Feldgrau Author: John P. Moore

[John P. Moore]

Dave - Thanks for the kind words. That is a fine 1936 Chained Dagger and I am especially pleased that you have it. Eugen Schlotter gave that dagger to his son who sold it and you ultimately added it to your collection. Eugen Schlotter was not happy to learn that his son had sold the dagger and decided to give nothing further to his son. Eugen Schlotter later decided to give everything else he had to me.

For those who do not know it Dave's father was a US Army signal officer in WW II so there was another connection to Eugen Schlotter. It is always a pleasure to get to know collectors who have something that once belonged to a veteran that I knew. Another collector and fine gentleman in Tennessee has the ground Röhm dagger that once belonged to SS-Obersturmbannführer Hans Bünning, who my son and I once visited in Nürnberg.

John

[John P. Moore]

Last April I commented on the Axis History Forum how the A-Z list in my “Führerliste der Waffen-SS” publication had increased by 29 pages with the addition of hundreds of new names of SS-Untersturmführers and Standaten-Oberjunkers from March 1945 and later. Plus hundreds of new unit assignment details from 1940 – 1945 for many of the other officers found in that 1,275 page data base. These new assignment details come from period documents. Also, some corrections. Additional data has been added to the separate division lists, KIA/MIA lists and cemetery lists. Since then a number of people have expressed an interest in purchasing an “upgrade” of Disc 1 of Part 1 of “Führerliste..” where all of this data is found. The regular price of the 2-disc Part 1 is USD 145 or Euro 125. Now I am offering an upgrade price of USD 55 or Euro 40 for Disc 1 of Part 1 for people who have earlier purchased the original Part 1.

Interested people can send me a PM or e-mail me at [email protected]

John

[martinski]

¨Hi to all and especially to John P Moore!

As i'm researching certain aspects of the Waffen-SS, I came aware through this Forum about the existence of the "Führerliste der Waffen-SS" by John P. Moore. So I decided to take the step, contacted John, had a very smooth communication by mail and bought immediately the full collection. In a very short time I received the box with the cd's and... FANTASTIC!

I am amazed and surprised by the high quality scans and the wonderful chronology. An SUPER job John did! As I'm using state archives myself, I know how hard it is to collect and obtain all this kind of info. Great job John!

I hereby strongly recommend the "Führerliste der Waffen-SS" to all serious researchers!!! It is really worth buying this amazing archive! Better go for it!

Also the way John personalized my cd's with my name is a nice bonus. Thank you VERY much!

Thanks VERY much John! Please keep me informed about eventual updates!

Best Regards

Martin
Vlaanderen - Flandern - Flanders

[John P. Moore]

Thank you for those very nice comments Martin! I would like to point out that Martin is , also the author of the book, An American in Paris, the Story of the Indian 74 Model 340, about the Indian heavy motorcycles, ordered and bought by France in 1939 and afterwards intensely used by the German Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS.

He has been visiting the battlefields of the Ukraine for more than 10 years, especially the positions between Korsun and Lissianka that are described in Doug Nash’s Hells Gate book. Martin is also a sponsor and conducts lectures in the Russian language at the State Museum for the History of the Great Patriotic War in Kiev. I am learning quite a bit from this new friend.

[John P. Moore]

A couple of announcements -

1. It has been over 18 months since I announced the last significant upgrade to the A-Z list in my “Führerliste der Waffen-SS” publication when 29 pages of data were added. Now an additional 43 pages have been added to the A – Z list and the new page count is 1,318 pages. Much of the new information comes from recently discovered records from 1944-1945 relating the 3.SS-Panzer Division “Totenkopf” and graduates of the 17, 18 and 19 Kriegsjunker Lehrgangs and 13 Reserve Kriegsjunker Lehrgang. There are also corrections to errors found in previous versions of the A – Z and division lists. 19 additional pages were added to the Addendum section of Part 1 with the inclusion of a 15-page officer list for the 14.Waffen Grenadier Division originally prepared by Michael Melnyk plus a 4-page chronological KIA/MIA list for the same division organized by unit. 12 photos of Waffen-SS officer graves at the Dagneuex military cemetery near Lyon, France have been added courtesy of Jérôme R. Many of those graves belong to officers of the engineer battalion of the “Handschar” division who were killed during the mutiny in September 1943 along with some “Totenkopf” Division officers from 1940.

The price for the “upgraded” Disc 1 of Part 1 of “Führerliste der Waffen-SS” is USD 55 or Euro 45 for people who have earlier purchased the original Part 1 that currently sells for USD 145 or Euro 125.


