Paul Hausser

Paul Hausser (1890-1972) was the highest-ranking officer of the Waffen SS, an Oberstgruppenfuehrer and Colonel General of Waffen SS.. He was the only SS leader to have been a general before joining it. Coming to the SS from long service and retirement in the prior Army, he established combat training, and then commanded SS troop formations reporting to the OKH or OKW headquarters or Army commands subordinate to them, not SS headquarters. He finished the war as a regular Army Group commanding officer.

After World War II, he fought a campaign to consider the Waffen SS to be a regular combat organization rather than part of the criminal conspiracy that the International Military Tribunal (Nuremberg) had adjudged the overall Schutzstaffel. While he testified at the tribunal, he himself was not charged with war crimes other than SS membership. Varying the usual sequence for senior officers, he joined the SS three years before he became a Nazi Party member.

In his Nuremberg testimony, Hauser agreed the matter could be confusing.

These various branches of the organization of Heinrich Himmler unfortunately wore the same uniform, though they had different insignia. The only thing they had in common was their chief, Heinrich Himmler. The various branches were completely separate from each other even before the war. This separation was intensified more and more during the war. The units of the Waffen-SS were under the command of the Army authorities. The other branches, SD, Police, et cetera, were subordinate to Himmler.

Adolf Hitler did not clarify the matter, in that he had long reassured the regular Army, before World War II, that the SA and SS were not replacing them as the primary military force. Reitlinger quoted Hausser as saying, in 1940, that the SS was to be an "elite police force" no more than a tenth of the size of the military. In 1942, Hitler said only reasons of prestige required sending SS units to the front, although they had been trained in armored combat well before then.

Supporting Hitler's argument was that only Hauser, Sepp Dietrich, and Felix Steiner commanded armies as SS officers, while Hitler had appointed 36 colonel generals and 18 field marshals in the Army, many of whom had little high command experience before 1935. Hausser was unique, in the SS, of having been a Reichswehr general officer. Steiner had directed senior officer training and held field commands, and was on a general officer career track. In contrast, Heinz Reinefart had been an army sergeant, rose to full police general, but was disgraced while commanding a corps.

It can also be argued, however, that Hausser was correct in that the senior SS commanders of corps and above, and many of the division commanders, had much more regular military experience than other SS officers, of equal rank but not in the Waffen SS. Some of the younger division commanders spent their entire careers in the Waffen SS.

Pre-Nazi Career

He retired, on 1 February 1932, from the Reichswehr with the rank of heutenant general. In 1933, he joined the Stahlhelm, which was not a Nazi organization, and with this organization I was transferred to the SA reserve in 1934.

SS Career

After the events in the summer of 1934, I was asked by Heinrich Himmler whether I would be willing to take over the establishment and direction of an officer candidate school. I accepted this assignment, and in November 1934 1 joined the Verfuegungstruppe.

He directed the SS officer training school from Easter 1935 to the summer of 1936, and then became inspector of the Verfuegungstruppe from 1936 to 1939.

"During the war, for 2 years in each capacity, I led an SS division and an SS Panzer corps, and then from 1944 on I was again in the Army, as commander-in-chief of an army group. I am in a position to give information on the Verfuegungstruppe in peacetime and on the Waffen-SS during the war, as far as I became acquainted with them personally, and as far as they were under my orders. I do not know the General SS. During the war I was not employed at any main office.