y the falt of 1943, after serious defeats at Stalingrad and I(ursk, in North Aft ica, and in the U-Boot war, GermanY's fortunes had unalterabiy turned for the wo rse. Wortd War II had reached its zenith, and the Third Reich was on a downward course. At that time, Hans Schmidt, then a 16year old minor leader in the Hitler Youth, had to seriously contemplate for which of the services of the German Arm ed Forces he was going to volunteer. For only by enlisting before being called t o arms along with his schoolmates of the same age group, did he have some chance of not being shipped, alter a few weeks of infantry training, to the Eastern fr ont, where at the time several hundred thousand German soldiers had lost their l ives already. This book explains the reason why Hans opted for the Waffen-SS and not for the German Army (the Heer), the Luftwaffe or the Ikiegsmarine. It also tells why, in the Waffen-SS, in 1944, he probably belonged to the last batch of recruits to experience the extremely tough but excellent regular training of this elite force, and why he and his comrades fought with such discipline to the bitter end, realizing early that for Germany the war had been lost. In early 1944, after a short stint at the Reichsarbeitsdi enst, the obligatory Labor Service, Schmidt joined the Waffen-SS as a potential officer's candidate. At the Breslau Infantry howitzer barracks he received nonco mmissioned officer's training that lasted throughout most of the year. Schmidt's first combat assignment was in December of 1944, when he was ordered to the Fir st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler (the armored division whose nuc leus had been the Fiihrer's lifeguards regiment). Hans arrived in the Ardennes f orest at the very beginning of the Battle of the Bulge, thus being able to (continued on bock flaP)SS Panzergrenadier --//*-U/ / o .lOther works by Hans Schmidt Books: Jailed in'democratic' Germany (in English) End Times/End Games (in Englis h) Endzeiten/Endspiele (in German) Deutschlands Zweite Stunde Null (in German) Hitler Boys in Americao Re-Education Exposed (in English) probable publication d ate: fall of 2002 Brochures: (all in English) German Hegemony in Europe Das Deut sche Reich und die USA Will the United States lose Germany to Russia The End of Chivalry Newsletters: Ganpac Brief (in English, monthly since l9g3) Amerika-Brief (in German, monthly, I 98g- I 99 I ) USA-Bericht (in German, monthly, since 1992) SS Panzergrenadier A true story of World War ll by Hans Schmidt Second Edition plus articles and esssays in both languages It is anticipated that a new book by Hans Schmidt, "Hitler Years", covering the years from 1933 to 1943, will be available by the fall of 2003Copyright A 2002, Hans Schmidt Wc llrirlrk thc lbllowing lirr porrnission to quote exccrpts: Published in the United States by Hans Schmidt. rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, record ing or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author/publisher. Short excerpts for book reviews are excepted from these restrictions. Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to: All {'olorrr'l 'l'r'cvor N. l)upuy, lrom his book "Hitler's Last Gamble", llat1rn('o llins |ttrblishcrs, Ncw York, 1994 Rolrirr l,rttttstlert, liom his book "SS, Him mler's Black Order, 1923-45" 3trlIr rrr l'trblishing, Stroud, Gloucestershire, E ngland, 1997 (Jclrt'r'rl Michlct ltcynolds, from his book "Steel Inferno", Sarpe ton lrreq,q, Ncw York, 1997 (.lt!rcr higlrlY " Publisher: HANS SCHMIDT P.O.BOX 1739 BREVARD NC 2871 2-1739 llutlle of'the Bulge, then and now" by "t Jan Paul Pallud, After the Battle magazine, England, 1984 ed. by Danny S. Parker, Books, London, 1997 Greenhill "Hitler's Last Gamble" by Trevor N. Dupuy, Harper Collins, New York, 1994 ",\',S - Himmler's Black Order 1 923'45 ", by Robin Lumsden, Sutton, England, 1997 " llttluls und Decorations of Hitler's Germany" by Robin Lumsden Airlife, England, 2001 " l'lutz der Leibstand arte" by G. Nipe & R. Spezzano RZM Imports, Southbury. CT 2002 "Steel Inferno" b y Michael ReYnolds, Sarpedon, New York, 1997 " I lniforms of the.S,S" (6 volumes ) by Andrew Mollo, Windrow & Greene, England, L992 "Waffen-SS" by Keith SimPson, Gallery, New York, 1990 'll'tfle,tt ,\s soldier 1940-1945" by Bruce Quanie & Je ffrey Burn, osprey, England, 1993 "lV|lbn-SS - The Encyclopedia" by Marc J. Rila nenspoel Military Book Club, Garden City, NY 2002 " ll'rtrPons and Fighting Tact ics of the Waffen'99", by Drs. S. & R.Hart, Iitler's Ardennes Ofensive" ScHMtDTHBKS@C|TCOM.NET rom Schmidt, Hans 1927 SS-Panzergrenadier, a true story of World War II ISBN No. 0-9669041-5-3 1. Schmidt, Hans, 1927 2. Soldiers - Germany - Biography 3. Germany - History 20tt' Century 4. Military history - Elite units 5. World War, 1939-1945 - GermanArmed Forces - Waffen-SS 6. Germany - National Socialism 7. Personal Narratives, German Second Edition MBI, Osceola, 1999 " W(nn alle Brtider schweigen" a large book of illustrations, Printed in the USA MUNIN-Verlag, GermanY, 1973 I)er l;.reiwillige, the monthly magazne of the German Waffen-SS veterans, MUNIN-Verlag, Germany Siegrttnen magazine and books, Richard Landwehr, P.O.Box 6718, Brookings, OR 97415 "()llrt'r /,o.s.sc.s" by James Bacq ue, Stoddard, Toronto, 1989 "surrtndcr rt'the Dachau Concentration Camp" by John I I. I-inden, 1997lrrologtte ('ltaptcr I This Second Edition of ('lrapter 2 ('huptcr 3 ('hatptor 4 5t Panzergrenadier is dedicated to all the brave soldiers ('ltapter ( 5 from many nations who during World War gave their lives ll for their country, mothers whose lhapter 6 (lhapter 7 Ohapter 8 (lhapter 9 Chapter 10 Ohapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapt er 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Cha pter 30 and to their grief was never ending. Contents Page IX January 12,1945 1 The start of the war l4 The Reichs arb eits d ienst 20 The SS 42 Breslau-Lissa 51 Ideological instructions 67 Basic training 7 8 An important letter home 9L Officer's Candidate 107 Einsatzurlaub 1944 118 Wai ting for the assignment 127 The Battle of the Bulge r32 The Leibstandarte 1,45 S t. Vith/Meyerode 153 The Vl r66 Bastogne 175 Fighting the Americans 189 The 10 A merican POWs t96 The last West engagement 208 Back with the comPanY 214 To the E astern front 225 GranbriickenkoPf 238 Judenau hosPital 248 Going back to the uni t 261 The last battles 268 Hainfeld in Austria 286 Starting to go home 298 In US ArmY stockades 310 Bad Hall 318 The Larnbach stockade 346 Really going'home 360 Epilogue 373 Appendix rePort The Darmstadt air raid The Oradour-sur-Glan incide nt The Marzoboffo'owar crime" Waltcr's story Incloxvilt I:'rologue Itroltx',ttt' like thc helpless yelp ol'a young dog being 1rl:rirrtivc c:r'y. lt sottnclcd qui eter minutes, when there was a crucl boys. k it:ltctl t one could in the artille rybarrages of friend and foe' y ln r1r1lp-rcptary Prologue My situation could not possibly have been worse. It seemed I had but tw o choices: Quick death by an American bullet right between the eyes, or there wa s the somewhat slimmer chance of dying a slow death by freezing. Even while the incessant shooting by the enemy r iflemen was still going on, I could not help noticing the horribly cold water fr om melting snow creeping up on me from the ground, seeping through all the cloth es I was wearing, eventually encasing, with all its wetness, that part of my bod y which I was forced to press into the ditch so that none of the Americans would notice me. Then and there I was certain that this was going to be the worst day of my life, should I survive this ordeal. Unfortunately, the great possibility of dying through a well-aimed American bullet did not prevent, for the first hou r or so of my ordeal, a deadly fear overcoming me, a fear that was exacerbated b y the realizationthat I could not survive as motionless as I had to be for the f ew hours until dark, without succumbing to hypothermia. Then I heard it: One sho t after another hit the dying boy lying less than ahundred feet in front of me, the blood from the resulting wounds coloring the snow around him red. Almost eve ry time the young, solclicr was hit, probably when onc of his bones was slutllt: t'r:rl or whc:rt:l bullr-:t grlzc:rl his lreiul, hc lct out a wcak, showed no mercy: Some of Ircilr thc boy sobbing. But the "rr.*y this human being as r'e (ils crbuiously winted him dead" and used ir targct fbr their shooting s kills' how American lior the ,"r, or my tire I never understood wounded boy at t hat unarmed' sgldicrs could so cold-bloodedly fire then lvil9 crying in the deep snow s0lclier who was at first running, ho*t after our one-sided su close to th eir fositions. ThiJfrappened GL come unhesitatingly out of skirmish, and long af ter I had r..r, among the many German tftcir fox hole, urrl search for "souvenir s" and to the side of me' The guys clead a good stone's throw in front and in my opinion their fiom across the Atlantic were in no danger, pureJallous murder' F or myself shooting now was, war or no war, done what I witnessed on this I can o nly say that I never could have 1945 in the Ardennes ice_cold afternoon of the l 1rh of January I was in charge of a forward fbrest. only a few days earlier, whi le a Jeep occupied ^by three machine gun emplacement, we saw along a nalrow frel d road American soldiers driving nonshalantly iotally oblivio-us to the fact thr ough the snow-.orr"."d landscape, distance of the German that they were within e asy shooting bearings' As my machine infantry. ffrey had obviousiy lost their bo th the Jeep and its gunner lifted the MG-42 t; "finish off' not to shoot. Since the occupants, t *.,.ty gave him the sign was no reason to expose our Americans had not seen us there not believe that the outcome position to them and others' and I did enemy soldiers who were at of the ** *o,rtd hinge on killing three sit uation developed months this moment no danger to us. R Iimitar gl's, on the East ern front while we were fighting later, in April of t war' the Russians in our l ast battles of the lullSincemydyingcomradewasclosertotheAmericansthanto plaintive call, " Heinz' Heinz' so me, they must h"* heard his last don't you help me?" - hetf mir doch. " - "Heinz , Hein), wtry round of bullets tore into his while another, and this time the last, was probably lying dead hocly. Rut lleinz never came. He too one of t he many victims s.lrcwlrcrc ncar$y on thcse lrozen fields' brly li{iccl his hclm etlcss ol'orrr lirilctl tttissiott. liinllly' thc dying lrtttttlrccl .r ittttl t ltct, 1,.'*,,, lyirrg,.s still irs tllc Irt.lrtl ()'cL. 