Germanic SS

Origins

Before the war, both Denmark and Norway had fascist parties. The Danish National Socialist Workers' Party (Danmarks Nationalsocialistiske Arbejderparti; DNSAP) was founded in 1930, however, only held three seats in parliament by 1939. By 1933 Vidkun Quisling was the leader of a Norwegian political party, Nasjonal Samling (NS, National Unity). However, it was not effective as a political party until the pro-German government took over after Norway was conquered. At that point, its state police, abolished in 1937, was reestablished to assist the Gestapo in Norway. In the Netherlands, the Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging (National Socialist Movement; NSB) had greater success before the war. The party had 4 percent of the vote in the 1937 national elections. After the occupation in 1940, all these groups worked in their respected countries in support of Nazi Germany and became recruiting grounds for the Waffen-SS.

The Nazi idea behind co-opting additional Germanic people into the SS stems to a certain extent from the völkisch belief that the original Aryan-Germanic homeland rested in Scandinavia and that in a racial-ideological sense, people from there or the neighboring northern European regions were a human reservoir of Nordic/Germanic blood. Conquest of Western Europe gave the Germans, and especially the SS, access to these "potential recruits" who were considered part of the wider "Germanic family". Four of these conquered nations were ripe with Germanic peoples according to Nazi estimations (Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, and the Flemish-speaking Belgians). Himmler referred to people from these lands in terms of their Germanic suitability as, "blutsmässig unerhört wertvolle Kräfte" (by blood exceptionally highly qualified people). Accordingly, some of them were recruited into the SS and enjoyed the highest privileges as did foreign workers from these regions, to include unrestrained sexual contact with German women. Eager to expand their reach, fanatical Nazis like Chief of the SS-Hauptamt, Gottlob Berger considered the Germanic-SS as foundational for a burgeoning German Empire.

Himmler's vision for a Germanic-SS started with grouping the Netherlands, Belgium and north-east France together into a western-Germanic state called Burgundia which would be policed by the SS as a security buffer for Germany. In 1940, the first manifestation of the Germanic-SS appeared in Flanders as the Allgemeene-SS Vlaanderen to be joined two-months later by the Dutch Nederlandsche-SS and in May 1941 the Norwegian Norges-SS was formed. The final nation to contribute to the Germanic-SS was Denmark, whose Germansk Korpet (later called the Schalburg Corps) came into being in April 1943. For the SS, they did not think of their compatriots in terms of national borders but in terms of Germanic racial makeup, known conceptually to them as Deutschtum, a greater idea which transcended traditional political boundaries. While the SS leadership foresaw an imperialistic and semi-autonomous relationship for the Nordic/Germanic countries like Denmark, the Netherlands and Norway as co-bearers of a greater Germanic empire, Hitler refused to grant them the same degree of independence despite ongoing pressure from ranking members of the SS.

Duties

The purpose of the Germanic SS was to enforce Nazi racial doctrine, especially anti-Semitic ideals. They typically served as local security police augmenting German units of the Gestapo, Sicherheitsdienst (SD), and other main departments of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA). Their principle responsibilities during wartime was to root-out partisans, subversive organizations and any group opposed to Nazi ideals. In other cases, these foreign units of the SS were employed by major German firms to distribute propaganda for the Nazi cause among their compatriots and to police and control workers. More than this however, the inclusion of other Germanic peoples was part of the Nazi attempt to Germanize Europe in the collective, and for them, Germanization entailed the creation of an empire ruled by Germanic people at the expense of other races.

One of the most notorious groups was in the Netherlands where the Germanic-SS was employed to round-up Jews. Of the 140,000 Jews that had lived in the Netherlands prior to 1940, around 24,000 survived the war by hiding. Despite their relatively small numbers, a total of 512 Jews from Oslo were hunted down by the Norwegian Police and the Germanske SS Norge (Norwegian General SS); once caught, they were deported to Auschwitz. More Jews were rounded-up elsewhere, but the total number of Norwegian Jews captured never reached a thousand throughout the course of the war. Similar measures were planned by the SS against Danish Jews who totaled about 6,500 but most of them managed to go into hiding or escape to Sweden before the senior German representative in Denmark, SS-General Werner Best could marshal the SS forces at his disposal and complete his planned raids and deportations.

Germanic-SS organizations

The following countries raised active Germanic-SS detachments:

An underground Nazi organization also existed in Switzerland, known as the Germanische SS Schweiz. It had very few members and was considered merely a splinter Nazi group by Swiss authorities.

Post war

After World War II, many Germanic SS members were tried by their respective countries as traitors. Independent war crimes trials (outside the jurisdiction of the Nuremberg Trials) were conducted in several European countries, such as the Netherlands, Norway and Denmark.

Germanic-SS ranks

The Germanic SS maintained an insignia system based on the ranks and insignia of the Schutzstaffel. The various names of the ranks were slightly modified depending upon the particular country in which they were used.

The following is a comparison of regular SS and Germanic-SS rank titles.

‡ The Flemish in Belgium used the same titles as the Dutch SS. No rank above SS-Standartenführer has been found.