The German Officer’s Boy

The situation had changed, and the flight of eight German fighters engaged a mass of Soviet Yakovlev Yak-9 and Lavochkin La-5 fighter aircraft that were protecting Il-2 Sturmoviks on a ground-attack mission.

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Hartmann shot down two enemy aircraft before his fighter was hit by debris and he was forced to make an emergency landing. He then, in accordance with Luftwaffe regulations, attempted to recover the precision board clock. As he was doing so, Soviet ground troops approached. Realising that capture was unavoidable, he faked internal injuries. Hartmann's acting so convinced the Soviets that they put him on a stretcher and placed him on a truck.

Hartmann patiently waited for the right moment to escape, then, using the distraction of the Stukas attack, he attacked the single guard. Hartmann jumped out of the back of the truck and ran into a large field of giant sunflowers. Evading the pursuing soldiers, Hartmann hid and waited for nightfall. In the dark, Hartmann followed a Soviet patrol heading west to the front.

As he approached the German position, he was challenged by a sentry who fired a shot which passed through his trousers. On 20 September , Hartmann was credited with his th aerial victory—he claimed four this day to end it on By the end of the year, this had risen to In the first two months of , Hartmann claimed over 50 Soviet aircraft. His spectacular rate of success raised a few eyebrows even in the Luftwaffe High Command ; his claims were double and triple-checked, and his performance closely monitored by an observer flying in his formation.

On 2 March, he reached By this time, the Soviet pilots were familiar with Hartmann's radio call sign of Karaya 1 , and the Soviet Command had put a price of 10, rubles on the German pilot's head. Hartmann's opponents were often reluctant to stay and fight if they noticed his personal design.

As a result, this aircraft was often allocated to novices, who could fly it in relative safety. Hartmann then had the tulip design removed, and his aircraft painted just like the rest of his unit. Consequently, in the following two months, Hartmann amassed over 50 victories. On the train, all four of them got drunk on cognac and champagne. Supporting each other and unable to stand, they arrived at Berchtesgaden. Major Nicolaus von Below , Hitler's Luftwaffe adjutant, was shocked.

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After some sobering up, Hartmann was still intoxicated. Hartmann took a German officer's hat from a stand and put it on, but it was too large. Von Below became upset, told Hartmann it was Hitler's and ordered him to put it back. He also mentioned the high loss rates and improved Soviet aviation. What impact these remarks had on Hitler is unknown. In April and May , 9.

The German Officer's Boy

In April Hartmann claimed five victories. In May, Hartmann filed claims number to which included six on the 6 May. While flying "top cover" for another Schwarm , Hartmann attacked a flight of four P Mustangs over Bucharest , Romania , downing two, while the other two Ps fell victim to his fellow pilots. Later that month, during his fifth combat with American pilots, he shot down two more Ps before being forced to bail out, when eight other Ps ran his Messerschmitt out of fuel. During the intense manoeuvring, Hartmann managed to line up one of the Ps at close range, but heard only a "clank" when he fired, as he had run out of ammunition.

One of the PBs flown by Lt. Goebel of the th Squadron, 31st Fighter Group , broke away and headed straight for him. Hartmann later successfully lobbied to be reinstated as a combat pilot. On arrival, he was asked to surrender his side arm — a security measure caused by the aftermath of the failed assassination attempt on 20 July Hartmann refused and threatened to decline the Diamonds if he were not trusted to carry his pistol.

After consulting Oberst Nicolaus von Below, Hitler's Luftwaffe adjutant, Hartmann was allowed to keep his side arm and accepted the Diamonds. Allegedly, Hitler revealed to Hartmann that he believed that, "militarily, the war is lost," and that he wished the Luftwaffe had "more like him and Rudel. The Diamonds to the Knight's Cross also earned Hartmann a day leave. On his way to his vacation, he was ordered by General der Jagdflieger Adolf Galland to attend a meeting in Berlin-Gatow. Galland wanted to transfer Hartmann to the Messerschmitt Me test program.

Galland, valuing comradeship and seeing the merit in Hartmann's request, cancelled the transfer to the jet squadron and rescinded the order that had taken him off combat operations. Galland then ordered Hartmann to the Jagdfliegerheim vacation resort for fighter pilots in Bad Wiessee , [43] where, on 10 September, Hartmann married his long-time teenage love, Ursula "Usch" Paetsch.

