HIAG leaders—Paul Hausser, Felix Steiner, and Kurt Meyer—directed a campaign to promote public perception of the force as elite, apolitical fighters who were not involved in the crimes of the Nazi regime.
[3][4] The functions of the Waffen-SS spanned combat operations on the front lines, internal security duties in occupied Europe, and the implementation of the Nazi regime's genocidal racial policies.
The tribunal found that "the units of the Waffen-SS were directly involved in the killings of the prisoners of war and the atrocities in the occupied countries" and judged the entire SS to be a criminal organisation.
The results are still felt, with scholarly treatments being out-weighed by a large volume of amateur historical studies, memoirs, picture books, websites, and wargames.
Hausser went on to describe the growth of the Waffen-SS into a so-called multinational force where foreign volunteers fought heroically as a "militant example of the great European idea".
[13] 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.
According to historian Simon MacKenzie, "the older or the more famous the unit, the larger the work—to the point where no less than five volumes and well over 2,000 pages were devoted to the doings of the SS Division Das Reich", authored by Otto Weidinger.
[20][n 3] HIAG worked with Rudolf Lehmann, chief of staff of 1st SS Panzer Corps, to produce what Parker calls an "exculpating multi-volume chronicle" of the division, even including the Malmedy massacre.
[20] The project also included the former chief of staff of the unit, Dietrich Ziemssen, who in 1952 produced a revisionist version of the massacre in his pamphlet Der Malmedy Prozess.
[21][n 4] By the mid-1950s, HIAG had established an image 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 units), and the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads).
In the era of the Cold War, senior Waffen-SS personnel were "not shy about the fact that they had once organised a NATO-like army, and an elite one at that", notes MacKenzie (emphasis in the original).
[23] John M. Steiner, in his 1975 work, points out that SS apologists, especially strongly represented in HIAG, stressed that they were the first to fight for Europe and Western civilisation against "Asiatic Communist hordes".
Historians Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies write:[12][n 5] Paradoxically, these post-Cold War books thrived despite two decades of German, Israeli and American scholarship that convincingly portrayed the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS as part of the killing machine in the East.
(...) Little if any sentiment has been extended [by the Americans] to the families of the 8 million Red Army soldiers who died fighting the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS, or the 22 million civilians killed by these military organisations and the killing squads, the Einsatzgruppen.As a "crucible of historical revisionism" (in Picaper's definition),[26] HIAG achieved remarkable success in its rewriting of history, unlike in its goals of economic or legal rehabilitation of the Waffen-SS.
[33] These groups worked to maintain momentum through the recruitment of younger generations and through outreach to foreign veterans of the Waffen-SS, aided by the continued publication of Der Freiwillige.
MacKenzie highlights the long-term effects of HIAG's revisionism:[35] As an older generation of Waffen-SS scribes has died off, a new, post-war cadre of writers has done much to perpetuate the image of the force as a revolutionary European army.
The degree of admiration and acceptance varies, but the overall tendency to accentuate the positive lives on, or has indeed grown stronger.Historian Bernd Wegner observes that any survey of the literature on the history of the Waffen-SS would show "an immense discrepancy between the veritable avalanche of titles and the quite modest yield of credible and scholarly insight".
[41] Their list includes (quoted material is from The Myth of the Eastern Front): The historian Henning Pieper notes a "huge array of non-scholarly works which can be summarised as belonging to genre of 'militaria literature'".
The Internet era has greatly expanded the opportunities for communications between the gurus, "romancers", and others who agree with their philosophies, providing a forum for a so-called "non-political celebration" of the fighting qualities of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS.