Swiss,
Swedish and Danish men who volunteered for the Waffen-SS were highly
intelligent and ambitious individuals, a new study suggests.
In
an article published in the journal Contemporary European History, Dr Martin
Gutmann argues that men from the neutral countries of Scandinavia and
Switzerland who offered their services “left for Germany with an active
interest in contributing both physically and intellectually to the NS project”.
Gutmann challenges ‘the myth of the volunteers’ – namely, that they were
uneducated social ‘losers’ and deviants, drawn by naivety or greed.
Instead,
he argues, most were well-travelled, well-educated, and of a middle or
upper-class upbringing. By examining documents detailing the lives of a number
of volunteers, such as journals and school records, Gutmann concludes
volunteers “were not weak followers, but confident leaders”.
Gutmann
also found that volunteers were, with very few exceptions, convinced
nationalists, who had a “sense of impending demographic and racial
degradation”, and were fearful of both Bolshevism and liberal capitalism.
They
were “at best ambivalent towards the German National Socialist party”, but had
“an ideological inclination towards fascism”, and were keen to “reclaim the
‘purity’ of [their] nation[s]”, he found.
And
from reading volunteers’ military evaluations, Gutmann surmised that many of
the men had an inclination towards “viewing violence as having personal and
socially redemptive qualities”.
While
acknowledging that each volunteer had personal reasons for joining the Nazi
regime, Gutmann concludes it was “a profound decision taken only by confident
and ambitious individuals who were well aware of its potential consequences but
willing to gamble for the sake of an ideal”.
Gutmann
told historyextra: “There are already some excellent national studies that look
at the various motivations and experiences among SS volunteers from Denmark,
Norway and Sweden separately.
“But
the transnational approach of my study offers some unique insights. By placing
the more intellectual and influential volunteers from various countries
side-by-side, I uncovered surprising similarities in the types of men from the
smaller European peripheral countries who were attracted to the National
Socialist ideology and project.
“I
was motivated to conduct this study because my maternal grandfather served in
the Swedish military during the war and my paternal in the Swiss. Both of them
had vivid and patriotic memories of this time, and they often told me about the
few ‘mentally deranged traitors’, as they called them – Swedish and Swiss who
helped the Germans.
“So
I decided to look into this issue more closely.
“It's
easy and perhaps more convenient to lay the blame for this murderous ideology
completely with Germans, and to some extent Italians, and to see other western
Europeans as victims. Of course, the truth is rarely this straightforward.”
Dr
Nir Arielli, a lecturer in international history at the University of Leeds,
told historyextra: “Martin Gutmann makes an important contribution to the study
of transnational volunteering by applying the dispassionate approach to
foreigners who joined the Waffen-SS during the early stages of the Second World
War.
“His
very thorough analysis, which draws on material from 19 archives in seven
countries, sheds new light on the motivations of these men.
“The
German war effort offered individuals whose armies did not take part in the
fighting a blend of adventure, a test to affirm their worthiness and the
opportunity to fight for a cause – or parts of a cause – they believed in.
“Much
like other transnational volunteers in the modern era, foreigners in the
Waffen-SS wanted to add meaning to their lives, and chose to seek it in very
dangerous and controversial settings.”
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