Did the Wehrmacht and the SS hate each other?

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:01]Hello, in today's video I'm going to discuss the friction between the SS and the army and the consequences that this had for the Nazi German war effort. Nazi Germany was something called a polycratic state. Now that those who are in favor of dictatorships argue that while there's one person in charge and therefore everything runs smoothly because there's not a competing agencies trying to put their own word in. Well, nothing could be further from the truth because and Nazi Germany's probably the most extreme example of this is that Hitler one argument could say that because he didn't want any single organization to challenge him. So therefore he created lots of agencies often with overlapping or authority and who would then fight amongst themselves.

[00:01:07]That another argument and this is something I get the impression from reading Albert Speer is that Hitler didn't know what he was doing anyway and so he wanted to reward people so he gave them jobs to do and positions which didn't really mean anything. And actually you do see this as well in Russia today to a certain extent but it's not exactly exaggerated as much as it was in Nazi Germany.

[00:01:36]As far as the military's concerned therefore you've got the Wehrmacht and the SS engaging in fierce institutional rivalry, jurisdictional disputes and competition for resources. Although of course both were united to a certain degree in service to the regime's criminal objective.

[00:02:04]Now initially the Wehrmacht viewed the SS with a mixture of aristocratic disdain and professional suspicion. The regular army was shaped in Prussian military tradition emphasizing professional autonomy and the traditional laws of land warfare. In contrast the SS was the ideological spearhead of the Nazi party was led by Himmler and he envisioned the SS as a new order of racial warriors.

[00:02:41]The ideological differences since therefore fueled friction as many career officers were concerned with military efficiency and to a certain extent international law at least in principle whereas the SS doctrine explicitly rejected traditional laws of warfare as being outdated and bourgeois.

[00:03:06]Tensions flared for the first time in during the invasion of Poland. Wehrmacht commanders were disgusted at the SS units random use of violence against civilians and these protesters these protests obviously were rarely humanitarian but they were pragmatic. But it needs to be pointed out that the arguments used were the arguments the SS themselves might have understood.

[00:03:34]So officers feared these executions murders I should say undermining military discipline and as something that would fuel partisan resistance. And on the level of military operations notable examples of this frictions friction continued in the Balkans as well so Yugoslavia and the Greek campaign and where competing anti-partisan operations by army and SS units they led to confusion, inefficiency and a struggle for command dominance.

[00:04:11]However it's above all in the invasion of Soviet Union as from June 1941 where this rivalry sort of gets even bigger. As the Wehrmacht advanced it established military administration areas in rear areas. However the SS operating through the Reich Security Main Office RSHA and in consequence directly under it the Einsatzgruppen these mobile killing units of which I've done so many videos about. So they held a parallel mandate for security.

[00:04:51]They these tasks were actually not nothing to security whatsoever. It was a systematic campaign of mass murder targeting anyone they didn't like and above all Jews people they perceived to be communists and anybody else they perceived was to be was against them. Wehrmacht field commanders frequently chafed at this SS and their independent authority.

[00:05:21]The Einsatzgruppen often acted unilaterally. They didn't ask the the military or even even tell the military command what was going on. And so whereas many army group commanders provided logistical support, intelligence sharing and food all the things necessary for these killings they resented the chaos that the SS created. They argued that mass shootings were counterproductive. They alienated local populations whose cooperation was needed for labor and intelligence and in some instances field commanders filed formal protest not out of moral objection but because they feared SS atrocities would destabilize their zones of control and complicate military logistics which is precisely what happened. Albert Speer I'll refer to once more. He referred to the fact he was able to travel around Ukraine without an escort but within a few months this wasn't possible and this was due to the behavior of these what I would term political criminals SS and and the likes.

[00:06:42]So they they turned what was effectively a peaceful area into areas where where the partisans actually controlled completely. You look at Belarus there's there's only the roads the communications areas and even then only and the railway lines and and the cities which were controlled by the German forces in the countryside there was absolutely no law whatsoever.

[00:07:11]The expansion of the Waffen SS into a fully fledged army of over 900,000 men by by January of 1945 created a permanent state of competition for manpower. As the Waffen SS grew it drew recruits from the same demographic pool as the Wehrmacht and this actively promoted itself as a vanguard of a new Nazi military order. This recruitment drive directly undermined the Wehrmacht's ability to maintain its own strength especially after the catastrophic losses on the Eastern Front as from the beginning of 1943.

[00:07:59]The mutual disdain between the two corps was profound. The Wehrmacht's traditional officer corps dismissed Waffen SS officers as politically indoctrinated amateurs who lacked professional military training and discipline. Conversely the SS leadership saw the Wehrmacht as an outdated conservative institution insufficiently committed to the racial goals of national socialism or should we say the conspiracy theories because that's what they were. This rivalry manifested in fierce disputes over conscription quotas, draft exemption and the allocation of replacement troops with each side accusing the other of being ideologically soft or professionally incompetent.

[00:08:46]This of course led to competition for material resources and technical parity.

[00:08:54]And this competition was intense. Both institutions vied for access to weapons, ammunition, vehicles and fuel and the Waffen SS got preferential treatment from key figures in the Nazi hierarchy and this in this case I need to point this out from Albert Speer's own armaments ministry which allocated newer tanks and better small arms to SS divisions.