't()rc,X prctlogue I'rologuc XI they had fallen. l For me, the worst of it all was that I was forced to lie abso lutely still for what seemed an eternity. Any movement at all could cost my life . For an hour or so after we ran into the ambush, the Americans had made a sport out of shooting at anybody and anything that moved, and there were times when b ullets hit the ground so close to me that I thought I was the target. Perhaps it was the tree line directly behind me, and the fact that a small clump of weeds shielded my face, that had made me somewhat invisible to the enemy soldiers. And , although I was in a shallow ditch, possibly a hole from a tree felled long &Bo , I was located on slightly higher ground than the killing fields. As the Americ an soldiers were shooting at the young soldier, I felt like just getting up from my hiding place, walking over to the two hundred other German soldiers who had earlier in the day lost their lives in the meadow. The dead and I had been part of an ill-fated attempt to regain an i mportant crossroads not far from Bastogne in Eastern Belgium during the now famo us "Battle of the Bulge". That I had not been hit in the furious American fusill ade that surprised us on our way to the crossroads will forever remain a puzzle to me, for my few comrades in front of me, and all those from our squad followin g single file, had been-killed right away. From my vantage point I could see man y ofrtheir lifeless bodies lying grotesquely where sign,r ti'buttle - - the deatl, 'tlttitrtment causeway, a (tpprouching the GIs and asking them whether they were crary or worse. But without a Red Cross fl ag this would have been pure suicide. A half century Later, discovering which en emy unit had been on the opposite site, it is likely that even the Red Cross emb lem wouldn't have saved me from being killed had I attempted to rescue my young comrade. These Americans belonged to the same unit that was mentioned on page 11 9 of famed U.S. General James M. Gavin's book "on to Berlin," where he describes a D-Day incident that would most certainly have been called a war crime had the shooters been German soldiers: German prisoners on the other side unf'ortunately emerged fro* the stone buildin gs g7'h opened up with anrl started across the causeway. The disappeared, and ev erything they had. But their iitteryness soon small band of they went on to reli eve Capiain Rae and the day' " paiachute troops who had aciomplished so much tha t these (considering the circumstances we can assume that hands up as a sign of German soldiers were unarmed and had their certainly did not fire surrender. And having no weapons, they most must assume that the back. The way the inlident is described, we guard' Furthermore it German POWs were already under American Gen eral Gavin is interesting to note that the otherwise meticulous guess how many l eft it up to the imagination of the reader to massacre' I doubt German pOWs were literally executed in this Massacre of that there was ever an inquiry: The alle ged Malmedy months away') American soldiers ascribed to my division was heart of I had been lying in that icy ditctr but 10 km east of the judging boy soldier, Bastogne for ,.u.rul hours, when this German old, came running out from his appe arance perhaps seventeen years was largely beyond of a line of hedge ,o*, to the right of me that foot in the deep my view, dragg"ing his obviousiy wounded leftlines that were snow. But ittii.uO of trying to reach German rear of us' or lif ting somewhere far, perhaps a rniie or more, to the he ran in his arms in surren der and going over to the Americans, equidistant from where his panic exactly pa rallel tJthe front, about in his honible death' I was lying, andthe American lin es, resulting knocked out vehicles, and scattered were everywhere. As they made the last turn column of U.S. gT'h Division would pass through our bridgehead that night and launch qn ut tack against German positions in the morning. Fresh from the btmls, .iu,st ut du sk thcy murchetl ./ron Stc.-Merc-liglise toward rhe ((ut,\(u,u.l/, l4trllittg tn (tr( ttltltrthcnsivt, u,ilh rrrch kilomeltr. 'l'ht, "It was anticipated that the newly arrived Whiletheboywasbeingkilled,Ihad,forfiveortenminutesat the hours passed I least, f orgotten my own piedicament. But as I was lying finally noticed the icy cold of the wet snow atop which and in the creating an excruciating numbness on the unde rside moments when I extremities of my body. Eventually there were the just want ed to go to ,i""p, and forget about this insane war' shooting around Americans, the snow, the irung"t *d the stupid me. in that white bed once, just when I almost felt warrn and cory - - I was suddenl y ol'icc crystals, - - thc onsct of hypothermia? trccn trainctl .w.ke:'ctr rry , . ,cw s'urtr rf i*ctririi,'rg shclls: ll.virrgXl l l'r,lt4g,t: on these heavy guns I knew that the rounds were from a battery of German 155mm ( s.I.G.33) howitzers, each of whose grenades weighed almost a hundred pounds. As was nonnal, the first rounds of the German artillery were somewhat short of the enemy positions, the next four shells went over the target, and the third barrag e of ror:nds following immediately was supposed to explode right in the center o f the enemy positions. Alas, this did not happen: all the German grenades fell r ight between the bodies of my dead comrades, and, in succeeding ba:rages, even m uch too close to me. In addition of having to fear of being killed by the Americ ans, or slowly freezing to death, I now had to worry about being torn to shreds by exploding shells of German origin. I assume the German battery did not have a forward observer but aimed at the target from predetermined markers in the area , like the tower of a church, a stand of high trees, or the roof of a farm house . This can easily lead to errors in the desired distance, and in this case it le d to the shells exploding but 30 to 100 feet in front of the enemy line. Guessin g that the Americans would be somewhat distracted by the shelling, I used the op portunity of an incoming barrage to slowly glide back in the ditch for a few yar ds behind some of the thicker trees framing the large open field. I could still observe the enemy soldiers but now there was less chance of being seen by them. I left my damaged rifle where I had first dived to the ground when the shooting began, but I took the two hand grenades I had ca:ried on my person with me, and placed them next to me, the strings to the fuses ready to be pulled in a second, if necessary. Alas, I had not used them when the Americans were looking for sou venirs: the GIs were just out of my throwing range, and I had not used them when they killed the boy, for the same reason. Still, the grenades gave me the sligh t feeling of again being master over my own fate. Surveying, from my new vantage point, a possible way back and out of sight of the Americans, it was quite clea r that retreat was impossible as long as daylight lasted. Many more dead German soldiers were lying behind me than in front, namely in the open expanse between the enemy and myself. Having ample time to do so, I watched the incoming howitze r shells exploding at the bottom of the meadow, and then I tried, by Ittoking at thc deep craters and which way the black earth had been tltrowlt, to cstitnatc thc trajcctrlry at which thc shclls had hurst into camc' As a the groutttl atttl liom which direction they probably my position rcs ult, I guessed the distance between the cannons and guns was to he about 4,000 m eters, and that the battery of four had been our that Iocated due north of the B ohey/Doncols crossing target earlier in the duy.+ my family, to promising envelope of darkness, my thoughts went to if they all of whom I did not know where they were now' or even had been who were still alive: to my mother and fow siblings war from the Saarland about a cvacuated for the s econd time in the sight of our month earlier because the enemy had come within s oldier house; to my father who was stationed as an occupation Richard brother so mewhere in Norway; and to my older "Navy" when Greece was still in from whom I h ad lasi heard months ago was guarding the German hands, and the German Kriegsmar ine Mediterranean. I was thinking, "how did I get into this predicament of being yea rs and close to losing ;i hfe at the young age of seventeen except keeping an ei ght months?i Not having anything else to do, 1970' I had a chance A quarter century after this incident, in the winter of the war' Showing my father' to visit the Bastogn" ,i". for the first time since lif e, I pointed to a good map who accompaniedo'rl, *rr"r" I had aimost lost my As the hours went by, and while I was waiting forthe + oftheareawhichlhadprocured,"nototohimthatthelikelypositionofthe the village of N iederwampach' German 150mm howitzers had been at or near assumptions were right' we four kilom eters due north. To discover whether my intention 6f asking an older person who drove to this remote farm village *iin ine any heavy German artillery remembered the-wai wnethei he or sne recalled pieces having been firing tr9m. !.nat area' not have to ask anyb-ody: Once we had arrived in ttiederwampach w.e. did positio n from where it was last fired' next to a farm no6", ptOiOlV still neai the s'l' G'33, with obvious signs we discovered one of these heavy grnt, a German used th at long as a childrens' of 25 years of total neglect and of-having be-en wooden wheels was broken' plaything. Ourinf,a virit"tO y""t-t trt"i d. of the awav' An old farmer told us and some of the ,*t"i shields of tnl gun had. rusted viitige on January 13th, 1945, and that it was that the Americans captured tne inen *nen the guns fired their last rounds' permanent place in history: Now this particut ar cannon nat itt'tatty found. its a concrete pedestal at the The good citizens of Niederw"tp..n "rected .howitzer on it' There it stands repaired entrance of t heir village and placeith; tne' Oattfes"ihai' took place so long ago' in the now to my descendalt-]lwill forever "o,1r"to*i" unforgettable winter of 1944145, an d for me and "at me'" cannons that was one of the four shooting of the heavy be oneXIV l'rologtte SS I tatlzet'grcllild ler eye on the Americans, I even tried to figure out the additional days but by then I was so numb that I was unable to do it. lln frlemortnnt ChaPter I II began on was only twelve years old when world war believed that the september 1, Ig3g. At the time few Germans (certainly more justified incursion of the Weh rmacht into Poland into justified than were similar American military incursions in the 1980s) Mexico in 1916, and into Panama and Grenada six years' How well I would turn into a World War lasting almost september 3,-1939, when' remember th at following fateful Sunday, near the Westwall zone already evacuated from our h ome located the border with France)' I went to iirr" c.tt"an fortifications alon g her what it meant my great-grandmother, oma 8u,,,, and asked (state of war)' f or that when two nations were irra"Kriegszustand" would henceforth exist is what I had then just heard onlhe radio France on one hand' and between the empires o f Great Britain and I A sculpture by Paul Bronisch. Exhibited in 1941 at an art exhibition in Munich. As with so many "Nazi" art objects it is likely that this sculpture was purposel y destroyed by Allied soldiers after the so-called "Liberation". l the German Reich on the other' ,,Kriegszustandmeans wff, and a honible time to c ome ," oma ever have dreamt that Busse answered. None of us would then be a comb at soldier but toward the end of this war I would not only to death, 19t very fa r would also lie in