The War Crime That Shocked Even the Nazis
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Of all military units of the Second World War, few were as infamous or feared as the German Waffen-SS. Entirely separate from the regular German army or Wehrmacht, the SS - short for Schutzstaffel or “protection force” - were the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, its members swearing their allegiance
not to Germany or the German Government but directly to Adolf Hitler himself. First formed in 1925 as a personal bodyguard for Hitler, by 1939 the SS had grown into a powerful organization a quarter-million strong, divided into three main branches: the Allegemeine or General SS, which ran the whole organization as well as the Gestapo secret police, the Totenkopfverbände, which ran the concentration camps, and the Waffen SS, the combat wing which fought alongside the regular armed forces. As the vanguards of Nazi Party, the men of the SS were selected for their racial purity, physical prowess, and absolute devotion to Nazi ideology. As Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, explained: "One basic principle must be the absolute rule for the SS man. We must be decent, loyal and comradely to members of our own blood and to nobody else. What happens to a Russian, or to a Czech, doesn't interest me in the slightest"
Recruits’ family trees were rigorously scrutinized for even a single drop of Jewish blood, and in the early days even a single tooth filling could disqualify a candidate from serving - though as the war ground on and the SS grew increasingly desperate for men its standards would relax substantially, with even Muslim volunteers from the Balkans being allowed into its ranks. As soldiers, Waffen-SS troopers underwent a brutal training regime to forge them into perfect warriors - tenacious, cunning, contemptuous of danger,
and courageous to a fault. While this tenacity and zeal made the Waffen-SS a formidable fighting force, it often proved counter-productive, their refusal to retreat in the face of battle resulting in disproportionately high casualty rates. Their fanaticism also made them merciless towards their enemies...
This is an abridged version of a video on our channel TodayIFoundOut which you can check out and subscribe to here: @todayifoundout
20 Comments
were wiped out few weeks later, while fighting in Normandy,
so they really did get their comeuppance.
The War Crime That Shocked Even the Nazis
Fact Quickie
208,228 views
Of all military units of the Second World War, few were as infamous or feared as the German Waffen-SS. Entirely separate from the regular German army or Wehrmacht, the SS - short for Schutzstaffel or “protection force” - were the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, its members swearing their allegiance
not to Germany or the German Government but directly to Adolf Hitler himself. First formed in 1925 as a personal bodyguard for Hitler, by 1939 the SS had grown into a powerful organization a quarter-million strong, divided into three main branches: the Allegemeine or General SS, which ran the whole organization as well as the Gestapo secret police, the Totenkopfverbände, which ran the concentration camps, and the Waffen SS, the combat wing which fought alongside the regular armed forces. As the vanguards of Nazi Party, the men of the SS were selected for their racial purity, physical prowess, and absolute devotion to Nazi ideology. As Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, explained: "One basic principle must be the absolute rule for the SS man. We must be decent, loyal and comradely to members of our own blood and to nobody else. What happens to a Russian, or to a Czech, doesn't interest me in the slightest"
Recruits’ family trees were rigorously scrutinized for even a single drop of Jewish blood, and in the early days even a single tooth filling could disqualify a candidate from serving - though as the war ground on and the SS grew increasingly desperate for men its standards would relax substantially, with even Muslim volunteers from the Balkans being allowed into its ranks. As soldiers, Waffen-SS troopers underwent a brutal training regime to forge them into perfect warriors - tenacious, cunning, contemptuous of danger,
and courageous to a fault. While this tenacity and zeal made the Waffen-SS a formidable fighting force, it often proved counter-productive, their refusal to retreat in the face of battle resulting in disproportionately high casualty rates. Their fanaticism also made them merciless towards their enemies...
This is an abridged version of a video on our channel TodayIFoundOut which you can check out and subscribe to here: @todayifoundout
"Down this road on a summer day in 1944, the soldiers came. Nobody lives here now. They stayed only a few hours. When they had gone, a community, which had lived for a thousand years, was dead."