"Fascinating - assiduously researched". (Michael Burleigh). "Hitler's Foreign Executioners" reveals for the first time Heinrich Himmler's secret master plan for Europe: an SS empire that would have no place for either the Nazi Party or Adolf Hitler. His astonishingly ambitious plan depended on the recruitment of tens of thousands of 'Germanic' people from every corner of Europe, and even parts of Asia, to build an 'SS Europa'. This book, researched in archives all over Europe and using first-hand testimony, exposes Europe's dirty secret: nearly half a million Europeans and more than a million Soviet citizens enlisted in the armed forces of the Third Reich to fight a deadly crusade against a mythic foe, Jewish-Bolshevism. Even today, some apologists claim that these foreign SS volunteers were merely soldiers 'like any other' and fought a decent war against Stalin's Red Army. Christopher Hale demonstrates conclusively that these surprisingly common views are mistaken. By taking part in Himmler's murderous master plan, these foreign executioners hoped to prove that they were worthy to join his future 'SS Europa'. But as the Reich collapsed in 1944, Himmler's monstrous scheme led to bitter confrontations with Hitler - and to the downfall of the man once known as 'loyal Heinrich'.
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"Prodigiously researched." --The Jewish Book Council
About the Author
CHRISTOPHER HALE is a writer and television documentary-maker. His previous book, Himmler's Crusade (Bantam, 2003), won the prestigious Giuseppe Mazotti Prize in 2006. He has produced and directed programmes for the BBC, Channel 4 and the Discovery Channel. He lives in Berlin and his website is www.christopherhale.co.uk.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
By H. T. Davies
VINE™ VOICE
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
This book covers an area of WWII which is often overlooked and now, as the author says, more often glossed over. Did men from the occupied countries join the SS to protect their lands from the threat of international communism or were they really adherents of Nazism? In the Baltics especially the SS units seem to be glorified as national heroes defending the homeland and any "excesses" (i.e. mass murder) put down to hostile left-wing propaganda or quite simply denied.
There is much original research and many interesting potted biographies of volunteers, many of whom have, as the author points out more than once, had 60-odd years to invent convincing backstories in which they metamorphose from vodka-sodden sadistic killers into white knights forlornly defending the frontiers of civilsation. Not all skullduggery is confined to the Axis - we find the British authorities up to some shady dealing as the ink dies on the instrument of surrender. It was also interesting to learn that the Grand Mufti became a mentor to Yassar Arafat in the post-war Middle East.
However, I found two big problems with the book. The typos and editing errors are abundant. Names of persons and places change from page to page and sometimes sentences stop mid-way because they have reached the end of the line (literally) and the new line starts with a new sentence. Sometimes you can guess what is missing, sometimes not. The other problem is the author's style which is very repetitive. How many times do we need to be told that von dem Bach-Zelewski was a 'bandit hunter'? Twice may be but surely not every time this SS leader is mentioned. The same applies to Himmler's masseur, who gets nearly as many mentions as the Reichsführer himself.... Read more ›
There is much original research and many interesting potted biographies of volunteers, many of whom have, as the author points out more than once, had 60-odd years to invent convincing backstories in which they metamorphose from vodka-sodden sadistic killers into white knights forlornly defending the frontiers of civilsation. Not all skullduggery is confined to the Axis - we find the British authorities up to some shady dealing as the ink dies on the instrument of surrender. It was also interesting to learn that the Grand Mufti became a mentor to Yassar Arafat in the post-war Middle East.
However, I found two big problems with the book. The typos and editing errors are abundant. Names of persons and places change from page to page and sometimes sentences stop mid-way because they have reached the end of the line (literally) and the new line starts with a new sentence. Sometimes you can guess what is missing, sometimes not. The other problem is the author's style which is very repetitive. How many times do we need to be told that von dem Bach-Zelewski was a 'bandit hunter'? Twice may be but surely not every time this SS leader is mentioned. The same applies to Himmler's masseur, who gets nearly as many mentions as the Reichsführer himself.... Read more ›
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
By Mr. Pj Williams
VINE™ VOICE
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
for anyone who reads military history regularly its nearly always a struggle to find that balance in a book of scholorship written in an interesting and accessible way. well Hale does an outstanding job of it here, by dispelling myths, bringing new information to light and doing it in a riveting fashion. Having just read Weales book on the SS about 4 months after reading this you notice a massive differnce in the general Quality of the research, also you come away from this book feeling like you really have learnt somthing new. His treatment of the evidence is sometimes a liitle less even handed but doing so with a subject like killing squads I imagine would be supremely difficult so I am not bothered about that, but his treatment of the various counties involved, and the getting away from the " it was all germans and only Germans " was refreshing as so many writers still wander down that road, especially when the wermacht still doesnt get its share of the blame from some writers.