[00:09:25]During the 1943 to 4 period the allocation of Tiger and Panther tanks heavily favored the Waffen SS and the most extreme example that I can think of is the Battle of Kursk in July 1943.

[00:09:43]So you have the disaster of Stalingrad which leads to Manstein's brilliant counter attack in the late winter early spring of 1943 to stalemate position and then you come to the Battle of Kursk July 1943 the second SS Panzer Corps Leibstandarte Das Reich and Totenkopf they were the probably the best and certainly most heavily equipped units in the military often possessing a much better much larger number of the new Panther D and Tiger 1 heavy tanks than the Army's most senior Panzer divisions but but all these years of training and then experience statistical records show that while the Wehrmacht bore the brunt of the defensive fighting as from the late summer of 1943 across multiple fronts it was the SS who were usually pulled out of the line first to be fully refitted with the latest now Panther A and Panther G tanks much ahead of the regular Army units so by 1944 a significantly higher percentage of Waffen SS tank battalions were fitted with the Tiger 1 now Tiger 2 the King Tiger compared to their Wehrmacht counterparts by late 1944 the SS possessed seven fully equipped Panther Panzer sorry Panzer divisions which received a disproportionate share of the monthly tank production often and normally at the expense of the depleted Army units such as for example Panzer Lehr or the second Panzer division this perceived favoritism bred deep resentment within the Wehrmacht whose commanders argued that combat effectiveness not political loyalty should determine resource distribution so what effect did this have on the attempted coup of the 20th of July 1944 so this was the conservative Wehrmacht officers led by Claus von Stauffenberg who wanted to offer the overthrow the regime and so it was the regime of which reacted with brutal anyway retaliation again against those involved in this in the aftermath the SS used the event as a pretext to systematically dismantle the remaining professional autonomy of the Wehrmacht and Himmler was appointed command of the replacement Army placing SS oversight directly within the military's own administrative structure military salutes were replaced with the Nazi salute and National Socialist guidance officers were embedded throughout the ranks to monitor loyalty so effectively they were the same as the Soviets political commissars for the SS the plot was the ultimate validation of their narrative that the old aristocratic officer corps was inherently inherently disloyal and that only the ideologically pure SS could be trusted to lead the defense of the Reich in its final desperate months so this rivalry extended into the occupied territories where both organizations organizations established parallel administrative and economic structures the SS controlled vast nest networks of concentration camps and industrial enterprises notably through the SS owned Deutsche Wirtschaft Betriebe which competed with Wehrmacht run requisition systems for food raw materials and labor >> [clears throat] >> in Eastern Europe Wehrmacht economic officers frequently clashed with SS leaders over exploitation of local resources with each side accusing the other of holding supplies or disrupting production the SS's brutal methods of extraction often involving mass deportations further destabilized areas under nominal Wehrmacht control complicating military logistics and provoking partisan resistance that the Army not the SS then had to suppress despite this fierce competition it is really important to emphasize that collaboration remained the dominant mode of interaction when it came to implementing the Nazi's core policies and above all racial policies both institutions cooperated extensively in the Holocaust anti-war anti-partisan warfare and the suppression of the civilian population the existence of internal conflict within the Nazi state apparatus didn't negate the shared complicity of both organizations resource rivalry and jurisdictional friction did not equate to moral opposition rather it reflected competing visions of how best to serve the regime's genocidal and imperialist aims post-war trials including those analyzed by Willard B Colson 1948 recognized that such institutional dynamics did not absolve either organization of criminal responsibility the competition was a struggle for primacy within a criminal system not as is or has been suggested or was suggested certainly until the late 1980s a contest between legality and lawlessness so I have already touched on these themes in previous videos but and I will continue to do so if we look at the 20th of July for example we have people involved who I would I would term to be utterly clean to those who were really dirty such as Helsdorf Nieba criminals who had actually served the regime and also of course it is very difficult to say where do you draw the line I mean what would you do if you found yourself in this situation which isn't always all that easy and and we sometimes may be demanding heroism from others that we do not possess ourselves on where can what was right what was wrong and what could have been done to prevent things happening now I've spoken quite a lot Eric von Manstein I have said how much I admire him as a military person but I think he was severely lacking in morality he may have made fun of Hitler in his at home I mean taught his dog to do Hitler and the Nazi salute on on the command Heil Hitler clearly this was meant to be an insult towards the leadership but when people complained to him about the massacre in Simferopol in Crimea he told the person to not get involved as it was nothing to do with him anyway good thanks so much for listening so I upload every every day now I upload at 2000 hours most days it's a short video but another it's a it's only up to 3 minutes but I am Tuesdays and Fridays and often now on other days as well I'm doing longer videos in which I discuss um things of this nature for example there's also a channel membership which costs uh I don't know I can't remember now 4 pounds and 5 dollars or is it 5 pounds and 6 dollars or 6 euros can't remember something like that and that will give you access now to more than 800 members only videos should you be interested but for the moment from me in now I'm in the UK thanks for watching bye for now