Nazis raise an American SS unit

Well they don't have to worry about any of that in the US Army, because the US Army in the 1940's wasn't having any Depression-type shortages.

Neither did the CCC. My uncles & their cousins who were in the CCC remembered the food as adaquate. Modeled on Army rations of the 1930s & supervised by Army officers and cooks.
 
Well they don't have to worry about any of that in the US Army, because the US Army in the 1940's wasn't having any Depression-type shortages.

That and it is exaggerated. Even in the 1930's out and out starvation was pretty damn rare in the US. Many had to go to soup kitchens but actually starving to death was all but unknown. Most Americans still had cars and could afford gasoline to fuel them, even poor people. Even in the Grapes of Wrath the family is going by truck to California not walking. It was published in 1939 , when the US was coming out of the depression. People at the time did not see it as unrealistic that a poor family from the Dust Bowl owned a truck. The GDP certainly dropped a lot during that time but the US was already so rich that it was still rich by World Standards. There are still millions, if not billions, of people on this planet that can only dream to be wealthy enough to own a truck.
 

I always found it strange that there was an assumption that there were significant number of Westerners eager to defect to the Nazis and Japanese Militarists in 1940s propaganda. That would imply the government was massively unpopular. The "Fifth Column" was mainly mythical . The collaborators joined the Nazis after their country was taken over not before. They were mostly cowards and greedy, slimy people who would lick the boot of anyone who was in charge.
 
Fermenting unrest in America with the promise of a New Confederacy would be a good stragity. Not a successful one but it would divert resources that would otherwise used against Germany.

The era in which that might work to a significant degree was long gone. The US Army had little . if any, more difficulty recruiting men from Alabama, Mississippi or Georgia than in New York , Pennsylvania or California in the Spanish-American War and both World Wars. It would have been such an epic failure no significant resources would have been shifted.
 
While there were segments of the "average" American population that were attracted to various aspects of Nazi ideology, especially the racial theories, there were several things that were off-putting in terms of a general attraction. A lot of Americans who were anti-Semitic or anti-negro, or anti-Asian etc were themselves in racial categories that might not be convenient should the Nazis win. Americans of other than pure "Aryan" heritage (Slavs, Italians, Irish and so forth), as well as the fact that even in 1940 a lot of Americans were "mongrels" with a mixed ethnic background. The anti-Christian bent of Nazi Germany was not as well publicized, however in the case of Americans from the South there would be a conflict between the deep religiosity there and Nazi policies - in spite of the fact that race hatred and religion were not incompatible tin the South. Another issue is that while Southerners in the military were amenable to discipline, the sort of regulation of all aspects of life that the Nazis strove for was going to be anathema for Americans in general and Southerners in particular who prided themselves on their independence.

As far as the more "upper class" admirers of fascism/Nazism, much of their attraction was the concept of the "better sort" running things, naturally they saw themselves as the "better sort". Even if these folks were given officer ranks in this new unit they would find themselves very low on the food chain. For them it is like how those who channel their reincarnated pasts always were a knight, or a noble or something like that. Seems nobody was a dirt poor serf in their prior life...

In any case the only way to get any significant numbers (more than 10 or 12) Americans in such a unit would be to recruit as volunteers before 1939 and certainly before 12/7/41. Also include a provision they would not be fighting against US forces. FWIW while everyone knows about the Americans who fought for the republic in the Spanish Civil War, there were some who fought for the Nationalists/Franco.
 

Wimble Toot

Banned
As far as Hitler/Himmler was concerning, the US was the epitome of race chaos and miscegenation, so the idea of finding sufficient numbers of pure Deutschamerikanen from POWs is unlikely as it was IRL.
 
As far as Hitler/Himmler was concerning, the US was the epitome of race chaos and miscegenation, so the idea of finding sufficient numbers of pure Deutschamerikanen from POWs is unlikely as it was IRL.

They certainly believed that, but they also recruited Slavic "untermenschen" like Croats and Ukrainians, so certainly an exception could be made for many (white) Americans barring examples like Polish Americans etc.
 
Would there be a "brown scare" as congressmen called up and questioned all the leaders of obscure old right organizations with memberships in the low two digits for their complicity in the formation of the unit? Or even some of the big names -- Leonard Wood, the Pattersons, Robert McCormick, and perhaps even the big man himself, Charles Lindbergh?

