Black Edelweiss: A Memoir of Combat and Conscience by a Soldier of the Waffen-SS (review)

At a moment in history when the nexus between extremist ideology, individual fanaticism, and highly motivated military elites once again dominates the security and military planning of the world's democracies, the author provides a thoughtful, insightful, and highly readable account of how a seemingly ordinary, well-educated young man can be manipulated by the values of an absolutist, all-embracing belief system, allied with longstanding familial values, into willingly going out to do righteous battle against a particular concept of "barbarism." In the 1940s, the young man in question ended up in the Waffen-SS fighting "Bolshevism." In today's world, he might be a member of al qaeda flying planes into buildings.

Written immediately after the war's end when he was a POW in American captivity, the author presents a complex narrative, one that captures the intense pride and sense of self-fulfillment he experienced as a combat soldier of the Waffen-SS, counterpointed by his growing realization that men who wore the same uniform as himself were intimately involved in the worst genocidal crimes of Hitler's Germany. Because it was written so soon after the events it covers, the author perfectly captures the sights and sounds of his extensive combat experience, actions that cover both his regiment's part in one of the great fighting retreats of history, the XVIII Mountain Corps' withdrawal through hundreds of miles of Finnish Arctic wilderness into Northern Norway, and a successful but ultimately pointless assault on American positions in the Vosges Mountains. The author vividly describes the dangers, discomforts, camaraderie, and intense isolation, indeed myopia, of combat. He perfectly captures the reality of a situation where life and death are experienced at the level of the section or platoon; identification is with the company or battalion; and where interest and knowledge only rarely expand to embrace any wider setting.

It is clear from the book that the author, for a soldier of the Waffen-SS, had a "good" war. Be it mountain warfare training in bucolic Bavaria, combat in the empty spaces of Northern Finland, or a late arrival on the Western Front, his regiment, which unselfconsciously bore the name of one of history's greatest mass murderers, Reinhard Heydrich, avoided both the barbarity of warfare on the Eastern Front and the slaughter that befell the German Armed Forces during their retreat from Normandy. The author also had the unique experience of fighting his war amongst a largely friendly civilian population, either Finns or the "booty" Germans of the border areas of Greater Germany. Not for him the experience of battling partisans or sealing off a village while Einsatztruppen rounded up Jewish "bandits."

In retrospect, he clearly recognizes that he was lucky; he narrowly avoided a posting to the Prinz Eugen division, then on antipartisan duty in Yugoslavia. Service with that unit would have exposed him to SS brutality at its worst. And he missed by chance receiving the blood group tattoo that would have indelibly marked him as a member of the SS. It was this last fortuitous event, coupled with his language and shorthand skills, which allowed him to land on his feet as POW clerk/interpreter to an American JAG officer. This job, in turn, gave him access to the documentation being produced for the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. It was this information, and access to contemporary newspaper reports, that caused him to reassess not only his own wartime service and that of his comrades, but also the entire belief system that led him into volunteering for service in the Waffen-SS. It is this exploration that is a fascinating and unique contribution to our knowledge of the motivations of the men who comprised not only the Waffen-SS, but much of the...