A little organizational information.
The SS was organized in two branches, the Waffen (combat) SS and the General SS. The Waffen SS fought on the front lines next to the German army, the Wehrmacht, but had a different chain of command, often with serious coordination problems between the two. To further frustrate matters, the field artillery were under the partial control of the Luftwaffe, the Air Forces, under yet another different command structure.
The Waffen SS were very high quality, elite forces, and at least at their creation, the *average* education of officers was a Masters’ degree.
The General SS, on the other hand, committed the vast majority of genocidal acts and war crimes, and were also tasked with operating the concentration camps, under the direction of the Financial Ministry, of all things.
When the tide was turned in the eastern front, and the Wehrmacht was in retreat, the Waffen SS carried out some extraordinary delaying actions against the Russians, even more extraordinary than the battle of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae. For example, a single antitank company held off two Russian mechanized armies for two weeks, with little more than tube antitank weapons (Panzerfausts) and small arms.
Once Germany had conquered most of Europe, the Waffen SS also organized nationalist SS units in many of the countries they occupied, often recruiting among anti-communists.
Its delusional to pretend that the Waffen SS had no hand in the mass murders. In fact Das Reich was more than happy to mass murder the entire town of Orador in France. And the excuse? That’s how they did things on the eastern front.
American GIs at Malmedy also would be interested to hear that the Waffen SS wasn’t a bunch of low life’s that systematically murdered outside the norms of the military profession.
And the Das Reich 2nd SS division, which was formed in Ukraine, and did some of its nastiest work there, had an emblem for their unit. It was an emblem called the Wolfsangel. Coincidently, it was also adopted by the Svoboda party (Socialist National party) and can be seen on he armbands of the Right Sector thugs that just took over Kiev and all the security and defense posts in the new government.
the Financial Ministry because they considered Jews and Poles and Russian pows as little more than beasts of burden — actually worse than beasts of burden
Exactly. Europe's conservatism is very different from America's (because it has no Biblical sentimentalism) and for that reason, Nazism and Communism are seen as the only two alternatives there.