Interview with German WW2 Veteran SS Scharführer Hans Thiesen from SS Totenkopf Division Russia

Powerful and informative Interview with Scharführer Hans Thiesen from Totenkopf Division, October, 1998.

Hans Theissen:
"On June 20, we were under cover of trees, and it was ordered that all vehicles be hidden and camouflaged. We had a terrific sense of duty, that for the last time the Bolshevist menace to the world would be over. On June 21 our leaders pulled all battalions in for briefings, ours spoke for roughly an hour. He said a great battle was about to begin between Germany and our allies and Jewish Bolshevism. He was a professor before the war, and studied Russia and its history; he said to prepare for a long war, but hope for a short campaign. Something I should like to mention to you is that he stressed to us that we would be at war against an ideology, not the Russian people. He told us to steel ourselves to the hardness with which the enemy could fight, and that we must be harder.......

We stopped after 4 hours of marching, and a few Wehrmacht soldiers had prisoners. Our Obersturmführer went over to speak to them and give them water. He told us later that they were happy to be captured and asked if they could help us. That was surprising, but the speech I heard the night before rang out, we are at war with an ideology, not the people. We started to see more and more prisoners on the roads, I was surprised to see so many. It was said that Stalin wanted to attack us, and these vast numbers of men and equipment we saw support this.....

At the beginning of the war, it [view of the Russian soldiers] was very favorable; at the end, I hated them [Russian soldiers] due to their barbarity and cruelness. The first prisoners we took were European Russians, they hated the bolshevists as much as we did, and they wanted their country freed. We ate with a group of officers who were captured, and our Obersturmführer translated, saying they had been forbidden to worship, lived in poor housing, and when asked about the condition of Jews, said they all lived in good areas now, unlike during the Tsar, who kept them in ghettos. They felt the Jews had a leading role in the revolution, and kept their heel on the Russian people's throats. Many of their friends disappeared without a trace, and asked if we could investigate after we won. Our leaders decided that we could allow some of the prisoners to stay with us if they wanted, the officers would go back to Germany for debriefings, and talk was running high how many would join us to fight. I want to add that in the beginning, we felt no hatred to the Russians, they came out to greet us with what little food and drink that they had. They looked so poor and wretched....

.....The Red Army became more Eastern-looking by 1942, and the attitude changed in the way they fought. In the beginning there were no reports of atrocities or breaches of law by the Russians. As the war went on, reports started circulating of German soldiers being murdered after surrendering and civilians killed for helping us."