A Common Myth Regarding The German SS That Persists To This Day

0:00This podcast is brought to you by the National payroll institute, the leader for the payroll profession in Canada, setting the standard of professional excellence, delivering critical expertise, and providing resources that over 45,000 payroll professionals rely on. There is a famous photo from Hamburg in 1936. It's a sea of people at a rally that was, that had an attendance eight-all Hitler. And almost every single picture, a person in the picture is doing the Hile Hitler salute, except for one lone man that stands out like a sore thumb. And it's widely believed that that man was a man by the name of August, August landmesser. And he joined the party because everyone was joining the party. But then he fell in love with a Jewish woman named Irma. And he was hauled for a tribunal for some made up law about denigrating the race and the blood and all this stuff. They didn't have enough to convict him. So they said, don't do it again. Well, he did it again. And his wife is widely believed to have been killed in a euthanasia camp.

1:03And he was sent for reeducation, eventually killed apparently. And once they were forced to the front and his kids were separated and put in orphanages. Now I say, tell you that story off the top because there was a time after the war where a lot of Germans wanted you to believe that they were all August landmesser. And history is trickier than that. And not to say that everybody who did the Seaghyl did it because they both wrote it Lee were Nazis, but there's, you know, pack mentality and pressure and the, you know, the fear of what happened to August landmesser can make you do some stuff. But on the next episode of hostile history, they're talking about an entire swath of people. There was a push to clean the hands of an entire part of the German military. And we're joined by the host of hostile history, David Boris. Welcome. Ben, great introduction. Always a pleasure to talk to you. All right. So talk to me about the, what is it?

2:04The cleanware Wehrmacht. Wehrmacht. Yes, Ben, this is, I have to say this is one of the most interesting topics I have ever dealt with. I find it so interesting because it's about myth making. It's so interesting to me the way nations choose what myths to make and what myths to discard. In this case, what ends up happening? The myth of the clean Wehrmacht. In the aftermath of the Second World War, there was a concerted effort to basically establish a false truth or a false narrative that said it wasn't the broader German military that was complicit in war crimes. It was simply a small number of diehard SS fanatics. Everyone else was fighting an honorable war, fighting to defend their country and either didn't know about it or truly was not in complicit in any way. And this myth persists for decades. Yeah. Does any of it have to do with the story of Closvon Stoffenberg, the guy that Tom Cruise

3:06played in the movie Valbrie? And that was a, because he was his tenure in the German military predated Hitler's rise, right? And that's part of the myth, right? That's a lot of those guys were proud German military men that had nothing to do with the Nazis and the Nazis came in. So they got folded in, but they weren't Nazis. And even some of them tried to kill Adolf Hitler. Is that part of this? Sure, of course it is because there are examples of Nazis who rejected at certain points of the war, especially when it started to go bad, started to reject Hitler's leadership. And that's part of a conversation that stems from these decades of this myth is the idea of what we call the myth of the good Nazi. Yeah. Is that there were these Nazis who were good people who then decided at certain points to fight against Hitler. But the problem has been that becomes the dominant narrative. And the reality of the horrors and what the Velmok actually did, it's totally buried beneath

4:07that stuff. But what's to me, what's interesting about this story is it's sort of like the political calculus around this, because this, this, this was a myth that was created in the postwar rebuilding of West Germany and add now, add now a relied still on a big contingent of these guys to, to stay in power in West Germany. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, let's, let's break down the Cold War for a second. You have Germany, East Germany is now in the Soviet sphere, West Germany in the democratic Western sphere. And guess who's on the front line of the war if it goes hot, it's West Germany. Guess who's expected to fight the Soviets if they cross the border, it's West Germany. And guess how many of those West Germans fought in the Vermark, many of them totally, right? So you got to imagine that the Americans, the Canadians, the Brits, NATO in general, they don't want to be, they don't really want to be disturbing West Germany that much. They don't want to like sort of rock the boat with these people that they're kind of asking to be on the front line of the new war. And it's almost like, let's just move on.

5:09Don't ask, don't tell. And that's why this myth just continues for decades and decades and decades. So what were the, what were the social implications of the myth gaining traction and how did it get deflated? Well, the social implications, a couple of things. I think the one thing that is a historian I've seen in my career is the idea that there's, you could sort of take certain aspects of the Vermark and isolate them from the war crimes. So like a good example, Ronald, right? Everybody knows who Ronald is, right? Oh, they've been, they've been, they've been. That's right, the desert fox. And there is this absolute fanboy subculture of Ronald and there's this notion that no, no, no, no, he might have been a Nazi, but he wasn't a bad Nazi. He didn't, he wasn't part of those war crimes. That's, that's, that's, it's not. Because he was fighting North Africa. He was far away from the death camps. That's, I mean, that's the, that's how the narrative sort of unfolds. But the fact of the matter is he was complicit in different ways in many different war crimes. For sure, we know this now, but that's an example of this sort of social fanboy, fan person

6:12culture that starts to develop where people just want to talk about Blitzkrieg and the Tiger Tank and the Panther Tank and all this stuff and not ever address the war crimes. And so guess what happens? It becomes really convenient to just go, yeah, they weren't complicit in it because, you know, that's, that's just a few diardinauts. Yeah. So it actually feeds this whole subculture. And then what happens is last couple decades, great historians like our guest waitman Bjorn who we had on and others, Christopher Browning go, no, no, no, everyone, let's get real here. Let's really look at the evidence and guess what the evidence says? Many, many people in the very mark were complicit in horrific war crimes. And I think because you had the SS and the essay that were so, so like died, you know, died in the wool. They drank the Kool-Aid on day one. They were so proud to be Nazis that a lot of people look good and comparison, but that doesn't mean they were Nazis. Yeah, absolutely. And of course, like you have the Nuremberg trials. You have these huge show trials to get the worst of the worst.

7:14And there's people that killed prisoners of war that rounded up Jewish civilians that did all of these things who kind of just get sort of forgotten in the aftermath and frankly, get forgotten for the rest of history in many ways. And it's this myth that we're really myth busting this week. We're really breaking this down and showing people, hey, it's much darker than what we think it is. Yeah. And so, but tell me, how did it, how did we get to a point where we can, we can confidently and persuasively call it a myth today? Well, you know, to be honest, part of it lies in the German state itself because the nation of Germany underwent a dramatic and actually quite impressive effort of their own reckoning with the past. And the German state, you know, after the late 1960s into the 1970s, the younger generation started saying we did take part in this or our parents, our grandparents took part in this, our families took part in this. So the German state really began that momentum. And then sort of as you get into the end of the 20th beginning of the 21st century,

8:15more Western English speaking academics begin to pick up that sort of real raw pulling back of the curtain. And so it starts there. I mean, Germany did has done an impressive amount of reconciliation with the past in this regard. Well, listen, one of these days your podcast is going to have to take on the toxic destructive nature of narratives that they're pushed by the likes of Tucker Carlson. That's anybody on who says that Churchill is the real bad guy of the second world war. I got, we got to give people like that no quarter, no quarter. Yeah. Second, they get a toll hold. They're going to, they start, they, they, they, they want their living problem, right? They want room, room to grow. Wow. That was really good. You said that too. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate you, man. Thank you so much. I love our chats every week. Thank you. Me too, man. Take care, buddy. And just a reminder, if you want more BMS, we put it a podcast every day and you can find even more content on X on Instagram and on YouTube.