Saturday, June 20, 2020

Waffen-SS soldiers on the right side of history?



Did you know that retrained Waffen-SS soldiers guarded the Nuremberg war trials? Probably not, and neither did I. This YouTube clip tells the weird story. 

It turns out that the Waffen-SS units were Estonian and Latvian, mostly the former. At least some of their members hadn´t volunteered for service in the Nazi German military. This provided the United States with a suitable loophole to pardon all Baltic Waffen-SS soldiers stranded in the Allied occupation zones of Germany after World War II. Some were then retrained by the Americans to guard the premises in Nürnberg where the war trials were held. The fact that the ex-SS fighters spoke German was an important reason for the assignment. Another reason was that many American soldiers had either been sent home or were needed at other locations in Germany. 

My main problem with this clip is the monotonous voice of the narrator, which makes my ears almost hurt after a couple of minutes! 

But that´s me.

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