the snow, slowly freezing just having celebrated her from wh ere Oma Busse was still living, two weeks shy of bdtil"rtOay. She would eventual ly die in 1954' had ;;r ifiA;;irthday because the attention of the news media be en too much for her to handle' from September 1' For GermatrY, World War II offi cially lasted Poland bcgan' to May 8' 1939, whcn the German campaign against unc onditionally' Without 1945, whc* tlrc lae hrmttc.ftt capitukrtcclff, 2 &i Hans Schmidt SS Pimz,ergrcnaclier J question there is some truth to the argument that World Wars I and II together w ere really one Thirty Years' War, the second one in a millennium in the continui ng battle for hegemony over Europe. The first Thirty Years'War lasted from 1618 to 1648, the second from I9l4 to 1945, but this argument will really only be set tled by history long after we are all gone. There was not a day during this time when I did not follow the course of events, having begun to read the daily news papers by the time I was ten, a couple of years before the war, when the Spanish Civil War had dominated both the world's headlines and my attention. By 1943 Wo rld War tr had taken a decidedly bad tum for Germany when the remnants of the Si xth Army had been forced to capitulate at Stalingrad at the end of January. Of t he 250,000 men encircled in this city on the Volga river, 2,000 kilometers from Germany, 90,000 survivors went into Russian captivity after some of the fiercest hand-to-hand fighting of the war, and of those but 5,000'or 6,000 ever saw Germ any again. When the spring thaws in and around Stalingrad permitted the burial o f the corpses of fallen soldiers that had given their lives for their countries, 125,000 dead German soldiers and -perhaps ten times as many soldiers of the Red Army needed to be br.ried, While 1942 had been a relatively normal year for us in spite of one major British air raid on my home town of Saarbrticken that dest royed much of the inner clty, including the beautiful new opera house but none o f the sr.urounding steel mills and the many other plants producing war materiel, 1943 brought one great defeat after another. Sootr after the survivors of the 6 tr Army had sr:rrendered at Stalingrad, the remnants of the Afrika Korps experie nced a similar fate in TrHris in May of that yetr, and in the following Septembe r Italy switched sides, leaving the fighting on the Italian peninsula mostly to German toops. In July of 1943, inthe Kursk salient of the Eastem front the great est tank battle in history had taken place, with the Wehrmacht having been unabl e to reach its objective. In the second half of 1943 the American Eighth Air For ce had joined the British Royal Air Force in attacking targets inside Germany, w ith one large German city after another being gutted, and many famous edifices o f a thousand years of (iermur culture bcing dcstroycd. 'l'hc ycar 1943 was also the time whelr thc (iennrur U-llouts incurrcd their grcatest losses, with thc bc st ,i cold waters of the or the U-Boat commanders losing their lives in the ships and Attantic. They had found their match in the radar-equipped planes of the Westem allies. At the time I In April of 1943I had turned sixteen years of age' German province of was employed in Saarbrticken, the capital of the year as a near the French-German border. I was in my second " Westrnarlt'o the business apprentice at the Kohlenhandelsgesellschafi a larger , superprivately o-wned coal nading corporation - apart of conffol over the tftu t nun official wartime capitalist monopoly in the entire Saar, Palatinate and Lo rraine region, Saarland- distribution of "oi was boring and' in a tfr"rr part of the German Reich. The wo rk itself in front of a w&!, hard for a teenager who hated to sit for hogrs nurn bers typlwriter, sending o.ri d.liuery orders, or entering endless which most of the men irrto u ledger. But there was a war going on in Forces, or normally per forming these tasks were in the Armed Instead, old World War I elsewhere in the ,.*i"" of the govemment. girl apprentices between the veterans, yoWB housewiver, *d boy and kept things running' we ages of lato 1-8 years of age, such as mysel f, regular work we also dld amazingty well, I must admit. Besides doing professi on,^-*d on every had to attend special classes pertaining to our in ow office bu ildings second weekend it was my duty to keep watch bombs that in case the Briti sh Royat Air Force dropped incendiary could be doused before doing too much damage' in the Labor Richard, my older brother, had completed his duty November of 1942 and Service (Reichiarbeitsdiensf or RAD) between joining the Navy February 1943, almost immediately thereafter a year and a half (Kriegsmarine) as a volunteer. with-hi* being but 1943 on I had to older than myself, this meant that from the fall I was going to join' seriously .onir*piate which branch of the services at Stalingfad where an One thing was ctear, especially after the disaster from the inordinately large ntrmber oi regular Army infanqrmen of letting myself be draft ed saarland had b; lost I had no intention front. and becoming an infantry soldi er on the Eastern be assigned to units By votgnteering, I had a much better chan ce to of operations' in more exotic pl#s fike in the Mediterranean theater where the food was in France or even in Denmark or czechoslovaki4 the war I did miss good supposed to be still plentiful. Throughout with lots of whipped bread, butt er, honey, and especially fine desserts crcim.4 Hans Schmidt SS Panzergrenadier 5 If in the fall of 1943 someone had asked me which branch of the services I reatl y wanted to join, I would have said the Lufuafe (Air Force). Due to the fact tha t Richard had already joined the Navy, ffid considering the never-ending sibling rivatry between the two of us, this part of the German armed services was eliminated from the start. But often having seen huge flytng armadas of the Allies, frequently consisting of hu ndreds of four-engine bombers, making their way at greatheights resolutely and seemingly untouchable above the Saarland toward the East, into the Reich, I had the sincere wish to become a fighter pilot and to as sist orn flying aces, such as Adolf Galland, Hermann Graf, Hajo Herrmann, Walter Nowotry, "Bubi" Hartrnann and others, in shooting down the "Lancasters", the "B -17s" and the "B-24s" of the British and the Americans. AIas, after inquiring at the Lufnnaffe recruiting office it became clear that all I could hope for in th e German Air Force was being assigned to an anti-aircraft unit. I simply did not have the educational prerequisites to become a pilot. Even a good friend of min e who had been a mernber of the Flieger-HJ (the branch of the Hitler Youth close ly connected with the Air Force) and who had eamed his wings as a glider pilot, was never accepted to the L"ft offt pilot program because he did not have the "A bitur", the stringent German high school diploma. Adolf Galland, the fighter ace who became the commanding General of the German fighter pilots at the end of th e war, lamented this stupid policy in his book "The First and the Last". Up to a bout a year before the end of the wff, the Waflen-SS was the only branch of the German Armed Forces whose losses at the front could not be made good through ind uction of draftees. Theoretically at least the Waflen-SS was an all-volunteer ar my, and some of the highranking Generals of the regular army were anxious to kee p it that way; they obviously feared the competition. The result was that SS eff orts to get the cream of the crop of potential volunteers were finely tuned, and special attempts were made to discover boys with leadership qualities in the ca dres of the Hitler Youth. Surviving recruifrnent posters of the Waffen-SS still show the efforts that were made to dig into the Hitler Youth reservoir firture manpower. To the best of my (ut"t) knowledge, the Waffen-Ss did not have a barracks or taining grounds in thc cntirc Saarland. Most wcrc located in the center of Germany, in llitvrriir iurcl Austria, and also in oceupicd iucils such as in thc proteetornte ol'llohelniu rurd Murnvirt, lirnttcr ('zccltosltlvt*,iu, rutd itt of Holland. This meant that I had little contact with this service before I joined it. The only SS soldiers I had ever had some direct contact with before donning the rlniform with the SS runes on the collar patch and the German national emble m (the eagle with outsfietched wings holding a wreath with the swastika in the c ircle) on the left upper arm of the tunic, were the two JZihne brothers, Kwt and Heinz, both exemplary Hitler Youth leaders from otr town; Kurt Thiel, a distant cousin and neighbor, and one of the apprentices of our company who had joined j ust when I started at the frm. All four of them would eventually give their lives for Germany. Even in the fourlh year of the wff, the occasional Waffen-SS sold iers on furlough in Saarbriicken left, as a rule, a better impression than the i nfantymen home from sewice on the Eastem front. The Waffen-SS fellows walked mor e erect, their uniforms were better fitting and in better shape, and there is no doubt that the awareness of belonging to an elite unit confributed to the proud bearing of the young soldiers who wore the names of their famous divisions hke Das Reich, Totenlropf, Wiking, Adotf Hitler, Hitlerjugend, and others' on their sleeve cuffs. I do not recall when I first went to an SS recruiting office to in quire about joining. It might have been in the srmlmer of 1943, shortly after a small Soup of us, all minor Hitler Youth leaders, had been invited by the regula r army to affend a weekend refeat (actually a ploy to get us to volunteer) at th e Army-Panzergrenadiers at Landau in the Palatinate. I found it all very interes ting and we all were touched by the cleanliness of the relatively new barracks, ffid the good food we received. The officers we dealt with, alt highly decorated men, also left us with a good impression. Furttrermore, there is no question th at we admired the new weapons shown to us, such as the MG'42, the new assault ri fle, night-vision goggles and hand-held anti-tank rocket lar.rnchers. We were to ld that much more new weaponry was in the offing. What I didn't like was the asi nine barracks drill I was able to observe from the distance. On the very weekend of our reffeat, a gfoup of new draftees had arived at this training facility, a nd some overzealous drill instructors made the most of it. The new arrivals seem ingly had atl their uniforms and boots just thrown at them without rcgarcl t1r t hcir sizcs, and thc spcctacle bcfore us had the quality ol'an Ituliap cerlecly r Ls the poor li;llows lrobblcd irr thcir ill-litting otrtlits IHans Schmidt SS Panzcrgronadior 7 from one place to another, constantly being harassed by screaming asses, namely the most obnoxious drill instructon @Is) one can imagine. I knewfromthe Waffen-S S soldiers of myhome townthat in this branch of the German senrices Hitler's ord ers of "no stupid barracks drill and no mean-spirited DI harassment" had been (g enerally) followed. But obviously the Army drill instructors still stuck to