The real SS
Patrick Cosg rave
Mr Jonathan Guinness, readers may recall, once rejoiced in the political nickname, 'razor blades'. This was not because he had ever betrayed any marked viciousness of character but because, when he was contesting the Lincoln by-election, and entirely in a misguided fit of helpfulness, he suggested that muderers should be presented with razor blades, in case they should want to use these prosaie instruments to do away with themselves, Mr Guinness has a good deal of charm, but little pretension to Political cunning or ruthlessness. And the reaction of his acquaintances to the news that he had, for a week, entertained Herr Richard Schulze-Kossens, late of the Waffen SS, was, so far as 1 could gather, simply that Jonathan was being silly again; and I shared that view.
Cracks at Mr Guinness's expense, how ever — and much of the comment made on the visit of the three ex-SS men and exit — Should not be allowed to conceal from us either the substance of the issue, or the real Purpose of the essay in prologue to a Collection of war photographs which the three heroes were in Britain to publicise. Even before trying to clarify that substance, though, what these three men did should be made clear.
It is a cardinal point of the propaganda of the Association of Soldiers of the Former Waffen-SS that they were brave, honest and straightforward soldiers of Germany, of unusual valour and distinction, certainly no more, and probably a good deal less, guilty of the cruelty inevitably attendant On warfare than other units in any army. Further — at least in public — they avoid emphasis on Hailer, and stress their service to the Fatherland.
Herr Schulze-Kossens, however, was the Fuhrer's Military Adjutant for three of the war years, and in intimate contact, therefore, with the beast in his most bestial Period, including the period of the preparation of the Final Solution to the Jewish problem. Herr Hubert Meyer, the sparse, grey and dignified looking old gentleman who tried to hold a press conference served in the 12th SS Panzer division, under his namesake Kurt, the butcher of Caen,.who murdered a number of Canadian prisoners Of war after the battle in and around that City. The third of our visitors, Herr Walter Harzer (9th SS Hohenstaufen) once employed the engaging ruse of holding his British prisoners in barbed wire cages around his headquarters, to protect himself from RAF bombing.
I mention these moments in the careers of these men not because they were the worst things they as indivduals, or the SS as an organisation, did during the war, but because of their claims, repeated again and again in the Prologue to The Book of Photographs of the Waffen SS to be a military elite, worthy to rank with the great and the valorous in the Guards divisions (this is the comparison they themselves make) of the past. But if there is one thing that characterises valiant soldiery it is respect for other valiant soldiery. Still, as I say, it was not the worst they eVer did. The slaughter of the entire population of the French village (it was not then a town, as the Prologue for some obscure reason claims) of Oradour was one of the battle standards won by the Das Reich Division of the SS in 1944.
Nor can this be surprising. For the SS, contrary to the repeated implications and arguments of the Prologue, was associated with Hitlerism and Nazism — and intimately associated — long before Hitler came to power. In no sense were they — as the Prologue states — elite units formed in the thirties to defend their homeland and restore its military reputation. They were founded in 1925 as the Schutzstaffel (bodyguard) of Hiller, and can be identified absolutely with every bunch of political thugs carrying disease into European politics at that time. In 1929 the basic outline of the SS was very nearly completed: the job was finished in 1933, although the title `Waffen SS' was not introduced until 1940. When it was included, however, it specifically included the Inspectorate of the concentration camps. The major effort of the Association which harbours our visitors has been to separate the Waffen SS from all the others, but it falls down on even a moment's examination of the historical evidence.
On one vital — and endlessly repeated — point, however, the Prologue is valuable. Herr Meyer and his colleagues clearly bitterly resent the fact that so much unfriendly attention has been focussed on them; and that the Wehrmacht, the German Army, has escaped relatively so lightly. Again and again, they point to occasions when they acted under Army orders, and to occasions when the Wehrmacht committed atrocities. All this is fair and true, for so great was the corruption of Nazism that hardly a German institution escaped. In so far as the SS have received more attention than the Wehrmacht it has been because of their intimate association with Hitler himself; because the Totenkopf (Death's Head) units of the Allgemeine Division of the SS (whose bravery the prologue praises) were the concentration camp guards; and because it happened to have been the case that wounded SS men, more frequently than any other German casualties, were sent to the camps after battle service.
But, even if all this is true, should they have been thrown out? Has our anger with, say, Napoleonic atrocities not passed; and will our anger with German atrocities not pass in time? But there is a great difference. It is the public policy of our German allies to continue to abhor the records of these men, and to take institutional and educational steps to see that their kind of evil never reproduces itself. There is an identity of repugnance between the government of the Allied countries and that of West Germany, and we would have been betraying the hope of modern Germany as much as own memories to have shown tolerance. We found that our police had fewer powers than we thought in dealing with the vermin of the past: it is a happy thought that we had sufficient.
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