Reply #22: Waffen SS far from the worst [View All]

Waffen means fighting. The Waffen SS, especially the first three divisions Liebstandarte, Todtenkopf and Das Reich were elite divisions to be sure. They were the best equipped and were used to spearhead attacks, but they largely served at the front lines fighting right beside the Wehrmacht divisions.

Far worse would be the non-Waffen SS, the behind the front guys who ran the concentration and extermination camps and other parts of the terror hierarchy.

Largely the Waffen SS were front line soldiers who fought in all the great battles of the Western and Eastern Fronts. There were great successes like the recapture of Kharkov, and great failures like the Lake Balaaton offensive. There were also outrages, especially in Russia from the Waffen SS, but I wouldn't rank them as the worst Nazis by far.

PS- After the war, many of them ended up in the French Foreign Legion and ended up fighting for the French in of all places, Vietnam. There's a great book called "Devil's Guard" written by a Waffen SS officer who joined the foreign legion, was surprised to see so many of his Waffen SS comrades there, and in Indochina was allowed to form an all-German-speaking brigade of former SS sodiers who fought the Vietnamese guerrillas with great ruthlessness and effectiveness. He wrote the book to tell the US what they were doing wrong in Vietnam. The French were forced to break up the SS brigade when they got a lot of bad publicity by invading communist China in chase of Vietnamese guerrillas.

Why write novels when history has so many amazingly true stories like this.