2. “Führerliste der Waffen-SS” has been further expanded with the addition of a Part 6. This is a single DVD containing the Personalakten of 802 Waffen-SS and Allgemeine-SS officers. There are 9,321 pages of documents and photos. This compilation comes from some of the document scans that I have performed over the years for relatives, collectors and other researchers. The price for Part 6 is USD 75 or Euro 60. A listing of the files to be found on the DVD can be provided upon request

PM me or e-mail me at [email protected]

I am also planning to add a Topic in the Waffen-SS section of Feldgrau where I can post future additions and corrections to Disc 1 content as it comes to my attention.

John

[John P. Moore]

My Führerliste der Waffen-SS publication contains two forewords written by Waffen-SS veterans. One is written by Fritz Hahl and the other by Dr. Adalbert Lallier. For those of you who have not seen these forewords below is the one by Dr. Lallier that he wrote in December 1999 when Führerliste consisted of only a single CD. (It has since been expanded to eleven CDs and one DVD following suggestions from fellow researchers) Dr. Lallier and his brother were both shanghaied into the Waffen-SS from their home in the Banat area of Serbia. They were given the choice of joining the Waffen-SS or being put up against the wall where they would be shot. Their ethnic background was a mixture of French Huguenot and Austro-Hungarian. Adalbert Lallier was attending signal officer school at Leitmeritz in the Sudetenland when the end of the war came and his brother went missing. After the war and service with the UN Adalbert Lallier moved to Canada where he obtained a university degree followed by a masters degree from Columbia University in New York and his doctorate from the Sorbonne in Paris. He was a university professor in Montreal where he taught political science and economics and ran the international MBA program. We were introduced in 1996 by another officer from the III.SS-Panzer Korps who had served with Lallier as a radioman in the “Prinz Eugen”. I spent several days with him in June 1999 while I was in Montreal to attend a convention. We got on well and I continued to receive his excellent academic guidance. Dr. Lallier is a man of conscience and strong moral convictions. In 2001 he travelled to Germany to testify for the prosecution in the murder trial of his former tactics instructor, Untersturmführer Julius Viel, who was found guilty of shooting seven Jewish inmates of a nearby concentration camp who belonged to a work party engaged in digging anti-tank ditches around the signal school at Leitmeritz. While Dr. Lallier does not have a favorable view of the Waffen-SS he does recognize those special qualities of leadership, bravery in battle and the comradeship that intrigue so many of us about this formation. I could not have found a more knowledgeable and objective person to write the foreword below.

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Foreword:
The Armed Forces and the State: The essence of democracy is freedom, the nature of the armed forces is discipline. The intelligence of the soldier is not the important question, since the armed forces would let their nation down, if their
soldiers were not willing to obey their orders instantaneously.
Field Marshal Montgomery of EI Alamein, June 26, 1946.

Leadership: The personal bearing of officers and of the soldiers in positions of command provides an example that is of determining influence on the armed forces. An officer who demonstrates before the enemy, cold-bloodedness, decisiveness, resoluteness, and courage, will entice his troops to join him in his leaving the trenches and throwing himself towards the enemy. But he must also seek to find the way to the hearts of his subordinates, by way of acquiring an understanding of their feelings and reasoning, and of demonstrating a never ending concern for their well-being. Both in an emergency and in moments of grave danger, reciprocal trust in one another constitutes the strongest foundation of discipline and bonding, and therefore of survival.
German text on Leadership and the Armed Forced, published in
October 1933.

The Task of the Waffen-SS Junkerschulen (of the Third Reich): The responsibility of the Waffen-SS Junkerschulen was the training of a professionally competent replacement generation of Waffen-SS officers, i.e. of its new Führerkorps in a spiritual environment of a unique brotherhood in which continuous exchanges and reassessments that were conducted by the officer-candidates' critical minds, attested to the unusual - in the opinion of the traditional, dogmatic, military presence of young minds that were wide-awake, self-reliant, and impressively effervescent. Another remarkable uniqueness is found in the stimulus of a consciously cultivated "kameradschaftliche" equality, which made for a bonding between levels of rank while still confirming their separate existence. This bonding was at the root of the creation of a personal linkage, amongst and between all ranks, that was of such great significance in which all aspects of the relation of all Waffen-SS soldiers to their Waffen-SS leaders especially of fealty - was so impressively determined. In consequence of this unique evolution in its "inner setting and formation", the Waffen-SS may be called a "truly classless" military formation: all Kameraden were truly equal amongst themselves and were thereby accorded the opportunity for the full development of their natural abilities. The Waffen-SS was a military formation in which very young soldiers were led by very young leaders. In the Junkerschulen, equal emphasis was placed an both military training and its specialized areas, and personality development, with its concomitant acceptance of responsibility, whereas humbleness and submissiveness vis-a-vis superiors were frowned upon and categorically rejected as incompatible with the ethos of the Waffen-SS formations. Its credo of Unsere Ehre heisst Treue, as an expression of traditional fealty to the leader of the nation, the Führer, Adolf Hitler, and from the bottom of the lowest ranks up to the Senior Commander, reflected only one part of the, unique, bonding amongst Waffen-SS soldiers, lower ranks and officers alike. In its complete form, it involved and cut across both the vertical and the horizontal dimensions, across all ranks as well as involving the whole officers corps, from Oberstgruppenführer Paul Hausser, all the way down to the most recent Freiwilliger, the 17-year old Waffen-SS Mann.
Partly paraphrased from Richard Schulze-Kossens, Militärischer Führernachwuchs der Waffen-SS: Die Junkerschulen. Osnabrück, Munin Verlag, 1982.