All in all A great book well executed which brings colour to those innvolved and will keep you looking for spare moments in the day to read more of it. One of teh better books I have read this year
All in all A great book well executed which brings colour to those innvolved and will keep you looking for spare moments in the day to read more of it. One of teh better books I have read this year
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
By Lance Grundy
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
By the summer of 1944 just over half of the men serving in the Waffen SS were not so-called "Aryan Germans" at all. Dutchmen, Danes, Norwegians, Flemings, Swedes, Swiss, Romanians and Frenchmen had been fighting in SS uniforms since 1942 and by the summer of 1943 they had been joined by Ukrainians, Fez-wearing Muslims from Bosnia, Latvians and Estonians. By the end of the war, men from the occupied territories of the Soviet Union, Indians from the sub-continent and even a handful of British National Socialists known as the 'Britisches Freikorps' were all fighting for Hitler under the banner of the SS. Even when the war was lost, fanatical, rag-tag bands of foreign SS men could still be found scuttling around Berlin taking pot-shots at the invading Soviet soldiers. This book endeavours to explain who these men were, why they were recruited, why they were prepared to collaborate with and die for the foreign power who had invaded their countries and expose the role they played in the destruction of European Jewry.
According to Christopher Cole, Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS, had an almost unbelievably ambitious plan to create an SS empire which would, in time, supersede both the National Socialist Party and its leader Adolf Hitler. This 'SS Europa' would bring together 'Germanic' peoples from all over Europe, Germanise them further and dissolve their national identities. The first stage of this master plan called for the 'chosen' people to be bound together in perpetuity through the shedding of a 'blood sacrifice' in a joint war of total annihilation against the Nazis' two pet hates, Jewry and Bolshevism.... Read more ›
According to Christopher Cole, Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS, had an almost unbelievably ambitious plan to create an SS empire which would, in time, supersede both the National Socialist Party and its leader Adolf Hitler. This 'SS Europa' would bring together 'Germanic' peoples from all over Europe, Germanise them further and dissolve their national identities. The first stage of this master plan called for the 'chosen' people to be bound together in perpetuity through the shedding of a 'blood sacrifice' in a joint war of total annihilation against the Nazis' two pet hates, Jewry and Bolshevism.... Read more ›
12 of 15 people found the following review helpful
By Bill Niven
Format:Hardcover
In contrast to the previous reviewer, I was not left wondering what happened, or who did it, or when, in the passage that reviewer considers to be unclear. Hale introduces the topic from a variety of perspectives, but the connection between them I found not the least hard to fathom. The paragraphs on Amery show us the Nazis trying to recruit former BUF members into the Waffen SS, while the following section on the Baltic discusses the contribution of Latvians and other Baltic nationals to this organisation. It is true that the word `formerly' is used at one point, instead of `formally'. But are we really going to make one slip of the pen a criterion for judging the quality of a book? If so, we can rule out a whole number of masterpieces of historiography on that grounds alone.
Readers, please do not be put off from buying Hale's book. It is, as Michael Burleigh comments on the cover, "fascinating". It is also a highly original and thoughtful work, challenging some of the core assumptions behind Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's "Hitler's Willing Executioners". If the Holocaust was the result of an ingrained anti-Semitism unique to the German psyche, why did so many non-Germans participate? As Hale shows, it is by no means the case that they were frogmarched into the Waffen SS. And why was Himmler so apparently ready to integrate so many foreigners into an elitist organisation supposedly constituted according to principles of race? Not necessarily, Hale argues, simply because recruits were needed (the usual argument of historians, Hale tells us). It seems that Himmler long harboured the idea of racially "improving" the stock of non-Germanic peoples by getting them involved in the grand schemes of Nazi world conquest. Race was a more malleable concept that has hitherto been assumed.... Read more ›
Readers, please do not be put off from buying Hale's book. It is, as Michael Burleigh comments on the cover, "fascinating". It is also a highly original and thoughtful work, challenging some of the core assumptions behind Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's "Hitler's Willing Executioners". If the Holocaust was the result of an ingrained anti-Semitism unique to the German psyche, why did so many non-Germans participate? As Hale shows, it is by no means the case that they were frogmarched into the Waffen SS. And why was Himmler so apparently ready to integrate so many foreigners into an elitist organisation supposedly constituted according to principles of race? Not necessarily, Hale argues, simply because recruits were needed (the usual argument of historians, Hale tells us). It seems that Himmler long harboured the idea of racially "improving" the stock of non-Germanic peoples by getting them involved in the grand schemes of Nazi world conquest. Race was a more malleable concept that has hitherto been assumed.... Read more ›
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A New and Provocative Perspective
Our view of the Second World War is one which Hollywood has comfortably help shape -- is of uniformed generals leading their troops and tanks into battle, with not just the sides... Read more
Published 21 months ago by LAURENCE C PETERS
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating new study of SS foreign volunteers.
The murky history of the foreign volunteers to the SS has for too long been the preserve of either books that only highlighted and focused on the military aspects of their service,... Read more
Published 21 months ago by M. Nicholson
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no thank you
I bought this book and was very disappointed to read on the second page of the preface that in January 1943 the German military authorities gave John Amery access to British POWs. Read more
Published 21 months ago by Niccolo65
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