SS vs. VC

I finished a fascinating book, The Devil’s Guard.  It had been out of print for ages, so I had to buy it used from someone selling it for less than $200.

 SS.  This was the elite organization of Nazi Germany.  No Holocaust film is complete without SS guards, guarding the concentration camps and rounding up hapless Jews; brutal guards and cynical officers – even the charismatic and articulate Hans Landa from Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglorious Basterds”.  With their black uniforms and dramatic symbols, the SS runes and Totenkopf (Death’s Head), the SS is certainly a fascinating incarnation of evil.  Although the SS was a vast organization with its tentacles in all walks of German life, most of what the SS is infamous for nowadays is its role in the Holocaust.  The Totenkopfverbande (Death’s Head Detachment) manned the concentration and extermination camps.  The Einsatzgruppen were special squads operating in the forests of Ukraine, Byelorussia, and the Baltics mowing down Jews in vast open pits dug by the victims themselves.  After the war, the SS was seen as Nazi Germany’s primary organization responsible for the atrocities associated with the regime. Its leader, Heinrich Himmler, escaped justice by swallowing a cyanide capsule upon capture by the British; Adolf Eichmann was kidnapped from Argentina by Mossad agents and brought to justice in Jerusalem.  

Part of the SS, but not part of the Holocaust operations, was an elite army known as the Waffen SS (Armed SS).  This was originally designed partly as Hitler’s personal bodyguard (Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler), which became the First SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler (LAH), and a modest group of special disposal troops, the Vefugungstruppe (SS-VT), which later developed into the Second SS Panzer Division Das Reich. They were intended both as an elite fighting force loyal directly to Adolf Hitler, but also as a militarized police force after the war which would have gained credibility and respect on the battlefield.  Complicating the “we had nothing to do with the camps” argument, however, is the Third SS Division, Totenkopf, which was raised from concentration camp guards and led by Theodore Eicke, who was responsible for developing the camp system and establishing its rules.  The two major stains on the Waffen SS were the massacre of French civilians in Oradour, perpetrated by a unit from the Das Reich division, and the massacre of US prisoners at Malmedy, in Belgium, during the Battle of the Bulge, by the Leibstandarte Division.

 The majority of Waffen SS units, however, were concerned with fighting the Red Army on the Eastern Front.  They formed ad hoc kampfgruppes (battle groups) which combined for specific operations as necessary, a flexibility unique to that army.  SS units were the scourge of the Reds and later the Allies, always feared and underestimated at their enemies’ peril.  Fortunately for their enemies, the SS was limited in number, never more than 10% of the size of the Wehrmacht, a few core German divisions and many more foreign units (see below).

 The Waffen SS attracted some German Army mavericks who had unconventional ideas for training which were frowned upon by the traditional German Army.  The Waffen SS trained with live ammunition and upgraded the exercise, fitness and calisthenics of the soldiers, plus a healthy dose of Nazi propaganda training.  Its soldiers received the first camouflage uniforms, a distinctive dot cammo (green or brown, depending on spring or fall) and also received the best weapons and equipment, and its panzer divisions received the newest tanks.  Waffen SS soldiers are the ones seen in the last third of “Saving Private Ryan” almost overrunning Tom Hanks’ small group of soldiers and paratroopers. 

 Another fascinating aspect of the Waffen SS was its multinational composition.  It initially accepted “Aryan”/Nordic volunteers from Norway, Denmark, Holland, and Flemish Belgium, plus “Reichdeutsche” (foreign nationals of German ethnicity).  Later, the SS lowered its racial standards and allowed French, Walloons (French speaking Belgians), Hungarians, Estonians, Latvians, and even Russians, Ukrainians, and other Slavs.  Leon Degrelle, commander of the SS Walloon Division, was the highest decorated non-German in the Waffen SS.  There was a Yugoslav unit, the Handschar Division, of Muslim Croatians.  However, the infamous “Britisches Freikorps” was little more than a 30 man unarmed unit which never saw combat.

 After the war, some of the Waffen SS veterans, fleeing what they perceived to be indiscriminate justice at the hands of the victorious Allies who labeled all SS personnel “war criminals”, wound up in France and received sanctuary in the ranks of the French Foreign Legion, which has a reputation for accepting disreputable characters from all over the world.  By this point the French were involved in a costly guerilla war in the mountains and forests of North Vietnam, against Ho Chi Minh’s US-trained and Chinese-supplied guerilla force, the Viet Minh.  The Foreign Legion allowed the Germans to form their own self-contained, independently operating unit.

 Viet Minh.  The precursor to the infamous Viet Cong (VC) was the Viet Minh, essentially the same organization under a slightly different name.  Without a sovereign state, North Vietnam, yet in existence, the army was purely guerilla but had substantial support from China and the USSR.

 The German unit operated behind Viet Minh lines and caused considerable problems for them.  Many of them were sharpshooters, carrying silenced rifles.  They learned fluent French and some Vietnamese, and were assisted by a Viet Minh turncoat, whose whole family had been wiped out by the Viet Minh.  Realizing that the Chinese were supporting the Viet Minh, the German unit went into China proper, dressed in black pajamas, tire sandals, the conical hats, and blew up several staging camps.  They also rescued several units of captured Legionnaires, and avenged others who were not so fortunate. 

 The Germans ruthlessly repaid Viet Minh atrocities in kind; on the rare occasion in which VM officers were lenient with French prisoners, the Germans acted likewise.  On one convoy, the Germans rounded up the wives and children of the local guerillas and used them as human shields to guarantee the safety of the convoy.  At another camp, besieged by a ruthless VM officer murdering captive Legionnaires outside the stockade of the camp, the Germans captured the VM unit’s local family and brought them to the camp, threatening to kill them if the VM officer didn’t back off.  This resulted in a mutiny in the VM ranks, who turned on their own officers.

On one remarkable occasion, one of the Germans challenged a VM officer to an open debate in front of the local villagers.  This German was well versed in Marxist ideology and ripped apart the VM’s arguments one by one; he was clearly excited and amused to engage in this battle of wits, words and ideas instead of bullets. 

  The Germans had also studied Mao’s guerilla warfare tactics and the writings of Spencer Chapman, a British officer who had been part of the UK advisors who remained in Malaysia after the Japanese took over, advising and organizing local guerillas to fight the Japanese; his book The Jungle is Neutral served as much as a primer in jungle warfare and counterinsurgency as Mao’s own teachings.  It turns out the French had done no prep work training the Legion for fighting in jungles (their training bases were in North Africa) nor had they bothered to study the tactics of the Viet Minh or of Mao himself, who literally wrote the book which Communist guerilla movements followed. 

 Unable to defeat the Germans in the forest, the Viet Minh used its political connections among the world’s Communist movement, particularly in France, to embarrass the French into disbanding the German unit.  Its men, unwilling to be parceled out piecemeal to the other Foreign Legion units, and having satisfied their enlistments, resigned from the Legion and found homes around the world.  In 1971, the leader of the unit, Hans Wagemueller (not his real name), met with the author of The Devil’s Guard and dictated his fascinating story.