SS Grenadiers on The Russian Front

By Bob Carruthers

Rare photographs from both official and unofficial SS sources illustrate the role of the individual in this epic struggle. This is a candid and comprehensive picture of warfare on the Russian Front at the sharp end. These were the men who manned the trenches, climbed mountains and marched across the endless steppe in all seasons.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Release date: Apr 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781473868380

Bob Carruthers

Bob Carruthers is an Emmy Award winning author and historian, who has written extensively on the Great War. A graduate of Edinburgh University, Bob is the author of a number of military history titles including the Amazon best seller The Wehrmacht in Russia.

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INTRODUCTION

The Waffen-SS were the politically motivated soldiery who grew out of the paramilitary Schutzstaffel (the Nazi party protection squads) and ultimately formed the armed wing of the Nazi party. These ideologically driven warriors had initially been drawn from the hard men who protected Hitler as he spoke in the beer halls. In 1933, when Hitler gained power, this small group assumed the formal role of Hitler’s bodyguards. In 1934, the proto-Waffen-SS was born with the establishment of the SS-Verfügungstruppe . With its strict entry requirements the Waffen-SS was the prime instrument in Hitler’s vision of a racially superior force, however the man who was to give the idea concrete form was Heinrich Himmler. As Hitler personally had no time for detail and therefore no actionable plan, the vague rhetoric spouted by Hitler had to be translated into reality by Himmler. It was Himmler who was the real driving force behind the creation and management of the Waffen-SS…

During the inter-war years the SS-Verfügungstruppe came under the control of the SS-Führungshauptamt (SS operational command office). Upon mobilisation however tactical control was given over to the High Command of the Armed Forces (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht). However, according to Hitler’s orders, it would always remain a ‘unit of the NSD’. The SS-Verfügungstruppe first saw action during the Polish campaign of 1939. They were also renamed the Waffen-SS and deployed during the 1940 campaign in France and the 1941 invasion of Greece and the Balkans.

By 1941, the Waffen-SS had been further expanded and was by now a formidable force of six divisions; designed to assist, by military means, in the achievement of the political goal of seizing additional Lebensraum (living space) for the German people. The Lebensraum ideology proposed an aggressive expansion to the east of Germany and the German people. The Nazi regime famously purported that territorial expansionism to gain additional living space was an inevitable law of nature. In support of this claim, 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 own territories. The hierarchy of the Nazi Party bought into this idea and planned that Germany would inevitably need to expand territorially as the Third Reich was indeed facing an overpopulation crisis. Adolf Hitler explicitly acknowledged the crisis with the words: ‘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.

The policy of Lebensraum was explicitly based on the natural superiority of German race. The Germans who bought into the philosophy of National Socialism considered themselves to be members of an Aryan master race and, by virtue of their racial superiority, they believed themselves to have the right to displace those deemed to be part of inferior races. In order to avoid intermixing of ‘inferior’ racial genes It was also considered of vital importance that the men who would accomplish the great task of winning Lebensraum were racially homogeneous.

Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler troops undergo a drill inspection in Berlin, November 1938.

As a result of Hitler’s rhetoric and Himmler’s willingness to translate those ideas into action, those peoples deemed to be inferior races living within territory selected for Lebensraum were subject to arbitrary expulsion, enslavement, or destruction. From 1939 to 1941, the Nazi regime gave the outward appearance of having discarded plans to annex Soviet territories; the improved relations with the Soviet Union strengthened this deceptive stance via the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, as well as the very public assertions that Central Africa was actually 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; yet