thei r old ways. This experience eliminated the regular Army once and for all from my considerations, and soon thereafter I visited the Waffen-SS recruiting office in Saarbrticken to gamer information. In Novembe r of 1943,the Hitler Youth allocated a few places for a forfifght of semi-milita ry exercises at a Wehrertiichtigungslager (in short, "WE-Lager": 'tnilitary training and fitress camp') to the HJunits in our arca. As a minor Hitler Youth leader I was in position to name those boys who co uld participate, and I did not forget to place myself on the roster. The WE-Lage r system had been instituted in the middle of the war in order to provide teenag e boys with some of the necessary military skills that did not involve the use o f weapons. While the overall organization of these camps was in the hands of the Reich offices of the Hitler Youth located in Berlin, all the instructors were o fficers and non-coms of the fow armed services who due to injwies or other reaso ns could no longer do combat duty. Here I must mention that tlre WE-Lager system of that time can in no way be compared with the so-called "Boot camps" or even military schools available to American youths of the present. Here and now it se ems endemic that the grown-ups in charge of such institutions should, in many ca ses an) ilay, not be entusted with young people. The many horror stories we read about are, unfortunately, all too true. My boss was not very happy when I told him that I would be absent for about two weeks. Particularly since he had to con tinue paymg my meager salary while I was away. The fact is, he couldn't do anyth ing about it. But enjoyed my stay at the WE-Lager near Bergzabern in the Palatin ate. The instructions we received there focused largely on how soldiers ought to behave in the field. For instance, how to dig proper fox holes, how to camoufla ge, and how to find our way with a compass. Most important for me was the fact t trat the food rations we received was good and plentiful. At the Bergzabem WE-Iager I also had my first contact in the war with officors and non-coms of Austia n extaction. I forurd them much morc lihble and oasygoing than Relcladeutsche (R eich Germans) but no less German in their ouflook. The truth is that of all the Germans fi.om the many tribes ttrat con*itute the German people, to this day I regard the South Ty roleans, men from part of otu people cut offfrom grcater Germany by the post-Wor ld War I freaty (really a dictate!) of St. Germain, to be not only the all-round best soldiers but also the best Germans in spite of the fact that according to the papers they carried they were Italian citizens. An inordinately large number of volunteers of Austrian, Bavarian, and other German tribal background coming from Southem Germany and Southeast Europe served in the Waffen-SS. I therefore m aintain that this elite corps that began in the late turenties as a pmamilitary unit more or less based upon the ideals of the much more strict Prussian militar y code of honor, eventually tumed into a symbiosis of the two main lines of Germ andom, namely of Prussia and Austria. This urdoubtedly accounted for the fact th at the Waffen-SS spirit was much more free and tolerant than was the German mili tary as a whole. One British expert on the subject even ventr.red the idea that by wat's end the Waffen-Ss had become the most 'democratic' outfit among the German armed forces.I When I finally went to a Waffen-SS recruiting office to enlist, I was told that due to my age I needed written permission from both of my parcnts, and that real ly nothing could be done until I had a draft board classification. Due to the le ngth of the wat, and as a result of the increasing air activities of the enemy, it was no fun anymore to remain in formerly quite livable Saarbriicken. Except f or some anificially sweetened te4 and also artificially-made clear beef broth" a nd probably low-alcohol beer, by then nothing could be bought in stores or eater ies without ration coupons. The Saarland is a small German province of about one million people living on rouglrly 1,000 square miles of land. Meaning, it is mu ch overpopulated. The soil is poor, and not conducive to profitable, large-scale farming. A large part of the food consumed in the Saar area has always been imp orted from German agricultural states or from neighboring lnnaine and the Palati nate. This fact, plus the result of the first evacuation lasing from 1939 to 194 0 that had emptied the warehouses, resulted in the Saarlanders from the start of the war having to sacrifice on food essentials. Still, the people didn't compla in and continued, along with the Ruhr and the Upper Silesian industial atrcas, t o provide the basis for the German industial war potcntial.Hans Schmidt SS Panzergrenadier oe J\ro v ) /" \\_ -9 t, -'*scHLEsw tgHOLS'EIN HAMgURG rOWER SAXONY Taking the shortages in stride and remembering better times are not the same thi ng. It sometimes happened that on a tr.rm to Saarbrticken one neighbor would ask the other good naturely whether he was *l-2-3" (an 'American'-style traveling t o the inner city to visit the "automat" restaurant similar to Horn & Hardart's i n New York) or whether he was going to have apiece of Marzipan Torte atthe famou s Schlosscafe Both of these places were, unfornrnately, by then dismal looking r uins. (An allegorical story about Berlin in 1945, fitting to the above: An Ameri can occupation officer takes a ride in a sfreet car filled with Germans. He list ens to their stories. Then, somewhat surprised he says to an older German next t o him that he is shocked by what he is hearing: I i;\ u----'BicL $ HAX ovtR Cherinitr qr..'t -\ hearing is talk about food and other necessities of life that are now missing. H owever, if one rides in a subway ofNew York and listens to the people there, one can always hear them speak of things pertaining to culture. What do you have to say about thrt?" ..well, Hen offizier, there is really an easy explanation for this phenomenon: People always like to speak of the things they do not "St, I thought the Germans were a people of culture, but all I am have!") hThe fall weather in late November 1943 was quite miserable; and the crty was par tially destoyed, dark (due to the blackout), cold and dtrty. The concussion bomb s that had been dropped onto the main business district of the city had not only created many ruins but had also left a choking veneer of cement dust that seeme d to penetrate into wfi Rrrr "*ffir*rg. i R ' 4 s rurlFlcx I ar rI ^*J F,1:!i::Ti"*-.-i..rx.r1s// (1 lnch lr rbout 100 miles) rr11i1 Smrlrnd b not even tdce the elze of Eglin AFB in Flodda. Saarbriicken, the capit al, lr rbogt 600 kllomctcrg fom Berlln but only 40O km fiom Pads if one uses the Notc llttlc Saarland ln the lorrer left comer of Germany. Population one million . The ailobrhn. every comer and lie on every comice. In addition, the obnoxious stench from the doused fires of burnt houses, the result of the incendiary bombs, permeated the entire city. For young people like us there was nothing to do anymore except per form war-related duties such as berng air raid wardens in our office building on altemate weekends, or to assist, with the Feuerwehr-Hitler Jugend, the fire eng ines after the enemy planes had dropped their bombs' After Stalingfad all "unnec essary" businesses had been shut down, and that included places where one could dance' Those movie theaters that had not been reduced to rubble, like the famous UFA-Theater in Saarbri.icken, or had been confiscated by the govemment to serve as sleeping quarters for the huge number of all sorts of foreign workersl0 Hans Schmidt SS Panzorgrenadior II assigned to our war industry often showed films that were both outdated and unin teresting. Volunteering for one of the senrices was the only way to get away fro m these miserable conditions. Wiftin weeks after I had come back from the WE-Lag er, all the boys bom :rn1927 were ordercd to appear at the local draft board, th ere to receive their classifications. This was accompanied by a thorough medical examination. Due to my heart murmur, the legacy of scarlet fever in 1938, when I was eleven, I was classified "KV" (lcriegsver*A1" in the wendungsftitrig: "oka y for wanime setvice," similar to United States) with the caveat ttrat I ought t o serve only in the artillery where I wouldn't have to nn much. I have sftonger than average bones and this assured that I would be able to lift 100 pound artil lery shells. When I protested, the doctor changed his recommendation to "sturmar tillerie," meardng the tank-like vehicles without the taversing turret of a norm al Paraer. My parents signed my enlistnent papers for the Waffen-SS, "for four y ears, or for the duration of the war, whichever is longer," only reluctantly. Bo th thought tlrat at l6%yeals of age I was still much too young to be a soldier. I countered their arguments with the fact that my father's brother Richard had b een only 18 years and 3 months old when he died at the Russian front in 1916, dw ing World War I, and he had been about the same age as I was in late 1943, when he joined the lJhlans, the light cavalry, in 1915. Besides, the fellows at the W affenSS recruiting office had told me that there was only a slim chance for me t o fe cAtea up before my l7m birtlrday in April of 1944. At this stage of the war , efforts were still made not to send any soldiers into combat who had not reach ed their l8e birttrday. Bu! obviously, there were exceptions. My father, who was stationed at some desolate spot on the Nonvegian coast" was objecting mbre to m y enlistnent than did my mother. Besides the issue of my young age he also did n ot care much for the Waffen-SS because of the pre-war antagonism, or rivalry, th at existed between the leadership of the NSDAP (the Nazi par!y), to whish he bel onged, and the black or Allgemeine SS. (In faimess it has to bc stat d that he di&r' t care much for the SA, the brown-shirted storm fioopets, eithu.) to use the railroad system from Saarbrticken to the assigned place. forgotten which notice came first, but one was 'notn the Waffen-SS ignment to some sort of noncommissioned officer's taining school in the other came from the RAD (the Labor Service) for a three months' needed Today I have with the ass Prague, and tour onIt mut havc bcen soon after Cluistnas of 1943 when I received not jurt o116 but two induction notices within a few days of each other. Botlr werc accompaniod by propcr marching orders and the papers theNorttr Seaisland of Borkum' I was elated to finally get away from the drudger y of the office. To youlg be away from the family was never a problem for me. Ev en as a child I did not tend toward Heimweh,homesickness, that affects many othe r people. But the receip of two induction notices within a short time, grving me a choice in the matter, proved to be one of those ,r*.ro* fatefirl "coincidence s" that would impact my life greatly. I often had the feeling that a'oguardian a ngel" was watching over me, and this incident in the war was but one such occasi on. I discovered the proof of the ramifications of this 1943 occurence