Valhalla's Warriors -Waffen-SS Eastern Front

[valhalla]

Hello,
I am keen for feedback from any readers on my first offering "Valhalla's Warriors: A history of the Waffen-SS on the Eastern Front".

It was recently put out on Amazon etc by DogEar Publishing.

I choose the self-publishing route as it was just too difficult to break into the traditional publishing houses.

http://www.waffen-ss-book.com/book.html

Regards

Terry Goldsworty

[Paddy Keating]

You seem to be all over this website, canvassing reactions to your book, based on a doctoral thesis you submitted to Bond University. Well, it's a bit too soon for any of us to have been able to read it but enthusiasm deserves a response so here's the excerpt from the publishers’ website - http://www.waffen-ss-book.com/excerpt.html - with a few "blue pencil" remarks to get a discussion going:

1. The origins and ideaology of the Waffen-SS
The SS were [Syntax? – PK]] initially formed as a bodyguard for Hitler who could no longer rely on the support or loyalty of the original SA stormtroopers, who were the foot soldiers of the Nazi Party [Surely more a case of Hitler proving disloyal to his SA comrades at the behest of the Establishment bodies backing the Hitler regime? – PK]. From this handful of men the Waffen-SS became the largest branch of the SS. In doing so, apologists for the Waffen-SS argue that it became the defacto [de facto – PK] fourth branch of the German armed forces of World War II, the others being the Navy, Army and Air Force [True to a point, where apologists are concerned, but would the author describe Konrad Adenauer as a Waffen-SS apologist? – PK]. During the course of this book I will show that the Waffen-SS was clearly not just another branch of the German Armed forces.

The Waffen-SS soldiers were unique in that they were the first of Germany’s armed forces that swore [Revise syntax? – PK] a personal oath of loyalty to Hitler, and underwent a rigorous process of indoctrination to Nazi ideals [Syntax: “in Nazi ideals”? - PK] and were trained to be a highly disciplined, motivated and successful military formation Discuss time frame of political indoctrination vis-à-vis SS-VT/Waffen-SS? - PK]. For this reason the Waffen-SS has been viewed by some as a “… praetorian guard and elite” of the Nazi state (Wegner, 1985:220) Isn't it still viewed thus? - PK. Indeed, during a dinner conversation on the 1st of November 1941 Hitler remarked that “Within a hundred years or so from now all the German elite will be a product of the SS, for only the SS practices racial selection” (Trevor-Roper, 2000:106). The Waffen-SS gained considerable respect both from foes and friends due to the fact that The Waffen-SS possessed military qualities equalled by few others and surpassed by none [Questionable assertion. Some Waffen-SS units achieved very high military standards but the organisation as a whole cannot be so simply described as a military elite. Just from a military viewpoint, 1. Fallschirmjäger-Division was arguably superior to any of the Waffen-SS divisions in combat terms, if the divisions’ respective war records are subjected to general comparison. - PK]. By war’s end it numbered some 900 000 men.

Hope this is the sort of comment you were looking for. I expect the mainstream publishers to whom you submitted your manuscript probably did not give you any feedback. No personal disrespect intended, but it is just as well you were after a Ph.D rather than a doctorate in military or Third Reich history.

PK

[Paddy Keating]

Dr Goldsworthy's thesis, on which the book is based, can be downloaded from the Bond University website at http://epublications.bond.edu.au/theses/goldsworthy/. I have not read it yet but look forward to doing so. However, I did run a couple of searches through the document, including a search for any reference to Konrad Adenauer, to whom I referred above. For those with scant knowledge of Adenauer, here's a fairly good précis of his life and career: http://www.answers.com/topic/konrad-adenauer.

