Posted on 12/03/2007 6:39:45 PM PST by DogByte6RER
The SS were not the same as regular German troops. They consisted mostly of thugs, criminals, and gangsters. the regular army looked down on them but were also afraid of them since they were Hitlers favorites and held much power. SS troops not only raped, tortured, and pillaged, but murdered as well. The regular German army had discipline for the most part, but SS units, again, for the most part, did not.
A lot of people confuse the Waffen SS (the Nazi equivalent of the Marines, so to speak) and the SS, who were the political police troops you describe and were but a handful, a bit like our own Secret Service with SEALS thrown in (not that the SS and SEALS commit atrocities). The Waffen SS infantry troops were watched by the Feldgendarme. I don't know who, if anybody, watched the SS.
Also, the SS' reputation was amplified by Stalin, whose NKVD troops exterminated Ukrainian villages suspected of greeting the Germans as liberators. The NKVD butchers managed to blame the Germans for this, just the way they did for the Katyn massacre.
The net result of this is that it is really hard to find objective accounts of what the SS really did, a bit like the Spanish Inquisition: the truth is bad enough, but it's drowned in a sea of hearsay and bad B-movie-grade inventions.
If you have a reliable source to read, I'm interested.
Sickening and hillarious at the same time.
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