Dutch Waffen-SS Volunteers and Genocide on the Eastern Front

During the Second World War, Hitler’s armies rampaged across the European continent and even beyond. Scattered over the battleground, there was a group of soldiers who were known everywhere. In their short but remarkable existence, they were infamous for their fanaticism and relentlessness in battle. However, not only their courage was beyond dispute, but also the fear and horror that they awoke. They were responsible for some of the worst crimes of the Nazi regime. They were the Waffen-SS.

Where the Wehrmacht (the regular German army) could only enlist German soldiers, the Waffen-SS did not have this restriction. Nazi leaders had already seen the potential of non-German volunteers to expand their army. The Netherlands was occupied in May 1940 and recruitment for the Waffen-SS started early, by the end of the same month. In the following five years, approximately 25.000 Dutchmen volunteered to join the ranks of the German Waffen-SS. This number was not only relatively but also absolutely, the largest contingent of non-German volunteers from all of the Nazi occupied territories in Europe.

Dutch Waffen-SS volunteers were military active at the Eastern Front from the start of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 till the very end. In the years after the war, they always insisted that they were never involved in genocide. They would never even have heard of the fate of the Jews until after the war. Their diaries however, prove otherwise.