Adenauer was Chancellor of the BRD from 1949 to 1963 and his anti-Nazi credentials were absolutely impeccable. He is quite central to postwar evaluations of the Waffen-SS, having said of the Waffen-SS in August 1953 that "Die Männer der Waffen-SS waren Soldaten wie andere auch!" In English, this means: "The men of the Waffen-SS were soldiers like any others!". This opinion is shared by many people, including apologists and revisionists, and it has become quite risky even to refer to it without drawing condemnation as an apologist or revisionist from certain quarters. The excerpt published on Dog Ear's website, which can be found on Page 131 of your Bond University thesis, indicates that you see anyone who shares Adenauer's viewpoint as an apologist. Dog Ear also quote from your foreword:

The conventional wisdom that the Waffen-SS in World War II fought a relatively clean fight, unsullied by the atrocities committed by the Nazis, is challenged—and largely demolished. Focusing on the Eastern Front, the book contends that the Nazi vision of a racial-ideological death struggle against Slavic hordes and their Jewish-Bolshevik commissars resonated with soldiers of the Waffen-SS, steeped in traditional anti-Semitic and racist dogmas. In doing so this book clearly shows that the Waffen-SS was an organisation that committed widespread atrocities, and were truly soldiers of evil.

This is a rather sweeping contention. Some Waffen-SS soldiers certainly held the sort of views described here but it simply cannot be said of all Waffen-SS soldiers, particularly by 1943. That the Waffen-SS was involved in atrocities has never been in doubt. However, all branches of the German Armed Forces were involved in atrocities to varying degrees. No participant in WW2 could claim to have fought an entirely clean war, which by no means excuses what the Germans did in the course of Adolf Hitler’s post-imperialist misadventures in Eastern Europe and Russia.

Anyway, I look forward to your responses and will, in the meantime, read your thesis. Mind you, I have scanned it briefly and, in response to a question from another member elsewhere on this website, it refers copiously to various established reference works and other sources dealing with the Waffen-SS but does not appear to bring anything new to the table. It is really the sum of your interpretation of the available material, isn't it?

PK

[AAA]

A scan of that thesis : Long on suspect generalizations, cherry picked quotes, and short on primary sources (and *heh* no German language ones). There are meatier threads here and on AHF.

[michael kenny]

Terry I noticed you have not yet got the rank of 'Author'. You also seem to have had a very frosty reception.

[John W. Howard]

Hi Mike:
Perhaps we are all being a little too sceptical here; none of us have read Dr. Goldsworthy's text yet. But the book cover set my teeth on edge; using phrases such as "Hitler's Elite" and "Malestrom of Barbarity" turned me off immediately. I think Paddy Keating's second post covers my reservations about the cover blurb. That being said, marketing dictates eye-catching hype, and I am hoping that the text holds more promise.
This paragraph is off-topic, but exploring Nazi crimes has been done very well. Instead I really wish someone would write an in-depth investigation into the "Malestrom of Barbarity" loosed on the world by Communism. What went through a Soviet Commissar's mind when he shot someone in the back of the neck? What was it like to take away a "Kulak's" food and watch him and his family starve to death? What was it like to idle their black Volga sedan all night long outside a writer's home, scaring him and his family members half to death with the threat of arrest? How did the Soviets inculcate barbarity into their secret policemen? What kind of motivation was needed to get the average Ivan to consign mentally healthy people to an insane asylum? If we want to explore evil done in the Twentieth Century, there is a whole bucketful of corpses to explain on the Left.

[Paddy Keating]

I'm roughly a third of the way through this 435 page thesis, John, and I must say that it strays away from the core topic in places, pages 51 to 53 being a case in point. Terry Goldsworthy writes on Page 53 that:

The people targeted on September 11th were clearly not combatants, whereas in the conflict in the Middle East we see the combatants of each side as being involved in a recognised conflict that we can accept or rationalise (although the actions of suicide bombers against civilian targets may strain this rationalisation). The actions of the terrorists on September 11th would seem to be more extreme, indiscriminate and morally unjustifiable. Indeed, Professor Dershowitz touched on a salient point in which he clearly outlines the respective approaches of the two combatants in the Middle East conflict:

Israel has, I think, over the years managed to minimise the number of deaths. The first time they went after Yassin they used a 500-pound bomb and missed him because they didn't want to use a two-tonne bomb that could have killed him because they wanted to minimise civilian casualties. That's been the approach - minimisation as opposed to maximisation of civilian casualties amongs Palestinian terrorists. There's simply no moral comparison. (Wendt, 2004)

Quoting Professor Alan Dershowitz on the Middle-East Question and related matters such as 9/11 is all very well when discussing definitions of "evil" but it seems rather out of place in a dissertation about the crimes of the Waffen-SS on the Eastern Front. Dr Goldsworthy might have balanced the Dershowitz viewpoint by, for instance, quoting the French lawyer and man of letters Jacques Vergès, who contends that there is little definable moral difference between shooting and burning civilians en masse in the manner of the Einstazgruppen and dropping HE and incendiary bombs on civilians from a high altitude. Maître Vergès is as controversial a figure as Professor Dershowitz. Of course, today's terrorist often morphs into tomorrow's freedom fighter. Some terrorists become respected heads of state.

