Black Edelweiss: A Memoir of Combat and Conscience by a Soldier of the Waffen-SS

Even more than the strictly military narrative, however, the author has crafted a searingly candid view into his own mind and soul. As such, Black Edelweiss is much more than a "ripping yarn" or a low-level military history. Black Edelweiss joins not only the growing body of German military memoirs, but the more select, more narrowly-focused group of personal memoirs by other Waffen-SS enlisted men. Beyond the microcosmic view of combat these books relate to the extent that they are honest and candid such books are important for what they can reveal about their authors motivations and reflections on those impulses and their consequences. To date, these works differ significantly.

As it joins the ranks of the books in this genre, Black Edelweiss makes a unique and very important contribution. It is a true, personal account of the author s war years, first at school and then with the Waffen-SS, which he joined early in 1943 at the age of seventeen. For a year and a half, the author fought as a machine gunner in SS-Mountain Infantry Regiment 11 "Reinhard Heydrich," mainly in the arctic and sub-arctic reaches of Soviet Karelia and Finland, and later at the Western frontier of the Third Reich. The characters in the story are real, and the conversations and actions are recounted to the best of his ability from the short distance at which he wrote the manuscript in 1945 46.

Apart from the piercing insights into the question of why the German soldier fought as he did, what makes this book truly unique is the author s anguished, yet resolute examination of the dialectic between the honorable and valorous comportment of his comrades and the fundamentally reprehensible conduct of about 35,000 men behind the front lines who nevertheless wore the same uniform.

During his captivity, the author was assigned for a time as a clerk to a US Army Judge Advocate General s Corps officer, and in the performance of his administrative duties, the author had access to the mounting reams of documentation of the Holocaust. His growing recognition of the involvement of Waffen-SS personnel in the monstrous crimes of that process caused him to dig deeply into his soul, to examine his most intimate and private motivations and thoughts, and to reevaluate the most basic assumptions of his life to that point. The author captured this process and the result in the notes which became this book.

Honestly, forthrightly, and courageously told, Black Edelweiss is a precious gift to historians and other students of World War II. It not only provides a glimpse into the attributes that made the German armed forces a formidable and tenacious foe, but squarely confronts the most painful issue facing German World War II veterans in general, and Waffen-SS veterans in particular.

Supported by 22 photos, 8 maps, and notes.

This memoir is interesting on a variety of levels. One is the account of mountain infantry training the author received as a young volunteer for the Waffen SS. Far from politically indoctrinated fanatics, we see an elite military organization preparing men for combat in modern war. I suspect that the emphasis on political and racial indoctrination was more a product of the pre-war years, when the Waffen SS was seen as a force against potential enemies within the Reich, not after say 1941 when large numbers of new replacements were needed to man an expanding number of divisions fighting in foreign theaters of operations. That and the fact that many foreign volunteers, some from ethnic groups lower on the SS pecking order, where filling the ranks of these formations as well. The emphasis went from "elite order of racial Uebermenschen" to "cadre of the common European struggle against Bolshevism". This latter attitude is mentioned by the author numerous times and obviously was one of his main reasons for joining the organization.

On another level is the sociological perspective of various views common among Germans during 1941-3. He sees his own class in school as divided between the idealists and the pragmatists. Some, like the author, saw the war as a personal challenge and were eager to commit themselves, while others saw it as the business of others and hoped to survive the chaos as best as possible, which is hardly the usual view we have of German youth of that time. Interesting in that the author shows us how universal this conflict of views is. One need only think of the attitudes of the generation of young Americans confronted with the Vietnam War and how they reacted, although in some cases in later life only to adopt the opposite view when it no longer required a personal commitment.

So some of us can respect the author's decision to serve his country as a soldier in wartime. But the branch he chose to serve with was the Waffen SS, part of the larger SS, which was to be branded a criminal organization by the Allied courts due to their administration of the Holocaust among other crimes. The author admits the crimes and the guilt of the SS (he found out about the death camps and other atrocities as a POW after the war), but can't condemn all his comrades, most of whom are dead, as criminals in serving a cause which they believed in, which the author never thinks included common knowledge of the criminal character of the SS. It is a quandary for which the author never finds an answer, perhaps because no answer is possible. That the author saw the Nazis as having perverted all the values that his generation had believed in, of destroying his country in a senseless war while pursuing the most inhuman crimes imaginable is tempered by the fact that he doesn't see the defeat of Germany as a liberation. . . See page 133.

