Das Reich Read Online Free PDF

principles of National Socialism, the anti-semitism, the uncritical devotion to Hitler – it can be taken for granted that almost every officer of the Das Reich shared all these, not least from practical gratitude for what Hitler’s Germany had done for his career. The only acceptable salute in an SS unit was ‘ Heil Hitler ’. Otto Pohl readily forgave his father-in-law and two brothers-in-law dead in Russia, Karl Kreutz his home in Berlin destroyed by bombing and his family refugees in Silesia, Ernst Krag his six wounds, and the half of his class comrades at officer school already dead.
    The aspect of their conditioning that is most relevant to this story is the extraordinary respect with which they had been imbued for the virtues of strength, of ruthless dedication to the task in hand, and the equally extraordinary indifference to the claims of the weak and the innocent. All their virtues were reserved for others within their closed society. They possessed neither charity nor mercy for any who were not deemed to have deserved it by their own code. It is striking that when the survivors of the British First Airborne Division at Arnhem found themselves in the hands of the SS, they expected to be shot. Instead, they were treated with the respect due to heroes. According to the SS code of chivalry, these were fellow-knights worthy of their highest honour. Yet as we shall see below, those whom the SS did not deem worthy of its respect – above all, enemy civilians – were treated with unflinching ruthlessness. The young leaders of the SS had been educated and trained to believe that only one principle mattered – the interests of Germany as they themselves and their commanders saw fit to interpret them. They did not spurn morality or justice or process of law – these were simply forgotten or unknown concepts to them. If the Einsatzgruppen – the SS extermination squads – or the concentration camps ever passed through their consciousness, they never allowed thesemildly distasteful matters to linger. They were part of the natural machinery of the state, and no concern of theirs.
    The greatest fear of an SS officer was that he might be considered guilty of weakness or cowardice. He could never be wrong if he adopted or accepted the most drastic solution to a problem. From the first appearance of the Waffen SS in the war, it had been made apparent that superior officers would always pardon an excess of zeal in the right direction. In September 1939, a member of an SS artillery regiment in Poland herded fifty Jews into a synagogue and shot them. The prosecuting officer at his court martial appealed for the death sentence, and the man was indeed sentenced to a term of imprisonment. But then Berlin intervened. An appeal hearing was held, at which the presiding judge said that the accused ‘. . . was in a state of irritation as a result of the many atrocities committed by Poles against ethnic Germans. As an SS man, he was also particularly sensitive to the sight of Jews and the hostile attitude of Jewry to Germans; and thus acted quite unpremeditatedly in a spirit of youthful enthusiasm.’ The sentence was quashed. The SS never looked back. Throughout the next four years of conquest and struggle, above all on the Eastern Front, the Waffen SS shot whomsoever they wished, whenever they wished. Within two weeks of the invasion of Russia, the SS Wiking Division had killed 600 Galician Jews ‘as a reprisal for Soviet cruelties’. The Leibstandarte Division found six of its men brutally killed by Russian troops, and shot every prisoner for three days, a total of about 4,000 men. In September 1941, a support unit of the Das Reich assisted an SS extermination squad to kill 920 Jews near Minsk. Mass killing in pursuit of state policy never became the professional business of the Waffen SS – the Einsatzgruppen looked after all that sort of thing. But there can have been few experienced officers and men in the Waffen SS by June