Witnesses to the wedding included his friends Gerhard Barkhorn and Wilhelm Batz. From 1—14 February , Hartmann briefly led I. Gruppe of Jagdgeschwader 53 as acting Gruppenkommandeur until he was replaced by Helmut Lipfert. Galland also intended Hartmann to fly with Jagdverband Some sources report that Hartmann's decision to stay with his unit was due to a request via telegram made by Oberstleutnant Hermann Graf.

The last wartime photograph of Hartmann known was taken in connection with this victory. I must say that during the war I never disobeyed an order, but when General Seidemann ordered Graf and me to fly to the British sector and surrender to avoid the Soviets, with the rest of the wing to surrender to the Soviets, I could not leave my men.

That would have been bad leadership. Hartmann's last kill occurred over Brno , Czechoslovakia , on 8 May, the last day of the war in Europe. Early that morning, he was ordered to fly a reconnaissance mission and report the position of Soviet forces. Hartmann took off with his wingman at Passing over the area, Hartmann saw two Yak-9s performing aerobatics for the Soviet columns. As he lined up the second fighter, Hartmann noticed a flicker of shiny dots above him coming from the West; they were Ps.

Rather than make a stand and be caught between the Soviets and the Americans, Hartmann and his wingman fled at low level into the pall of smoke that covered Brno. Hartmann later recalled his final violent action of the war:. We destroyed the aircraft and all munitions, everything. I sat in my fighter and fired the guns into the woods where all the fuel had been dropped, and then jumped out. We destroyed twenty-five perfectly good fighters.

They would be nice to have in museums now. As Gruppenkommandeur of I. After his capture, the U. Army handed Hartmann, his pilots, and ground crew over to the Soviet Union on 14 May, where he was imprisoned in accordance with the Yalta Agreements , which stated that airmen and soldiers fighting Soviet forces had to surrender directly to them. Hartmann and his unit were led by the Americans to a large open-air compound to await the transfer.

Hartmann embarked on a prisoner train eastward, travelling via Vienna , Budapest , across the Carpathian Mountains into Ukraine , Kiev , Moscow and finally Kirov. He was asked to spy on fellow officers and become a stukatch , or "stool pigeon". He refused and was given 10 days' solitary confinement in a four-by-nine-by-six-foot chamber. He slept on a concrete floor and was given only bread and water. On another occasion, the Soviets threatened to kidnap and murder his wife the death of his son was kept from Hartmann.

During similar interrogations about his knowledge of the Me , Hartmann was struck by a Soviet officer using a cane, prompting Hartmann to slam his chair down on the head of the assailant, knocking him out. Expecting to be shot, he was transferred back to the small bunker. Hartmann, not ashamed of his war service, opted to go on a hunger strike and starve rather than fold to "Soviet will", as he called it.

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More subtle efforts by the Soviet authorities to convert Hartmann to communism also failed. He was offered a post in the East German Air Force , which he refused:. If, after I am home in the West, you make me a normal contract offer, a business deal such as people sign every day all over the world, and I like your offer, then I will come back and work with you in accordance with the contract. But if you try to put me to work under coercion of any kind, then I will resist to my dying gasp. During his captivity Hartmann was first arrested on 24 December , and three days later, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

After continuous failed attempts by the Soviets to break him, Hartmann was charged with war crimes, specifically the "deliberate shooting of Soviet civilians" in the village of Briansk , attacking a "bread factory" on 23 May , and destroying "expensive" Soviet aircraft. Sentenced to 25 years of hard labour , he refused to work.

He was eventually put into solitary confinement, which enraged his fellow prisoners.

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They began a revolt, overpowered the guards, and freed him. He made a complaint to the Kommandant ' s office, asking for a representative from Moscow and an international inspection, as well as a tribunal, to acquit him of his unlawful conviction. This was refused, and he was transferred to a camp in Novocherkassk , where he spent five more months in solitary confinement.

Eventually he was granted a tribunal, but it upheld his original sentence. He was subsequently sent to another camp, this time at Diaterka in the Ural Mountains. In a trade agreement between West Germany and the Soviet Union was reached, and Hartmann was released along with 16, German military personnel as one of the last Heimkehrer.

In January , the government of the Russian Federation , acting as the legal successor to the Soviet Union, exonerated Hartmann by admitting that his conviction for war crimes was unlawful. During his long imprisonment, Hartmann's son, Erich-Peter, was born in and died as a three-year-old in , without his father ever having seen him. Hartmann later had a daughter, Ursula Isabel, born on 23 February He also made several trips to the United States, where he was trained on U.