The mistake was in not overthrowing the criminal regime themselves, which was a "disgrace", but in having to have their enemies do it for them. Furthermore, the final outcome of the National Socialist swindle was not inevitable, "All the same one lesson is clear: never again must there be any public authority without active popular control". Page 71.

There are others points the author mentions as well such as the belief common in Germany after the First World War that a new movement which would do away with the old distinctions of class and status, create a Volksgemeinschaft, was necessary for national rebirth. Also of special note are his interesting and gratifying comments concerning US troops in action and his description of Operation Birke, the German evacuation of their Lapland Army from Finland to Norway in the fall of 1944, an arduous trek of over 1600 kilometers conducted in good order under pressure from both the Red Army and later the German's former allies, the Finns. I doubt that this unique military achievement of the Lapland Army will ever be repeated.

This book should be of interest to all readers interested in the Eastern Front in World War II, particularly since it is one of the few accounts available of fighting on the Karelian sector, those interested in the history of the Waffen SS or those interested in a sociological perspective of Germany during World War II.


There were honorable men in the Waffen-SS!   October 2, 2002
73 out of 86 found this review helpful

During almost a decade of teaching graduate level WWII(ETO) courses, I developed a curiosity about the Waffen-SS. Specifically, why did so many men volunteer and how was the esprit de corps developed by its elite divisions?

Yes, some of those men committed attrocities. But the spate of oral histories coming to light after more than half a century indicate that such conduct was not limited to the SS. We also did some of that. But as they say, "history is written by the winners."

Voss joined the Waffen-SS in 1943 at age 17 and wrote the notes that were to become _Black Edelweiss_ as a 20 year old PW. As a former Lieutenant in the Jungvolk, he enlisted because he wanted to help his country. His father and older brother were on the Ostfront. His father, a veteran of WWI had also been a Freikorps volunteer. Fighting Bolsheviks was a family tradition. His best friend was transferring from the Wehrmacht (Heer) to the W-SS.

Patriotism was a family value, Johann was a patriot.

He also volunteered for a mountain division and was posted to the 6th-SS Gebirgs Division "Nord," stationed in Soviet Karelia and northern Finland above the Artic Circle. After about year of fighting, allied with the Finns, Finland again capitulated to the Soviets. Nord had to fight its way out of Finland. Voss' 11th Regiment ended up in the lower Vosges near Reipertswiller fighting the US 157th Reg, 16-20 Jan '45. In Feburary he was taken prisoner during an ill advised attack on Lampaden. Many of his comrades died during this fight.

That Nord was still undertaking attacks, futile as they were, was due to the comradeship found in good outfits, usually concomitant with good NCO and Officer leadership.

So what prompted him to write his memoirs as a 20 year old PW? The JAG Captain he worked for as a clerk/translator (he also spoke French), was the recipient of photographs from the concentration camps. Voss was horrified by these photos. He had not joined for that reason, nor would his family have condoned such behavior. The camps were thought by the average German to be work camps.

As a point of information, combat Waffen-SS units were not posted to these camps. Yes, before the SS-Totenkopf was placed under Army control after the Polish campaign, the SSTK served as Einsatzgruppen behind the lines during that campaign. Regardless, there were only a small number of W-SS, usually convalescing from war wounds, who saw duty as guards.

About a month after the trials at Nurnburg began (which was why the JAG had the photos), the International Military Tribunal ruled that the Waffen-SS, as part of the Allgemeine SS, was guilty of being a criminal organization. "So, under the law of the victors, the volunteers were a gang of criminals."

_Black Edelweiss_ is a must read for persons curious about World War II and for that matter, curious about German culture.

Keith Bonn's Aberjona Press has done another amazing research-wise accurate job! Superb follow-up was done on "Voss'" memoir. Again, a must read!

