HIAG
HIAG was a lobby group and a denialist veterans' organisation founded by former high-ranking Waffen-SS personnel in West Germany in 1951. Its main objective was to achieve legal, economic, and historical rehabilitation of the Waffen-SS.
To achieve these aims, the organisation used contacts with political parties, and employed multi-prong historical negationism and propaganda efforts, including periodicals, books, and public speeches. A HIAG-owned publishing house, Munin Verlag, served as a platform for its publicity. This extensive body of work, 57 book titles and more than 50 years of monthly periodicals, has been described by historians as revisionist apologia.
Always in touch with its members' Nazi past, HIAG was a subject of significant controversy, both in West Germany and abroad. The organisation drifted into open far-right extremism in its later history; it disbanded in 1992 at the federal level, but local groups continue to exist into the 21st century. Its monthly periodical, Der Freiwillige, survived until 2014. While HIAG only partially achieved its goals of legal and economic rehabilitation of the Waffen-SS, its propaganda efforts led to the reshaping of the image of the Waffen-SS in popular culture.
Background
In the years following World War II, the Allied occupational authorities in Germany implemented policies which included demilitarisation, denazification, democratisation and decentralisation. The Allies' attempts were often perceived by the occupied population as "victors' justice" and met with limited success. For those in the Western occupation zones, the beginning of the Cold War further undermined these policies by reviving the idea of the necessity to fight against Soviet communism, echoing an aspect of Hitler's foreign policy. In 1950, after the outbreak of the Korean War, it became clear to the United States that German armed forces would need to be reconstituted. Former German officers used the changing political and military situation as leverage to demand the rehabilitation of the Wehrmacht. In October 1950, a group of former senior officers produced a document, which became known as the "Himmerod memorandum", for West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer. It included the demands that German war criminals be released and that the "defamation" of the German soldiers, including the Waffen-SS personnel, cease, which Adenauer worked to implement.To accommodate the West German government, the Allies commuted a number of sentences for war crimes. A public declaration by Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower followed in January 1951, distinguishing "between the regular German soldier and officer and Hitler and his criminal group... The fact that certain individuals committed in war dishonorable and despicable acts reflects on the individuals concerned and not on the great majority of German soldiers and officers." The same year, some former career officers of the Wehrmacht were granted war pensions. Unlike the Wehrmacht, the SS had been deemed a criminal organisation at the Nuremberg trials and could thus act as an "alibi of a nation", as being solely responsible for crimes of the Nazi regime. Consequently, Waffen-SS career personnel were not covered under the 1951 law.
In 1949, the ban on forming veterans' associations was lifted. Encouraged by the shifting tone of the World War II discourse and the courting of the Wehrmacht veterans by the West German government and political parties, former Waffen-SS members came forward to campaign for their interests.
Formation
HIAG's history began in late 1950 by a gradual amalgamation of local groups. The majority of its members were former junior officers in the Waffen-SS. In the summer of 1951, HIAG was formally established by Otto Kumm, a former SS-Brigadeführer. By October 1951, HIAG claimed to consist of 376 local branches.Leadership
By December 1951, former high-ranking Waffen-SS general Paul Hausser was HIAG's first spokesperson. Two well-known former Waffen-SS commanders, Felix Steiner and Herbert Gille, became early leading figures. Sepp Dietrich and Kurt Meyer became active members upon their release from prison, in 1955 and 1954. Meyer became HIAG's most effective spokesman. After Meyer's death in 1961, Erich Eberhardt, formerly of SS Division Totenkopf, assumed that role. As of 1977, Wilhelm Bittrich served as the chairman.HIAG membership was open to convicted war criminals, with the group's position being to absolve them of their responsibility. For example, the group openly embraced and advocated on behalf of Dietrich, Walter Reder, and Herbert Kappler, former SS men convicted of wartime massacres.
Organisational principles
With the publication of its first periodical, Wiking-Ruf, in late 1951, HIAG was beginning to draw attention to itself and generate public controversy, including speculation that it was a neo-Nazi organisation. In response, Hausser wrote an open letter to the Bundestag, West Germany's parliament, denying these accusations and describing the HIAG as an advocacy organisation for former Waffen-SS troops. Hausser asserted that its members rejected all forms of radicalism and were "upstanding citizens".The HIAG bylaws of 1952 described the aims of the organisation as providing comradeship, legal assistance, support for those in Allied captivity, help for families, and aid in searches for those still missing. The HIAG campaigned for Waffen-SS veterans to be awarded the legal status of persons formerly in the public service, under article 131 of the Basic Law, so that they would qualify for the same rights and pensions as Wehrmacht's career soldiers.