Hartmann considered the F a fundamentally flawed and unsafe aircraft and strongly opposed its adoption by the air force. After his military retirement, from —74, Hartmann worked as a flight instructor in Hangelar, near Bonn , and also flew in an aerobatics team with Adolf Galland.

In he caught a cold that developed into angina pectoris , the condition that had killed his father at the age of He recovered and, by , was medically cleared to fly, after which he resumed instructing at the various flying schools. Fearing a second attack, he became cautious and limited his appearances at public events. I do not live for exhibitions. Hartmann was the subject of a biography by the American authors Trevor J. Constable and Raymond F. Toliver, under the title The Blond Knight of Germany. Originally released in the United States in , it was published in Germany the next year, as Holt Hartmann vom Himmel!

The Blond Knight was a commercial success and enjoyed a wide readership among both the American and the German public. The book has been criticised as ahistorical and misleading in recent American and German historiography. Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies , in their work The Myth of the Eastern Front , describe it as one of the key works that promoted the myth of the "clean Wehrmacht". The historian Jens Wehner notes that the German-language version of the book was immensely popular in Germany, but contained serious flaws in its presentation of historical realities.

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These included uncritical borrowing from the Nazi propaganda elements of the Fliegerasse " aces " and stereotypes about the Soviet Union. According to Wehner, the latter could be traced to the prevailing attitudes during the Cold War. Further, the political and social consequences of World War II were completely ignored. Hartmann flew 1, combat missions during World War II, resulting in engagements and claimed and credited aerial victories against Allied aircraft.

Khazanov quoted Hartmann having shot down Soviet aircraft. Khazanov has been heavily criticised by aviation historians such as Jean-Yves Lorant and Hans Ring for faulty research. Ring and Lorant both point out that the missions that Khazanov tried to use to prove Hartmann's claims false were riddled with false and misleading information.

For example, Khazanov claimed that on a mission on 20 August , Hartmann claimed two victories west of Millerovo but not a single Soviet aircraft was lost. German records show not a single claim was made in that area. This was also false. It is often said that Hartmann was more proud of the fact that he had never lost a wingman in combat than he was about his number of kills; he did have at least one shot down. Capito was a former bomber pilot who had retrained on fighters. After scoring his fifth victory, Capito asked to be Hartmann's wingman.

Hartmann refused initially, believing Capito was insufficiently trained on Messerschmitts. On their first mission together, they were engaged by P Airacobras: I called to him to turn hard opposite, so I could sandwich the Red fighters, but in his standard-rate bomber turn he got hit.

I saw the whole thing and ordered him to dive and bail out immediately. To my intense relief I saw him leave the aircraft and his parachute blossom. Matthews and Foreman, authors of Luftwaffe Aces — Biographies and Victory Claims , researched the German Federal Archives and found records for aerial victory claims, plus two further unconfirmed claims. This and the — dash indicates unconfirmed aerial victory claims for which Hartmann did not receive credit.

Hartmann had kept the whereabouts of his Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross secret from his captors during his time as a prisoner of war, claiming that he had thrown it away. The hiding place was in a small stream. His comrade Hans "Assi" Hahn managed to hide the Knight's Cross in a double bottom cigar box and smuggled it back to Germany when he was released from captivity.

Hartmann joined the military service in Wehrmacht on 1 October His first station was Neukuhren in East Prussia , where he received his military basic training as a Luftwaffe recruit. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For the photographer, see Erich Hartmann photographer. For the ethnic group, see Bubi people. For the music project, see Black Devil Disco Club.

The Blond Knight of Germany. Toliver and Constable give the impression that eight kills are probable, while other sources speak of seven victories. Hartmann himself, in a document dated 16 May , used the rank Hauptmann. Retrieved 14 January Members were never able to join the ranks of the German High Command and it was dependent on the army for heavy weaponry and equipment. This was primarily done to emphasize the SS as being independent from the Wehrmacht.

Its units took unnecessary risks and had a higher casualty rate than the army. After the invasion, Hitler entrusted the SS with extermination actions codenamed Operation Tannenberg and AB-Aktion to remove potential leaders who could form a resistance to German occupation. The killings were committed by Einsatzgruppen task forces; deployment groups , assisted by local paramilitary groups. Satisfied with their performance in Poland, Hitler allowed further expansion of the armed SS formations, but insisted new units remain under the operational control of the army.

