Why the Waffen-SS

Discussions on all (non-biographical) aspects of the Freikorps, Reichswehr, Austrian Bundesheer, Heer, Waffen-SS, Volkssturm and Fallschirmjäger and the other Luftwaffe ground forces. Hosted by Christoph Awender.
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Harro
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Re: Why the Waffen-SS

#2551

Post by Harro » 12 Jun 2017, 15:47

michael mills wrote:Fortunately for Hausser, as a commander of Waffen-SS combat formations at the divisional and higher levels, he was involved only in genuine military operations, despite the prejudiced insinuations of Mr Keenan, unaccompanied by any solid evidence.
Apparently climbing the Totesstiege at KZ Mauthausen is a genuine military operation...
Bundesarchiv_Bild_192-305,_KZ-Mauthausen,_Himmlervisite.jpg

Sid Guttridge
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Re: Why the Waffen-SS

#2552

Post by Sid Guttridge » 14 Jun 2017, 12:23

Hi Jkeenan,

You ask, "Why disgusting?"

You presumably read immediately above your question "Krüger made jokes about jews at this reunion and EVERYONE at the reunion laughed out loud. incredible................... disgusting."

The administration of this forum would look very unkindly on a poster who "made jokes about Jews". If we don't think they are "disgusting", we are probably on the wrong forum.

As for "After the war thos nazis became engenieers, lawyers, doctors, architects, businessmen etc.", if true, it rather belies accusations that W-SS veterans were universally discriminated against after the war.

Cheers,

Sid.


michael mills
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Re: Why the Waffen-SS

#2553

Post by michael mills » 15 Jun 2017, 06:33

Apparently climbing the Totesstiege at KZ Mauthausen is a genuine military operation...
Hausser was shown over KL Mauthausen, but was not involved in running it. His area of personal responsibility was limited to genuine military operations, as I wrote.

And the fact remains that he was recruited to train the nascent Waffen-SS because of his military expertise as a retired Reichswehr general, not because of a political commitment to National Socialism.

Furthermore, the caption on the photo shows that it is dated 1 April 1941, ie well before the concentration camps took on an exterminatory role.

offizier1916
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Re: Why the Waffen-SS

#2554

Post by offizier1916 » 15 Jun 2017, 14:29

Hello all

I just reviewed the beginning of the Documentary and I have to correct myself. It was not Hauptsturmführer Krüger who made Jokes about Jews during a veteran reunion of the Waffen SS, but OTTO ERNST REMER.
But Krüger said in the Interview, that he "cant believe that 6million jews were killed. this is beyond my imagination, it would be three time the population of my home town Hamburg."

Note: Krüger used an "academic" and on the same time "military" language. His language reminds me of an educated middle class family.

here is the Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85dYQYNQxps

edit: has anyone details about Walter Krügers military service? I only found something about another Walter Krüger who was a Obergruppenführer.

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Re: Why the Waffen-SS

#2555

Post by j keenan » 16 Jun 2017, 02:14

offizier1916 wrote:Hello all

I just reviewed the beginning of the Documentary and I have to correct myself. It was not Hauptsturmführer Krüger who made Jokes about Jews during a veteran reunion of the Waffen SS, but OTTO ERNST REMER.
But Krüger said in the Interview, that he "cant believe that 6million jews were killed. this is beyond my imagination, it would be three time the population of my home town Hamburg."

Note: Krüger used an "academic" and on the same time "military" language. His language reminds me of an educated middle class family.

here is the Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85dYQYNQxps

edit: has anyone details about Walter Krügers military service? I only found something about another Walter Krüger who was a Obergruppenführer.
Krüger was right six million jews were't killed

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Gorque
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Re: Why the Waffen-SS

#2556

Post by Gorque » 16 Jun 2017, 06:12

j keenan wrote:Krüger was right six million jews were't killed
So how many were killed?