only abou t 20 years later &[ing a visit to Germany when I met the person again who had reported to the Waffen-SS in Prague in my stead: Cans Balzert, one of the other ap prentices at the office of the Kohlenhandelsgesellschafi Westmarh had been bom i n 1926 and should have been drafted already but, seemingly, none of the armed se rvices was very anxious to have him. I assume that his physical condition was no t up to par. Like myself,Balzert did not want to be drafted into the Army infant ry and be shipped to the Eastem front. He also hated to keep on working at the " KHG Westmark," as we called the company for short. on the day I appeared at the ofEce with the two induction notices in hand and showed them to my co-workers, B alzert was the first to ask me what was my choice. The truth was, I couldn't mak e up my mind. In assigning me (obviously because of my Hitler Youth leadership a ctivities) to some sort of school, or, better, to a pot for special course, the Waffen-Ss had undoubtedly sweetened the anxious to the sea -.. A"A atthough I ha d always liked also knewand was weather up that the breathe the fresh air of the North Sea, I there in Northem Germany was much colder than either in the Saarla nd or in Bohemia at this time of the year. And I had always in disliked both col d weather and cold water' It was Balzert's idea that 6'RAD" first. He any case I ouglrt to go to the island of Borkum and the dii mention that after three month s I would join the Waffen-SS no (I matter what, and perhaps get an even better a ssignment than Prague. all knew that this was higtrly unlikely since it was well known that of12 Hans Schmidt SS Panzorgrenadier 13 the areas within the realm of the Reich the food in the Protektorat Bohmen und M ahren was still the best. There, the milk was supposed to be still arnble; the s ausages were supposed to be as fine as we remembered them from before the war, a nd - allegedly - one could still purchase cake and cookies without ration coupon s. Up to then there had also been no air raids on cities or towns within the for mer Czechoslovakia.) One day Hans Balzefibegged me to go with him to the draftbo ard so that the civil servants there could just change my marching orders for Pr agUe over to him, by replacing my name with his. And that is exactly what we did . He went to Prague, ffid I traveled to Northern Germany. Immediately after the war, when I was still in the Saarland and had resumed my apprenticeship at the " KI{G Westmark", nobody knew what had happened to Hans Balzert except that he had been missing on the Eastern front since the middle of 1944. I also discovered t hat he had been assigned to the SS Division "'Wiking," composed mostly of non-Ge rman, albeit 'Nordic" volunteers, who had enlisted in order to fight Bolshevism. At our office, where his sister still worked, we all presumed that Balzert was dead. By the time I left my homeland to emigrate to the United States, the fate of my replacement 'alter ego' to Prague was still unknown. Finally, in 196I, 16 years after the wff, I was able to visit Saarbrticken again (in the meantime I h ad been busy tryrng to get all my family, except our parents, to immigrate to th e United States,) and after being informed that Hans Balzert had eventually retu med from a Soviet prison camp, we met again. Since this fellow's fate might have been mine, had I gone to Prague instead of to the North Sea island, I was espec ially curious to discover what had happened to him. This is what I found out: On ce Hans Balzertgot to Prague in the winter of 1944, he was not assigned to the n on-commissioned officer's training that had been plarured for me. lnstead, he we nt through a few short months of intensive basic training, and was soon shipped to a combat urrit. When in the surnmer of 1944 the entire center of the German E astern front collapsed as a result of treason, and more soldiers went into capti vity than had been lost at Stalingrad,Balzert was among the POWs who lirund thcm selves being shipped to the far reaches of the Soviet crrtpire:. A lbw ycars aft cr the war, after having been held for about lirrr; 9r' lrvc yLriu's in thc brut ul (it Il,ACi (while all this time his family srrlli't'crl lirrttt ttpl krtttwit tg wltr'rlltt:t' llt: wils tleltd tlr alive), lte was when I met him in 1961 he had still not fully he was recovered from his ordeal, and to the best of my knowledge been my fate if I had sick for the rest of his l ife. - - - - would that have of gone to prague instead of to the Reichsarbeitsdi enst on the island released due to illness. Borkum??? &$il}:&:. r#,i##ffii1ff'r#hl'S'-i*'ffi]*5;;jr''b. i*ff;sisFE#r$*ffi# died ror in ;',Tlilr':E;:;ff';:"il;; row on thethe-warre". sl--IY" a Soviet left ) spent years in Balzeriio"tt"* ";; Germany, HansEisht of the male apprentice-s of the Klg y::ll?i:"::TflT':T# ;;;#pleft' l am standing in the top row' second fromHans Schmidt Naval base of Scapa Flow afmistice, and "int rnedn' at the British June 2l' Iglg' wh en the harsh in the Orkney lsfrnas' iowever' on became known' according to condi tions of the an aflny p"rnniuta no nary to speak of, and only which Germany von Reuter' ttre of 100,000 ,otai.o,'*J no air force' Admiral all his ships in the n *r, g*. grders to sink commander of the 9 10 battle ships' 10 battle cruisers' S capa Flow anchorafr';; beneath ttte *uroes of the North small cruiser, *a +Z-a"r to'"tri',t *-hpeacetimetheLaborServicewasnotarmedanddidnotrecerve Sga. r -,-r r: r -^ Igl8 T;;t;i t"'uilltt *^ #;; d; weapons instructions, GhaPter 2 first had My decision to complete my Labor Service duty when I arrived on years of age to be the right one. Not yet seventeen and both the fresh' salt air of th e island of Borkum, i *^ ttiU gowing' the proved in ttris agicultural aiea Norlh sea" and the decent food we recaived orrr bodies . The physical labor near the Dutch border, did wonders for camouflagng heary Ge rman *. prrfo*r{ most of it consisting of erecting so-called "Rommel coastal bat teries *itft gr"*tty, itd ;;;A' R"mmel ;p;tg*t' Telephone poles pounded into the hndings by the Allies)' beach sand to ttwati po:tential 4iaer strenghtened our muscles' polished spades. as rifles, gas ar""irsued militarv hard*ar" such moving tools w e from rifles were leftover Gcwehr 98 masks, helmets *,4 tt" iit"' Our the Germa n standard rifle of World War I. This weapon differedfi^om ggk c.k" for kurz: sh oo generatly only in world war II, th. c;;"h, to and'was therefore somewhat diff icult that it had a l""g* the longer banel asswed handle fo, Vo*g UoV'' Oi tfre gtfrgllrana' shooting in tlre^Hitler Youth' I did well in geater accururcy' was good and the fact that ttre food competitions. "ffi;ry.&ill B;;";;th" 1t qt *.* il; *J was performed with highly changed' and besides the earth #ft;; eprn't"* gun the emplacement of a 280mm (15') One day *e forces "umorrflaged be too easil y discovered with sod so that it.oJa riot event). Always being ,rroJo they try t o 1;d on Borkum (an 'nlikety barrel of this gun had once been placed on !t:1"*t r"w, f discoveredrttur,tt theWorldWarIb"*l.cruiseruMoltlre'',andwasusedagainstthe Srygt!rychlacht)' Britis h fleet in the Battle of Jutland (German, Barrelsofheavygunshavesometimestobereplacedafterheavyuse'I guns' and just as is customary-wittrthe barrels of rapid firing machine assumethisparticularbanelhadb eentuk"'offthe,oMoltlre,,in1916the ari.a inspectors who roamed Germany after andhidden of versaittes.' Among nrany other things' ;gthg of the *"s atto*ed onty a very limited nrunber of such heavy utillcry pieoes by the World War I victors' part of the German high sea's fleet that Tlv- "Moltlro" it suffrcient,tomysurprisewewereoccasionallyalsoabletoprrrchase ng, and oil sardine s from the commissary. additionat items sriir ^ jays when we could buy half-lite r bottles of And there *"r. a* u few to were quite underage seemed cheap wine. T hat most of us I had not yet developed a taste for matt r in this ,.rp"* erthe time to buy *yt"tf out of KP and guard wine, and I used *V Ji"""ti"" duty, both of wh ichl hated' three months on Borkum were The most rn"*o*Ut" events of my P-51 (Mu stang) fighter plane by the shooting ao*o of * American thenearbyanti.aircraftba ttery..Li'ideritz'':theAmericano.Jabo'' too low over our base' and ('Jagd bomber " - ;gh;"t;;f? lt* discovery on the beach' and finally crashed itto--tt" "4 and the that bl"*i";;6;p"*' of a large round enemy mine subsequent river eshmry' had been dropped into tlre Ems It*iry to* T;;t .ll'n" wudclivqcdtothcBritishNawasaconditionoftheNovember sr: P-51 I remember About ttte sr'ooii"g t"; of the American and enjoying our the me ss hall this: One auy, *" *tt? sitting in stew or soup fortified with a simple l unch, p'oUuUiy 'o*"-h"u"y whictr margarine or jam was spread' heavy slice of aai i;;;;J;p"" the viotent shooting of light antiwhen in the airi*r" we heardl6 Hans Schmidt SS Panzergrenadier 17 aircraft guns intermixed with the angry noise of an enemy fighter bomber making turns. There had been no alarm, but we knew enough to dive underneath the heavy tables where we were sitting. It took but a minute and the plane flew directly o ver our baracks, still spewing bullets from its machine guns. Being curious, we ran to the window facing the North Se4 only to see the P-51, already afire, cras hing into the ocean. The plane had been flying so low that there was not the sli ghtest chance for the pilot to have safely ejected. I doubt that I finished my m eal. The incident with the enemy sea mine, a huge round ball of steel filled wit h explosives lying on a stetch of beach where we were pounding telephone poles i nto the sand, is worth mentioning only because some of my comrades went within a yard or so of the mine, looking for who knows what. I clearly remember seeing th e little fingers with fuses sticking out of the mine, the breaking of which upon colliding with a ship would cause a temendous detonation. Being mindful of the explosive power of a mine, I kept what I considerpd a safe distance immediately after we had dscovered the thing. But wlren demolition experts of the Kriegsmari ne arrived, to blow the mine up, they laughed when we showed them what we had co nsidered a safe distance: More than three times furttrer away than we had though t wonld perhaps have been okay. Someone in Berlin, or wherever the assignments t o the various RAD units were decided, must have had a macabre sense of humor whe n he selected yourlg men from two different coal mining areas of Germany, namely , the Ruhr and the Saar valleys, to serve together at the MD-Abteilung 5/195 on the isle of Borkum. That was comparable to recruits from the most stamch Confede rate areas of the United States being placed into tlre same baracks with hish de scendants of some of the most famous Union regiments. Well, that is what happened to us. Not only were we placed in the same company but also in the same room that was to be the home for One day the obnoxious and high-handed attitude of the Rutn guys got too much for us, and I stated our opinion in no uncertain terms. Somehow it had happened tha t I had become the spokesman for the Saarlanders, and