In the five-day campaign, the LSSAH linked up with army units and airborne troops after a number of clashes with Dutch defenders. SS troops did not take part in the thrust through the Ardennes and the river Meuse. The Germans then trapped the British and French troops in a huge pocket at Dunkirk. There, soldiers of the 2nd Battalion were responsible for the Wormhoudt massacre , where 80 British and French soldiers were murdered after they surrendered.

At the close of the campaign, Hitler expressed his pleasure with the performance of the SS-Leibstandarte , telling them: Fritz Klingenberg , a company commander in the Das Reich , led his men across Yugoslavia to the capital, Belgrade , where a small group in the vanguard accepted the surrender of the city on 13 April. A few days later Yugoslavia surrendered. In some cases, they were joined by the Wehrmacht. Serbia became the second country after Estonia declared Judenfrei free of Jews.

Of Greece's 80, Jews, only 20 percent survived the war. At first they fought Soviet partisans , but by the autumn of , they left the anti-partisan role to other units and actively took part in the Holocaust. While assisting the Einsatzgruppen , they formed firing parties that participated in the liquidation of the Jewish population of the Soviet Union.

The SS was built on a culture of violence, which was exhibited in its most extreme form by the mass murder of civilians and prisoners of war on the Eastern Front. The extermination activities of the Einsatzgruppen generally followed a standard procedure, with the Einsatzgruppen chief contacting the nearest Wehrmacht unit commander to inform him of the impending action; this was done so they could coordinate and control access to the execution grounds. He decided that alternate methods of killing should be found, which led to introduction of gas vans.

Prisoners or auxiliaries were often assigned to do this task so as to spare the SS men the trauma. In response to the army's difficulties in dealing with Soviet partisans, Hitler decided in July to transfer anti-partisan operations to the police. This placed the matter under Himmler's purview. Himmler set the SS and SD to work on developing additional anti-partisan tactics and launched a propaganda campaign.

Thereafter, they secured rural communities and economic installations such as factories and administrative buildings. An additional priority was securing agricultural and forestry resources. The SS oversaw the collection of the harvest, which was deemed critical to strategic operations.

Communists and people of Asiatic descent were killed presumptively under the assumption that they were Soviet agents. An increasing numbers of Jews and German citizens deemed politically suspect or social outsiders were arrested. Intensification of the killing operations took place in late when the SS began construction of stationary gassing facilities to replace the use of Einsatzgruppen for mass killings.

For administrative reasons, all concentration camp guards and administrative staff became full members of the Waffen-SS in The labor needs of the war economy, especially for skilled workers, meant that some Jews escaped the genocide. By , the SS-TV had been organized into three divisions: By , it became standard practice to rotate SS members in and out of the camps, partly based on manpower needs, but also to provide easier assignments to wounded Waffen-SS members.

In , Himmler founded the first SS business venture, Nordland-Verlag, a publishing house that released propaganda material and SS training manuals. Thereafter, he purchased Allach Porcelain , which then began to produce SS memorabilia. Each had at least one factory or quarry nearby where the inmates were forced to work. Their workload was intentionally made impossibly high, under the policy of extermination through labor. By , the SS had purchased 75 percent of the mineral water producers in Germany and were intending to acquire a monopoly. These operated in factories the SS had confiscated from Jews and Poles.

The SS owned experimental farms, bakeries, meat packing plants, leather works, clothing and uniform factories, and small arms factories. Items seized included 2, On 5 July , the Germans launched the Battle of Kursk , an offensive designed to eliminate the Kursk salient. On 17 July he called off the operation and ordered a withdrawal. Alarmed by the raids on St Nazaire and Dieppe in , Hitler had ordered the construction of fortifications he called the Atlantic Wall all along the Atlantic coast, from Spain to Norway, to protect against an expected Allied invasion.

The Normandy landings took place beginning 6 June The division included tanks and 50 assault guns , plus supporting infantry and artillery.

However, as the division was part of the armoured reserve, Feuchtinger was obliged to seek clearance from OKW before he could commit his formation. They also took part in the Battle for Caen June—August These forces were to mount an offensive near Mortain and drive west through Avranches to the coast. The Allied forces were prepared for this offensive, and an air assault on the combined German units proved devastating. Waffen-SS units which had survived the summer campaigns were withdrawn from the front line to refit.

