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127-464: HIAG ( German : Hilfsgemeinschaft auf Gegenseitigkeit der Angehörigen der ehemaligen Waffen-SS , lit.   'Mutual aid association of former Waffen-SS members') was a lobby group and a denialist veterans' organisation founded by former high-ranking Waffen-SS personnel in West Germany in 1951. Its main objective was to achieve legal, economic, and historical rehabilitation of

254-465: A de facto official language of Namibia after the end of German colonial rule alongside English and Afrikaans , and had de jure co-official status from 1984 until its independence from South Africa in 1990. However, the Namibian government perceived Afrikaans and German as symbols of apartheid and colonialism, and decided English would be the sole official language upon independence, stating that it

381-402: A second language , and 75–100   million as a foreign language . This would imply the existence of approximately 175–220   million German speakers worldwide. German sociolinguist Ulrich Ammon estimated a number of 289 million German foreign language speakers without clarifying the criteria by which he classified a speaker. As of 2012 , about 90   million people, or 16% of

508-612: A "commonly used" language and the Pan South African Language Board is obligated to promote and ensure respect for it. Cameroon was also a colony of the German Empire from the same period (1884 to 1916). However, German was replaced by French and English, the languages of the two successor colonial powers, after its loss in World War I . Nevertheless, since the 21st century, German has become

635-444: A 1951 issue of Wiking-Ruf . Internal disagreements began to emerge in the early and mid-1950s as to the stance of the organisation: Some believed in the adoption of a more open stance and the centralisation of the group under Steiner and Gille, while others within the organisation believed that this would harm the goals of rehabilitation. The main stated aims of the organisation were to provide assistance to veterans and to campaign for

762-674: A 1958 editorial, he praised the foreign volunteers who, like German SS men, saw the "diabolical" threat of Bolshevism and "fought like lions" against it, as part of the Waffen-SS. The picture books echoed the same themes; one of them proclaimed: "From all European lands came volunteers as genuine comrades-in-arms. They fought for their Fatherland against Bolshevism." Glossy books, such as Waffen-SS in Pictures (1957), featured, as described by MacKenzie, "tales of valour and heroism" and "propaganda photographs of Aryan-ideal volunteers from all over

889-469: A HIAG member's letter to the leadership conveying the dismay at "Jews" who became "powerful once again" and could thus stand in the way of political support for the Waffen-SS rehabilitation. Spiegel also reported Wilke's findings that the HIAG leadership maintained close contacts with far-right groups. Lobbying by HIAG and other revisionists produced some early successes. In 1953, Chancellor Adenauer stated in

1016-559: A greater need for regularity in written conventions. While the major changes of the MHG period were socio-cultural, High German was still undergoing significant linguistic changes in syntax, phonetics, and morphology as well (e.g. diphthongization of certain vowel sounds: hus (OHG & MHG "house") → haus (regionally in later MHG)→ Haus (NHG), and weakening of unstressed short vowels to schwa [ə]: taga (OHG "days")→ tage (MHG)). A great wealth of texts survives from

1143-458: A native tongue today, mostly descendants of German colonial settlers . The period of German colonialism in Namibia also led to the evolution of a Standard German-based pidgin language called " Namibian Black German ", which became a second language for parts of the indigenous population. Although it is nearly extinct today, some older Namibians still have some knowledge of it. German remained

1270-696: A popular foreign language among pupils and students, with 300,000 people learning or speaking German in Cameroon in 2010 and over 230,000 in 2020. Today Cameroon is one of the African countries outside Namibia with the highest number of people learning German. In the United States, German is the fifth most spoken language in terms of native and second language speakers after English, Spanish , French , and Chinese (with figures for Cantonese and Mandarin combined), with over 1 million total speakers. In

1397-538: A propaganda company ( Propagandakompanie ) of the Waffen-SS, but nothing came out of it. By the mid-1950s, HIAG had been able to differentiate the Waffen-SS from other SS formations; the crimes that could not be denied were attributed to Allgemeine-SS (security and police), the SS-Totenkopfverbände , and the Einsatzgruppen . The Waffen-SS was thus successfully integrated into the myth of

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1524-523: A public speech in Hanover that members of the combat formations of the Waffen-SS had been "soldiers just like the rest" who had been "simply drafted". Large describes this declaration as "irresponsible and unhistorical", while the military historian Simon MacKenzie refers to it as "the least credible" of the several claims put forth by Waffen-SS apologists. MacKenzie states that on the Eastern Front

1651-464: A result of this heightened review, by September 1956, only 33 of 1310 applications by ex-Waffen-SS officers had been accepted (making them 0.4% of the Bundeswehr's officer-corps), as compared to 195 of 462 applications by enlisted men. At the height of HIAG activity in the early 1960s, around 8% of the approximately 250,000 former Waffen-SS members living in West Germany were members of HIAG. This

1778-483: A result, the surviving texts are written in highly disparate regional dialects and exhibit significant Latin influence, particularly in vocabulary. At this point monasteries, where most written works were produced, were dominated by Latin, and German saw only occasional use in official and ecclesiastical writing. While there is no complete agreement over the dates of the Middle High German (MHG) period, it

1905-528: A sanitised version of history without any references to massacres. He argues that the unit histories, like other HIAG publications, focused on the "positive", "heroic" side of National Socialism. The researcher Danny S. Parker notes similar efforts undertaken to rewrite the history of the Leibstandarte division. HIAG worked with Rudolf Lehmann, chief of staff of the 1st SS Panzer Corps , to produce what Parker calls an "exculpating multi-volume chronicle" of

2032-601: Is a recognized minority language in the following countries: In France, the High German varieties of Alsatian and Moselle Franconian are identified as " regional languages ", but the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages of 1998 has not yet been ratified by the government. Namibia also was a colony of the German Empire, from 1884 to 1915. About 30,000 people still speak German as

