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one of them. An officer who had been in North Africa with the Wehrmacht described how the British would sometimes surrender simply because they had run out of petrol. ‘But we knew that their air forces would be a terrible problem. We were not frightened of their men, but of their material . . .’
    Ever since the first winter in Russia, 1941, when the German Army suffered privations of Crimean proportions because of supply failures and military misjudgments in Berlin, many even among the SS had been puzzled by the High Command’s omissions and failures. By 1944 some, like Wisliceny, had long since abandoned hope of winning the war militarily, but still hoped for some political settlement at tolerable cost. Others, like the twenty-four-year-old veteran Otto Pohl, not only loved their tanks and their division, but cherished ambitions to reach high command, and never thought of defeat. ‘Until the very end in 1945, I was sure that it would be all right for us,’ he said. Pohl was a son of one of the old German elite who had transferred his allegiance very early to the new aristocracy. His father had been an officer in the Kaiser’s navy who joined Hitler in the 1920s, and was now an SS general. Young Pohl was educated at one of the special Young Socialist cadet schools, volunteered for Russia in 1941, and somehow survived there for three years. Some officers, like Otto Weidinger, had been troubled about the logic of invading Russia, but not Pohl: ‘A soldier never asks himself whether an operation is a good idea. Fighting is his business.’ When they asked themselves why they were sent the wrong type of ammunition, why there were desperate fuel shortages, why they were sometimes compelled to suffer terrible losses to no purpose, scarcely a man in the division considered fixing the blame onAdolf Hitler. Some said that the Führer simply did not know of these things. Others, that he was badly advised by those around him, above all by Bormann and Ribbentrop.
    But it is essential to perceive that, in many respects, these young soldiers of the SS – and the divisional commander was their only officer older than thirty-two – had much in common with the men of other armies. The SS newspaper prided itself on the freedom with which it criticized the failings of the organization. Officers and men shared a far closer relationship than those of the British Army. They inflicted their arrogance upon the outside world, not upon each other. Among junior officers, there was a hoary joke whenever some supreme organizational disaster was inflicted upon them: ‘. . . Wenn der Führer wüsste! ’ – ‘. . . If only the Führer knew!’ When they sang, it was seldom the Horst Wessel song, more often a number like Waldeslust :
    I don’t know my father,
    I’m not loved by my mother,
    But I don’t want to die so young . . .
    In the privacy of their billets, most of them enjoyed a reasonably civil relationship with the French civilians who were obliged to house them. A Frenchwoman who provided quarters for six men of the Das Reich in Montauban in 1944 described how one of them with punctilious correctness brought her a 1,000 franc note that he had found in his room. It was a matter of pride within the SS that no man was permitted to lock up his possessions in barracks, although some of them stole petrol from the unit stocks to get to the brothels in Toulouse. The SS officers were elaborately, Germanically courteous to the wives and daughters of their enforced hosts. They considered themselves, indeed, to be the very pattern of chivalry. An officer of the Das Reich cited to the author an example of his division’s gentlemanly code: in Russia, a colleague was found to have committed some aberration with a Russian woman, and was at once ordered to go to his quarters and shoot himself. He did so.
    Yet these young men, so careful in their private courtesies and honesty, were also profoundly flawed. It is unnecessary to review in detail the