Today, one can no longer say that the history of the Waffen-SS has been poorly researched. So it is not surprising that two conferences on this topic took place within half a year. First, the Hannah Arendt Institute for Research on Totalitarianism organized a large event in Dresden between December 2 and 4, 2010, followed by the German Committee for the History of World War II with a smaller workshop in Würzburg on May 6-7, 2011. While in Dresden the focus was on "communalization and exclusion" in the Waffen-SS, in Würzburg the focus was more on the military-historical perspective and on a comparison with the Wehrmacht. Thus, both conferences were designed to complement each other, as a planned joint anthology will also show.
First, the chairman of the committee and host RAINER SCHMIDT (Würzburg) welcomed the audience of about 60 in the magnificent Toscana Hall of the Würzburg Residence. He quoted an SD report from 1942, according to which the Waffen-SS allegedly would not take any prisoners of war. On the other hand, SS veterans claimed after 1945 that they had been "soldiers like others." In his introduction, Schmidt linked the hope that the workshop would challenge or even destroy these myths.
First, the chairman of the committee and host RAINER SCHMIDT (Würzburg) welcomed the audience of about 60 in the magnificent Toscana Hall of the Würzburg Residence. He quoted an SD report from 1942, according to which the Waffen-SS allegedly would not take any prisoners of war. On the other hand, SS veterans claimed after 1945 that they had been "soldiers like others." In his introduction, Schmidt linked the hope that the workshop would challenge or even destroy these myths.
The first panel was chaired by Bernd Wegner (Hamburg). He pointed to the formerly meager field of research on this topic, which has undergone a fundamental transformation in the last decade. Among the many recent works on the subject is that by RENE ROHRKAMP (Marburg) on the recruitment practices of the Waffen-SS. In his lecture based on the results of the book, he divided the recruitment policy of the Waffen-SS into four temporal phases and ultimately came to the conclusion that the Waffen-SS had become increasingly younger in the course of the war.
The following presentation by MARTIN CÜPPERS (Ludwigsburg) dealt with a particularly dark chapter of the Waffen-SS: the SS brigades and SS cavalry regiments of the Reichsführer-SS command staff and their participation in the Holocaust. Originally equipped in the summer of 1941 only with the vague order to act mercilessly against looters and to drive women as well as children out of the villages, the SS cavalry regiments deployed in the Pripjet marshes radicalized to varying degrees. While Gustav Lombard's cavalry division (SS Cavalry Regiment 1) proceeded to indiscriminate murder of all Jews from the very beginning, SS Cavalry Regiment 2 initially killed "only" the male Jewish population. On August 1, 1941, Himmler finally sanctioned Lombard's more radical solution in a central order and issued this as the future line of march. For Cüppers, it was a mixture of anticipatory obedience, profiling, and careerism that the discretionary powers were initially interpreted differently. Under this impression, the Reich leadership ultimately opted for the most radical variant.
NIELS WEISE (Würzburg) concluded the first day with a paper on Theodor Eicke and his SS division "Totenkopf" and its role in Nazi propaganda. In the French campaign of 1940, the division, recruited from concentration camp personnel, had turned out to be a frequently robbing and murdering soldateska. Propaganda could by no means present this taint to the German public. This changed from the turn of the year 1941/42, when the division was trapped with other Wehrmacht divisions in the Demjansk cauldron. Under the leadership of "Papa Eicke" the troops held out until relief arrived from the outside and the SS propaganda believed that they had finally found their "story". Sharp arguments followed between the Wehrmacht and SS reporters about the portrayal of the Kesselausbruch. In the end, the Wehrmacht had to cave in, and the leading role of Eicke and his division prevailed as the official version. Nevertheless, even after Eicke's death, he and his division remained important only for SS propaganda, but not for general Nazi propaganda.