2159-612: Is also notable for its broad spectrum of dialects , with many varieties existing in Europe and other parts of the world. Some of these non-standard varieties have become recognized and protected by regional or national governments. Since 2004, heads of state of the German-speaking countries have met every year, and the Council for German Orthography has been the main international body regulating German orthography . German

2286-558: Is an Indo-European language that belongs to the West Germanic group of the Germanic languages . The Germanic languages are traditionally subdivided into three branches: North Germanic , East Germanic , and West Germanic . The first of these branches survives in modern Danish , Swedish , Norwegian , Faroese , and Icelandic , all of which are descended from Old Norse . The East Germanic languages are now extinct, and Gothic

2413-478: Is called the "German Sprachraum ". German is the official language of the following countries: German is a co-official language of the following countries: Although expulsions and (forced) assimilation after the two World wars greatly diminished them, minority communities of mostly bilingual German native speakers exist in areas both adjacent to and detached from the Sprachraum. Within Europe, German

2540-430: Is complicated by the existence of several varieties whose status as separate "languages" or "dialects" is disputed for political and linguistic reasons, including quantitatively strong varieties like certain forms of Alemannic and Low German . With the inclusion or exclusion of certain varieties, it is estimated that approximately 90–95 million people speak German as a first language , 10–25   million speak it as

2667-535: Is generally seen as ending when the 1346–53 Black Death decimated Europe's population. Modern High German begins with the Early New High German (ENHG) period, which Wilhelm Scherer dates 1350–1650, terminating with the end of the Thirty Years' War . This period saw the further displacement of Latin by German as the primary language of courtly proceedings and, increasingly, of literature in

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2794-611: Is generally seen as lasting from 1050 to 1350. This was a period of significant expansion of the geographical territory occupied by Germanic tribes, and consequently of the number of German speakers. Whereas during the Old High German period the Germanic tribes extended only as far east as the Elbe and Saale rivers, the MHG period saw a number of these tribes expanding beyond this eastern boundary into Slavic territory (known as

2921-565: Is less closely related to languages based on Low Franconian dialects (e.g., Dutch and Afrikaans), Low German or Low Saxon dialects (spoken in northern Germany and southern Denmark ), neither of which underwent the High German consonant shift. As has been noted, the former of these dialect types is Istvaeonic and the latter Ingvaeonic, whereas the High German dialects are all Irminonic; the differences between these languages and standard German are therefore considerable. Also related to German are

3048-435: Is one of the major languages of the world . German is the second-most widely spoken Germanic language , after English, both as a first and as a second language . German is also widely taught as a foreign language , especially in continental Europe (where it is the third most taught foreign language after English and French), and in the United States. Overall, German is the fourth most commonly learned second language, and

3175-597: Is one of the three biggest newspapers in Namibia and the only German-language daily in Africa. An estimated 12,000 people speak German or a German variety as a first language in South Africa, mostly originating from different waves of immigration during the 19th and 20th centuries. One of the largest communities consists of the speakers of "Nataler Deutsch", a variety of Low German concentrated in and around Wartburg . The South African constitution identifies German as

3302-574: Is one of the two ravens that are the companions of the god Odin ; muninn is Old Norse for "memory". The aim of the publishing house was to publish, in cooperation with HIAG, the works of former Waffen-SS members. Its authors were former Waffen-SS unit commanders or staff officers who were members of HIAG. The Munin Verlag titles did not go through the rigorous fact-checking processes common in peer-reviewed historical literature; they were revisionist accounts, unedited by professional historians, presenting

3429-401: Is partly derived from Latin and Greek , along with fewer words borrowed from French and Modern English . English, however, is the main source of more recent loanwords . German is a pluricentric language ; the three standardized variants are German , Austrian , and Swiss Standard German . Standard German is sometimes called High German , which refers to its regional origin. German

3556-525: Is the Sachsenspiegel , the first book of laws written in Middle Low German ( c.  1220 ). The abundance and especially the secular character of the literature of the MHG period demonstrate the beginnings of a standardized written form of German, as well as the desire of poets and authors to be understood by individuals on supra-dialectal terms. The Middle High German period

3683-578: Is the only language in this branch which survives in written texts. The West Germanic languages, however, have undergone extensive dialectal subdivision and are now represented in modern languages such as English, German, Dutch , Yiddish , Afrikaans , and others. Within the West Germanic language dialect continuum, the Benrath and Uerdingen lines (running through Düsseldorf - Benrath and Krefeld - Uerdingen , respectively) serve to distinguish

3810-485: Is understood in all areas where German is spoken. Approximate distribution of native German speakers (assuming a rounded total of 95 million) worldwide: As a result of the German diaspora , as well as the popularity of German taught as a foreign language , the geographical distribution of German speakers (or "Germanophones") spans all inhabited continents. However, an exact, global number of native German speakers

3937-689: The Ostsiedlung ). With the increasing wealth and geographic spread of the Germanic groups came greater use of German in the courts of nobles as the standard language of official proceedings and literature. A clear example of this is the mittelhochdeutsche Dichtersprache employed in the Hohenstaufen court in Swabia as a standardized supra-dialectal written language. While these efforts were still regionally bound, German began to be used in place of Latin for certain official purposes, leading to

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4064-575: The Bundeswehr at their old rank. Former Waffen-SS men who wished to join the Bundeswehr still faced heightened scrutiny, especially the officers. All Waffen-SS applicants went through the rigorous vetting process reserved for those with the higher ranks in the Wehrmacht. HIAG labeled the procedure "political inquisition" and complained bitterly about it in its publications, but to no avail. As

4191-639: The Alamanni , Bavarian, and Thuringian groups, all belonging to the Elbe Germanic group ( Irminones ), which had settled in what is now southern-central Germany and Austria between the second and sixth centuries, during the great migration. In general, the surviving texts of Old High German (OHG) show a wide range of dialectal diversity with very little written uniformity. The early written tradition of OHG survived mostly through monasteries and scriptoria as local translations of Latin originals; as