The historian David C. Large wrote that, like any public pronouncements, these bylaws did not tell the full story of HIAG's real goals. By investigating how these statutes were applied in practice, he was able to tease out what the organisation stood for. For example, HIAG claimed to represent the entire Waffen-SS membership, living and dead, as well as their families: 500,000 in total. In reality, the organisation's rolls did not exceed 20,000. HIAG attained this number in the late 1950s, and maintained it until the early 1960s.
HIAG also asserted that the Waffen-SS was merely "the fourth arm of the Wehrmacht"; these claims were even "more dubious", explains Large. As a Nazi organisation combining both military and police powers, the Waffen-SS was an arm of the SS: its members stood under SS jurisdiction separate from that of the Wehrmacht; its personnel were responsible for guarding concentration camps and were thoroughly implicated in war crimes during the campaigns in the West and in the East.
On the other hand, as the war progressed, and the Waffen-SS grew to encompass conscripts, Waffen-SS personnel began to resemble that of the Wehrmacht, contributing to the postwar confusion as to the organisation's status. The results of conscription allowed the Waffen-SS proponents to blur the line between the Waffen-SS and the Wehrmacht, arguing not that the Waffen-SS did not participate in atrocities, but that the Wehrmacht did so as well. Large argues that the equivalence is meaningless, as, contrary to the myth of a clean Wehrmacht, it actively participated in the racial war of extermination in the Soviet Union.
Ideology
Although HIAG's leaders discouraged political affiliations, any leanings were to be "in the spirit of European and patriotic sentiment", as described in a 1951 issue of Wiking-Ruf. Internal disagreements began to emerge in the early and mid-1950s as to the stance of the organisation: Some believed in the adoption of a more open stance and the centralisation of the group under Steiner and Gille, while others within the organisation believed that this would harm the goals of rehabilitation.Waffen-SS advocacy
The main stated aims of the organisation were to provide assistance to veterans and to campaign for the rehabilitation of their legal status with respect to war pensions. During its early existence, HIAG also focused on "tracing service" actions.Tracing service meetings
HIAG embraced the Suchdienst activities, not only because it was concerned for the fate of some 40,000 members of the Waffen-SS who were missing in action, but because this outwardly humanitarian and non-political activity could help improve how it was perceived by the West German government and the society at large. Such public relations activities were important to HIAG, as it faced ongoing scrutiny and even calls for a ban on the organisation. The Suchdiensttreffen events later evolved into annual Kameradschaftstreffen, which were large-scale conventions, often accompanied by rallies.Inaugural convention
In 1952, the organisation held its first major meeting in Verden. It began respectably, with Gille announcing that the veterans were ready to "do their duty for the Fatherland" and Steiner declaring support for "freedom, order and justice". But the next speaker delivered a different message. Hermann-Bernhard Ramcke, a former paratroop general and a convicted war criminal, invited to demonstrate so-called solidarity with the Wehrmacht, condemned the Western Allies as the "real war criminals" and insisted that the blacklist on which all former SS members then stood would soon become "a list of honour".The outburst caused a furor within West Germany. Periodicals as far as the U.S. and Canada carried headlines "Hitler's Guard Cheers Ex-chief" and "Rabble-Rousing General Is Worrying the Allies", with the latter article reporting that Ramcke's speech had been greeted with "roars of approval and cries of 'Eisenhower, Schweinehund!' ". HIAG and its spokesperson Steiner hastily tried to distance the organisation from Ramcke and his remarks.
Waffen-SS war criminals as victims
The notion that Waffen-SS personnel had been "soldiers like all others" found its way into the discourse regarding war captivity. HIAG claimed that its members were victims of Allied arbitrariness and complained of harsh internment conditions. HIAG equated the status of war criminals with that of prisoners of war and obfuscated the differences between the veterans of the Wehrmacht and those of the Waffen-SS.In its periodical Wiking-Ruf, HIAG made use of the same drawings of emaciated German POWs behind barbed wire used by the publications of another post-war organisation—the West German . In its turn, VdH saw its role as a counterbalance to militaristic veterans' organisations such as HIAG and explicitly distanced itself from them in the early 1950s.
Along with other veterans' organisations, HIAG campaigned for the immediate amnesty and early release of war criminals still in Allied captivity. This issue was significant, as most of these organisations made their cooperation in the area of rearmament contingent on the satisfactory resolution of the amnesty issue. It was partly for this reason that the West German government was sympathetic to the fate of these individuals and made every effort to secure their early release. Chancellor Adenauer even met with Kurt Meyer in Werl Prison when he went there on an inspection tour.