This, complete, data base contains the names of most all of the former officers of the Waffen-SS, an estimated minimum total of about 26,100 individuals by early 1945. According to Schulze-Kossens, this total comprised the following subgroups:

(1) The "first-hour" Waffen-SS officers (those who had been transferred or taken over from the old German Imperial Army, the Reichswehr, or the Landespolizei, and did not need to be trained in the pre-1939 Junkerschulen) 700

(2) The "first batch" - before the beginning of World War Two of
officers that were trained in the pre-war Junkerschulen 1,000

(3) Officers transferred from the ranks of the Allgemeine-SS 2,000

(4) Officers who had earned "battlefield" promotions, for their
"courage in the face of the enemy" 3,400

(5) Non-German volunteers, who had been recruited from their
former (non-Third Reich) military units, and who were confirmed
with the same rank as Waffen-SS officers 3,000

(6) Officers who received their appointment after the successful
conclusion of their (respective) Junkerschulen 16.000

Gross total of Waffen-SS officers (1935 - Jan. 1945) 26,100

[Note: Other estimates, including those involving the time period
between early February 1945 and end-June 1945, and including the number of Waffen-SS Junkers and Standartenoberjunkers who were
still in Junkerschulen during that period of time, puts the total number
of Waffen-SS officers and officer candidates closer to a grand total of about 30,000 (the writer of this Foreword having been promoted to Waffen-SS Junker in mid-March 1945].

As regards to the number of Waffen-SS officers who were killed in battle on the various fronts, commencing with August 1939, the minimum estimate (Schulze-Kossens) suggests a total of 12,600, while the maximum estimates (involving also those killed until the very last day of the war) put forth a total of about 16,000. According to Schulze-Kossens, the percentage of officers in all Waffen-SS formations amounted to three per cent of the estimated total of 900,000 soldiers; however, the number of Waffen-SS officers killed or missing was relatively higher, about 5 per cent of the total Waffen-SS soldiers killed or missing.

This numerical data base expresses the most accurate estimates that are available; however, and in fact equally significantly, it also accounts for all former officers of the Waffen-SS, those already dead and those still living, not only in reference to numbers, but also with emphasis an their vertical structure, by rank and by the number of officers in each rank, as well as an the significance of the "character" of these soldiers as individuals. Perceived In this sense, this data base contains the names of the "model" or "exemplary" officers of the Waffen-SS (the "deserving" ones, including the Ritterkreuzträger), as well as their "opposites", those who had in fact or are still viewed as having committed offences against the rules of conduct that had been prescribed for the Waffen-SS formations: misdemeanor, disrespect, AWOL and desertion, criminal acts, cowardice, war crimes. Since it appears that the names of the "worst offenders" were removed from the Honour Roll of the Waffen-SS, some of the names contained in this data base may not any more be traceable to their respective Waffen-SS Stammkarten.

With this data base, its creator/author intends to provide a literally complete set of names of the men who had served as officers of the Waffen-SS from its inception, in 1933, to its "official" demise May 9th 1945; soldiers of whom more than one half had lost their lives of had gone missing during the course or the war, or were killed or executed after the end of the war; while the surviving officers had to learn how to adapt to a lifestyle of which most of them had known very little, that of a constitutional, multiparty, democracy, in a socio-political setting in which the largest number of the surviving veterans, the former Reichsdeutsche were viewed for a long time as having been members of a criminal organization, and were therefore suffering from prejudice and social ostracism, whereby the wartime fealty of all and the heroism of many of their Waffen-SS Kameraden was either never officially acknowledged or was subjected to continuous harassment and deprivation.

This list of names of former Waffen-SS officers is supposed to serve as a topical reference source and to serve individuals and groups with specific interest in the history of the Waffen-SS as an elite military formation with an innovative internationalist orientation and affiliation, that was fighting alongside the Wehrmacht in its rote as the (traditional) legitimate arm of the Third Reich in Hitler's conduct to "continue and implement its foreign policy designs with more effective means". It is exclusively a report of registered fact, which contains the following, specific entries for each officer: date and place of birth, Waffen-SS identity number, posting with a particular unit or formation of the Waffen-SS, last rank and date of promotion to that rank, and the date of death. It does not trace out the officers' origin, education, and professional affiliation.