4318-537: The Early Middle Ages . German is an inflected language , with four cases for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative); three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) and two numbers (singular, plural). It has strong and weak verbs . The majority of its vocabulary derives from the ancient Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family, while a smaller share

4445-480: The European Union 's population, spoke German as their mother tongue, making it the second most widely spoken language on the continent after Russian and the second biggest language in terms of overall speakers (after English), as well as the most spoken native language. The area in central Europe where the majority of the population speaks German as a first language and has German as a (co-)official language

4572-583: The German Federal Military Archive  [ de ] for any information that may have implicated units and personnel in questionable activity. To rehabilitate the image of the force, HIAG underwrote the publication of works by right-wing academics sympathetic to the Waffen-SS. The unit narratives were extensive (often in several volumes) and strived for an official-seeming representation of their history, backed by maps and operational orders. MacKenzie points out that "the older or

4699-522: The German states . While these states were still part of the Holy Roman Empire , and far from any form of unification, the desire for a cohesive written language that would be understandable across the many German-speaking principalities and kingdoms was stronger than ever. As a spoken language German remained highly fractured throughout this period, with a vast number of often mutually incomprehensible regional dialects being spoken throughout

4826-746: The Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I , and the other being Meißner Deutsch , used in the Electorate of Saxony in the Duchy of Saxe-Wittenberg . Alongside these courtly written standards, the invention of the printing press led to the development of a number of printers' languages ( Druckersprachen ) aimed at making printed material readable and understandable across as many diverse dialects of German as possible. The greater ease of production and increased availability of written texts brought about increased standardisation in

4953-666: The Old High German language in several Elder Futhark inscriptions from as early as the sixth century AD (such as the Pforzen buckle ), the Old High German period is generally seen as beginning with the Abrogans (written c.  765–775 ), a Latin-German glossary supplying over 3,000 Old High German words with their Latin equivalents. After the Abrogans , the first coherent works written in Old High German appear in

5080-676: The Sprachraum in Europe. German is used in a wide variety of spheres throughout the country, especially in business, tourism, and public signage, as well as in education, churches (most notably the German-speaking Evangelical Lutheran Church in Namibia (GELK) ), other cultural spheres such as music, and media (such as German language radio programs by the Namibian Broadcasting Corporation ). The Allgemeine Zeitung

5207-550: The Standard German language in its written form, and the Duden Handbook was declared its standard definition. Punctuation and compound spelling (joined or isolated compounds) were not standardized in the process. The Deutsche Bühnensprache ( lit.   ' German stage language ' ) by Theodor Siebs had established conventions for German pronunciation in theatres , three years earlier; however, this

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5334-561: The Steyr area on 8 May 1945. Kumm was held at the Dachau internment camp administered by the US Army. Kumm avoided extradition to Yugoslavia to stand trial for war crimes by fleeing over the wall of the camp. After the war, Otto Kumm was "denazified" and became a businessman. Kumm was a founder and the first head of the Waffen-SS veterans' organization HIAG , established in 1951 to lobby for

5461-513: The Upper German dialects spoken in the southern German-speaking countries , such as Swiss German ( Alemannic dialects ) and the various Germanic dialects spoken in the French region of Grand Est , such as Alsatian (mainly Alemannic, but also Central–and   Upper Franconian dialects) and Lorraine Franconian (Central Franconian). After these High German dialects, standard German

5588-469: The pagan Germanic tradition. Of particular interest to scholars, however, has been the Hildebrandslied , a secular epic poem telling the tale of an estranged father and son unknowingly meeting each other in battle. Linguistically, this text is highly interesting due to the mixed use of Old Saxon and Old High German dialects in its composition. The written works of this period stem mainly from

5715-489: The "Wehrmacht was just as brutal as the Waffen-SS". In the following months, a number of war-criminals from the ranks of the Waffen-SS were released. Many of them were made eligible for prisoner-of-war compensation from local governments. In 1956, the West German Federal Ministry of Defence announced that former members of the Waffen-SS, up to the grade of lieutenant colonel, would be accepted into

5842-496: The "most important works of [Waffen-SS] apologist literature". They demanded rehabilitation of the combat branch of the Nazi Party and presented Waffen-SS members as "soldiers just like any other". Both Hausser and Steiner followed up their 1950s books with works published in the 1960s. Published in 1963, Steiner's book was called The Army of Outlaws ( German : Die Armee der Geächteten ). Hausser's work appeared in 1966 under

5969-566: The 1951 law. In 1949, the ban on forming veterans' associations was lifted. Encouraged by the shifting tone of the World War II discourse and the courting of the Wehrmacht veterans by the West German government and political parties, former Waffen-SS members came forward to campaign for their interests. HIAG's history began in late 1950 by a gradual amalgamation of local groups. The majority of its members were former junior officers in

6096-551: The Continent". In 1972, HIAG produced a five-hundred page SS picture tome under the nostalgic title When All Our Brothers Are Silent . Hausser spearheaded the project with Jochen Peiper , a controversial Waffen-SS figure, as a contributor. Other similar books included Scattered are the Traces (1979), Cavalry Divisions of the Waffen-SS (1982), Panzer Grenadiers of the 'Viking' Division in Pictures (1984), and many others. (One of

6223-633: The Eastern Front. Soviet intelligence identified large German tank formations in western Hungary and developed a successful counterattack strategy. After the failure of Operation Spring Awakening, Sepp Dietrich 's 6th SS Panzer Army and the LSSAH retreated to the Vienna area. After Vienna fell to the Red Army in the Vienna Offensive , the bulk of the LSSAH division surrendered to U.S. forces in

