Hausser served as an officer in the Prussian Army during World War I and attained the rank of general in the inter-war Reichsheer.

Under Hausser's leadership, HIAG reshaped the image of the Waffen-SS as a so-called pan-European force that fought honorably and had no part in war crimes or Nazi atrocities.

In response, Hausser wrote an open letter to the Bundestag denying these accusations and describing the HIAG as an advocacy organisation for former Waffen-SS troops.

A foreword from the former Wehrmacht General Heinz Guderian provided an endorsement for the Waffen-SS troops and referred to them as "the first realization of the European idea".

[20] The book described the growth of Waffen-SS into a multinational force where foreign volunteers fought heroically as a "militant example of the great European idea".

[20] Historians have refuted this characterisation, arguing that it was largely Nazi propaganda employed to bolster the ranks of the Waffen-SS with foreign volunteers.

[20] Waffen-SS in Action was included in the index of objectionable war books maintained by West Germany's Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons.

[21] Hausser later wrote another book, published in 1966 by HIAG's imprint Munin Verlag [de], under the title Soldaten wie andere auch ("Soldiers Like Any Other").

MacKenzie, the work epitomised how HIAG leaders wanted the Waffen-SS to be remembered, while the historian Charles Sydnor described it as "equally tendentious".

These works demanded rehabilitation of the military branch of the Nazi Party and presented Waffen-SS members as both victims and misunderstood heroes.

[24] By the mid-1950s, under Hausser's guidance, HIAG attempted to establish a position that separated the Waffen-SS from other SS formations and shifted responsibility for crimes that could not be denied to the Allgemeine-SS (security and police), the SS-Totenkopfverbände (concentration camp organisation, "Death's Head troops") and the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units).

In 1957, he wrote an open letter in Der Freiwillige, HIAG's official publication, to West Germany's minister of defence, stating that Death's Head troops "merely served as external guards in the concentration camps without the possibility of interfering with the internal procedure".

He did not mention that the guards accompanied prisoners on external labor details and that commanders of concentration camps generally came from the Waffen-SS.

[26][27] This apologist position also ignored the fact that the organizational structure of the SS tied the Waffen-SS to the Nazi annihilation machine through transfer of personnel between various SS units and the shifting responsibilities of the units themselves, as they may perform frontline duties at one time and then be reassigned to "pacification actions", the Nazi term for punitive operations in the rear.

The French author Jean-Paul Picaper labels it as a "self-panegyric",[30] while David Clay Large uses the words "extravagant fantasies about [Waffen-SS's] past and future".

[32] Hausser's last project within HIAG was the five-hundred page SS picture tome under the nostalgic title Wenn alle Brüder schweigen ("When All Our Brothers Are Silent"); the project was spearheaded by Hausser, along with convicted Nazi war criminal Joachim Peiper, another prominent Waffen-SS figure, as a contributor.