Sheringham’s 1940s weekend earlier this month has received unprecedented publicity this year – for all the wrong reasons.
After a group of men appeared at the event in Nazi uniforms and allegedly marched in the high street, the incident made local and national news throughout the week.
This coverage has led to sustained discussion about the men’s actions on the day, but the statements later made by two members of the group have also been published with far less critical attention. These statements are misleading and trivialising. Now widely available, it is important that they are corrected.
“Not one member of the group portrayed a German.”
In defence of their actions, a spokesperson for the group said: “We were wearing Waffen SS infantry uniforms displaying national shields and insignia of the countries portrayed. Not one member of the group portrayed a German.”
Let’s unpick this. The Waffen-SS was formed in 1939 as an armed branch of the SS to support Germany’s eastward advance. They fought on the front lines, participated in anti-partisan warfare, carried out mass executions and worked in concentration camps such as Auschwitz and Dachau.
To give one example of their activities, in July and August 1941 the Waffen-SS and the German army together murdered over 13,000 Jewish men, women and children by driving them into the Pripiat Marshes in Belarus, where they drowned or faced execution. In short, the Waffen-SS were crucial agents in Nazi Germany’s most murderous policies.
While it is true that non-Germans joined the Waffen-SS, there is no evidence to suggest that non-German Waffen-SS soldiers were any less brutal.
On the contrary, multiple factors encouraged non-German members to act with equal, if not greater, ruthlessness than the Germans they served alongside. Firstly, foreign enlistment in the Waffen-SS was initially voluntary and involved a strict screening process.
Those who joined up supported Hitler’s vision for Europe strongly enough to volunteer their lives – and were able to prove this to SS examiners. In fact, many volunteers came from ultra-nationalist, authoritarian movements in their home countries and shared radical, often antisemitic right wing sentiments.
Furthermore, non-German members of the Waffen-SS often pre-empted or exceeded requirements set by the Nazi authorities in an attempt to prove their commitment to an organisation which assumed that non-Germans were inherently less loyal.
Even those who joined the group for more opportunistic reasons had a vested interest in German victory once they had thrown their lot in with a Nazi organisation: they knew very well that should Germany lose the war, they could be imprisoned or executed for their collaboration. For these reasons, non-German members of the Waffen-SS were some of the last to capitulate, still fighting in the streets of Berlin until the very end of the war.
“We represent the western European nations that fought against Stalin and communism”
The statement given by the group’s spokesperson also specifies that they “represent the western European nations that fought against Stalin and communism during World War II.”
In particular, the group is reported to re-enact the ‘Wiking’ division of the Waffen-SS, which included recruits from western European countries such as Denmark and the Netherlands.
Western European members of the Waffen-SS were not exempt from their units’ acts, though: in 1941, codebreakers at Bletchley Park intercepted a message that Flemish and Norwegian volunteers had taken part in killing actions in the Soviet Union and later that year, the ‘Wiking’ division helped units of the security police to kill the entire Jewish population of Mariupol, Ukraine.
Waffen-SS units did participate in front-line action against Stalin’s Red Army, but standard warfare was only one part of their brief on the eastern front. The Waffen-SS also targeted Soviet civilians in their ‘anti-partisan’ activities, believing that any Soviet citizen could be harbouring or supplying partisan fighters. Even children, as future partisans or Red Army soldiers, were threats.
As a result, the massacre of entire villages for suspected contact with partisans, or in retaliation for partisan activities, was common. Nazi racial theory also underpinned these brutal tactics by identifying communists as a mortal threat to Nazism, and the ‘Slavic’ peoples who lived in the Soviet Union as sub-humans.
According to this ideology, war crimes committed against communist ‘Slavs’ weren’t just acceptable, they were necessary. Focusing on the fight against “Stalin and communism” is a euphemistic and misleading representation of the Waffen-SS’s activities on the eastern front. To suggest that it is acceptable to represent Waffen-SS actions “against Stalin and communism” betrays at best a serious lack of understanding of the organisation’s actions on the eastern front.
At worst, this statement is a concerning echo of the idea that brutal actions taken against communists are automatically justified.
“I’ve got the right to take the mickey out of the silly little Austrian artist”
Jim Keeling, one of the men who dressed in Nazi uniform, told the EDP that his father’s war service meant he had “the right to take the mickey out of the silly little Austrian artist.”
Evidently, Adolf Hitler was not just a “silly little Austrian artist”, and having lost relatives in conflict does not entitle individuals to actions or comments which cause harm and offence today.
This behaviour and the group’s attempts to justify it are harmful. Mr Keeling’s comments seem like a casual, if immature, attempt to downplay his actions but they contribute to a wider trend of Holocaust trivialisation which has dangerous results. Holocaust trivialisation causes pain to victim communities, contributes to misinformation and supports antisemitic conspiracy theories which influence and inspire antisemitic abuse.
In summary, the group’s statements distort the reality of Waffen-SS activity and attempt to justify the re-enactment of a criminal organisation who perpetrated war crimes on a massive scale.
To suggest this display has educational value and any place at a family-friendly celebratory event is delusional.
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