6350-723: The Empire. Its use indicated that the speaker was a merchant or someone from an urban area, regardless of nationality. Prague (German: Prag ) and Budapest ( Buda , German: Ofen ), to name two examples, were gradually Germanized in the years after their incorporation into the Habsburg domain; others, like Pressburg ( Pozsony , now Bratislava), were originally settled during the Habsburg period and were primarily German at that time. Prague, Budapest, Bratislava, and cities like Zagreb (German: Agram ) or Ljubljana (German: Laibach ), contained significant German minorities. In

6477-468: The FDP hoped to win popular support. HIAG took on the cause of those imprisoned or executed for war crimes and openly celebrated its members' Nazi past. A partial list of ensuing controversies in the first 12 years of HIAG's existence includes: Large, who studied HIAG extensively, stated in 1987 that HIAG's anti-democratic and antisemitic statements were "the essence of what HIAG was all about", concluding that

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6604-748: The Frisian languages— North Frisian (spoken in Nordfriesland ), Saterland Frisian (spoken in Saterland ), and West Frisian (spoken in Friesland )—as well as the Anglic languages of English and Scots. These Anglo-Frisian dialects did not take part in the High German consonant shift, and the Anglic languages also adopted much vocabulary from both Old Norse and the Norman language . The history of

6731-536: The German language begins with the High German consonant shift during the Migration Period , which separated Old High German dialects from Old Saxon . This sound shift involved a drastic change in the pronunciation of both voiced and voiceless stop consonants ( b , d , g , and p , t , k , respectively). The primary effects of the shift were the following below. While there is written evidence of

6858-451: The German states; the invention of the printing press c.  1440 and the publication of Luther's vernacular translation of the Bible in 1534, however, had an immense effect on standardizing German as a supra-dialectal written language. The ENHG period saw the rise of several important cross-regional forms of chancery German, one being gemeine tiutsch , used in the court of

6985-681: The Germanic dialects that were affected by the High German consonant shift (south of Benrath) from those that were not (north of Uerdingen). The various regional dialects spoken south of these lines are grouped as High German dialects, while those spoken to the north comprise the Low German and Low Franconian dialects. As members of the West Germanic language family, High German, Low German, and Low Franconian have been proposed to be further distinguished historically as Irminonic , Ingvaeonic , and Istvaeonic , respectively. This classification indicates their historical descent from dialects spoken by

7112-558: The HIAG convention in Karlsberg, Bavaria, he stated that "SS troops committed no crimes, except the massacre at Oradour, and that was the action of a single man". Meyer claimed that the Waffen-SS was the same as the German Army. On another occasion, Meyer publicly denounced the "regime" [West Germany] that could "honour traitors" but would vilify its soldiers. He condemned the notion of "collective guilt" and equated Jews and Jesuits to

7239-454: The HIAG's leaders remained true to their Nazi ideology . Similarly, the historian Karsten Wilke, who worked with the HIAG archives in the 2000s, discovered that the HIAG members' positions were "consistently racist, anti-Semitic and anti-democratic", as the German news magazine Der Spiegel characterised them in its 2011 article "The Brown Bluff: How Waffen SS Veterans Exploited Postwar Politics". Referencing Wilke's work, Der Spiegel quoted

7366-655: The Irminones (also known as the Elbe group), Ingvaeones (or North Sea Germanic group), and Istvaeones (or Weser–Rhine group). Standard German is based on a combination of Thuringian - Upper Saxon and Upper Franconian dialects, which are Central German and Upper German dialects belonging to the High German dialect group. German is therefore closely related to the other languages based on High German dialects, such as Luxembourgish (based on Central Franconian dialects ) and Yiddish . Also closely related to Standard German are

7493-757: The Italian autonomous province of South Tyrol . It is also an official language of Luxembourg , Belgium and the Italian autonomous region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia , as well as a recognized national language in Namibia . There are also notable German-speaking communities in France ( Alsace ), the Czech Republic ( North Bohemia ), Poland ( Upper Silesia ), Slovakia ( Košice Region , Spiš , and Hauerland ), Denmark ( North Schleswig ), Romania and Hungary ( Sopron ). Overseas, sizeable communities of German-speakers are found in Brazil ( Blumenau and Pomerode ), South Africa ( Kroondal ), Namibia , among others, some communities have decidedly Austrian German or Swiss German characters (e.g. Pozuzo , Peru). German

7620-408: The MHG period. Significantly, these texts include a number of impressive secular works, such as the Nibelungenlied , an epic poem telling the story of the dragon -slayer Siegfried ( c.  thirteenth century ), and the Iwein , an Arthurian verse poem by Hartmann von Aue ( c.  1203 ), lyric poems , and courtly romances such as Parzival and Tristan . Also noteworthy

7747-605: The Nazis and the Waffen-SS, as all being victims of history and prejudice. In the first instance, Meyer was most likely referring to Adolf Diekmann who was the senior officer present during the Oradour massacre . Meyer himself had served a lengthy prison term for his role in the Ardenne Abbey massacre . In the second instance, he was apparently referring to the members of the 20 July plot . At Jochen Peiper's memorial in 1976, Hubert Meyer referenced Peiper's open letter from Landsberg Prison , which had previously been quoted in Hausser's 1953 books. Hubert Meyer's speech later appeared in

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7874-411: The November 1976 issue of Der Freiwillige : For a broad public in Germany and even more throughout the rest of the world, [Peiper] has become the embodiment of that which all of us were clearly, intentionally and wrongly burdened in Nuremberg.... We have not forgotten what Jochen Peiper wrote to us from Landsberg Prison in 1952: "Don't forget that the first Europeans killed in action were in the units of

8001-403: The SS apparatus. The Tribunal found that "the units of the Waffen-SS were directly involved in the killings of prisoners of war and the atrocities in the occupied countries" and judged the entire SS to be a criminal organisation. HIAG aimed to reverse that judgement through significant propaganda efforts in the service of its historical negationism . According to Large, HIAG was a case study in

