War and Game

By Jean-Luc Leleu
Is it still useful to talk about the Waffen-SS? No other military corps in contemporary history has gained such terrible notoriety. In the social memory of European nations the image of the “fanatic” SS soldier prevails, associating him with the bloodiest crimes on the front and in the occupied territories.1 But who really were the volunteers who joined this troop? Except for the officers’ corps, this question has so far not been systematically addressed by historical research.2

As a “parallel army” (E. Neusüss-Hunkel), the Waffen-SS was a paramilitary organization whose status obliged it, at least in theory, to recruit only volunteers – in contrast to the Wehrmacht, a state institution composed of professional soldiers and conscripts. While it would be impossible to present the profiles of all the approximately 800,000 men who served in the ranks of the military branch of the SS during the conflict, this chapter will try to give in outline a collective portrait of these men. To this end, I will first discuss how the SS-Hauptamt – the main SS office in charge of the recruitment – organized recruiting channels. Inside the Reich this was mainly done by establishing partnerships with the National Socialist youth organizations (Hitlerjugend and Reichsarbeitsdienst). In the occupied territories the strategies were (1) organizing the so-called Volksdeutsche communities (ethnic Germans living outside the Reich’s borders); (2) addressing more or less artificially constructed “Germanic” groups, and; (3) targeting the “non-Germanic” with specific measures. I will then try to determine the social background of the volunteers and to explain the evolution of their motivations before and during the war. Finally, the role of coercion in the enlistment of Waffen-SS volunteers during the war, which has been the topic of intense historical debates, will be assessed.

Recruiting SS soldiers in and outside the Reich
The perception of the Waffen-SS oscillates between two extremes. It is considered by some as a body of enthusiast “fanatic” National Socialists, by others as an organization of conscripts more or less pressured to join its ranks in the second half of the war. Neither perspective is wrong, but neither picture is complete on its own. For the development of recruitment within the Reich, the measures introduced by SS General Gottlob Berger were decisive.3 As soon as he became head of the SS Recruiting Office in summer 1938, he concluded agreements with the Hitler Youth to organize a Patrol Service (Streifendienst) and a Rural Service (Landdienst). The ranks of both organizations were filled with young Germans who met the racial and physical SS criteria, and who were therefore a target for SS recruiting commissions as soon as they arrived at an age to bear arms (17 years old). In the same way, an agreement was concluded in December 1941 with the Reich Labour Service (Reichsarbeitsdienst) to facilitate the entry of SS recruiting commissions into the camps in which young men had to serve for a period of three to six months before joining the army. In addition to the establishment of these institutional links, Berger targeted the countryside, employing “honourable”, locally well-known personalities who had a strong influence on their fellow-citizens, such as teachers, landowners or civil members of the SS.4

When, from 1941/1942 onwards, the army started to enlist ever younger men, Berger’s main objective became to recruit candidates as early as possible – primarily before they were called up by the army, since after this point it was generally no longer possible to join the Waffen-SS. This strategy reached its full effect in 1943, thanks to the full powers given by Hitler, with the creation of three “teenager” SS divisions (9th, 10th, and 12th SS divisions, of which two were filled by young men from the Labour Service – born in 1925 – and the third by young men serving in the Hitler Youth and born in 1926).

Finally, this policy found its apogee in a large but clandestine census of the age group born in 1927 and 1928, carried out by the SS under the cover of a general detection of tuberculosis during the winter and spring of 1943/1944. This elaborate and secret census helped Berger to find SS recruits during the growing manpower shortage in the Reich. The SS was thus copying the increasingly aggressive recruiting strategy of the army, which from 1943 onwards started pressuring young men to join the army as early as possible. Yet, despite some successes, none of these measures resolved the manpower problem of the SS; not enough young men were persuaded to join the Waffen-SS until the end of the war.5

As in Germany, the SS strove to create recruitment channels abroad. An obvious target of recruitment campaigns were the Volksdeutsche, the German communities settled in the Balkans, Eastern Europe and Nordschleswig (southern Denmark). Before recruiting operations began, Himmler ordered large censuses of those communities. In this case, among others, the statisticians of the Third Reich became real “scientific soldiers”, as has been pointed out by Götz Aly and Karl Heinz Roth.6

Results were impressive. By June 1944, about 150,000 Volksdeutsche were serving in the Waffen-SS.7 In September 1944, 60,000 Romanian Volksdeutsche, about 12 per cent of the whole German community in Romania, had enlisted.8 In Hungary, this figure reached 13 per cent.9

In the “Germanic” lands – the Netherlands and Scandinavia – the absence of organized recruiting channels led to poor results at the beginning. This proved the need for such channels. As an interim solution, it was decided to recruit men from the paramilitary groups of the local fascist parties. After Himmler’s order in January 1941 to pursue this avenue, the SS, for example, undertook negotiations with the Dutch Anton Mussert’s NSB (Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging) and obtained about 1,000 men in five weeks – a number to compare with the 786 “Germanic” volunteers from the Netherlands, Flanders and the Scandinavian area that the SS had been able to recruit in the five months between August and December 1940.10

In comparison to the large number of Volksdeutsche who joined the ranks of the Waffen-SS, the numbers of “Germanic” volunteers always remained very low, showing the inability of the SS to convince these populations of a “community of destiny” with the Reich. Nonetheless, some increase was noted from the summer of 1943, after Berger’s SS-Hauptamt had introduced in all “Germanic” countries a card index system to register all citizens who manifested a certain sympathy for the Reich, or at least an absence of hostility: militants of fascist or pro-German organizations; students who had received a scholarship to study in the Reich; workers who had volunteered to work in Germany; and members of territorial units in service with the German armed forces (e.g. “Landwacht Niederlande” or SS-Wach-Bataillon 3 in the Netherlands).11

From 3,000 men at the beginning of the war against the Soviet Union in June 1941, the number of “Germanic” volunteers rose to 12,021 in January 1942, 19,331 in June 1943, and 34,887 (37,367 including the French) in January 1944. Many of these men did not meet the SS’s high physical standards and racial criteria (in particular, the minimum height of 1.70 m), but only the military service criteria.12 This total is far below the exaggerated estimates given in the tendentious literature written during the Cold War by former SS officers in order to rehabilitate the Waffen-SS and to present it as a NATO avant-garde seeking above all to fight communism on the Eastern Front.13 The number of Dutch volunteers, for example, could never have been as high as 50,000 to 60,000 men, as former SS General Steiner maintained in his book in 1958, since we know that the exact number was 21,908 on 1 January 1945.14

In the second half of the war, POW camps and factories in the Reich became common recruiting grounds for the SS, especially after Hitler’s order of March 1944 giving Himmler the authority to liberate any POW who volunteered for armed service in the Waffen-SS or for service in the Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei or Sicherheitsdienst).15 This procedure became de facto the only possibility for the SS to recruit foreigners after the evacuation of the occupied territories in 1944, but results were nevertheless poor.16

Of course, all these strategies encountered numerous obstacles. The SS experienced frequent problems due to National Socialist leaders, German institutions such as the army, the German Foreign Minister, and satellite states such as Romania and Hungary, among other things.17