Rich Iott’s latest line on the Waffen SS unit he reenacts: “I don’t think we can sit here and judge” them.
Really? SS units on the Eastern front? I’ll sign up to judge them.
Just for the record it’s worth noting that there’s a significant taxonomy of Nazi Germany’s soldiery. First you have men serving in the German regular army, the Wehrmacht. Then there were militarized SS formations, actually part of the Nazi party, the Waffen SS. Then there was duty on the Eastern front, where the Nazis followed a much more barbaric approach to war than they did on the Western front – and where casualties were vastly higher on both sides. Then on top of all that there were the Waffen SS divisions recruited from non-German volunteers. That’s the category of the ‘Wiking’ division Rich Iott is into. So these were the folks who weren’t conscripted and weren’t even German but thought the whole National Socialism thing was such a great idea that they signed up voluntarily, as even sub-German master race junior partners. (The recruits for Wiking were from Scandinavia, the Netherlands and the Baltics.) I mean, that’s dedication!
In any war and in any army you’re going to find a range of people, behaviors and beliefs, but if you’re looking for a part of the World War II German war machine to rehabilitate the ordinary soldiers, this is not where you’d start. To put it mildly.
