[jjtheblunt]

> hired, trained, and equipped former Nazi SS officers

did Nazis claim pre-existing enlisted officers (that pre-date the Nazis) as their own?

I mean Erwin Rommel predates the Nazis and was just a professional soldier, but they claimed him as their own, even though he himself always thought them nutjobs, it seems.

[areoform]

That was the Wehrmacht i.e. the Armed Forces. The SS was the paramilitary organization that carried out the holocaust. They were committed Nazis and acted as bodyguards, the secret police, death camp operators, and slave labor exploiters.

Rommel was not a SS member. You can learn more about them here, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schutzstaffel

[formerly_proven]

> The SS was the paramilitary organization that carried out the holocaust.

Germany carried out the holocaust. Sure, the SS is most associated with it, which should not lead to the false conclusion that holocaust was "an SS thing". It was a German thing. Case in point, the Wehrmacht provided large numbers of personnel for the camps and the whole "clean Wehrmacht" idea started out as a defense in the Nuremberg trials (among other popular ideas such as "I just followed orders").

[jjtheblunt]

anecdote : my German teacher (same age as my mom) was a little girl in rural well off Germany during WW2. She said general people outside cities had no idea about the Nazis and holocaust till they started hearing rumors, about which they were in denial, for a long time...the persistence of the rumors was gradually accepted as a horror.

Saying "Germany carried out the holocaust" might be accidentally read as if it was a unified effort. It may not have been.

[iudqnolq]

FYI: This is a massive and controversial area of scholarly dispute. It's also famous, your average American might well have heard of it. You're expressing something in line with the minority opinion.

[cagey]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Wehrmacht_myth#End_of_th...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism_and_the_Wehrmacht