By late 1944, Allied soldiers had stopped taking SS prisoners. It wasn't official policy, but it was happening everywhere. And you can't really understand why until you see what the SS had been doing for years before that.
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| Captured SS Soldiers |
From Eight Bodyguards to Almost a Million
Germany in the early 1920s was not a stable country. The First World War had killed 2 million German men and wounded 4.2 million, roughly 19% of the entire male population. In this chaos, Hitler ordered the creation of a small bodyguard unit in 1923 consisting of just eight men. By 1933, when the Nazis seized power, those eight had grown into an organization of over 52,000.
The requirements to join were strict. You had to be at least 5 foot 9, have perfect eyesight with no dental fillings, and be between 17 and 23. Officers had to prove their ancestry back to 1750, enlisted men to 1800. A single Jewish ancestor, even one by marriage, was enough to refuse an application. Training lasted 16 to 20 weeks, considerably longer than the regular army's 12 to 16, with daily lectures on racial doctrine and unconditional obedience.
By the time the war began, the SS had split into branches. The general SS handled racial policy and policing. The Totenkopf units ran concentration camps. And the Waffen-SS was the military combat force that grew from about 28,000 men in 1939 to over 38 divisions with roughly 900,000 men passing through its ranks. In 1942, all camp guards became full Waffen-SS members, and personnel constantly transferred between branches. When the 3rd SS Panzer Division Totenkopf was formed, 6,500 of its men came directly from camp guard units.
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| Enlarged Waffen-SS Army |
This overlap between the camps and the combat divisions would define how the SS behaved everywhere they went.
A Pattern That Started in Poland
The invasion of Poland on September 1st, 1939 set the tone. Hitler ordered the campaign carried out with the greatest brutality and without mercy. Before it even began, the SS had assembled a list of 60,000 Polish academics, professionals, and intellectuals marked for elimination. In less than two months, German forces destroyed more than 500 villages. By spring 1940, between 60,000 and 80,000 people had been executed.
In France the following year, the pattern continued. On May 27th, 1940, 99 surviving British soldiers of the Royal Norfolk Regiment surrendered to the 3rd SS Division under a white flag. They were marched to a wall and machine-gunned. Only two survived by lying among the bodies. The next day, the 1st SS Division forced about 100 British prisoners into a barn and threw grenades inside. Between 80 and 89 were killed. The commander, Wilhelm Mohnke, never stood trial and died in 2001 at age 90.
On the Eastern Front, two orders issued before the invasion made the intentions clear. The Barbarossa Decree called it a war of extermination. The Commissar Order stated that Soviet political officers were to be executed immediately upon capture. Four Einsatzgruppen followed behind the advancing armies, and by the end of 1941 had killed more than 500,000 people. By the war's end, the number reached about 1.5 million.
Normandy and Malmedy
When Allied forces landed in Normandy, they got a taste of what had been happening in the East. The 12th SS Panzer Division, recruited from Hitler Youth graduates aged 17 to 19 but led by Eastern Front veterans, killed more than 150 Canadian soldiers who had already surrendered in the days following D-Day.
Three days after the landings, the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich arrived in the town of Tulle. They rounded up every male between 16 and 60 and publicly hanged 99 men from lampposts, balconies, and bridges while the rest of the town was forced to watch.
But it was December 1944 that crossed the final line. During the Battle of the Bulge, SS troops at the Baugnez crossroads near Malmedy lined up approximately 130 American prisoners in a field and opened fire with machine guns. 84 were killed. Around 43 survived by pretending to be dead.
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| Taken just After the Malmedy Horror |
By that same evening, word had spread throughout the US Army. On December 21st, the 328th Infantry Regiment issued a written order: no SS troops or paratroopers will be taken prisoner but will be shot on sight.
The Tattoo That Became a Death Sentence
Every Waffen-SS member received a small tattoo during basic training on the underside of the left upper arm showing their blood type in small black ink, about 7 millimeters. It was a medical measure meant to save lives through faster blood transfusions.
It became their death sentence. Surrendering to Soviet forces with that mark meant almost certain death. And increasingly, surrendering to Western Allies wasn't much safer either.
SS soldiers tried everything to remove it. Some burned the skin with cigarettes. Others cut it out surgically or used chemical removal. But the scarring was often just as incriminating as the tattoo itself. Standard Allied procedure during surrender required prisoners to remove their shirts and raise their arms. Either way, the mark condemned you.
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| The Blood Mark Tattoo |
On the Eastern Front, Soviet soldiers went through field hospitals specifically searching for that tattoo. In Berlin during April and May 1945, Russians moved through the wards examining every wounded German. Nazi Germany had killed roughly 3.3 million out of 5.7 million Soviet prisoners in German captivity. The Soviets knew exactly who had done it.
Retaliation
Two weeks after Malmedy, American soldiers gathered between 60 and 80 German prisoners after savage fighting over a Belgian village called Chenogne. Many were SS. They lined them up in a field and opened fire. General Patton wrote in his diary afterward that he hoped they could conceal it. No inquiry was ever completed.
The killing of SS prisoners had become so routine that it was creating operational problems. Intelligence officers couldn't gather information because nobody was being kept alive long enough to interrogate.
Many of the men wearing SS uniforms by late 1944 were just boys, 16 or younger, who couldn't bear responsibility for what their predecessors had done. But the reputation built over years of atrocities meant they shared the same fate.
The Camps
In spring 1945, Allied soldiers finally saw with their own eyes what the SS had been guarding. American forces reached Dachau on April 29th. Outside the camp, they found roughly 50 railway boxcars carrying 4,000 people who had been given food for only one day at the start of a three-week journey.
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| The Dachau Train |
After entering the camp, soldiers separated prisoners into regular Wehrmacht and SS. What happened to the SS group afterward is something no one was ever prosecuted for.
As Germany collapsed, entire SS divisions fought westward through Soviet lines not to continue the war, but to find someone else to surrender to. The blood group tattoo followed them into captivity. When the International Military Tribunal declared the SS a criminal organization, that tattoo became evidence of membership. Men who bore it were automatically labeled as offenders, faced prison camps, had property confiscated, and lost their civil rights.
The Nuremberg trials convicted hundreds with a rate of about 73%. But many were released just a few years later. Some of the worst escaped to Argentina or received immunity in exchange for useful knowledge.
From eight bodyguards in 1923 to 900,000 men by 1945. Every atrocity added another entry to a ledger that eventually came due. And a 7-millimeter tattoo meant to save lives on the battlefield became the mark that ended them.
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