In the ensuing discussion, questions revolved mainly around the homogeneity of the Waffen-SS. Ultimately - according to the final tenor of the conference participants - one must distinguish between different phases here. Before 1939, the Waffen-SS was certainly politically homogeneous, but by no means militarily so. Instead, it often resembled a "playground" for desperados who had been rejected by the Wehrmacht or who had failed. Due to the constant exchange of personnel during the war, however, the Waffen-SS became more homogeneous militarily, but lost its personnel homogeneity in the crew area due to the expansion.
The panel chaired by Rolf-Dieter Müller (Potsdam) on the second day was opened by ROMAN TÖPPEL (Munich) with a comparison of the military performance of the Waffen-SS and the Wehrmacht. For this purpose, Töppel drew on the SS divisions "Leibstandarte," "Das Reich," and "Totenkopf" as well as comparable so-called elite divisions of the Army in the Battle of Kursk in 1943. He showed, based on primary sources, that the SS divisions were indeed equipped with better material than their Wehrmacht counterparts. The speaker refuted the frequently raised accusation of poor leadership in the Waffen-SS by arguing that the SS did not suffer above-average casualties at Kursk. Overall, Töppel summed up, the Waffen-SS had proved itself militarily at Kursk; its units were among the most professional and reliable during the battle.
CARLO GENTILE (Cologne) dealt with the different behavior of three major units in the fight against partisans in Italy in 1943/45. While the 16th SS Panzer Grenadier Division "Reichsführer-SS" murdered between 2,200 and 2,400 civilians in six months, the parachute tank division "Herman Göring" of the Luftwaffe had 1,000 victims in ten months. Finally, the Army's 26th Panzer Division killed "only" 200 civilians in twenty months. Gentile also emphasized that by no means all units of the 16th SS Division can be proven to have committed murders, but their actions as a whole speak a much more radical and bloody language than those of the 26th Panzer Division. In the history of the division published after 1945, the veterans of this army division remarkably openly confessed to the murders with shame and asked for forgiveness from the descendants of the victims.
In the final presentation of the workshop, JENS WESTEMEIER (Geiselhöring) spoke about Joachim Peiper, often considered an SS icon, and his division, the "Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler." Like Gentile, Westemeier emphasized (this time using the Battle of the Bulge) the difference between the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS in the number of war crimes committed. However, Westemeier did not see the Waffen-SS as a military elite. He referred to the horrendous losses, which could not be fully replaced in the long run. Moreover, hardly any of the officers of the Leibstandarte had undergone proper military training.
In the concluding discussion, the audience's questions and comments largely revolved around the question of whether or not the Waffen-SS was a military elite, which had not been clearly clarified after the presentations by Töppel and Westemeier. Further research will certainly be needed here to provide clarity. In the discussion the question was also raised whether the term "elite" seems to be useful at all as an analytical (but not historical!) term.
In the summary, PETER LIEB (Sandhurst) again urged a differentiated view of the Waffen-SS despite the extensive homogeneity of its leader corps. He also stressed how methodologically difficult it is to make military efficiency measurable. Finally, Lieb recalled that almost all comparable crimes committed by the Waffen-SS were also committed by units of the Wehrmacht - albeit with much less frequency in the Wehrnmacht. Moreover, the Wehrmacht - in contrast to the SS - did not kill women and children in the West as part of the fight against partisans, nor did it shoot Allied prisoners of war en masse. Thus, the Allies had already gained the perception of the "clean Wehrmacht" and the "criminal SS" before 1945 - an image that German society liked to take up after 1945.
Overall, the conference provided a good overview of recent research on the Waffen-SS. Thanks to recent empirical studies on the Waffen-SS in France and Italy, it can now be firmly stated that a general equation of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS cannot be maintained when it comes to the topic of war crimes. At the same time, however, the conference also highlighted two major research desiderata: First, the extent of the war crimes committed by the Waffen-SS in the "Barbarossa" enterprise, on which there have so far been studies only of the SS brigades. Second, the assessment of the Waffen-SS as a "military elite." For this point in particular, the Würzburg conference provided some important suggestions that will hopefully soon be taken up by researchers.