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Re: Why the Waffen-SS

#2557

Post by michael mills » 16 Jun 2017, 09:11

So how many were killed?
In 1954, Reitlinger calculated between 4.2 and 4.8 million, depending on the death toll for Poland. About one-third by gassing, a larger proportion by shooting, with the rest perishing from starvation, disease etc.

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Re: Why the Waffen-SS

#2558

Post by Gorque » 16 Jun 2017, 15:13

Hi Michael:

Wasn't there a communication near the end of the conflict, by Eichmann I believe, estimating approximately 6 million dead as a result of intentional murder or am I confusing this with his testimony in Jerusalem?

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Re: Why the Waffen-SS

#2559

Post by michael mills » 17 Jun 2017, 06:49

Gorque,

That was a claim made by Wilhelm Hoettl, discussed in this thread:

viewtopic.php?t=7585

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Re: Why the Waffen-SS

#2560

Post by Sid Guttridge » 17 Jun 2017, 09:24

Hi Michael,

As I understand it, Reitlinger's purpose was to establish the minimum indisputable figure for Jewish deaths, so that future revisionists and deniers would have difficulty quibbling over them.

Given this purpose and that he was working in the early 1950s, when full archival access was not available, it would not be surprising if Reitlinger's calculation was a bit short of the actual total. Indeed, the consensus today still seems to favour a total of around 6 million.

However, given that 4.2 million and 6 million are of the same order of magnitude, it makes little difference, in terms of responsibility or guilt, which is true. The discrepancy of 1.8 million is not caused by any claim that any of the known methods or sites of mass murder never existed. Therefore the same perpetrators were involved regardless of which total one favours.

Cheers,

Sid.

P.S. I think this aspect of discussion is drifting away from the Waffen-SS of this thread. While not entirely diovorced from the so-called "Holocaust", its prosecution was not the Waffen-SS's raison d'etre or main preoccupation.

michael mills
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Re: Why the Waffen-SS

#2561

Post by michael mills » 17 Jun 2017, 09:55

Gorque asked the question, I supplied an answer based on a reputable Jewish source, ie Reitlinger.

The six-million figure had been bandied about ever since the end of 1942, when it was a prediction that would later be accepted as a fact.

Reitlinger noted that that figure was based largely on guesstimates, particularly in the case of countries such as Poland, Romania and the Soviet Union, for which completely reliable statistics of the number of Jewish inhabitants in 1939, and of the number of survivors in 1945, were lacking. He set out to derive an accurate figure, based on solid documentary evidence.

Reitlinger was savagely vilified by the Jewish Establishment of his time for daring to suggest that the number of Jewish victims was less than the hallowed figure of six million. He himself expressed the opinion that it did not matter from an ethical point of view what the actual number of victims was, but it does matter from the point of view of historical accuracy.

It should be noted that Hilberg estimated the number of Jewish victims at five million, not much more than Reitlinger's upper figure of 4.8 million. I do not know of any archival evidence that has come to light since 1954 that has proved Reitlinger's estimates to be too low, particularly in the case of Poland and the Soviet Union.

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Re: Why the Waffen-SS

#2562

Post by Sid Guttridge » 17 Jun 2017, 10:28

Hi Michaei,

As I understand it, most European countries had censuses early in the decade and these were interrupted by the war. As a result, in most cases the last hard statistics for the Jewish (or any) population were a decade out of date by 1942-43. As the Jewish population had healthy natural increase, it is therefore likely that these early 1930s baseline statistics would have been an underestimate.

There is then the question of whether the definition (self-definition?) of Jewishness used in each of these censuses conformed with the Nazi definition. For example, large numbers of Hungarian Jews were assimilated and christianized. They may have been differently categorized by Hungarian and German definitions.

In any event, it probably means that the actual number of Jews in Europe in 1939 has a margin of error in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps even higher.

Yad Vashem has the names of about 4.5 million dead. Given the completeness with which many Jewish communities and their records were wiped out, this must be presumed an underestimate, particularly with regard to youngsters born after the last national censuses in the early 1930s. How big an underestimate is another matter.