8128-402: The SS tied the Waffen-SS to the Nazi annihilation machine through the transfer of personnel between various SS units and the shifting responsibilities of the units themselves, as they might perform frontline duties at one time, and then be reassigned to "bandit-fighting" operations – or Bandenbekämpfung — in the rear. Kurt Meyer embodied the voice of Waffen-SS apologists. In 1957, speaking at

8255-416: The SS-Standarte "Germania" in Hamburg. Kumm commanded the Der Führer Regiment of the SS Division Das Reich from July 1941 to April 1943. This regiment was nearly destroyed in the Soviet offensive of January 1942, when it was reduced to 35 men out of the 2,000 that had started the campaign in June 1941. Kumm was a commander of the SS Division Prinz Eugen from 30 January 1944 until 20 January 1945 and then

8382-404: The Third Reich and also with the SS to destroy and drag through the mud all of what was and is sacred to us. (...) Let us be clear about it: the [Allied] battle was directed not only against the authoritarian regime of the Third Reich, but, above all, against the resurgence of the strength of the German people. Erich Kern , a far-right Austrian journalist and a former Nazi war correspondent, became

8509-424: The Waffen-SS did not participate in atrocities, but that the Wehrmacht did so as well. Large argues that the equivalence is meaningless, as, contrary to the myth of a clean Wehrmacht , it actively participated in the racial war of extermination in the Soviet Union. Although HIAG's leaders discouraged political affiliations, any leanings were to be "in the spirit of European and patriotic sentiment", as described in

8636-466: The Waffen-SS would have opened the door to claims by personnel of other SS and Nazi organisations, including the SA , the SD , the Hitler Youth , and others—a prospect the federal government preferred not to contemplate, because of possible domestic and international consequences. Some of its more outspoken members sounded like Nazis, harming the public image of HIAG: "The wider aim of complete rehabilitation proved harder to achieve, in part because some of

8763-450: The Waffen-SS, its propaganda efforts led to the reshaping of the image of the Waffen-SS in popular culture . In the years following World War II , the Allied occupational authorities in Germany implemented policies which included demilitarisation , denazification , democratisation and decentralisation . The Allies' attempts were often perceived by the occupied population as "victors' justice" and met with limited success. For those in

8890-491: The Waffen-SS, that the ones beaten to death during the post war period mostly were men from our ranks. They had become fair game because of their belief in the indivisibility of Western Europe. Remember these martyrs." To buttress the reputation of the Waffen-SS, the memoirs of HIAG's leading members featured quotations by former Wehrmacht generals endorsing the fighting skills of the force. Steiner's, Meyer's, and Hausser's books have been characterised by historian Charles Sydnor as

9017-513: The Waffen-SS. To achieve these aims, the organisation used contacts with political parties, and employed multi-prong historical negationism and propaganda efforts, including periodicals, books, and public speeches. A HIAG-owned publishing house, Munin Verlag , served as a platform for its publicity. This extensive body of work, 57 book titles and more than 50 years of monthly periodicals, has been described by historians as revisionist apologia . Always in touch with its members' Nazi past, HIAG

9144-689: The Waffen-SS. In the summer of 1951, HIAG was formally established by Otto Kumm , a former SS- Brigadeführer . By October 1951, HIAG claimed to consist of 376 local branches. By December 1951, former high-ranking Waffen-SS general Paul Hausser was HIAG's first spokesperson. Two well-known former Waffen-SS commanders, Felix Steiner and Herbert Gille , became early leading figures. Sepp Dietrich and Kurt Meyer became active members upon their release from prison, in 1955 and 1954. Meyer became HIAG's most effective spokesman. After Meyer's death in 1961, Erich Eberhardt , formerly of SS Division Totenkopf , assumed that role. As of 1977, Wilhelm Bittrich served as

9271-773: The Wehrmacht, condemned the Western Allies as the "real war criminals" and insisted that the blacklist on which all former SS members then stood would soon become "a list of honour". The outburst caused a furor within West Germany. Periodicals as far as the U.S. and Canada carried headlines "Hitler's Guard Cheers Ex-chief" and "Rabble-Rousing General Is Worrying the Allies", with the latter article reporting that Ramcke's speech had been greeted with "roars of approval and cries of 'Eisenhower, Schweinehund !' ('Pig – Dog')". HIAG and its spokesperson Steiner hastily tried to distance

9398-471: The West German government, the Allies commuted a number of sentences for war crimes. A public declaration by Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower followed in January 1951, distinguishing "between the regular German soldier and officer and Hitler and his criminal group... The fact that certain individuals committed in war dishonorable and despicable acts reflects on the individuals concerned and not on

9525-621: The Western occupation zones, the beginning of the Cold War further undermined these policies by reviving the idea of the necessity to fight against Soviet communism, echoing an aspect of Hitler's foreign policy. In 1950, after the outbreak of the Korean War , it became clear to the United States that German armed forces would need to be reconstituted. Former German officers used the changing political and military situation as leverage to demand

9652-634: The aims of the organisation as providing comradeship, legal assistance, support for those in Allied captivity, help for families, and aid in searches for those still missing. The HIAG campaigned for Waffen-SS veterans to be awarded the legal status of persons formerly in the public service, under article 131 of the Basic Law , so that they would qualify for the same rights and pensions as Wehrmacht's career soldiers. The historian David C. Large wrote that, like any public pronouncements, these bylaws did not tell

9779-426: The broader West German process of historical manipulation. HIAG's rewriting of history encompassed multi-prong publicity campaigns—including tendentious periodicals, books, and public speeches, as well as a publishing house dedicated to presenting the Waffen-SS in a positive light. The leadership viewed restoring the "tarnished shield" as a key component of the desired legal and economic rehabilitation, and thus no effort

9906-516: The campaigns in the West and in the East. On the other hand, as the war progressed, and the Waffen-SS grew to encompass conscripts (from 1943), Waffen-SS personnel began to resemble that of the Wehrmacht, contributing to the postwar confusion as to the organisation's status. The results of conscription allowed the Waffen-SS proponents to blur the line between the Waffen-SS and the Wehrmacht, arguing not that

