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Nicknamed “bloody Walter,” SS Obersturmführer Walter Hauck embodied the Nazi ideal of manly toughness. Born in 1918, he started a career with the German police, joined the SS, and served as a company leader with the 12th Waffen SS Division “Hitler Youth” during the second half of World War II. He enjoyed a reputation for being a reckless, if not ruthless, soldier, the model of a “warhorse” and “political soldier,” a dedicated Nazi warrior who had elevated himself above any sentiment or sense of morality allowing for compassion for the weak. After the war, he was found guilty and sentenced to death in France for a massacre that had taken place in the French town of Ascq in Normandy, which he had launched in revenge for a partisan attack in April 1944. The next spring, in May 1945, he initiated the murder of twenty-six civilians in the Czech village of Leskovice. Yet, “Bloody Walter” was hard on himself as well. Earlier in the war, he had suffered—and recovered—from an attack on his tank that had almost burned him to death, leaving him with facial disfigurements that were still visible fifty years later, when I interviewed him. (Hauck was amnestied in 1957.)1
Our conversation took place in a casual atmosphere of sorts in Hauck's middle-class home in Stuttgart. His wife served cake and coffee. A little chitchat about our respective children helped introduce an air of relaxation to this encounter between a proud SS veteran and a young historian who did not hide his own distance, or that of his parents, from Nazi ideology and Nazi militarism. The conflation of trading war stories and petty bourgeois Kaffeeklatsch warmed up the interview, however, and led right to the topic that held my interest: what did being a man mean for Hitler's soldiers? During the conversation, Hauck showed me two photos, one of which depicts Hauck in a genuinely soldierly, manly pose; the handwriting dedicates it to a fellow SS officer, in “loyal comradeship” [Fig. 1]. The other photo shows Hauck as a soldier and father, yet in an obviously feminine role [Fig. 2]. He pushes a baby carriage, a symbolically loaded gesture that, at that time, was widely considered to be an ostensive violation of...