Some For Adventure and Some For The New Europe
Some volunteered in the SS for the the sheer excitement
“While political militants and career soldiers insist on the beliefs that made them join the German side, Giolitto’s ‘adventurers’ have no qualms about confessing that they did not enlist out of loyalty to any kind of principle. The anonymous author of Vae Victis, for example, accounts for his enrollment in 1942 by the attraction of the faraway, for him glamourous, environment. He could not, he recalls, remain in Paris, when ‘the radio, the papers, the movies, the posters, and the boredom’ were telling him about a country ‘where cities have names like “Tarangog” and “Dniepropetrowsk.” Later, that same memoirist explains his excitement at hunting down partisans by the fact that the outlaw’s leader is called ‘Nikitine’, and he asks how people can still ‘believe in the three percent life annuity’ offered by some French retirement systems, when there are opportunities ‘to be bandits in the woods, command a horde, and be called Nikitine.’
Similarly, though in a less disengaged fashion, Jacques Auvray assigns his decision to enlist in the Waffen-SS just after D-Day to the desire to be ‘in the thick of things.’ ‘The height of this war,’ he writes, ‘had caused so much excitement in the imagination of the young generation that the school, the office, or the workshop had become burdens of an unbearable triteness; clear headed decision to serve reasonably well had given way to a frenzy at serving at any price.’ The phrase ‘serving at any price’ is in this context particularly revealing. Set against Rostaing’s repeated statement ‘I’ve served France’, it points to a mere desire for participating—for being at the scene where important events are supposedly taking place.
Such perverse ‘derring-do’ attitudes contrast with those of Milicienssuch as Gaultier, who affirm that they enrolled on ideological grounds. As Giolitto acknowledges, several Frenchmen, especially young people, enrolled in the Waffen-SS for reasons that had nothing to do with politics or nationalism. The SS was sentenced at the Nuremberg Trials as a ‘criminal organization,’ but its prestige, in 1943-4, was still considerable in the eyes of a certain part of the population, even in occupied countries. France was no exception. Both during his interview in Le Chagrin et la Pitieand in his memoir, La Maziere explains that the SS was for him a ‘different, invincible race,’ made up of ‘strong, generous, and ruthless’ men, who ‘would never rot.’ Similarly, Andre Bayle recounts that it was his wonderment at the view of the SS stationed in France that made him enlist when he was barely sixteen years old. Being from a family of gymnasts and circus artists, he decided to join out of fascination for the athleticism, cleanliness, and discipline of that corps. Continuing the parallel between sport and war Bayle also justifies his decision to enroll by turning to DeCoubertin’s famous statement ‘the main thing is to participate,’ adding that he felt obligated to get involved ‘in any possible way,’ because ‘wait-and-see was not the proper attitude of an athlete.’”
Others were more idealistic and visionary
“As the volunteers used clichés to justify their hostility to the USSR, they explained their endorsement of a new ‘Europe’ in a language that is equally formulaic: ‘We are at a turning point in history. I feel European. France must abandon her nationalism and accept to be integrated into a larger European organization, following the example of Germany;’ ‘Chauvinistic nationalism is obsolete on our continent. If we don’t want to be dominated by Russian Bolshevism, or Jewish- American plutocracy, or even by both, we must defeat them, and in order to do that we need a united Europe.’ Again, the volunteer’s crude affirmations seem to originate in propaganda texts, such as the editorial published in the collaborationist newspaper La France au travail on 23 June 1941: ‘For us, the war between Germany and Russia is an episode in the struggle for a European federation, for a large community in which France has a place, with a significant role to play if she so wants.’ Laden with slogans, these statements are nevertheless instructive insofar as they designate as the enemy not just Communism, but ‘Jewish American plutocracy’: the crusader against Bolshevism is also a campaign against ‘Anglo-American Liberalism’, or more broadly against ‘Westernism,’ as Gutmann puts it in his analysis of the same tendencies in the writings of Scandinavian volunteers.
Still, whether the veterans who jot down their remembrances are French or Danish, they have the same difficulties specifying what they and their comrades’ objectives exactly comprised. If the new system could be neither capitalist, nor communist, what would be its social and economic structure? And how, from a political, administrative standpoint, would the new Europe be redesigned? The only memoirist to offer a specific, though admittedly utopian, plan Saint-Loup, who claims that the ‘progressivist’ theorists running the SS school at Hildesheim wanted to build a borderless, decentralized Europe that would extend from the Atlantic to the Urals. This plan, according to Saint-Loup, eliminated nation-states, replacing them with ‘ethnic communities’ that were then grouped into ‘an SS federation with a common ethics of race, power to the best, fundamental inequality, and submission of the individual to the people.’ Saint-Loup alleges that this ‘pan-European, supra-national, anti-imperialist’ scheme had been adopted by the SS in the autumn of 1944, and that only ‘circumstances’ kept it from being implemented.”
Looks like Saint-Loup and Volkish are on the exact same page…
-excerpted from “The Waffen-SS: A European History” edited by Jochen Bohler and Robert Gerwarth