10033-416: The cause of the Waffen-SS historical rehabilitation and restoration of their rights to post-war pensions. As the organization's chairman and its first spokesperson, Kumm set the tone for the rhetoric that was reflected in its publications and public discourse. In 1952, Otto Kumm published an editorial in the in-house magazine Wiking-Ruf ("Viking Call") outlining the organization's grievances: Even during

10160-717: The cavalry units in question, SS Cavalry Brigade , was responsible for the murder of an estimated 23,700 Jews and others in July–August 1941 alone, during the Pripyat Marshes massacres . Its regimental commander Lombard reported eliminating close to 11,000 "plunderers" in the first two weeks of the same operation.) HIAG leadership denied that there was any connection between the Waffen-SS and Nazi atrocities. In 1957, Paul Hausser wrote, in Der Freiwillige , an open letter to West Germany's minister of defence, stating that

10287-400: The chairman. HIAG membership was open to convicted war criminals, with the group's position being to absolve them of their responsibility. For example, the group openly embraced and advocated on behalf of Dietrich, Walter Reder , and Herbert Kappler , former SS men convicted of wartime massacres. With the publication of its first periodical, Wiking-Ruf ("Viking Call"), in late 1951, HIAG

10414-461: The clean Wehrmacht . The positive image of the Waffen-SS indeed found a receptive audience during the Cold War. Senior Waffen-SS personnel were "not shy about suggesting that they had once organised and led a NATO -like army (and an elite one at that)", notes MacKenzie. John M. Steiner, in his 1975 work, points out that SS apologists, especially strongly represented in HIAG, stressed that they were

10541-399: The concentration camp guard units ( SS-Totenkopfverbände ) served on external detail only, "without the possibility of interfering with the internal procedure". He did not mention that the guards accompanied prisoners to labour sites and that the commanders of concentration camps generally came from the Waffen-SS. This apologist position also ignored the fact that the organisational structure of

10668-430: The development of non-local forms of language and exposed all speakers to forms of German from outside their own area. With Luther's rendering of the Bible in the vernacular, German asserted itself against the dominance of Latin as a legitimate language for courtly, literary, and now ecclesiastical subject-matter. His Bible was ubiquitous in the German states: nearly every household possessed a copy. Nevertheless, even with

10795-456: The dialect so as to make the work as natural and accessible to German speakers as possible. Copies of Luther's Bible featured a long list of glosses for each region, translating words which were unknown in the region into the regional dialect. Luther said the following concerning his translation method: One who would talk German does not ask the Latin how he shall do it; he must ask the mother in

10922-508: The division, which even whitewashed the Malmedy massacre . HIAG involved a legal consultant to make sure the account would be within the framework of the strict German laws prohibiting glorification of the Nazi past. The project also included the former chief of staff of the unit, Dietrich Ziemssen, who in 1952 produced a denialist version of the massacre in his pamphlet Der Malmedy Prozess . In

11049-454: The early 1950s, HIAG claimed to represent 2 million potential voters, a vast exaggeration, as only 250,000 Waffen-SS veterans were living in West Germany at that time. In 1951, SPD leader Kurt Schumacher established contact with HIAG. When he first met with its leaders, Schumacher believed that 150,000 people were already members of HIAG, as evidenced by internal party correspondence; he considered that number to be "politically significant". In

11176-417: The early 1950s. Along with other veterans' organisations, HIAG campaigned for the immediate amnesty and early release of war criminals still in Allied captivity. This issue was significant, as most of these organisations made their cooperation in the area of rearmament contingent on the satisfactory resolution of the amnesty issue. It was partly for this reason that the West German government was sympathetic to

11303-503: The early 1960s. HIAG also asserted that the Waffen-SS was merely "the fourth arm of the Wehrmacht"; these claims were even "more dubious", explains Large. As a Nazi organisation combining both military and police powers, the Waffen-SS was an arm of the SS : its members stood under SS jurisdiction separate from that of the Wehrmacht; its personnel were responsible for guarding concentration camps and were thoroughly implicated in war crimes during

11430-519: The eastern provinces of Banat , Bukovina , and Transylvania (German: Banat, Buchenland, Siebenbürgen ), German was the predominant language not only in the larger towns—like Temeschburg ( Timișoara ), Hermannstadt ( Sibiu ), and Kronstadt ( Brașov )—but also in many smaller localities in the surrounding areas. In 1901, the Second Orthographic Conference ended with a (nearly) complete standardization of

11557-513: The fate of these individuals and made every effort to secure their early release. Chancellor Adenauer even met with Kurt Meyer in Werl Prison when he went there on an inspection tour. Behind the scenes, HIAG cultivated close relationships with the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the main opposition Social Democratic Party (SPD), garnering attention by inflating its membership numbers and influence. In meetings with politicians in

11684-685: The first to fight for Europe and Western civilisation against "Asiatic Communist hordes". German language German (German: Deutsch , pronounced [dɔʏtʃ] ) is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family , mainly spoken in Western and Central Europe . It is the most spoken native language within the European Union . It is the most widely spoken and official (or co-official) language in Germany , Austria , Switzerland , Liechtenstein , and

11811-543: The former Waffen-SS members' version of events. Until HIAG's dissolution in 1992, Munin-Verlag published 57 titles. Walter Harzer took on the role of the official historian of HIAG, in charge of coordinating the writing of the histories of Waffen-SS divisions. HIAG worked with historian Ernst Klink , of the Military History Research Office (MGFA) in Freiburg, to screen materials donated to

11938-419: The full story of HIAG's real goals. By investigating how these statutes were applied in practice, he was able to tease out what the organisation stood for. For example, HIAG claimed to represent the entire Waffen-SS membership, living and dead, as well as their families: 500,000 in total. In reality, the organisation's rolls did not exceed 20,000. HIAG attained this number in the late 1950s, and maintained it until