a heavy-set coal miner's s on with a Polish sum.Ime acted as the unelected leader for the Ruhr fellows. The inevitable happened: When I once more complained about some bagatelle, the big Ruhr fellow told me to shut up or else he would use his undoubtedly stong physiq ue to do so. I, not easily frightened, challenged him to ty it. No sooner had I said that, and I was totally knocked out by the expert right-hander of a trained boxer. As it happened, I had challenged a former boxing youth champion of the H itler Youth for a fight. For a week or so I walked around with one of the larges t shiners one can imagine. At the time I did not think that almost ayear latpr a similar, visible injury would save me a lot of touble while in American captivi ty. AIas, in the Reiclsubeitsdienst fights between the recruits were strictly pr ohibited, and especially those recruits who caused injury to Someone else could get in lots of trouble. When I was asked by the company commander how I got the black eye I insisted that it happened at night when I allegedly fell out of the high brmk bed. know he did not believe me but let it go at that. The noncommisio ned officer who ran the everyday chores of the company was not as benign, he saw to it ttrat for my alleged stupidity of falling out of bed (or was it because I did not snitch?) I was assigned to ttree days of KP, Ktichendienst. To this day I remember the huge mountain of potatoes ttrat had been boiled in the skin, and which I had to peel. My one-punch boxing defeat did not impait my reputation among my comrades. The Saarlanders were grateful that I had stood up for them, and the guys from the Ruhr appreciated that I did not snitch on my adversary. The r esult of this incident was a greater civility among all of I us. twelve of us for the next three months. The dozen of us boys were about equally divided between Saarlanders and, as we called them in an unflattering term, Pola cks from the Ruhr. Severe friction was foreordained, especially because the Ruhr guys want d to play the bigshots from inside the Reich while many Germans still reg arded the Oermans from the Saar as being only half-Germans as a result of their two docados' absence outside of German borders. One incident of a somewhat tragi-comic natwe has to be told because it shows how at a yormg age I reacted when faced with a difficult decision: One day, during field exercises in a large dune are4 our group of perhaps ten or twelve young RA D boys was accidentally separated from the company, and decided to make the best of it. kr other words, we purposely stayed lost for longer than necessary. Sudd enly we came upon a small enclave of prefabricated buildings ftat seemed tl8 Hans Schmidt t? rq j P {: a SS Panzergrenadier 19 unguarded but were sunounded by thick starlds of barbed wire. The entire area wa s marked with large signs "BETRETEN VERBOTEN!" (Enty forbidden). Well, it was precisely this prohibition that piqued our curiosity, and it didn't take us long to crawl undemeath the barbed wire int o the forbidden zone and somehow enter one of the prefabricated buildings. What we had discovered was the officer's lounge of a secret command center of the Ger man Lufiwffi, well equipped with soft arm chairs, comfortable sofas, and a refri gerator stocked with soft drinls. There might even have been some cigarettes for the smokers but of that I am not certain anymore. What we did was play "gentlem en" for an hour, lounging about in the cozy surroundings and enjoying some of th e sodas. We took carc not to damage anything. #: li ii Once we were back at our barracks, we kept mum about our find, hoping ttrat somedaywe could go back for aretumvisit. A few days later the entir e company was suddenly ordered to dress in the best uniforms, assemble in the ce nter of the barracks are4 and assume a parade position in the form of an open square. At the opening ofthe formation a lectem decorated with the swastika flag had been placed, ?trd as soon as everyone stood at attention, our commander accompan ied by a few high-ranking Luftwatre officers marched scowling onto the square, and spoke to us from the lectem. Due to the pl atoon I belonged to, and because of my size, I was standing right in the center of the first row of the middle platoor5 facing our comrnander and the Air Force officers directly. As the comrnander spoke I had the feeling that he was really talking only to me. The officer explained tlrat a few days earlier a group of La bor Service men had broken into a secret headquarters of the Luff$affe, and ther e created havoc. Because the secrecy of this Air Force installation had now beencompromised, the General in charge of the entire Northwest German area had dema nded that the culprits responsible for this heinous act ought to be severely pun ished. However, a review of all RAD companies that could have been in the genera l area of these headquarters on that particular day did not point to a specific unit" and therefore this assembly had been called in order to discover who was r esponsible. Thereupon the commander ordered all those who participated in this " crime" to step forward and accept the punishment they deserved. I was in a quand ary. I knew that the entire company would face restrictiors, punishment exercise s and the revocation of certain privileges, like going to the movies on weekends, if no one admitted his part in the break-in. On the other hand I was also fairly certain that not one of the o ther guys who was with me inside the headquarters would step forumrd because mos t were essentially cowards. Furthermore, there were not nuxry other RAD units st ationed on Borkum (if any others at all) and come what may, some sleuthing by th e officers would eventually discover the real culprits. I had but a few seconds to make my decisiorl but then I gave myself a moral push, took three steps forwa rd, out of the first line in the direction of the officers, and reported merely with "Arbeitsmann Schmidt zur Stelle!" ("RAD man Schmidt reporting, Sir.') Atthe same time I was listening intently whether anyone else had stepped forward with me. As I had expected, no one did. Our commander stepped closer to me, asking i n a loud voice, so that everyone could hear iL whether I was at the secret insta llation on ttrat particular day, something I readily admitted. Was I alone? What could I say but yes. Was anyone else with me in the headquarters? I denied that there had been anyone else with me. After a few more questions our commander st epped back and spoke with the Luftwaffe officers. Then he ordered me to tum arou nd and face the entire company. krstead of being scolded and punished, I found m yself being praised as an example of honesty, courage and integlty. But because no one else admitted to having been in the installation, and since it was cleart JntArbeitsrnann Schmidt could not have been all by himself, the entire company b ut myself was ordered to undergo severe punishment exercises for a few days. On the following weekend I, and I alone, would even have been allowed to go "downto wn" as the only one of all the recruits of the company, but in the interest of p eace and good comradeship I declined. In retrospect I must admit that what I had done on that day had little to do with courage and basic honesty. What really h ad happened was a quick and intuitive acknowledgment on my part that for all peo ple concemed, for officers and men alike, and especially for our commander, it w as better if one of the culprits stepped forward. I knew from the start that by being the only one to admit to the tansgression (if I was going to be the only o ne, which I had guessed correcfly) my punishment was not going to be very severe . The reaction of my comrades surprised me: None of them saw through the charade . Actually was admired for having been so oourageous. It was a good lesson for t he rest of my life. I &,20 Hans Schmidt SS Panzergrenadicr 2l entrance. For years stories of the extremely tough basic training Waffen-SS recruits had to undergo before they were assigned to the combat divisions, ffid I feared that my general attitude of taking all things easy would be put to a severe test. However, when I reported to the U.v.D., the Unterffizier vom Dienst (the non-commissioned off icer in charge of the guard house on that day) he was quite friendly, and even h elpful, and there was none of the denigration I had seen doled out to the new re cruits of the regular German army when I had visited their Panzergrenadier ba:ra cks at Landau in the previous year. I had heard many Ghapter 3 Having completed the RAD service, I went home agfui for a few duyr, where an ind uction notice from the Waffen-SS was alrgady waiting for me. This time I was ass igned to the replacement battalion of the Waffen-SS howitzers at Breslau-Lissa i n Silesia. At this taining center a special unit had been formed where young men who had shown leadership qualities in the Hitler Youth were being nurtured as f uture offi.cers of the Waffen-SS. It was there that I remained for most of the r est of 1944, rHrtil receiving my assignment to the Leibstandarte Adotf Hitler,I the LAH, in early December of that year to take part in o'Battle of the Bulge". the Ardennenoffensive,the now famed The baracks of the SS I.G.A.u.E.Btl.1,2 the official designation of the unit I was assigned to, was a brand-new installation , and some of the tall, three-story brick buildings were not even completed when I arrived. I still remember well my walk from the small railroad station of Bre slau-Lissa, a subr:rb of the German city of Breslau, to the barracks. I had a ti ght knot in my stomach when from the distance I saw the guard house of the base with a huge SS flag flyng above the tAft", missed due to my perennial shenanigans. Note the brand-new (still unfinished) ba rracks, and the lnfantry howitzers (150mm to the left, 75mm to the right) in the foregound' numerous changes, at the end of the war the official name of the division was 1. Panzerdivision "Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitle/'. lt was commonly referred to only as the lAH, I will use this designation or the name Leibstandarfe (life uards) throughout this book. Short for "lnfanterie-GeschUtz Ausbildungs- und Ers atz-Bataillon Nr. 1" (lnfantry Howitzer Training and Replacement Battalion Numbe r 1) My dog tag read "9766, 1/SS LG.A.u.E.Bn.1" found myself in the company of about a hundred other boys or young men my age like myself all new arivals. Soon we were being outfitted with two well-made uni forms each (one being a regular field gray outfit and the other was new, lg44 SS fatigues of the "harvest" camouflage pattern) and provided with all the other a ccouterments that make a soldier, including a 98k carbine, bayonet, helmet, gas mask, belt with shoulder harness, and an entrenching tool (spade) among others t hings. It was up to us to sew the eagle with the swastika on the left slccvc ofour uniform jackets, and the SS collar patches on the ctrllars ol'thc new fielcl gray uniform. No name ribbons for the slccvc culls wcro issuccl sincc rcplaccrn cnt battalitlns dicl not have Within an hour IHans Schmidt