Cheers,

Sid.

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Re: Why the Waffen-SS

#2563

Post by michael mills » 17 Jun 2017, 15:22

Yad Vashem has the names of about 4.5 million dead.
A rather dubious list, considering the way it was compiled, on the basis of a general invitation to all and sundry to write in and give the names of persons who they think perished during the war. Given that methodology, it is highly likely that there is a lot of double counting, with a given victim being listed a number of times, by different groups of distant relatives in the West, or in Yizkor books compiled by survivors from a number of communities.

Of course there do exist genuine lists of names of Jews deported to Auschwitz and other destinations in the East, compiled by the German authorities themselves at the time of the deportations. But such lists only cover Jews deported from Western and Central Europe, from Germany, Austria, Theresienstadt, France, Belgium, the Netherlands. In total such genuine lists identify fewer than one million Jewish victims; no lists were made by the Germans of the Polish and Soviet Jews killed at extermination camps in the Generalgouvernement or in shooting actions on occupied Soviet territory, ie of the overwhelming majority of victims.

Reitlinger himself realised that the number of victims from East European countries could not be known with any degree of exactitude, and that is why he postulated alternative high and low figures for the victims from pre-war Poland, with a variation of over one half million.

https://www.ushmm.org/online/hsv/source ... ceId=32961
Currently the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names is built on three types of sources:

Pages of Testimony
These are one-page forms, submitted to Yad Vashem by survivors, remaining family members, or friends in commemoration of Jews who perished in the Shoah. The first 800,000 Pages were collected in the 1950s, and the rest since. There are currently more than 2,000,000 Pages of Testimony written in some twenty languages. [...]

Historical documentation
This consists of historical documentation from the archives at Yad Vashem and other institutions. Examples include correspondence of Nazi officials and their counterparts throughout Europe, Jewish documents, including personal documents such as letters, passports, diaries and memoirs, as well as documents of Jewish organizations and institutions; lists detailing confiscation of assets, lists of inmates in ghettos, camps or deportations, and lists of victims or survivors; legal documentation from proceedings against Nazi criminals and collaborators; commemoration books; and many more. The documentation is in all European languages.

Local commemoration projects
There are dozens of local initiatives to record the names of the Jews from specific towns, regions, countries, or camps. Yad Vashem has joined forces with many of these projects, and their results are integrated into the Names Database.

Standard searches of the database will automatically cull information from all the sources, so that there may be multiple results for a single individual. Conversely, since the database is incomplete, many Shoah victims do not yet appear in it. As we progress, they will.

Sid Guttridge
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Re: Why the Waffen-SS

#2564

Post by Sid Guttridge » 17 Jun 2017, 16:45

Hi Michael,

You highlighted "Standard searches of the database will automatically cull information from all sources, so that there may be multiple results for a single individual".

However, you did not highlight the immediately following sentence, "Conversely, since the database is incomplete, many Shoah victims do not yet appear on it. As we progress, they will."

I guess that more advanced computer programmes will gradually iron out the duplications and add new names. Who knows what the final establishable total will be? Until then, anything between about 4.2million and about 6 million seem to still be in play.

Cheers,

Sid.

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Gorque
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Re: Why the Waffen-SS

#2565

Post by Gorque » 17 Jun 2017, 20:36

michael mills wrote:Gorque,

That was a claim made by Wilhelm Hoettl, discussed in this thread:

viewtopic.php?t=7585
HI Michael:

Thanks for the thread link. Höttl, from my understanding, had progressed his career within the RSHA quite high by the time the conflict had ended and may have had this converstion with Eichmann prior to Eichmann's departure to Romania. Being in the SD's Auslandamt, I would think his office and Eichmann's would have had dialogue with each other concerning Jews living abroad in Europe.
Last edited by Gorque on 17 Jun 2017, 20:51, edited 1 time in total.

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