12065-620: The great majority of German soldiers and officers." The same year, some former career officers of the Wehrmacht were granted war pensions. Unlike the Wehrmacht, the SS had been deemed a criminal organisation at the Nuremberg trials and could thus act as an "alibi of a nation" (as Gerald Reitlinger's 1956 book of that title suggested), as being solely responsible for crimes of the Nazi regime . Consequently, Waffen-SS career personnel were not covered under

12192-435: The home, the children on the streets, the common man in the market-place and note carefully how they talk, then translate accordingly. They will then understand what is said to them because it is German. When Christ says ' ex abundantia cordis os loquitur ,' I would translate, if I followed the papists, aus dem Überflusz des Herzens redet der Mund . But tell me is this talking German? What German understands such stuff? No,

12319-481: The influence of Luther's Bible as an unofficial written standard, a widely accepted standard for written German did not appear until the middle of the eighteenth century. German was the language of commerce and government in the Habsburg Empire , which encompassed a large area of Central and Eastern Europe . Until the mid-nineteenth century, it was essentially the language of townspeople throughout most of

12446-560: The largest concentrations of German speakers are in the states of Rio Grande do Sul (where Riograndenser Hunsrückisch developed), Santa Catarina , and Espírito Santo . Otto Kumm Born in 1909 into a family of a merchant in Hamburg, Kumm trained as a typesetter and worked at a newspaper. On 1 June 1934, Kumm joined the SS- Verfügungstruppe (SS Dispositional Troops) and on 1 July received his first training with

12573-535: The membership's "undemocratic" ways, but these efforts at reforming the veterans were futile. Such dealing with HIAG caused concerns within the SPD, where HIAG's members were thus described as "unteachables" ( Unbelehrbare ). HIAG found its best champion in the centre-right Free Democratic Party (FDP), whose platform was most closely aligned to HIAG's goals. The FDP demanded the release of war criminals, seeing their incarceration as "political". Through their support of HIAG,

12700-403: The mid-to-late 1970s, HIAG attempted to commission a favorable biography of Peiper, to stop "the bad rumors", according to a HIAG official. "We must steadfastly remain behind the wheel and direct this book ourselves, otherwise [Erich Kern] will do it", Harzer wrote to a fellow member in 1976. HIAG contemplated approaching (or approached) Herbert Reinecker , a prolific screenwriter who had served in

12827-471: The more enthusiastic members of HIAG sounded alarmingly Nazi in their pronouncements." During the Nuremberg Trials, HIAG's personnel, such as Hausser in his testimony as a defence witness, contended that the Waffen-SS was a purely military organisation no different from the Wehrmacht. The prosecution at Nuremberg rejected this claim and successfully argued that the Waffen-SS was an integral part of

12954-534: 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 2nd Panzer Division Das Reich ", authored by one of its former officers, Otto Weidinger. The French author Jean-Paul Picaper, who studied the Oradour massacre perpetrated by the men of the Das Reich , notes the tendentious nature of Weidinger's narrative: it provided

13081-402: The mother in the home and the plain man would say, Wesz das Herz voll ist, des gehet der Mund über . Luther's translation of the Bible into High German was also decisive for the German language and its evolution from Early New High German to modern Standard German. The publication of Luther's Bible was a decisive moment in the spread of literacy in early modern Germany , and promoted

13208-653: The ninth century, chief among them being the Muspilli , Merseburg charms , and Hildebrandslied , and other religious texts (the Georgslied , Ludwigslied , Evangelienbuch , and translated hymns and prayers). The Muspilli is a Christian poem written in a Bavarian dialect offering an account of the soul after the Last Judgment , and the Merseburg charms are transcriptions of spells and charms from

13335-401: The organisation from Ramcke and his remarks. The notion that Waffen-SS personnel had been "soldiers like all others" found its way into the discourse regarding war captivity. HIAG claimed that its members were victims of Allied arbitrariness and complained of harsh internment conditions. HIAG equated the status of war criminals with that of prisoners of war and obfuscated the differences between

13462-529: The organisation held its first major meeting in Verden . It began respectably, with Gille announcing that the veterans were ready to "do their duty for the Fatherland" and Steiner declaring support for "freedom, order and justice". But the next speaker delivered a different message. Hermann-Bernhard Ramcke , a former paratroop general and a convicted war criminal, invited to demonstrate so-called solidarity with

13589-400: The organisation's key employee responsible for its publishing arm. He first became active within HIAG in 1955, and then joined as a full-time employee in 1959. According to the historian Jonathan Petropoulos , Kern remained an "unrepentant and unreconstructed Nazi" up to his death in 1991. The theme of foreign volunteers was featured prominently, with Steiner lending his voice in this area. In

13716-462: The pronunciation of the ending -ig as [ɪk] instead of [ɪç]. In Northern Germany, High German was a foreign language to most inhabitants, whose native dialects were subsets of Low German. It was usually encountered only in writing or formal speech; in fact, most of High German was a written language, not identical to any spoken dialect, throughout the German-speaking area until well into the 19th century. However, wider standardization of pronunciation

13843-528: The rehabilitation of the Wehrmacht . In October 1950, a group of former senior officers produced a document, which became known as the " Himmerod memorandum ", for West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer . It included the demands that German war criminals be released and that the "defamation" of the German soldiers, including the Waffen-SS personnel, cease, which Adenauer worked to implement. To accommodate

13970-482: The rehabilitation of their legal status with respect to war pensions. During its early existence, HIAG also focused on "tracing service" actions ( Kameraden-Suchdienst ). HIAG embraced the Suchdienst activities, not only because it was concerned for the fate of some 40,000 members of the Waffen-SS who were missing in action, but because this outwardly humanitarian and non-political activity could help improve how it

