Hitler's "Elite" - the SS Trivia Quiz

Answer: False

As the war progressed, Hitler began to allow foreign membership in his exclusive little 'club' of elite military forces. This was largely due to the fact that many "true Aryans" died during the course of the war, (especially after the Nazi's invasion of Russia), and people were needed to replace them. While Jews and Poles were excluded from belonging to this military branch, (as if they would have wanted to!), various people from other nationalities were allowed to enter the ranks of the SS. By the end of the war, over 60% of the Waffen-SS was of foreign extraction.

The Waffen SS was NEVER considered to be a part of any of the branches of the regular military; Army, Navy, Air Force or otherwise. These branches of the military were not allowed to recruit from other nations, but the SS had its own rules, which allowed it to function as a kind of foreign legion.

The SS was essentially Hitler's own "private army", to do with as he wished.

Answer: The Night Of Long Knives

In June, 1934 during the Night of the Long Knives, the purge of the Sturmabteilung (SA) began and was finished, with nearly all of its leadership purged, (read: dead) at the hands of the SS. In addition, the occasion was used to kill some perceived enemies of the Nazis.

Answer: Jews

Sonderkommandos, 'special units' (in the euphemistic language of Nazi Germany), were work units that were comprised of Jewish death camp prisoners who were forced (on threat of their own deaths), to help with the disposal of the bodies of gas chamber victims by placing their bodies into the waiting ovens. Usually, once these prisoners grew mentally weary, lost their minds, or simply became physically unable to carry out their tasks, they too were sent on to the gas chambers and the ovens and replaced. Thus the cycle of execution repeated itself with true Nazi efficiency.

'Sonderkommandos' were quite different from the 'SS Sonderkommandos' in that the former consisted of Jewish inmates held within the extermination camps, while the latter was comprised of Nazi SS troops.

Answer: Death's Head Units

The SS units called Totenkopfverbände (SS-TV) or in English "Death's-Head Units" took their name from their insignia. This branch of the SS organization was the one charged with overseeing the Nazi concentration camps.

These units, together with squads drawn from the SD (Sicherheitsdienst - Security Service) were tasked with implementing the "Final Solution", the planned extermination of all Jews in territory under German control. It operated as an independent unit within the SS itself, autonomous in its activities, running camps like Dachau and Buchenwald in Germany proper; Auschwitz in German-occupied Poland and Mauthausen in Austria as well as several other camps, Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor. (The last three were 'extermination' camps and served no purpose other than killing new arrivals as soon as possible, as opposed to being merely labeled 'labor' or 'concentration' camps where people were often worked to death on grossly inadequate rations).

Answer: ODESSA

ODESSA was an acronym of the words "Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen", which translates into English as the "Organization of Former Members of the SS".

This organization was developed by and for members of the Nazi regime with the express purpose of providing aid to those who were anticipated to survive and be able to escape the manhunts performed by the Allies at the war's end.

There were (and continue to be) those who deny the very existence of such a clandestine operation as ODESSA. Others however have suggested that it was a network of operations. Regardless of the name(s) of the organization under which many Nazis escaped, largely to South America, they were aided by some such organization. Some of those helped in this manner included the likes of such people as Franz Stangl, the former commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp, Adolf Eichmann (who also escaped to South America), and possibly Gustav Franz Wagner, a former deputy commandant at Sobibor extermination camp.

Answer: Mobile SS death squads

The "Einsatzgruppen" were under control of the SS, even before the start of WWII. This was the German name for 'task forces' or more accurately, 'death squads' or "mobile killing units". This "paramilitary" force was often comprised of a bunch of rag-tag regular army rejects who were responsible for many mass killings, initially by shooting, although later they used mobile gas chambers to conduct some of the mass murders.

According to their own records, they murdered more than a million people, nearly all of them civilians, as the Nazis invaded other countries throughout Europe. Starting in Poland, the Einsatzgruppen killed most of the Polish intelligentsia. They then rapidly moved on to killing Jews, Gypsies and others, in East European territories that the Nazis controlled.

Source: Wikipedia

Answer: Malmédy

Known as the Malmédy Massacre, this event occurred on the second day of the Battle of the Bulge, December 17, 1944. SS troops herded a group of American soldiers into an open field near the Belgian town of Malmédy, where they allowed the prisoners to climb out of the back of the military trucks in which they were being transported. The POWs were lined up and the Germans suddenly opened fire on them, killing somewhere between 90 and 130 of them. (Exact numbers have never been determined.)

