I wonder if the Nazis killed anyone in Soviet territory or did anything particularly heinous that would disgust anyone.
(I kind of wonder if Quora should be disallowed cause it’s just easy pickings)
I wonder if the Nazis killed anyone in Soviet territory or did anything particularly heinous that would disgust anyone.
(I kind of wonder if Quora should be disallowed cause it’s just easy pickings)
i dig the instant and brazen conflation of “SS Officers” with “german soldiers”, Jim Wayne, Duke University alum. more like Dooky University.
in war time Germany, officers were like 3% of all military personnel; a 33-to-1 ratio of not-officers to officers. 50,000 SS officers would mean the SS was officer heavy compared to regular army, which is very on-brand for a highly-political and tightly managed military group, representing >6% of the total SS force. today’s bloated US officer corps is around 19% for reference, and people write white papers about how it’s either an organizational crisis or cool, actually.
anyway, SS as an organization had 800,000 individuals, while the ww2 german army had 13.6 million members. those 50,000 criminals would represent the hardened core of ideologically committed and experienced killers. no doubt they were crucial in western containment of socialism.
Bigger ratio of officers and especially NCO’s to rank soldiers is normal in peacetime, it gives army room to rapidly expand in case of war, though 19% officers is still very excessive. It is a crisis which is characteristical for armies losing their military proficiency and turning into bloated bureocracies. What’s unusual in this particular case is that they are in constant war, but they only do one sided agressions against weak victims so majority of the army is free to wallow in corruption and stagnancy while minority is responsible for carrying the abovementioned acts - therefore this minority is the real military and the rest are likely just ballast - again characteristical thing for decaying colonial empires, compare especially with post-WW1 France.