Every single branch of the German armed forces participated in the Holocaust. Though the main agents of killing were the Einsatzgruppen which operated in the villages and countrysides of Poland, Belarus and the Ukraine, and then later the detachments which operated the death camps, their gruesome work was aided and abetted by the entire gamut of German military formations.

As an example, the 286th Security Division was a regular army unit that was staffed largely by older reservists. Their area of deployment was in the rear of the main advance on the Eastern Front and their responsibilities were to maintain supply lines, secure important crossroads, and defend against partisan or guerilla incursions. Nominally, these tasks are purely military in nature, but in the execution of their duties zealotry for the racial creed of Nazism led the division’s commander to eagerly report that “constant contact was maintained with the Security Service, specifically the Einsatzgruppe of Gruppenführer Neumann, the Einsatzkommando 8 of Sturmbannführer Dr. Bratfisch [sic], and in particular with Untersturmführer Reschke’s Orscha-based squad.” At another time the same commander had ordered that “as a matter of principle,” refugees in the security area should be “arrested or liquidated.” The natural and intended consequence of this order was the wanton execution of civilians.

In this, the 286th Security Division is a good example of the systemic involvement of the entire apparatus of the German military in the Holocaust. It was not but a small or identifiable group of cartoonishly evil men who were responsible for it all. As Christopher Browning detailed in his book on the men of Police Reserve Battalion 101 -- again, a unit staffed by regular army reservists with little explicit attachment to the party -- “by age, geographical origin, and social background” the members of the battalion were those who “were least likely to be considered apt material out of which to mold future mass killers.” As a matter of recruitment, the men who were employed at the point of action, where rhetoric met reality in actual killing, were not selected by any sort of “careful choosing of personnel particularly suited for mass murder.”

It should therefore be no surprise that the Waffen-SS was deeply imbricated in the same. If men like those attached to regular police battalions, who had no apparently special attachment to the ideology of Nazism, could be relied upon as executors of genocide, then what could be expected of the most ideologically committed fighting divisions if not more of the same?

Among the reams of evidence which were entered into the court record at Nuremberg, no small number went to establishing the criminality of the SS as a whole, and the Waffen-SS in particular. During his cross-examination of the SS General Paul Hauser, Major Elwyn Jones brought up the example of “horrible massacres, destructions by fire and looting” in the Yugoslav villages of “Otok Cornji, Ruda, and Dolac Dolnji” where members of the 7th SS Prinz Eugen Division gathered “women, children, and men in one place and then opened fire on the crowd with machine guns, threw bombs at them, looted their property, and burned the bodies.” Despite having adamantly defended the innocence of the Waffen-SS only moments before, even Paul Hauser was forced to admit that yes, those brutal men had been members of the same.

Ultimately, the particular instance which Major Jones brought up at trial is almost indistinguishable in its character from the hundreds of other such actions. Except for the dates and the names of the villages which distinguished them, Waffen-SS brutalities were so commonplace as to almost fade into each other. There is a Russian website which tracks the number of villages in Belarus that have been confirmed to have been entirely destroyed during the war, with their inhabitants either scattered or murdered, and it has never stopped ticking upwards. Though the Waffen-SS is not particularly responsible for every murder in the Belarus, they share no small portion of blame.

They are also to blame for some of the most infamous war crimes of the Western front. In a fit of rage at having been delayed by resistance activity, elements of the 2nd SS Panzer Division massacred almost the entire population of the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane, and largely leveled the town out of further spite. The only survivor was an old woman who, despite being shot, managed to escape from the church where the town had been told to congregate, and where the SS had begun their massacre with fire-bombs.

The other infamous incident came during the Battle of the Bulge, where members of the 1st SS Panzer Division massacred 84 captured Allied soldiers in an open field near Malmedy. None were armed, nor had any attempted escape before the shooting begun. For his role in this atrocity and others, the commander Joachim Peiper was later executed after trial.

As to the idea that members of the Waffen-SS were forced to fight; it’s true after 1943. At least in the sense that conscription had been instituted and it was a capital crime to avoid service. However, before that membership in Waffen-SS units was strictly voluntary and rather exclusive. Even then, though soldiers may have been forced to fight by nature of being conscripted, not a single German soldier was ever forced to brutalize. Despite the constant refrain that they were just following orders under fear of allegedly dire punishment, there is not a single instance of a German soldier being severely punished for refusing to murder, pillage, or otherwise commit atrocities.

In fact, an example of retributive punishment has been something of the golden goose that defense attorneys for war criminals have been searching for, because such an example would be compelling proof of coercion. That no such example has ever been brought to bear as a trial strategy says a lot about its existence, or lack thereof. David Kitterman made a study of examples of German soldiers who refused atrocious orders, and he found that more than half reported no negative consequences at all. For the remainder, about one-sixth of cases involved threats of punishment, but these punishments were rarely carried out. The most severe recorded consequence was levied against an officer named Hornig who was sent to Buchenwald while awaiting trial. However, while there he retained his officer rank and pay and lived in circumstances very different from the average inmate. The charges against him were never followed through on.

So, while pressure of a sort was no doubt felt by German genocidaires, it was almost entirely of the mundane sort. Social pressure, a sense of duty, and the appeal of obedience to authority were all factors in the decision to participate in brutality. However, in the face of justifying murder, none of these pressures can be said to be compelling enough to describe one’s actions as ‘forced.’ As with every other branch of the German military during the Second World War, members of the Waffen-SS committed war crimes, and they made the willing choice to do so.