At a stretch, were one writing a doctoral thesis, it might be reasonable to suggest that Nazi Germany introduced the world to corporate totalitarianism. There again, the same could be said of Soviet Russia. The SS evolved into a corporate entity, a virtual economic state-within-a-state, whose directors were not above sharp practice and questionable initiatives in the furtherance of their aims and who were not, in fact, subservient to the politicians, no matter what the latter presumed. In that sense, the SS evoked the Roman Praetorian Guard. The Waffen-SS was certainly one of the tools in that enterprise, as was the Wehrmacht in general. Now, that might have made an interesting doctoral thesis against the current backdrop of corporate globalisation, lack of accountability and dodgy practices resulting in all sorts of awful mayhem around the world.

But I have not noticed any reference to the economics of Himmler's private, virtual empire in Dr Goldsworthy's thesis. What I have noticed are a heavy dependence on the well-worn theses of other students and historians, interlaced with rather out-of-place references to Israel's struggle against Palestinian terrorism, underscored by morally questionable assertions from known extremists like Alan Dershowitz. I have also noticed what seems to be a reference to Gitta Sereny's "banality of evil" in the way in which Terry tells his reader, as if it were some sort of Damascene revelation, that very ordinary men commit the most appalling crimes. I would have thought that his twenty-odd years as a cop dealing with murder, rape and all sorts of other crimes would have told him more about the nature of man in all his states than a study, via the work of others, of the crimes of the Waffen-SS in WW2.

I must say that I entirely agree with Detective Senior Sergeant Dr Goldsworthy BA, MA, LLB, Ph.D's opinion, as stated in the Australian Financial Review of 9.10.2006 that: "the days of the uneducated policeman are disappearing. Crime is becoming more white collar, and we're in an information age in which we need to keep abreast of how crime develops." He is absolutely right. However, as a fairly experienced police detective tipped for senior rank in the Queensland Police because of his academic qualifications, it would be interesting to see how he might justify the relevance of a doctoral thesis about the Waffen-SS and "evil" to the Queensland Police department's fight against modern corporate crime in the mould of, for instance, Enron or, to relate it to Australia, the Alan Bond affair.

FG readers might be interested to know, while we are on the topic of corporate crime in relation to the book being promoted here by our latest author, that his alma mata bears the name of the London-born businessman Alan Bond, an associate of the infamous Australian corporate buccaneer Kerry Packer, himself a generous contributor to Bond University. Alan Bond was jailed for corporate fraud in the wake of the biggest financial collapse in Australian history, in which Bond masterminded a $1.2 billion scam against Bell Group. There again, a thesis directly related to serious homegrown corporate crime might not have gone down so well with the greybeards at Bond University, where Terry's own father, Dr Ashley Goldsworthy, was once Dean of the Business School.

A thesis directly addressing the mindset of major corporate criminals would have been more relevant to Dr Sergeant Goldsworthy's laudable express intention to tackle the problem through educated policing or, rather, with educated policemen, a rare resource in Queensland, by various accounts. But it might have been a bit too close to the knuckle for the greybeards of Bond University. Terry Goldsworthy appears to have made a wise choice in subject matter in offering this dissertation on the victimisation of the Jews by Hitler's henchmen, with a few lashings of pro-Israel propaganda thrown in for good measure.

Well, Terry, you did ask for feedback!

PK

[valhalla]

PK,
I suggest you grow up and forget the racial overtones. Yes, you obviously can surf the net,well done. I take exception to you purile insinuations about the way in which the PhD was obtained. If you can't give feeback without getting personal then move on my friend, because you are obviously below giving sustained or valuable comment.