SS Panzergrenadier 23 any, and we were far from being assigned to specific field units. As was customa ry in the German armed forces, some of the equipment we received was registered in the new Soldbuch (pay book) that we were issued within the first week of our tour of duty, and which we were admonished to carry with us at all times. By the evening of the first day at the Lissa barracks, my soldier's life had begun in earnest. Not to forget: In the Waffen-SS the heads of new recruits were not shav ed, nor did we have to have our hair cropped very close. No attempt was made to rob us of our individuality. Perhaps this is the time to explain to the reader o f these memoirs what the Waffen-SS actually was; how it came into being, and wha t bearing for the future of the European peoples on all continents the short exi stence of this German military elite unit had. Considering that by its proper na me the "Waffen-SS" existed but 5 years, something that constitutes but a second in the long history of the Germanic peoples, its impact was great and it is felt to this day. Nobody knows that better than the anti-Germans of oiu era who try to depict the SS (and Waffen-SS) in the vilest of terms. The simplest answer to the question "what was the Waffen-SS" one can give to Americans is to make a com parison with the Marine Corps: Like the Waffen-SS, the U.S. Marine Corps is the founh branch, besides the Army, the Navy and the Air Force, of the armed forces of the nation which it serves, and it is a generally acknowledged elite. Strictl y by law the Marine Corps is part of the Navy, and the intent was that the Marin es (nomen est omen) should always be under Navy command when thrown into battle. Viewing the engagements of the Marines in both World Wars and other actions inbetween these wars, and since then, it becomes clear that this intent was not ke pt. Well, similarly it can be said that the Waffen-SS fast outgrew its original purpose of being a small Praetorian guard at the service of the Ftihrer. However , while the birth of the U.S. Marine Corps was derived from the need, more than 200 years ago, to have infanty soldiers permanently stationed on the ships of th e U.S. Nurry, the Waffen-SS was merely an outgrowth of the regular SS, a German paramilitary organization that was created in the late 1920s by the leadership o f the National Socialist party, the NSDAP. The biggest difference between the Ma rines and the Waffen-SS probably lies in their different world defending their country or merely safeguarding the special interests of the wealthy U.S. elite when they occupy such countries as Nicaragua, Panama and (even) Vietnam remains to be questioned. Between the World Wars the former U.S. Marine Major General Smedley Butler wrote a book expressin g doubts whether the engagements in which he had participated had really been in the interest of the people of the United States. Conversely, there is no questi on that the Waffen-SS became a major force in preventing the capture of all of E urope by the Bolshevists, a calamity that would have set European culture back a thousand years. The planned and purposeful execution of the destruction of Chri stianity in the Eastern European countries that fell under the hammer and sickle between l9l7 and l99l speaks for itself. And I myself was in the 1980s able to see the devastating impact Bolshevism/Communism had on that part of Germany, nam ely the now extinct "GDR", that fell under Soviet suzerainty. To this day the "w orld media" still writes of the allegedly uncalled-for attack on the (seemingly) helpless Soviet Union by 'Nazi Germanyo'. They are writing this even at a time when a heavily armed military supe{power like Israel claims to be "defending" itself against the overwhelming might of disarmed, stone-throwing Palestinians. Th e fact is that the Soviet Union was poised to attack Germany in the stunmer of 1 941, and only the German preventive attack ordered by Hitler prevented the Sovie t Communists from washing their horses in the Atlantic by the fall of 1941. (Pro bably the best description of the German reasons for marching against the Soviet Union in June of 1941 can be found in the book "stalin's Wor of Extermination 1 941-1945" by the German military historian Joachim Hoffrnann, published 2001 by Theses & Dissertations Press, P.O.Box 64, Capshaw, AL35742) The genesis of both the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei - National Socialist German Workers' Party), namely, the "Nazi" party, and two of its major associate d formations, the SA and the SS, can be traced to the turmoil inside Germany fol lowing the defeat, + the First World War, of the German Reich inNovember l9l8.r viow, or idoological makc'up. Whcthor tho Marines rcally are & 3 Thc dcrlgndlont 'Nazl' party and 'Nazia" were colned by the encmlcs of the Nrtlo ntl goohlldr ln thr mrly 1920r, rnd hrd dcrogrtory oonnotrtlonr, rlbcltHans Schmidt SS Panzergrenadier 25 Upon the signing of the armistice on November 9, 1918, and the departure of Kais er (Emperor) Wilhelm II into exile in Holland, the German monarchist system that had ruled the nation since the reign of Emperor Charlemagne in the 9th century collapsed. The cental power of the Reich that between 1871 and 1918 had been loc ated in Berlin vanished. In some parts of Germany, but especially in Munich, Ham burg and the Rhineland, Communist agitators, generally under Jewish leadership ( as they had also been abroad, for instance in Hungary, Rumania and Russia) calle d for outright revolution and the establishment of German Soviet republics. Thes e actions generated resistance by the numerous German nationalists, among them m any combat soldiers, and along with the creation of ever more political parties arose the establishment of paramilitary gxoups' both nationalist as well as inte rnationalist in outlook, atiached to these parties lying for power. The b.** sit uation of l9l8 is somewhat reminiscent of ihe political conditions which exist i n the United States at the time of ttre writing of this book, namely, at the beg inning of the Twentyfirst Century: So-called internationalist and human rights, "race-mixing" (my terminology) gloups, for instance the leftist student associat ions, equally leftist unions and parties, Jewish, Black, Hispanic and Asian orga nizations, and all assorted Mamists cadres, can currently meet within the United States anywhere and anytime with impunity and without fear of interference. Unf ortunately, however, in this alleged "land of the free" doing the same is now al most impossible for patriotic American groups safeguarding their white, European .1, d i! .i American background, (confederate) heritage, or the call for the separation of the races. The latter is viewed as criminal by the system. The lessons of Sri Lanka, Albania and Afric a do not count. "Tolerance" is being promoted, albeit only for and toward those that do not question the without a specific pejorative interpretation except, after 1945, in connection w ith .Nazi Germany,' for the never-ending wartime allegations. ln the meantime th ough both d6signations have become part of everyday use, and in the minds of m;n y Americana they do not generally contaln a negatlve value judgment, obvlourly t o thc dlcmay of the publlc oplnlon moldcrs ln thc so-called the upholding of the Southern dcmocredcr,n current "liberal'system. Only a few days before these lines were 2001, the notor ious ADL (Antiwritten, on Tuesday, May Defamation League of B'nai B'rith), a sel f-appointed Jewish watchdog group thatspies on American citizens in all walks of life and probably has files on millions of them, a fact for which it already ha s been in trouble with the law, held a meeting attended by 600 of its most impor tant agents from all over the United States in a prestigious Washington hotel, a nd not a single instance of an attack or harassment by nationalist, patriotic gr oups or by antiSemitic individuals was reported. On the other hand, should, for instance, one of the betterknown militias of the United States try to arrange a national meeting of equal size in the nation's capital with attendant publicity, it would be impossible for them to rent a hall, assemble peacefully (as is guar anteed by the U.S. Constitution) and have the Attorney General of the United Sta tes speak to them. As a matter of fact, should such a meeting take place, we can be certain that assorted leftists under Jewish leadership would be in the foref ront of hundreds of dirty, disheveled, venomous and ski masked, obscenity-scream ing, leftist protesters. And what would these protesters profess to represent? D emocracy, freedom, "tolerance", "equal rights", and "freedom of expression". Ala s, they defend only freedom of expression for themselves and those who agree wit h them. But not for "fascists", their current bogeymen. (The constant misapplica tion of the words "fascist" to anything connected with 'National Socialism" indi cates how much the leftist protesters understand of the issues at hand. Alas, th eir knowledge and understanding of economic issues is even worse.) In the early 1920s an almost identical situation had developed in Germany, and there, just as now here in the United States and in Germany (again), it seemed in the interest of the prevailing system to suppress the patriots and pander to thq goons from the left. At first, when for instance Adolf Hitler wanted to speak to his follow ers and to those who were curious about his message, there was not a single Nati onal Socialist gathering or convention that was not intemrpted with physical for ce by leftist agitators. Their main oomplaint was that Hitler had pointed out th e prevalence of Jews in the high cadres of the Communist and other Manist partio s in Ocrmany and abroad. Rathcr than answer this allcgation l,26 Hans Schmidt SS Panzergrenadier 27 with facts of their own making, the leftists tried their utmost to keep Hitler and other high Nazis from speaking in public. It was then that the S A (Sturm Abteilung / Storm detachment), the so-called brown-shirts, came into be ing. Both Hitler and Hermann Gdring, the famed German Air Force fighter pilot of World War I, hadrealized that the Red terror could, in the absence of a patriot icJeaning police force and govemment, be broken only by counter-terror. Among th e millions of unemployed workers in Germany, the result of the lost war, it was easy to recruit a sufficient number of hardened street fighters in most of the l arge cities of Germany who could henceforth guard the National Socialist party m eetings and conventions as proud SA-men. The usual methods of the Reds to infilt rate Nazi meetings with their own street fighters backfired. As a rule they were recognized upon their entry into the meeting place (sometimes a circus tent, so large was the number of people who wanted to hear Hitler speak) and thus were k ept under constant surveillancq Once the Red leader in place gave a certain sign al to his comrades a melee broke out, the SA-men who had armed themselves with t runcheons went after the "demonstrators", most of whom soon found themselves lyi ng on the street with