seen this man before. He had sandy hair and green eyes, and last time I saw him, he was taking my father away in an ambulance.

The only thing that disturbed our equanimity during the wonderful days of rest and peace were American and Russian fighter-planes that sometimes came diving from the sky, and with their guns turned road users into bloody shreds. These attacks were not just against us soldiers, but also against the farmers in the fields, their wives and daughters, and against the small children on their way to school. This made us furious.

A t the end of World War II, the Nuremberg war tribunal sentenced the Waffen SS, possibly the finest fighting force the world has seen since Leonidas and his Spartans at Thermopylae, the bravest of the brave, collectively as war criminals.

Fighting in the Ardennes had reached a degree of savagery unprecedented on the western front. The shooting of prisoners of war has always been a far more common practice than military historians in the past have been prepared to acknowledge, especially when writing of their own countrymen. The Kampfgruppe Peiper’s cold-blooded slaughter of prisoners in the Baugnez–Malmédy massacre was of course chilling, and its indiscriminate killing of civilians even more so. That American soldiers took revenge was hardly surprising, but it is surely shocking that a number of generals, from Bradley downwards, openly approved of the shooting of prisoners in retaliation. There are few details in the archives or in American accounts of the Chenogne massacre, where the ill-trained and badly bruised 11th Armored Division took out its rage on some sixty prisoners. Their vengeance was different from the cold-blooded executions perpetrated by the Waffen-SS at Baugnez–Malmédy, but it still reflects badly on their officers.

After all, you can't really blame the Waffen S.S. for doing what comes naturally. But a funny thing happened on the way to the moral high ground.

ease. One of them, an agreeable

I had my usual dream that always followed a big dinner of red meat. You know, the one with the troupe of clowns, the Waffen SS division, and Emily Post. It was getting to the good part, where Ms. Post begins her lecture on table settings. The clowns were getting restless and the SS were asking hard questions about salad forks. Of course, the phone started ringing at that moment. Ms. Post answered the phone.

The Soviet Union suffered 65 percent of all Allied military deaths, China 23 percent, Yugoslavia 3 percent, the United States and Britain 2 percent each, France and Poland 1 percent each. About 8 percent of all Germans died, compared with 2 percent of Chinese, 3.44 percent of Dutch people, 6.67 percent of Yugoslavs, 4 percent of Greeks, 1.35 percent of French, 3.78 percent of Japanese, 0.94 percent of British and 0.32 percent of Americans. Within the armed forces, 30.9 percent of Germans conscripted into the Wehrmacht died, 17.35 percent of the Luftwaffe (including paratroopers and ground personnel), 34.9 percent of the Waffen SS. Some 24.2 percent of Japanese soldiers were killed, and 19.7 percent of naval personnel. Japanese formations committed against the Americans and British in 1944–45 lost far more heavily—the overall statistics are distorted by the fact that throughout the war a million of Hirohito’s soldiers remained in China, where they suffered relatively modest losses. One Russian soldier in four died, against one in twenty British Commonwealth

something kicked in and whatever it was that had shut him down released him. He collected his thoughts. ‘Bury them,’ said Mitchell. ‘Bury them? Bury them?’ Maillé snorted. ‘We don’t have time for that! And with what? Our bare hands?’ ‘Down the track,’ said Mitchell. ‘We take them down to the sheds.’ ‘We can’t carry all these men, Pascal,’ said Bucard reasonably. ‘I know. Down at the shed, there’s a …’ he struggled to find the word he wanted, ‘A… handcar,’ he said in English, then remembered. ‘Voiture de chemin de fer.’ ‘And then?’ said Laforge. ‘Just do as I say,’ said Mitchell. * Hours later Waffen SS-Sturmbannführer Ahren Brünner pulled the goggles off his dirt-streaked face and stepped down from his open-top vehicle. He examined the area around the torn rail track – there was no other sign of damage. Behind him his motorized company stayed alert; some scanned the hills and trees in case of ambush. Men and vehicles were spread out tactically as his men searched the area. He took a good look around but the damage seemed minimal. ‘Major?’ one of his men called. He turned towards the soldier, who pointed to a group of his men halfway down the embankment in the trees where they had pulled aside the cut branches that had camouflaged the overturned

Although it is unknown whether this ban was ever enforced, it is remarkable that such a measure was even suggested.56 In principle, pro-Nazi engagement was not supposed to constitute a Bekenntnis to German Volkstum; yet this is precisely how applications from Blagorodovac were to be judged. While the villager Johann A., who had served in the Waffen-SS, was accepted as an Aussiedler in 1959, those who had fought the German occupying army in Yugoslavia had allegedly renounced their Germanness—despite the fact that the people in question had at no point denied being German and were still registered as Germans in their passports.57 In fact, Blagorodovac was the symbol of a specifically German resistance to Nazi occupation and supposedly the place where the partisan army’s German-manned Thälmann battalion had first raised its banner.58 At this point, the meaning of Bekenntnis transforms into a strong political statement. This testifies to a politicized view of what and who was supposed to be German that neatly combined an apologetic view of the Nazi past with the anticommunist raison d’état of the West German state. An ethnic German after 1945 was supposed to have been a victim of communism, not a communist.

First, it was by now clear that thousands of suspects shared direct responsibility for some atrocities. Contemporary estimates concluded that there were about 250,000 to 300,000 members of the SS (this includes the militarized Waffen-SS units), 70,000 full-time Nazi party executives, 15,000 in the party intelligence service Sicherheitsdienst (SD), 15,000 in the Gestapo, and as many as 1.5 to 2 million in various brownshirt paramilitary and militia units. Even considering that these numbers might be inflated and the categories overlap with one another, it seemed in late 1945 as though “not less than 2 million persons in all of Germany (and probably not less than 500,000 persons in the U.S. Zone) will be war criminals under the Control Council Law.”10

Der Waffen-SS here all around, knows how to cherish every child and woman.

The SS could still save Europe today, like thirty years ago, but it no longer exists on the temporal plane. As I showed in my book Les SS de la Toison d’Or [The SS of the Golden Fleece, Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1975], in 1944, the SS galvanized ALL THAT REMAINED of TRUE WARRIORS and DARING THINKERS on the old continent. Carrying the oldest cross in the world, down from the North with the primitive Aryans, the Waffen SS was no longer German in the narrow nationalist sense of the term. It was European and wished to revive the basic values of blood and soil.

Jan Goossens weigert kleding te vervaardigen, voor de Waffen-SS.

ignored the many atrocities he had directed. “Wolff is [a] distinctive personality,” Dulles wrote, and “dynamic,” too. “Our reports and impressions indicate he represents more moderate element in Waffen SS, with mixture of romanticism.

indeed: more than five hundred National Socialists were murdered by the communists. Thousands were grievously injured. The SA was a volunteer, non-government organization

of Yugoslavs, 4 percent of Greeks, 1.35 percent of French, 3.78 percent of Japanese, 0.94 percent of British and 0.32 percent of Americans. Within the armed forces, 30.9 percent of Germans conscripted into the Wehrmacht died, 17.35 percent of the Luftwaffe (including paratroopers and ground personnel), 34.9 percent of the Waffen SS.

recent months,” Gignilliat began, “this board has devoted considerable time and attention to Reinhold Kulle’s employment in the district. Mr. Kulle was a Waffen-SS guard for two and one-half years at the Gross-Rosen concentration camp in Nazi Germany during World War II.