Bob Carruthers - The Waffen SS on the Eastern Front: A Photographic Record of the Waffen SS in the East (Images of War)

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B ased on Waffen-SS are often hailed as an elite fighting force. However, while it is true that this force fought exceptionally well in military terms, in social and humanitarian terms the reputation of the Waffen-SS, the armed political wing which grew out of the Schutzstaffel or Nazi party protection squads, will always be tainted by the war crimes they committed in the East and West. Their litany of crimes in the Soviet Union included the killing of those the Nazis designated as untermenschen or sub humans Slavs, Jews and Marxists.

The Waffen-SS was one of the weapons in the Nazi arsenal which was used to wage the unlooked for war which was to lead its architects to the courtroom at Nuremberg. These men you see here were the Nazi idealists who had bought into the Nazi creed of expansion to the east in search of Lebensraum .

The Lebensraum ideology proposed an aggressive expansion of Germany and the German people. The Nazis supported territorial expansionism to gain Lebensraum as being a law of nature. The Nazi creed espoused the idea that it was necessary for all healthy and vigorous peoples of superior races to displace people of inferior races; especially if the people of a superior race were facing overpopulation in their given territories. The hierarchy of the Nazi Party believed that Germany inevitably needed to territorially expand because it was indeed facing an overpopulation crisis which Adolf Hitler described as follows: We are overpopulated and cannot feed ourselves from our own resources. It was on this basis that expansion eastwards was justified as an inevitable necessity for Germany. From 1939 to 1941, the Nazi regime gave the outward appearance of having discarded plans to annex Soviet territories, this deceptive stance was strengthened by the improved relations with the Soviet Union via the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and the public claims that central Africa was where Germany sought to achieve Lebensraum . Hitler publicly claimed that Germany wanted to settle the Lebensraum issue peacefully through diplomatic negotiations that would require other powers to make concessions to Germany; at the same time however Germany prepared for war in the cause of Lebensraum , and the potential clash between the peoples of Germany and the Soviet Union.

In 1941, it was the stated policy of the Nazis to kill, deport, or enslave the Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, and other Slavic populations, whom they considered inferior, and to repopulate the land with Germanic people drawn primarily from the ranks of the Waffen-SS. The urban population was considered disposable and could potentially be exterminated by starvation, thus creating an agricultural surplus to feed Germany and allowing their replacement by the population of warrior farmers who were to be rewarded with grants of land in recognition for their service in the ranks of the Waffen-SS. The policy of Lebensraum implicitly assumed the superiority of Germans as members of an Aryan master race who by virtue of their superiority had the right to displace people deemed to be part of inferior races. The Nazis insisted that Lebensraum needed to be developed as racially homogeneous to avoid intermixing with peoples deemed to be part of inferior races, with its strict entry requirements the Waffen-SS was the prime instrument in Hitlers vision The man who was to give concrete form was Heinrich Himmler and it was he who was the real driving force behind the Waffen-SS in practical terms. The vague rhetoric spouted by Hitler had to be translated into practicality by Himmler. Hitler, as always had no concrete plan, as a result, those peoples deemed to be inferior races living within territory selected for Lebensraum were subject to arbitrary expulsion, enslavement or destruction.

Hitler gave a speech to his Waffen-SS troops just three weeks before the start of Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi code name for the attack on the Soviet Union. He said, This is an ideological battle and a struggle of races. Here stands a world as we conceived it beautiful, decent, socially equal and full of culture; this is what our Germany is like. On the other side stands a population of 180,000,000, a mixture of races, whose very names are unpronounceable and whose physique is such that one can only shoot them down without mercy or compassion. When you fight over there in the east, you are carrying on the same struggle against the same sub-humanity, the same inferior races, that at one time appeared under the name of Huns, another time of Magyars, another time of Tartars, and still another time under the name of Genghis Khan and the Mongols. Today they appear as Russians under the political banner of Bolshevism.

When he launched operation Barbarossa Hitler expected the Wehrmacht (the German armed forces) to conquer the Soviet Union and the Waffen-SS to carry out the goals of the party. To the Wehrmacht Hitler ordered the job of kicking in the front door so the whole rotten Russian edifice will come tumbling down. To the Waffen-SS therefore fell not just the job of combat but also waging a race war to create Hitlers long cherished dream of Lebensraum , the much-anticipated living space for the German people in the East. However, as events spiralled out of control, the war in the east became the most titanic struggle in the history of human conflict. From the opening moves the scale of the struggle was truly colossal. On one side were over three million well trained, equipped and battle hardened German troops including the Waffen-SS and half a million of their Axis allies. In total the Germans deployed 153 divisions including 21 Panzer and 14 motorised divisions containing over 3,400 tanks and 3000 aircraft. On the other side was a Soviet army of over five million men in 180 divisions with over 10,000 tanks and 20,000 aircraft.

This was a genuine life or death struggle, during operations in the East the Waffen-SS grew from just six divisions comprising 160,000 men at the start of Barbarossa until, by the end of the war, it represented a huge force of 38 combat divisions comprising over 950,000 men. Under the command of Heinrich Himmler, the Waffen-SS received privileged treatment in terms of weapons and supplies. As a consequence they attracted only the most committed recruits who were willing to fight and die for the cause. Not surprisingly with their advantages which sprang from highly motivated recruits, excellent equipment, cohesive background requirements and an all-embracing ideological indoctrination, the Waffen-SS soon earned a fearsome reputation in combat.