Some of those who still showed signs of life had even more rounds pumped into them. A small fraction of the prisoners escaped, some into a nearby cafe. Those were ousted after the building was set on fire and then they were executed as well. A handful escaped entirely, and soon the stories they related were spread like wildfire throughout the U.S. forces, galvanizing them into even more determined efforts to defeat their enemy and sealing among them an emotional philosophy of merciless retribution. If any U.S. soldiers had entertained favorable ideas about their possible treatment at the hands of the Nazis if captured, this action at Malmédy cleared those doubts immediately.

Answer: Sobibor

Sobibor was deliberately tucked away in a little-traveled part of Poland, in an effort to prevent prying eyes from seeing what was happening.

Up to 250,000 people were murdered there, the vast majority of them being Jews. Only 64 survivors of Sobibor have ever been known.

An in-house revolt by Jewish prisoners, led by Leon Feldhendler and Alexander Pechersky, was launched on October 14, 1943. In the fighting, 11 of the roughly 30 SS men and a number of Ukrainian guards were killed. Three hundred Jews escaped, but many were killed in the minefields that surrounded the camp while dozens more were hunted down over the next few days.

Following the revolt, the camp was demolished later that same month and the site was then disguised as a farm. The SS also planted hundreds of trees over the site in an effort to disguise its former use.

In 2001, a group of Polish researchers, archaeologists and historians began excavating the Sobibor site. Little information was gleaned because of the intensive clean-up conducted by the SS when the camp was closed. In 2007, an Israeli archaeologist named Yoram Haimi joined the investigation.

By August 2012, he and his team had uncovered a number of artifacts that were probably some of the last possessions of the prisoners. Amid the teeth, pieces of bone, and ashes through which they sifted they have recovered jewelry and other small items that have helped to identify some of the victims.

Yoram Haimi is quoted as saying, "Because of the lack of information about Sobibor, every little piece of information is significant. No one knew where the gas chambers were. The Germans didn't want anyone to find out what was there. But thanks to what we have done, they didn't succeed."

Source: Jewish Virtual Library

Answer: True

What a nice man!

Read below some of the "wonderful and glowing accounts" of Klaus Barbie's treatment of his victims:

"He was caressing the cat. And me, a kid 13 years old, I could not imagine that he could be evil because he loved animals. I was tortured by him for eight days."

Klaus Barbie dragged 13 year-old Simone Lagrange out of her prison cell each day, yanked her by the hair, and beat upon her open wounds in an effort to obtain information.)

And this one...

Lise Lesevre told how Klaus Barbie had once tortured her for nine straight days, beating her severely and nearly drowning her in a bathtub. She was hung up by handcuffs that had spikes attached inside them and was beaten with a rubber bar ... He eventually broke one of the vertebrae in her back.

Klaus Barbie personally tortured his prisoners and was blamed for the deaths of at least 4,000 people! No shirker was he!

Two of his most infamous crimes involved his capture of forty four French-Jewish children, whom he had sent to Auschwitz concentration camp to be burnt in the ovens immediately upon their arrival at the camp, and he also orchestrated the arrest and torture-to-the-death of Jean Moulin, one of the highest ranking members of the French Resistance.

As a U.S. citizen, I can only tell you just how PROUD I am to report the next bit of information! (Sarcasm intended, please!)
After the war, he was recruited by the Allies (I have to wonder why?) and worked for the British until 1947, at which time he began to work for the Americans. He was protected by the American intelligence community, supposedly because of his so-called "police skills" and his ardent anti-Communism.
With the aid of the Americans, he fled from prosecution in France in 1950 and relocated to South America together with his wife and children.

Years later, during his 1987 trial he boldly stated - "When I stand before the throne of God I shall be judged innocent."

Klaus Barbie was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987 after his extradition to France for crimes against humanity. He died in prison of leukemia four years later, at the ripe old age of 77.

Answer: Irma Grese

Known alternately as "The Beast of Belsen", "The Beautiful Beast", and as "Die Hyäne von Auschwitz" (The Hyena of Auschwitz), 22 year-old Irma Grese was the youngest woman executed under British law in the 20th century.

She was intensely sadistic and utterly depraved.

During the Belsen trials of 1945, some of the survivors of the atrocities committed at the camp gave testimony of the murders, tortures, and other cruelties that Irma Grese had participated in during her years at Auschwitz and at Bergen-Belsen. They spoke of her sadism, the beatings, mutilation and arbitrary shootings of prisoners, and of her dogs, which were reputedly half-starved in order to make them more vicious whenever she would use them to attack prisoners. On 13 December 1945, Irma Grese was led to the gallows where she, Bormann and Volkenrath were hanged, one by one, she being the first to hang.

Sources include: Wikipedia and Mirror.co.uk (Nazi She Devils)