Andrew Baggs


A memoir of rare value!   March 12, 2004
Mannie Liscum (Columbia, MO United States)
70 out of 75 found this review helpful

Black Edelweiss is a rare example of a personal WWII memoir written soon after the events (most of the draft was written while the author was a POW during 1945-46) with the emotional and historical breadth of a book written from a much greater distance of time and utilizing a variety of non-personal references. Johann Voss (a pseudonym) has put his life in the SS-Mountain Infantry Regiment 11 (given the name yReinhard Heydrichy in 1942) to paper in a way that the reader can truly assess the actions of a single soldier, his immediate platoon members and larger Regimental force rationally without the baggage of bias. This is not to say that the author has created a typical post-war apologetic piece that draws empathy/sympathy from the reader. Rather, Voss draws the reader along in an honest forthright story of his experiences as a loyal soldier within a larger group of comrades who, although fighting for the Hitler regime, did so with heart and passion for comrades, unit and country, but with clear chivalry (or at least as much as can fairly be expected in war) and battle fairness. It is the very nature of when this book was drafted (and little changed by the author later although published 60 odd years after being drafted) y while the author was still feeling connection to and pride of unit y that makes this NOT a typical Nazi apologia book. The book was however written at a time when the author was learning (second hand) about the atrocities of the Nazi regime and the SS structure more particularly, and as such the author is able to place his military experiences in perspective of the regime he served. This creates both an honest look at combat and the emotions invoked upon finding for what and whom he and friends served and died for. Emotion is raw and real in this book.

Voss starts and ends the book in third person from the POW pen, but in between weaves an engrossing story of how a young impressionable German is compelled to join an elite SS-Mountain Regiment; how this decision positively affects his life; how he survives the cold and combat of service above the Artic circle, in the Vosges Mountains, and the last days of the western Reich frontier; and how his earlier decision to join this elite group of men affected his life upon realization that his combat unit has been wholesale lumped with the SS of the Endloesung. The stories of regiment combat are visceral in content and quite rewarding. One can feel the cold, stress, fear and adrenalin of the situations.

I highly recommend this book if you want a clear and apparently unembellished, time-unbiased picture of a German combat unit in action. If you want to double your pleasure read Black Edelweiss back-to-back with another Aberjona Press production, Seven Days in January by Wolf Zoepf. This latter book deals exclusively with the SS Nord Division and itys combat both above the Artic Circle and the Lower Vosges and is pitched more from the pure combat history perspective.


My Friend, the Author   August 18, 2002
Dale Bowlin (Vancouver WA USA)
58 out of 60 found this review helpful

A few years ago while touring our WWII battlefields in the Vosges Mountains of Eastern France with members of my 70th Infantry Division Association, my wife and I met the author. Since that first meeting we have had the opportunity to exchange both our recollections of and our thoughts during those dark days. At the US Military Cemetery in St. Avold I have stood next to the author as he placed flowers by our Association's memorial wreath. I have listened to his words as he shared his feelings with our group of veterans on tour in Saarbrucken, the large German city we captured in March 1945. I have felt the anguish in his mind as he described becoming aware of the horrors that the Nazis and some of his fellow Waffen SS comrades had committed in the concentration camps.

And the author has listened to my story of being ambushed and captured, then wounded by artillery shrapnel, and surviving a severed artery because a German soldier risked his life while carrying me unconscious to medical aid.

As I read the fascinating Black Edelweiss I found myself frequently comparing my situation as a 17 year old youth in rural Kansas with the author's thoughts and activities halfway around the world. Black Edelweiss has given me a new perspective on both the German military and the citizens of Germany during the early `40s.

I found once I started reading it was difficult to put the book aside.


Sometimes...there are no answers!   January 15, 2003
Mark P. Myers (Greensboro, NC United States)
55 out of 60 found this review helpful

A first rate memoir, in which the author crystalizes his wartime experiences and reflections in a direct and thoughtful manner. As the publisher and editorial reviews have stated so well, there is fresh and added-value to this memoir, since it was largely written at the conclusion of WWII. It is free of the 'rationalization' and detachment typical of many memoirs written years later, and largely by the German Officer Corps.

The author addresses a number of the painful questions facing German WWII veterans in general, and Waffen-SS veterans in particular. Although, a number of the reasons cited by the author for his volunteer enlistment in the Waffen-SS, and support for the Nazi regime's war effort, may sound stereotypical, the context and timely record of his judgements transcend these well-worn cliches. The author was able to clearly and concisely translate his personal value system against the backdrop of Nazi Germany, and honestly open his life to the reader's inspection, free of rationalization and ready answers. He draws the conclusion that sometimes there are no answers of 'why' to pressing questions of personal value judgements, but that some values remain constant and must be used to face the future.

In sum, this memoir presents more of a common man's 'thinking' perspective - a middle-class and average German viewpoint. Again, not to be understated, is the value of this memoir as written at the end of WWII, and the honest insight captured within. Read and enjoy!