https://www.welt.de/geschichte/zweiter-weltkrieg/article165279783/Vermeintliche-SS-Elite-koepfte-Kriegsgefangene.html
The SS Karstwehr Battalion is still considered the top force of the "Black Order". In reality, it was a ragtag bunch, as brutal as it was incompetent. And murderous.
In an issue of the journal "Military History," military historian Peter Lieb traces the development of this unit, which is still considered an allegedly elite unit - the staged propaganda images reverberate. Lieb, who for years was the only German to teach at the British military academy Sandhurst, will soon publish a more detailed, scholarly paper in the Journal of Global War Studies.
According to his findings, the training of the supposedly elite unit was rather leisurely - at least when measured against the state of the war in 1942/43. On the one hand, there was a shortage of material and weapons, Lieb writes, and continues, "A look at a weekly training schedule reveals a far greater problem: The emphasis was on theoretical instruction, while field training remained the exception."
…
The police and SS apparatus was responsible for combating domestic opponents, led here by SS Gruppenführer Odilo Globocnik. He had previously headed the murder factories of "Aktion Reinhard" in occupied Poland, where up to two million Jews were gassed. Not surprisingly, from the fall of 1943 onwards, merciless manhunts also took place in his new area of responsibility.
Often in the forefront was the SS Karst Battalion. It concentrated on depriving the partisans of their livelihood, thus destroying localities that had (allegedly or actually) supported the guerrillas. In addition, civilians were shot in rows. In the very first operation, SS-Obersturmführer Oswin Merwald and his company destroyed the small village of Strmec on the Predil Pass on October 10, 1943. The male population was murdered, the women and children deported. The "reason": Two of its men had been wounded in a fire raid near the village.
But even this cruelty was easily surpassed by the SS Karstwehr Battalion - for example, on June 11, 1944. On that day, mountain troops of the Wehrmacht, who were also deployed to fight the partisans, handed over three captured free fighters to the SS Karstwehr Battalion. "What followed was an act of barbaric brutality," writes Peter Lieb - a still restrained paraphrase. Apparently private photographs of SS men document a war crime of the kind that was probably often perpetrated but rarely recorded.
First, an SS man gouged out both eyes of one of the prisoners and shouted, "Can you see freedom now?" Then the man was dragged to a chopping block, and SS-Oberscharführer Walter Weber decapitated the man with an axe. The same thing happened, apparently to the jeering approval of the SS men, to the second prisoner. The fate of the third is unknown.
Hans Brand remained unmolested after 1945, as did the other men of the SS Karstwehr. By the time the Würzburg prosecutor's office identified Walter Weber as the perpetrator of the beheading of the two captured partisans from photographs in the mid-1990s, the former plumber had been dead for several years.
What remains are pictures. The propaganda shots showing in detail the supposedly harsh training of the SS Karstwehr. And the series from June 11, 1944 - even more than seven decades later, it simply leaves one speechless.