Apart from its usefulness as a general reference source (e.g. how many officers were there in the Waffen-SS, and how were they distributed amongst the various Waffen-SS units?), this data base may also appeal to many readers, for its ability to serve as a source of information reflecting the interest of particular readers, e.g. distribution as to rank and seniority; linkage between age and rank; speed of promotion; years of service before getting killed (frequency distribution as to age, years of service, and death on the battlefield); percentage of surviving Waffen-SS officers (and their distribution as to rank, age group); number of surviving officers per Waffen-SS unit (units with the highest frequency of "killed and MIAs"); and, simply, seeking to check out names of relatives or presumed relatives, and their fates during and following the war.

Finally, this data base is also meant to constitute a memorial to the soldiers and the formations of the Waffen-SS, in their uniqueness as a military organization that was based an two principles that contradicted the tradition of standing national armies: the Freiwilligen-principle and the paneuropäische Soldatengemeinschaft für ein Neues Europa - commitments that eventually resulted in exceptionally high casualty rates and led to post-war recriminations that would not allow the building of an architectural monument in which the lists of the fallen members of the Waffen-SS would be forever inscribed, whereby the surviving veterans would be enabled to use it as their spiritual rendezvous, with the purpose of paying homage to and of reminiscing about those Kameraden, who had given up their lives believing that their behavior as soldiers bore out the requisites of the modern rules an the ethical conduct of war, and that their deaths, as the ultimate personal sacrifice, would serve a noble purpose and will therefore not have been in vain.

The creator of this data base qua general reference source, John P. Moore, has already earned universal acclaim for his intensive work on the signal corps of the Waffen-SS, which was crowned by his publishing the monumental volume Nachrichtenoffiziere der Waffen-SS/ Signal Officers of the Waffen-SS whose most recent edition, the third, has also already been sold out. Through his many years of meticulous research and fact-finding, which included hundreds of interviews with surviving Waffen-SS veterans (all the way up to and including several former Obersturmbannführers), the author was able to accumulate a vast collection of actual data on events as they happened, and was therefore able to subject the participation of the Waffen-SS signal corps to an extensive and objective analysis. His attempt at "discovering the truth" has not only earned him many appreciative friends, but has also helped in bridging the still existing vast gaps between fact and politically/ideologically induced misrepresentation of fact - his personal contribution towards an understanding of the role of the Waffen-SS as a military formation that participated in the Second War, and of its unique significance as the expression of a new Zeitgeist, viz. an innovative attempt to replace traditional nationalism and narrow-minded Chauvinism, with the first, entirely voluntary, step towards the eventual, complete and integrated, unification of the armed forces of the nations of Western Europe. Mr. John P. Moore commands my highest respect for his integrity, his foresight, his courage, and his determination to pursue this, honestly exploratory, path, and thereby to contribute to a much better understanding of the exceptional valour but also of the eventual tragedy of the Waffen-SS formations and their soldiers and officers.

Montreal, December 1999

Signed: Adalbert Lallier, PhD

Lallier.jpg (21.48 KiB) Viewed 7860 times

June 1959 at Columbia University

[haen2]

Thanks for posting this john,
As before and always, I am in awe of the amount of work and research you do, to keep things straight.
Keep it up as long as you can. I am glad that one of your sons is interested in your work, and hopefully will carry on when you can no longer.
I wish I could add some to this knowledge bank, but alas, my role as a kradmelder and sanitäter/helfer did not give me much to reflect on, other than the daily chores and short engagements.
H.N.

[Ricardo Silva]

Your work is truly impressive John,
i hope you continue to expand it, since it is vital that our global history isn't lost in time.
The SS is always a controversial theme, but one should not forget that history is always controversial and our role should be to preserve as much as possible so that future generations can learn with the past.

Keep the good work,

Ricardo Silva

[John P. Moore]

I often receive questions from people asking what I am going to do next. Yesterday my youngest son was over and he asked what I planned to do after I retire next December after more than 36 years of combined military and civilian government service. I told him that I might put together some more books on SS Panzer and Artillerie officers like I did on SS signal officers. While the Panzer theme would probably have the greatest interest, I have decided today to do one on the Artillery. Actually, I was considering doing such a book about 15 years ago at the urging of some former Wiking Artillerie officers. I even got Obersturmbannführer Hans Bünning to write a Vorwort as he had been both a signal and artillery officer. I have a good collection of previously unpublished photos, mainly as a result of Günter Bernau allowing me to look through his sacks of captioned photos and borrow whatever I wanted to make direct copies of. I would like to use a publisher who could put this book out in both print and e-book format. I would appreciate receiving any comments on this idea.