14097-423: The same letter, Schumacher referred to the Waffen-SS as a "branch of the Wehrmacht". Later, the SPD defence policy expert Fritz Erler and Helmut Schmidt , a member of SPD parliamentary delegation and a future Chancellor of Germany , handled the relationship with HIAG. They maintained close contact, attending private and public meetings and keeping up regular correspondence. They often admonished HIAG leadership for

14224-546: The states of North Dakota and South Dakota , German is the most common language spoken at home after English. As a legacy of significant German immigration to the country , German geographical names can be found throughout the Midwest region , such as New Ulm and Bismarck (North Dakota's state capital), plus many other regions. A number of German varieties have developed in the country and are still spoken today, such as Pennsylvania Dutch and Texas German . In Brazil,

14351-500: The third most commonly learned second language in the United States in K-12 education. The language has been influential in the fields of philosophy, theology, science, and technology. It is the second most commonly used language in science and the third most widely used language on websites . The German-speaking countries are ranked fifth in terms of annual publication of new books, with one-tenth of all books (including e-books) in

14478-634: The title Soldiers Like Any Other ( German : Soldaten wie andere auch ). According to MacKenzie, the books' titles were symbolic of the Waffen-SS image that HIAG's leaders wanted to portray, while Sydnor describes this later generation of books as "equally tendentious". In addition to HIAG's own publishing house Munin Verlag (below), similar books were also published by Plesse Verlag  [ de ] in Göttingen. In 1958, HIAG established its own publishing house—Munin Verlag. The name comes from Norse mythology popular with right-wing movements. Muninn

14605-554: The veterans of the Wehrmacht and those of the Waffen-SS. In its periodical Wiking-Ruf , HIAG made use of the same drawings of emaciated German POWs behind barbed wire used by the publications of another post-war organisation—the West German Association of Returnees and Families of POWs and MIAs  [ de ] (VdH). In its turn, VdH saw its role as a counterbalance to militaristic veterans' organisations such as HIAG and explicitly distanced itself from them in

14732-462: The war, and especially after the war, infamous and lying propagandists have been able to make use of all the unfortunate events connected to the Third Reich and also with the SS to destroy and drag through the mud all of what was and is sacred to us. [...] Let us be clear about it: the [Allied] battle was directed not only against the authoritarian regime of the Third Reich, but, above all, against

14859-555: The world being published in German. German is most closely related to other West Germanic languages, namely Afrikaans , Dutch , English , the Frisian languages , and Scots . It also contains close similarities in vocabulary to some languages in the North Germanic group , such as Danish , Norwegian , and Swedish . Modern German gradually developed from Old High German , which in turn developed from Proto-Germanic during

14986-600: The written form of German. One of the central events in the development of ENHG was the publication of Luther's translation of the Bible into High German (the New Testament was published in 1522; the Old Testament was published in parts and completed in 1534). Luther based his translation primarily on the Meißner Deutsch of Saxony , spending much time among the population of Saxony researching

15113-429: Was a "neutral" language as there were virtually no English native speakers in Namibia at that time. German, Afrikaans, and several indigenous languages thus became "national languages" by law, identifying them as elements of the cultural heritage of the nation and ensuring that the state acknowledged and supported their presence in the country. Today, Namibia is considered to be the only German-speaking country outside of

15240-408: Was a subject of significant controversy, both in West Germany and abroad. The organisation drifted into open far-right extremism in its later history; it disbanded in 1992 at the federal level, but local groups continue to exist into the 21st century. Its monthly periodical, Der Freiwillige , survived until 2014. While HIAG only partially achieved its goals of legal and economic rehabilitation of

15367-547: Was an artificial standard that did not correspond to any traditional spoken dialect. Rather, it was based on the pronunciation of German in Northern Germany, although it was subsequently regarded often as a general prescriptive norm, despite differing pronunciation traditions especially in the Upper-German-speaking regions that still characterise the dialect of the area today – especially

15494-696: Was appointed the new division commander of the SS Division Leibstandarte (LSSAH) as of 15 February 1945, after the division's commander Wilhelm Mohnke was wounded. As the division commander, Kumm and the LSSAH took part in Operation Spring Awakening (6 March 1945 – 16 March 1945), the last major German offensive launched during World War II. The Germans launched attacks in Hungary near the Lake Balaton area on

15621-522: Was beginning to draw attention to itself and generate public controversy, including speculation that it was a neo-Nazi organisation. In response, Hausser wrote an open letter to the Bundestag , West Germany's parliament, denying these accusations and describing the HIAG as an advocacy organisation for former Waffen-SS troops. Hausser asserted that its members rejected all forms of radicalism and were "upstanding citizens". The HIAG bylaws of 1952 described

15748-492: Was established on the basis of public speaking in theatres and the media during the 20th century and documented in pronouncing dictionaries. Official revisions of some of the rules from 1901 were not issued until the controversial German orthography reform of 1996 was made the official standard by governments of all German-speaking countries. Media and written works are now almost all produced in Standard German which

15875-461: Was perceived by the West German government and the society at large. Such public relations activities ("image polishing", according to Large) were important to HIAG, as it faced ongoing scrutiny and even calls for a ban on the organisation. The Suchdiensttreffen events (literally: tracing service meetings) later evolved into annual Kameradschaftstreffen ("veterans' reunions"), which were large-scale conventions, often accompanied by rallies. In 1952,

16002-425: Was spared. HIAG's first periodical was Wiking-Ruf , which was launched in 1951. In 1955, HIAG launched its other publication Der Freiwillige ( The Volunteer ). A 1952 editorial by Kumm highlighted key themes that were used throughout HIAG's subsequent history: Even during the war, and especially after the war, infamous and lying propagandists have been able to make use of all the unfortunate events connected to

16129-403: Was the timeframe when HIAG achieved its last success in economic rehabilitation: in 1961, the West German government partially restored pension rights to Waffen-SS personnel under the 131 legislation. HIAG greeted this development as a partial victory, which they hoped would lead to a complete rehabilitation. This wider aim proved impossible to achieve: the government was cautious, as rehabilitating

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