Get your facts right my father was the dean of the business school but he is not a "Dr". Second he had not been at the university for some years when I undertook my study. Third the thesis was examined by three external markers to Bond so that should shoot down the conspiracy theory that you are running with ( I thought most educated people would know that is the excepted standard for PhD's!!).

Don't insinuate I am Jewish to try and write off the book, I am not.

Your feedback is triviual and purile, and really you should devote your wasted time to better pursuits because you are one frustrated indiviual.

I will cop critical feedback, but not were it is insulting in it's juvenile nature.

[valhalla]

Oh Pk,
by the way my PhD is substantially different from the book, so perhaps you could buy the book before you denigrate it. At least then you might be accurate.

[pzrmeyer2]

Hi Mike:
Perhaps we are all being a little too sceptical here; none of us have read Dr. Goldsworthy's text yet. But the book cover set my teeth on edge; using phrases such as "Hitler's Elite" and "Malestrom of Barbarity" turned me off immediately. I think Paddy Keating's second post covers my reservations about the cover blurb. That being said, marketing dictates eye-catching hype, and I am hoping that the text holds more promise.
This paragraph is off-topic, but exploring Nazi crimes has been done very well. Instead I really wish someone would write an in-depth investigation into the "Malestrom of Barbarity" loosed on the world by Communism. What went through a Soviet Commissar's mind when he shot someone in the back of the neck? What was it like to take away a "Kulak's" food and watch him and his family starve to death? What was it like to idle their black Volga sedan all night long outside a writer's home, scaring him and his family members half to death with the threat of arrest? How did the Soviets inculcate barbarity into their secret policemen? What kind of motivation was needed to get the average Ivan to consign mentally healthy people to an insane asylum? If we want to explore evil done in the Twentieth Century, there is a whole bucketful of corpses to explain on the Left.

Excellent points, John. It does make one wonder why, given the thousands of books and authors that contunue to beat the dead horse of Waffen SS atrocities and eliteness, only a very, very few attempt to tackle the mind-blowing "banal" atrocities committed in everyday life in the Worker's Paradise that destroyed far more people than the nazis could ever hope to. Koestler, Conquest, Figes, and Martin Amis come to mind. Few others. I'm sure Dr Goldsworthy realized it was far easier to earn top marks for his thesis on the SS than to de-construct and de-mythisize the Cheka, GPU,NKVD, et etc. Especially given that the atrocities of the latter were committed by men whose surnames were eerily similar to his and those of some of his professors, no doubt.

[pzrmeyer2]

This is a rather sweeping contention. Some Waffen-SS soldiers certainly held the sort of views described here but it simply cannot be said of all Waffen-SS soldiers, particularly by 1943. That the Waffen-SS was involved in atrocities has never been in doubt. However, all branches of the German Armed Forces were involved in atrocities to varying degrees. No participant in WW2 could claim to have fought an entirely clean war, which by no means excuses what the Germans did in the course of Adolf Hitler’s post-imperialist misadventures in Eastern Europe and Russia.

The acclaimed (by some) Israeli military historian ans soldier Omer Bartov contended in his book "Hitler's Army" that it was the Wehrmacht, not the Waffen SS, that was more ideoloically driven, or at least inculcated with party ideology to keep it fighting fit, while the latter were more an orginization of professional soldiers*.

(*Im sure he was referring to the so-called "classic" Waffen SS Divisions--1,2,3,5,6,9,10,maybe 12)

[pzrmeyer2]

Quoting Professor Alan Dershowitz on the Middle-East Question and related matters such as 9/11 is all very well when discussing definitions of "evil" but it seems rather out of place in a dissertation about the crimes of the Waffen-SS on the Eastern Front. Dr Goldsworthy might have balanced the Dershowitz viewpoint by, for instance, quoting the French lawyer and man of letters Jacques Vergès, who contends that there is little definable moral difference between shooting and burning civilians en masse in the manner of the Einstazgruppen and dropping HE and incendiary bombs on civilians from a high altitude. Maître Vergès is as controversial a figure as Professor Dershowitz. Of course, today's terrorist often morphs into tomorrow's freedom fighter. Some terrorists become respected heads of state.

well put. Dershowitz, a fierce advocate and defender of torture when applied to those who threaten Israeli interests, is hardly a credible or qualified source to reference as a stand-alone when discussing actions committed in the titanic life-death struggle on the Eastern Front.

