Fegelein’s Horsemen and Genocidal Warfare: The SS Cavalry Brigade in the Soviet Union by Henning Pieper
Requirements: PDF Reader, 1.4MB
Overview: Whilst many different German military and paramilitary units involved in the Holocaust have been studied by researchers, not much has been written on the SS Cavalry Brigade due to a lack of access to files in Eastern European archives. This unit belonged to the Waffen-SS and played a special role both in the German war against the Soviet Union and the destruction of the European Jews.
The special significance of the SS Cavalry Brigade lies in its ‘dual role’: the unit had an ideological as well as a military function. On the one hand, it can be compared to the Einsatzgruppen and battalions of the order police as its members also killed thousands of Jews. It differs from these formations, on the other hand, as it was a genuine military unit and took part in combat against the Red Army. Soldiers of the SS Cavalry Brigade saw themselves as elite, very similar to the members of other Waffen-SS units. Like them, they were ‘political soldiers’, as Bernd Wegner has put it.
But unlike other formations of the Waffen-SS or divisions of the Wehrmacht, this brigade was not just a product of the German rearmament in the 1930s. It was a construct that originated from the sporting interests of the German aristocracy and the personal initiative of a high-ranking Nazi from Bavaria. Thus, its development set it apart from the machinery of war at first, but the SS Cavalry Brigade later found its own way into the German war of annihilation.
This work aims at writing a full history of the brigade for the first time…
Genre: Non-fiction, History
Download Instructions:
http://festyy.com/wXM5PM
http://festyy.com/wXM5P5
