The History of the Waffen SS - Ideology, Atrocities, and Reckoning with the Past.
This web page provides a brief introduction to the research project “The History of the Waffen SS - Ideology, Atrocities, and Reckoning with the Past”. The project was inaugurated on 1 July 2009 and ends on 31 June 2012. Drawing on methodologies and approaches from social history/everyday history and memory culture, the project will address a number of hitherto scantly researched topics and questions.
Overall approach
The general history of the Waffen-SS, the armed branch of Himmler’s SS-organisation, will be treated as an integral component of the Nazi racial state. More specifically the following traits are seen as being central to the history of the Waffen-SS:
· The Waffen-SS was envisaged as a corps of political soldiers, expected to carry out the Führerwille (i.e. Adolf Hitler’s orders and intentions) unconditionally and obediently,
· The Waffen-SS thus was not just a military body but first and foremost a remedy of Nazi racial policies and an integral part of the Nazi state’s policies of political suppression, ethnic cleansing, and genocide,
· The Waffen-SS was organisatorically and politically an integral part of the SS organisation,
· Beginning in 1940, the Waffen-SS grew rapidly and greatly diversified in terms of background and motivation of its soldiers, ethnic composition and type and usage of its units.
The present research project will supplement and broaden the existing research agenda by asking new questions and using sources so far untapped or rarely used. Based on the above, the project analyses the following main problems of the history of the Waffen-SS:
What was the relationship between the policy as formulated by the various central SS agencies and its implementation in the field? Were orders, for example concerning ideological training, carried out frictionless or were they substantially modified or disregarded?
To what extend did the increasing intake of groups and individuals which did not conform to the original designs, for example because they were conscripted or were non-Germans respectively “non-Germanic,” result in the emergence of “subcultures” within the Waffen-SS?
To what extend did ideology function as the glue which kept the Waffen-SS together and motivated the soldiers?
Was there a fairly uniform record of widespread participation in Nazi crimes among the individual Waffen-SS units or can distinct patters with respect to usage and practice be found among them?
What was the relationship between the soldiers’ political training and their participation in atrocities and war crimes?
How did the former Waffen-SS soldiers cope with their past in cold-war Europe and how did a sanitised and apologetic version of the Waffen-SS’s history to a certain extend allow the former SS-soldiers to serve as role models among extreme right wing groups, some military history “buffs,” and to certain subgroups of enlisted men and officers within the European and transatlantic post-war armies?
Facts about the project:
Duration: Summer 2009 – Summer 2012.Budget: 2 million DKK (roughly 250.000 €).
Project staff: Senior Lecturer Claus Bundgård Christensen (Roskilde University)
Director of Centre for Military History Niels Bo Poulsen (Royal Danish Defense College)
Research Director Peter Scharff Smith (Danish Institute for Human Rights)
The research project is financed by a grant from The Danish Council for Independent Research/Humanities
Expected output: conference papers, articles and a book manuscript.
Contact details:
Centre for Military History
Royal Danish Defence College
1-3 Ryvangs Alle
2100 Copenhagen
Denmark
Phone + 45 39 15 12 70
Email: cfm-01@fak.dk