injuries of various kinds. With the major Nazi leaders hav ing managed to be able to speak freely in most large German cities, the party gr ew fast. Soon it became apparent that especially Adolf Hitler needed a personal guard of loyal and intelligent followers who could arrange for the security meas ures needed when traveling in territories where the troops'.S These troops were made up of men who were ready for revolution and the y lvtew that someday things would demand the utmost from them. In 1924, when I c ame out of Landsberg prison, the party was in disarray and scattered into many c ompeting groups. I realized then that I needed a bodyguard, but a small, very re stricted one, made up of men who could be depended upon it became necessary to m arch without preconditions, even against their own brothers. I envisioned only t wenty men to a city if with one provision being that one could depend on them : $ g 'l R &a' & I tr' ;. German Communists were still dominant. Out of the tens of thousands of SA member s, small squads of the so-called Schutzstaffel (Security Detachment) were formed to whom fell the task of guarding the party leaders, and performing other senri ces. This was the beginning of the SS. In his table talks,a Hitler himself described the founding of the SS thus: i, s L .r*, j)., .Fr T iL F S, Y.' fi t tii "Believing that there are always circumstances when there is a needfor elite tro ops, I created in 1922-23 the 'Adolf Hitler shock 4 absolutely. Maurice, Schreck and Heidenformed the first group of hard Jighters i n Munich, and they were the origins of the SS; but tt was because of Himmler tha t the SS became an extraordinary body of men, devoted to an ideal, and loyal to the deatlt." On January 6, 1929, Heinrich Himmler, a somewhat shy and modest 29year-old agricultural manager with a degree in farming, became the head of the S S, then a small unit of 280 selected men that was nominally still part of the mi llion-man SA. The first SS men wore SA uniforms but with black trimmings, and bl ack instead of brown caps that were adorned with a silver skull (deathhead) insi gnia. The double S runes ("lightning bolts") on the collar would come later, as would the SS-motto o'Meine Ehre heisst Treue" (Loyalty is my honor) on the belt buckles. It was the decidedly unmilitary-looking Heinrich Himmler who created th e Order of the ^S^S, with religious overtones and ramifications far into the fut ure of Europe and the white race, from a group of a few hundred dedicated party followers. Himmler, a man with a strict Catholic upbringing, must have known the history of the Roman Catholic Church well, for there is little doubt that he ha d taken some of his inspirations for the creation of his order from the teaching s of Ignatius of Loyola who founded the Jesuit order in the early part of the 16 ft Century, just about the time when Martin Luther laid the foundation for the R eformation. Here I must mention that probably because of his unmilitary bearing and looks, Heinrich Himmler was not much respected in The original German word is "Stosstrupp", lt is of World War I origin and denote d the shock troope that were used to breach the enemy lines during prolongcd trc nch warfaro. A famoue poet-World War I war movie ln Germany .Slorrtrupp 1018', w m tltlcd { " Ar rcportcd ln thc book H/tlels Tlschgespdchc Plokrr, Sowrld-Vrrllg, Stuttgrrl, 1972 m rccordcd by Dr, HcnryHans Schmidt SS Panzergrenadier 29 the Waffen-SS, and I do remember that once someone had furned his picture to fac e the wall in the Waffen-SS barracks in BreslauLissa. Himmler was also derogator ily referred as the "Reichsheini", with the term Heini being both the diminutive of Heinrich in the German language, as well as sometimes being used to describe someone who is kind of awkward or clumsy. In other words, Heinrich Himmler was regarded by some as the buffoon of the Reich. I myself have never been an admire r of Himmler but I am fairly convinced that those who denigrated him during the Nazi era and after World War II will be proven wrong. Besides Adolf Hitler, and probably Joseph Goebbels, it will be Heinrich Himmler who wilt leave the most la sling impression long into the funre. In 1929 when Himmler became the head of th e SS, the tull name of the organization Schutzstaffel was still being used but s oon the designation SS became commonplace, and I, for instance, never ever saw t he Waffen-SS being called "WaffenSchutzstaffel", except in allied postwar litera ture written by people who didn't know the facts. It also deserves mentioning th at before the advent of the National Socialists the swastika was in Germany only a littleknown ancient symbol that could be found, for example, on Germanic stel es, in Roman ruins or on American Indian jewelry, but there was no special conne ction of this symbol with the German psyche. Or so it seemed. In 1918, nobody wo uld have dreamed that less than 20 years later almost every single German, young and old, would be wearing a uniform, or a pin or badge, adorned with the swasti ka. The allegation that the swastika has an anti-Christian connotation can be an swered wittt the fact that some of the tombs of the early Christians, for instan ce the gravestone of a Christian martyr in the Middle East who died about 700 AD , were decorated with swastikas of various kinds.6 Even lesser known than the sw astika was the S (lightning bolt) rune that in double form would in later times become the emblem of a white Aryan semi-religious order that will probably survive for many centur ies to come (even if at this time it is offrcially not in existence), namely, the SS. Within a little more than two years after being appo inted as the Reichsfiihrer or national commander of the SS, Heinrich Himmler had managed to enlarge his organization to about 30,000 men. No mean feat for anybo dy. He also imbued his order with a mythology combining Germanic (pre-Christian) rites, a strict adherence to racial laws and unquestioned featty to Adolf Hitle r. Nobody could have predicted that out of this small group of dedicated men wou ld eventually be created an elite army of nearly one million well trained and hi ghly motivated soldiers that generated both fear in the enemies of Germany and t he white race, as well as lasting admiration among many of those who were born l ong after the original SS men of the post-World War I era had died. The majority of the German people became familiar with the o'new" SS soon after January 30, L933, when Adolf Hitler became the Chancellor (prime minister) of the German gov emment, an event that was eventually referred to as the "nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung" (the National Socialist Assumption of power). Less than a month after this date, the Berlin Reichstag building (the German capitol) went up in flames set by a Dutch Communist. Hitler used this opportunity to incarcerate the most vociferous of his enemies, and for this reason 25,000 SA-men and 15,000 SS men were appointed to the auxiliary police. Toward the end of 1933 was the first time that the black-uniformed, armed and barracked SS regiments, ulmong them Hi tler's own Leibstandarte,T took official positions outside a few major German go vernment buildings and institutions. The Leibstandarte, along with other armed a nd barracked sS formations, would become the nucleus of the Waffen-SS. The power of the SS within both the many (and in number ever increasing) formations of the N*i p.tty, and in the Reich as suc\ rose considerably after the so,called Rd-h m putsch in June of 1934.8 1 to 6 Before the Hitler era, and perhaps because of the American lndian connection, thc swastlka seemad to have been used ln the Unlted Statee more oflen than in Gc many. Commcrclally, for lnltancc, among othcrc by a rallroad company, and ln Srn Antonlo, Tcxm by thc locrl ROTC-unllr, rnd cvcn by rn Amcrlcen Army dlvlrlon. T hr prrtlculrr grrvr rtonr I rm rlbrlng to orn br rrrn rt thc ' Thlr rcglmcnt would eventually become the division in which I served from Emrt Rohm hed bccn Dccambcr 1944 to thc cnd of thc war. Dumbr&n Orlo Munum rlOrqWtcvn nrrrwr$lngbn' DC. & 8 :' :::::: :Ti:11::*1' :"1: : ::: r dccontod oftlccr ln World War l, and wlth hlr talcnt :_30 $' Hans Schmidt tr SS Panzergrenadier 3l As a result the SA, the old vanguard of the National Socialist revolution, was relegated to a second spot, and the SS becarne the organization to safeguard the party, its leaders, the ideology, the race, and not the least t he German Reich and people from enemies inside and outside of the country. This new status would later lead to the development that all the major security servi ces of Germany fell under SS command, including the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspoliz ei - . Secret Police) and eventually also the regular German Schutzpolizei, the local police. Note the SS chain of command on page 213. There is no doubt that H immler had created an effrcient empire within an empire, with jurisdiction over nearly all personnel safeguarding the nation, inside and out.. Having in mind th at work liberates ("Arbeit macht frei"), and that regular prisons are only breed ing grounds for new and hardened criminals, the concentration camp system was cr eated first under SA auspices and then came under SS command, with the 6 KL" (Konzen trationsLager) Dashau becoming the first concentration camp to be extensively wr itten about in the German press. In the concentration camps not only habitual cr iminals but also known enemies of the system, particularly Communists, were kept under a strict regimen. The allegation that aheady in the early years after the assumption of power Jews were arrested and sent to the concentration camps "bec ause they were Jews" is not true. paramilitary army. However, like many other National Socialists, among them, for instance, the strasser brothers, Rdhm placed much emphasis on the socialistic i deas within the NS ideology while Hitler realized (rightly, in my opinion) that the interests of the German nation should be paramount. Based upon this divergen ce of opinion, Rdhm would have loved to replace the archaic and often aristocrat ic ideology of the German Army wilh the revolutionary fervor of a new socialisti c officer's corps. Hitler on the other hand realized that Germany's enemies woul d force a war soon, and that he had to depend upon the generals and other office s now in command. Whether or not in June of 1934 Ernst Rdhm really planned a put sch against They found themselves behind barbed wire because they were Communist agitators w ho advocated world revolution. Begfuuring immediately after the war and even unt il now (Daniel Goldhagen's book "Hitler's Executioners" comes to mind) there is still the argument as to what the German people could have known about the so-ca lled "Holocaust", and what not. One thing is certain: The leadership of World Je wry started their atrocity propaganda against the Reich immediately after Hitler 's assumption of power in the spring of 1933, at a time when most Jews were stil l in Germany. At a time when most Germans still frequented Jewish shops and depa rtment stores