Coincidentally, on 17 September, the Allies launched in the same area Operation Market Garden , a combined airborne and land operation designed to seize control of the lower Rhine. In December , Hitler launched the Ardennes Offensive, also known as the Battle of the Bulge , a significant counterattack against the western Allies through the Ardennes with the aim of reaching Antwerp while encircling the Allied armies in the area. Spearheading the attack were two panzer armies composed largely of Waffen-SS divisions. They soon encountered strong resistance from the US 2nd and 99th Infantry Divisions.

By 23 December, the weather improved enough for Allied air forces to attack the German forces and their supply columns, causing fuel shortages. In increasingly difficult conditions, the German advance slowed and was stopped. Many of the perpetrators were sentenced to hang, but the sentences were commuted. Peiper was imprisoned for eleven years for his role in the killings.

In the east, the Red Army resumed their offensive on 12 January German forces were outnumbered twenty to one in aircraft, eleven to one in infantry, and seven to one in tanks on the Eastern Front. Budapest fell on 13 February. Dietrich refused to carry out the order. By this time, on both the Eastern and Western Front, the activities of the SS were becoming clear to the Allies, as the concentration and extermination camps were being overrun. In spite of the hopelessness of the situation, members of the SS patrolling the city continued to shoot or hang soldiers and civilians for what they considered to be acts of cowardice or defeatism.

It had under its command the SD, Kripo, and Gestapo, as well as several offices to handle finance, administration, and supply. The SD was considered an elite branch of the SS, and its members were better educated and typically more ambitious than those within the ranks of the Allgemeine SS. They also gained a reputation for ruthlessness and unwavering commitment to Nazi ideology. Heydrich was attacked in Prague on 27 May by a British-trained team of Czech and Slovak soldiers who had been sent by the Czechoslovak government-in-exile to kill him in Operation Anthropoid. He died from his injuries a week later.

Beginning in and throughout World War II, the SS enacted a procedure where offices and units of the SS could form smaller sub-units, known as SS-Sonderkommandos , to carry out special tasks, including large-scale murder operations.

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The use of SS-Sonderkommandos was widespread. The unit's assignment was to visit mass graves on the Eastern Front to exhume bodies and burn them in an attempt to cover up the genocide. The task remained unfinished at the end of the war, and many mass graves remain unmarked and unexcavated. The Eichmann Sonderkommando was a task force headed by Adolf Eichmann that arrived in Budapest on 19 March , the same day that Axis forces invaded Hungary.

Their task was to take a direct role in the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. The SS-Sonderkommandos enlisted the aid of antisemitic elements from the Hungarian gendarmerie and pro-German administrators from within the Hungarian Interior Ministry. The Einsatzgruppen had its origins in the ad hoc Einsatzkommando formed by Heydrich following the Anschluss in Austria in March When military action turned out not to be necessary because of the Munich Agreement , the Einsatzgruppen were assigned to confiscate government papers and police documents.

They secured government buildings, questioned senior civil servants, and arrested as many as 10, Czech communists and German citizens. Hitler felt that the planned extermination of the Jews was too difficult and important to be entrusted to the military. The last Einsatzgruppen were disbanded in mid although some continued to exist on paper until due to the German retreat on both fronts and the consequent inability to continue extermination activities.

Former Einsatzgruppen members were either assigned duties in the Waffen-SS or concentration camps. Twenty-four Einsatzgruppen commanders were tried for war crimes following the war. It had more than lawyers on staff in the main offices in Berlin and Munich. Proceedings were conducted at 38 regional SS courts throughout Germany. It was the only authority authorized to try SS personnel, except for SS members who were on active duty in the Wehrmacht in such cases, the SS member in question was tried by a standard military tribunal.

Its creation placed the SS beyond the reach of civilian legal authority. Himmler personally intervened as he saw fit regarding convictions and punishment. Shortly after Hitler seized power in , most horse riding associations were taken over by the SA and SS. The unit was split into two regiments in December , with Fegelein in charge of both. By March their strength was 3, men. This unit saw service in the Soviet Union in attacks on partisans and civilians. Inmates in deteriorating health were examined by SS doctors, who decided whether or not they would be able to recover in less than two weeks.

Those too ill or injured to recover in that time frame were killed. At Auschwitz, the actual delivery of gas to the victims was always handled by the SS, on the order of the supervising SS doctor. Members were assigned as administrative staff and supply personnel, and served in command positions and as guards at women's concentration camps. Himmler also intended to replace all female civilian employees in his service with SS-Helferinnen members, as they were selected and trained according to NSDAP ideology.