Would Samuel Dickstein stay in Congress and take on this great burden? With Arthur "John Roy Carlson" Derounian as his chief investigator?
 

EMTSATX

Banned
The fact that it was the opposite is the best outcome. My Great Grandparents were from Germany. My Great Grandfather fought for the Kaiser. When the war ended he and his wife came to America to work as a coal miner.

They had 4 son's 2 were born in Germany (Friedrich and Karl) the third and my Grandfather were given what they thought were American names William and George.

They grew up speaking German. Friedrich got blown apart in Italy, Karl was in the Navy. William parachuted into Normandy and was never heard from again. George my Grandfather was 3 months past his 19th birthday on June 6th, 1944 when he came ashore on Utah beach. He lost his left foot at the Bulge.

It's not amazing that there was not American SS units it's that those people so quickly identify as American in less than a generation.
 
They certainly believed that, but they also recruited Slavic "untermenschen" like Croats and Ukrainians, so certainly an exception could be made for many (white) Americans barring examples like Polish Americans etc.
They counted Croats and Goths, and Hitler reportedly wondered about annexing them sometimes. But yes, so long as Americans aren't part Jewish, they might think them all about in par as being worthy to die for them. It was mostly for propaganda, anyways. When the Germans used local SS units, it acted to their detriment, as it meant they chewed through the only real pro-Nazis or fervent Fascists in the Low Countries and occupied Scandinavia.
 
Maybe when the Nazi's sent their Einheit Stielau SS commandos into the US POW camps in late 1944 to practice their English prior to Operation Greif, they could encourage US POWs to volunteer to join the SS to get out of the POW camp.

How many intelligent volunteers do we think they might get in late 1944? And before having shown that Germany still had one round to fire in December?

The British SS volunteers were no more than 30 men. Apart from a couple of fanatics, sources say they were either not exactly the brightest of the lot, or simply guys who were ready to sell their country for better food, booze, and women. Note the Germans had a much larger pool of British POWs than US.
 
The Waffen-SS had a large number of foreign soldiers, which included soldiers from most countries in Europe. Most were nations occipied by the Nazis, but there were some cases like the British Free Corps, or Legion of St George, which were a few dozen British working for the Nazis. The units were recruited with promises that their volunteers would join the fight against Bolshevism. Now, can the Nazis get an "American Free Corps" on these same lines?

Obviously it would be similar to the Legion of St George--a couple dozen men recruited from POW camps with the promise of joining the "real fight" against the Soviets. Most of the men claim they're doing it to sabotage this Nazi scheme. If they ever get into a real battle on the Eastern Front, they're probably doomed, although anyone who gets captured by the Soviets might prefer the gulag over the death sentence they'd get from the United States (although not all survivors would end up sentenced to death, just the leaders). The leader of this unit might end up a high profile figure and thus be tried for treason (and executed), while other executions would probably be for lesser crimes.

A problem might be the ethnic makeup of the unit--I think you'd see a disproportionate amount of German Americans and possibly Italian Americans interested in an American SS unit (by that I mean "no more than a hundred people"), but wouldn't they just join another Nazi unit (or even Italian?) instead of a new "American" unit? And the biggest problem is actually finding enough people to put together this unit to begin with.

Finally, any "American" names for the unit? It's obviously somewhat difficult since American values and ideals (Freedom, Constitution, etc.) don't really go along well with Nazism, and same goes for American heroes and leaders. You also have to get something all the Americans can agree on, Protestant, Catholic, Northern, Southern, etc. So I think it would have to have a simple name like "America".

I dunno about an American SS unit, but I will say we were honestly very lucky that so few men defected to support the Nazis during the war; I'm not one to engage in historical pessimism here, but we really did dodged a major bullet ITTL, as it could have been far worse, what with guys like Charlie Coughlin and the Silver Shirts, etc. running amuck all over the place.

The KKK were American nationalists and would never support the Nazis, since they're the definition of un-American. I don't know to what degree what we'd call nowadays neo-Confederates existed, since the Lost Cause was pretty mainstream, and it's the same thing with them--the Nazis are un-American.

To be quite honest, peaking as somebody who's actually done a fair bit of research on the KKK himself, I can say with absolutely no hesitation that it honestly really wouldn't have taken all that much to turn the Klan into a pro-Nazi organization, and perhaps majorly so at that.

Not supporting the war effort in the South wasn't a good way to make friends,

Perhaps, but neither was it in California, or New York, etc.
 
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