Some terrorists become respected heads of state.

I can think of few former PMs of some mid eastern countries right now...

[Tom Houlihan]

The racial/religious smearing will stop. This has nothing to do with whether the author was Jewish, Communist, Vegan, or a Democrat. We have cussed and discussed the backgrounds of authors. We all accept that someone's background is going to impact how they write. All authors, whether PhDs, or high school students, manage objectivity to differing degrees.

Examining the authors background, and his thesis are legitimate, but let's not allow either to overshadow the actual book in question. Let's put off the pissing contests until someone has read the book, eh?

As for the remarks regarding nepotism, the sad fact is that it does happen. Had PK actually thought you took advantage of that, trust me, he would have stated it clearly. He brought the point up in his normal brusque manner. Paddy is not the local tact instructor.

[Paddy Keating]

PK,
I suggest you grow up and forget the racial overtones. Yes, you obviously can surf the net,well done. I take exception to you purile insinuations about the way in which the PhD was obtained. If you can't give feeback without getting personal then move on my friend, because you are obviously below giving sustained or valuable comment.

I don't really understand what you mean by "racial overtones", Terry. I do however think that the people who gave you a Ph.D on the basis of what I have so far read allowed some pretty questionable assertions to pass unchallenged. As for my merits or demerits, you're entitled to your opinion but I'm not the one getting personal here. I am simply evaluating your work and your statements based on published evidence.

Get your facts right my father was the dean of the business school but he is not a "Dr". Second he had not been at the university for some years when I undertook my study. Third the thesis was examined by three external markers to Bond so that should shoot down the conspiracy theory that you are running with ( I thought most educated people would know that is the excepted standard for PhD's!!).

Some educated people and, indeed, some educators treading the halls of academe might suggest that a doctorate is a step on the road to a professorship and would presume that Professor Ashley Goldsworthy, your papa, had a doctorate of some kind under his belt. Of course, I cannot speak for Australia except to say that having worked for a number of Australian publications, I know that some things are done differently there. But, yes, alright, Professor Ashley Goldsworthy it is. He may not have been Dean of the School of Business when you did your Ph.D but the record shows that he was there when you did your LLB.

Not that there is anything wrong with that. I'm not running with any conspiracy theories, Terry. But I come from a long line of academics who propped up the walls of Trinity College, UCD, Oxford, Cambridge and various other institutions. I was at London myself, although I am pleased to say that I was expelled (sent down) after two years, which probably saved me. So I know how the academic world functions.

Don't insinuate I am Jewish to try and write off the book, I am not.

Ah! Here we are! [Note to mates: I won the bet!] I have insinuated nothing of the kind but I wondered when you would get around to it. You're the one who padded your enormously long thesis out with Israel-Dershowitz-War on Terror-related content, which really has nothing much to do with a study into Waffen-SS war crimes and crimes against humanity, has it?

Your feedback is triviual and purile, and really you should devote your wasted time to better pursuits because you are one frustrated indiviual.

I will cop critical feedback, but not were it is insulting in it's juvenile nature.

Were I to ask you to learn to write in good English before addressing me, Terry, that would be juvenile. I did pick you up on syntax because I find bad English in published work professionally offensive. Apart from anything else, it is disrespectful to the potential readership.

That aside, the salient aspect of this exchange is that you choose to hurl personal invective at me instead of fielding the specific criticisms I offered in relation to assertions you make in your thesis.

Very telling...

PK

[Paddy Keating]

As for the remarks regarding nepotism, the sad fact is that it does happen. Had PK actually thought you took advantage of that, trust me, he would have stated it clearly. He brought the point up in his normal brusque manner. Paddy is not the local tact instructor.

Go raibh maith agat, Tomás! Thank you. I'm still waiting for our newest historian to tell me if he sees Konrad Adenauer as a Waffen-SS apologist. He can google "Konrad Adenauer" if he's having trouble placing the name.

PK