War, Genocide and Cultural Memory

Claus Bundgård Christensen is associate professor of history at Roskilde University, Denmark.Niels Bo Poulsen is associate professor and director of the Institute for the Study of Military History, Culture and War at the Royal Danish Defence College, Copenhagen, Denmark.Peter Scharff Smith is professor in the sociology of law at the Institute for Criminology and Sociology of Law, Oslo University.

• About the Authors; Foreword; Chapter One Introduction, Part I –The Organizational and Military History of the Waffen-SS; Chapter Two From Hitler’s Bodyguard to the Waffen-SS; Chapter Three War of Extermination; Chapter Four Fall and Obliteration; Part II –Ideology, Discipline and Punishment in the Waffen-SS, Chapter Five Ideological Training in the Waffen-SS; Chapter Six Sexuality, Race and Religion: Ideology in Practise; Chapter Seven Punishment and Discipline in the Waffen-SS: Law and Legal Practice in the Racial State; Part III –A European Nazi Army: Foreigners in the Waffen-SS, Chapter Eight Germanic and Western European Volunteers in the Waffen-SS; Chapter Nine ‘Volksdeutsche’ in the Waffen-SS; Chapter Ten Eastern European Waffen-SS Soldiers of Non-German Ethnicity; Part IV –Soldiers and War Criminals, Chapter Eleven Waffen-SS and Nazi Crimes; Chapter Twelve Explaining the Atrocities: Context and Motives; Part V –Waffen-SS after 1945, Chapter Thirteen Surrender and Imprisonment; Chapter Fourteen Prosecution and Flight; Chapter Fifteen The Veterans Unionise; Chapter Sixteen The Waffen-SS in Post-War Remembrance Culture; Epilogue – The Nazi’s European Soldiers; Appendix; List of Abbreviations; Bibliography; Index

The infamy of the Waffen-SS stands in contrast to the lackluster state of its academic investigation. Three leading specialists in the field are describing here Hitler’s praetorian troop in all its facets. This state-of-the-art monograph is certain to be a standard work on the Waffen-SS for years to come’ —Jochen Böhler, Director of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, Austria