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War crimes in France are attributed almost exclusively to the Waffen SS. There is scarcely any mention in the surveillance protocols of comparable abuses by Wehrmacht soldiers.⁸⁰⁶ This conforms to the picture emerging from the latest research, which has found little evidence of Wehrmacht or Luftwaffe war crimes on this front and attributes responsibility for the most grievous abuses to the Waffen SS.⁸⁰⁷

It is hardly surprising, then, that the Waffen SS never shed the reputation for extreme brutality that began to coalesce in 1939–40. Alleged eyewitnesses repeatedly connected SS men with the murder of women and children, which was nearly always condemned as violating the military ethos.⁸⁰⁸ While a POW, Major Hasso Viebig met the first general staff officer of the Wehrmacht’s 58th Armored Corps, under which the SS division “The Reich” served for a time. Conversations with a Major Beck opened Viebig’s eyes:

Viebig’s narrative refers to the massacre of Oradour, in which a company from the division “The Reich” murdered 642 men, women, and children.

Few Wehrmacht POWs tried to maintain differentiated views when it came to war crimes. In April 1945, Franz Breitlich was conversing with his bunkmate Helmut Hanelt in the American POW camp Fort Hunt. Breitlich tells of how Russian civilians had been mowed down by tanks and machine gun fire. “Our troops really carried out some business,” Breitlich generalizes. “The vanguard of the Wehrmacht not so much, but when the SS arrived, they really did some business.”⁸¹⁰

It is interesting that Breitlich initially speaks of “our” troops, only to immediately qualify his statement by saying it was the SS, and not the Wehrmacht, who really got down to “business.” Very few soldiers went so far as to imply there was little difference between the Wehrmacht and the SS. One was Colonel Eberhard Wildermuth, who came from a relatively left-wing political background:

We dissociate ourselves in that way from these people, but they could immediately confront us and say: “But if you please, in this instance the German Hauptmann So-and-so, or the German Oberst So-and-so did exactly the same thing as the SS.”⁸¹¹

Wildermuth was no doubt well informed on the topic of war crimes as he had served on practically every front and had good connections to the German resistance. At the very least, he had witnessed Wehrmacht crimes in Serbia in 1941.⁸¹² But the conclusions he drew were the exception to the rule. Most Wehrmacht officers simply denied that their troops had ever been involved in crimes of such serious dimensions.