The year is 1944, a section of Waffen-SS soldiers of SS-Panzer-Grenadier Regiment 24 ‘Danmark’ are on patrol in the Oranienbaum Pocket. All of them are clad in SS uniforms and armed with rifles or machine guns. It is twilight and everything is calm. Prepared for action, the SS men steal forward searching for partisans. But wait a minute – there is something entirely amiss in chronology and geography. In fact, these are young men in a forest in Northern Zealand, and the year is 2013. They are re-enactors, members of Fronthistorisk Forening Danmark (the Society for Front History, Denmark) claiming to be re-enacting history.

Today, most SS veterans have passed away, but the Waffen-SS survives in the cultural practices through which we commemorate and understand the past, such as the above-described re-enactment episode. In the contemporary world, Himmler's black corps simultaneously serves as an important signifier among extremist right-wing groups, as a rallying point in the nation-building processes in certain east European countries, as an ingredient in pop-culture and as a symbol of the darkest sides of twentieth-century history. In mainstream political culture Nazism and its symbols, especially the swastika and the SS runes, have come to represent the antithesis of democratic values. The story of the Third Reich and the SS in the words of Alec Ryrie thus serves an important role in contemporary western society:

While this observation is valid regarding the overall political culture of western societies, there are important undercurrents where wholly different perspectives on the Waffen-SS live on. This chapter offers an introduction to the diverse ways in which the history of the Waffen-SS is used today.

Notions of the Waffen-SS

During the war, in the occupied countries, there was a general impression of Nazi collaborators as pathological deviants. The early post-war literature reinforced this notion by demonising the SS as the hub of Nazi crime. At the same time, there were many who attempted to delimit the SS, and by implication, the Waffen-SS, from the German population per se, in order to save the latter from accusations of complicity in war crimes.