Bring History to Life Collections Magazine

26 March 2024

Hitler’s black guard: The SS In 1943, the Italian resistance movement launched an assault against a SS police force in Rome and 50 Germans were killed. The response was swift: 335 Italians were picked at random and executed outside the city. A bloody trail followed the SS – not least among its military wing, the Waffen-SS – on the battlefields from Normandy to the Caucasus. The organisation gained a reputation for being one of history’s most brutal, responsible for countless massacres of both civilians and prisoners of war. In this issue you can read the story of the unit.