Nazi SS Veterans Interviewed in Cold War West Germany (1965)
On 27 January 1965, ITN broadcast Alan Hankinson’s special report on anti-Nazi demonstrations taking place in Rendsburg, a town in the West German state of Schleswig-Holstein. Protesters were marching ahead of a meeting of veterans of the Waffen-SS, the combat arm of the Nazi Party’s paramilitary Schutzstaffel (SS) organisation. Demonstrators were alarmed by media reports that SS veterans were secretly assisting each other into positions of power in West German society, including the country’s security services.
Waffen-SS veterans had for some time been engaged in an effort to rehabilitate the historical reputation and legal status of the Waffen-SS, and were aided in doing so by senior West German politicians including Konrad Adenauer and Franz Josef Strauss. Veterans interviewed by Hankinson denied having knowledge of the Holocaust until the war’s end, and argued that Waffen-SS veterans should be treated differently from other SS divisions which had participated in or overseen atrocities of the Nazi regime.
During the Nuremburg Trials, the Waffen-SS was found to have been an “integral part” of the SS, involved in several war crimes. Further historical evidence surfaced in the decades since the Second World War has shown Waffen-SS members and units to have played a crucial, frontline role in the evolution and execution of the Holocaust.
Credit to : ITN Archive