The Ukrainians and Tatars, who had suffered persecution under Stalin , were likely motivated primarily by opposition to the Soviet government rather than ideological agreement with the SS. The Estonian Legion had 1, volunteers under training by the end of The SS established its own symbolism, rituals, customs, ranks and uniforms to set itself apart from other organizations.

Before , the SS wore the same brown uniform as the SA, with the addition of a black tie and a black cap with a Totenkopf death's head skull and bones symbol, moving to an all-black uniform in The SS also developed its own field uniforms, which included reversible smocks and helmet covers printed with camouflage patterns. Many were produced in concentration camps.

The logo is a pair of runes from a set of 18 Armanen runes created by Guido von List in After a career in the SS became increasingly attractive to Germany's social elite, who began joining the movement in great numbers, usually motivated by political opportunism. By about one-third of the SS leadership were members of the upper middle class.

The trend reversed after the first Soviet counter-offensive of By all activities of the SS were managed through twelve main offices. It was technically under the command of the SS in Germany, but often acted independently concerning Austrian affairs. The Austrian SS was founded in and by was acting as a covert force to bring about the Anschluss with Germany, which occurred in March Political scientist David Art of Tufts University notes that Austrians constituted 8 percent of the Third Reich's population and 13 percent of the SS; he states that 40 percent of the staff and 75 percent of commanders at death camps were Austrian.

On Heydrich's orders, mass arrests of potential enemies of the Reich began immediately after the Anschluss. With a staff of 80 percent of whom were recruited from the Austrian police , it was the largest Gestapo office outside Berlin. An estimated 50, people were interrogated or tortured there. Although its de facto leaders were Adolf Eichmann and later Alois Brunner , Huber was nevertheless responsible for the mass deportation of Austrian Jews. Following Nazi Germany's collapse, the SS ceased to exist.

Some SS members were subject to summary execution, torture, and beatings at the hands of freed prisoners, displaced persons, or Allied soldiers. They placed the SS guards on starvation rations, made them work without breaks, forced them to deal with the remaining corpses, and stabbed them with bayonets or struck them with their rifle butts if they slowed their pace. The Allies commenced legal proceedings against captured Nazis, establishing the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in They were accused of four counts: Additional SS trials and convictions followed.

The courts did not find this to be a legitimate defense. Most were found guilty, and 23 received the death penalty. Sentences included hangings and long terms of hard labor. At his trial in Jerusalem in , he was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. Eichmann was quoted as having stated, "I will jump into my grave laughing, because the fact that I have the death of five million Jews [or Reich enemies, as he later claimed to have said] on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction.

He was deported to Germany in and was sentenced to life in prison in He died in Mengele, worried that his capture would mean a death sentence, fled Germany on 17 April He sailed to Argentina in July. In both instances he was assisted by former Luftwaffe pilot Hans-Ulrich Rudel. Thousands of Nazis, including former SS members such as Trawniki guard Jakob Reimer and Circassian collaborator Tscherim Soobzokov , fled to the United States under the guise of refugees, sometimes using forged documents. The eagerness or desire to enlist collaborators means that sure, you didn't look at their credentials too closely.

While the existence of ODESSA remains unproven, Sereny notes that "there certainly were various kinds of Nazi aid organizations after the war — it would have been astonishing if there hadn't been. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Major paramilitary organization of Nazi Germany. For other uses, see SS disambiguation. For other uses, see Koppa letter. Ideology of the SS. Waffen-SS foreign volunteers and conscripts. Uniforms and insignia of the Schutzstaffel. Runic insignia of the Schutzstaffel. Allen, Michael Thad The Business of Genocide: University of North Carolina Press.

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The Fall of Berlin, Der Ort des Terrors: Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager vol. Intelligence and National Security. Gazecie Wyborczej in Polish. Archived from the original on 7 September Retrieved 30 December Browder, George C Oxford and New York: The Origins of the Final Solution: Comprehensive History of the Holocaust. University of Nebraska Press. Brzezinski, Matthew 24 July Anatomy of the SS State. Burleigh, Michael ; Wippermann, Wolfgang Cesarani, David []. His Life and Crimes. Century, Rachel January Institute of Historical Research.

Retrieved 5 July Cook, Stan; Bender, R. Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler: Dear, Ian; Foot, M.