ISBN 1-891227-36-X
132 pages

Reviewed by Ray A. K. Crawford

   Given the title on the cover of this volume, indicating that it is an SS officers' list for March of 1945, I had high hopes for the answers to some questions I have regarding SS actions and activities at the end of the war, both relating to individuals and some last-ditch call-ups. It is, however, of narrower scope than this. As is stated later on the title page, it actually only covers the Waffen-SS. As it turns out, it apparently does not even cover that group comprehensively, for it appears that the names of numerous SS officers are missing.
   Before any hue and cry is raised regarding whether the men associated with these missing names are indeed Waffen-SS members, or "only" Allgemeine-SS or even "honorary" SS, the missing names include those of Himmler's military (as in Waffen-SS) adjutants, one of whom had been in this position since 1943, and who were with Himmler right to the day he died. As one was a major, and the other a colonel, they certainly qualified for the dienstalterliste found by Mr. Munoz. Another name prominently absent is that of the commandant of Hitler's Reichskanzlei, an SS general. Certainly, one would expect that the officers in Hitler's bodyguard would be Waffen-SS, and not chosen from among the "golden pheasants" of the Allgemeine-SS.
   As to the proposition that this list only contains "fighting officers" of the Waffen-SS, this would be untrue; it includes numerous HSSPF, staff of the RSHA, and the ever-elusive Hans Kammler. In other places, Mr. Munoz has missed the opportunity to give us a fuller picture of the objects of this work; for instance, he takes the time, and a full line, to tell us that Sturmbannfuhrer Eduard Strauch may have been Ic of 5th SS Mountain Corps. But he does not take the opportunity to inform us that Strauch had also been the commander of a subunit of Einsatzgruppe A. For those who would complain that this information is not germane to a volume dealing with 1945, I would reply that Mr. Munoz himself inserts material dealing with other periods of the war.
   Though Mr. Munoz states that he "decided to cull all available resources using microfilm notes, copies of documents gathered through decades of research, my very voluminous collection of foreign and English-language books," I was able to come up with more than a handful of missing names in the hour I spent glancing through a small number of common and readily available books on the SS, including Reitlinger's, Ailsby's, and MacLean's excellent works. Mr. Munoz declined to include a bibliography, and the only published works I could find listed in his annotations were Lumans' work on the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle, Silgailis' book on the Latvian Legion, and Payer's Armati Hungarorum.
   As Mr. Munoz does not even present us with a single facsimile page of his find, I have no way of knowing (short of digging through the NARA holdings myself) what other material may be missing. To my knowledge, at least some other dienstalterliste include the serial numbers, party numbers, and awards of the officers listed, none of which are included here, save the very occasional notation of a single award. This information may indeed not be in the original list, but since none of the original material is represented, and the editor is mute on the subject, it is impossible to say.

   A book review is not the place to decide the "merits" of Allgemeine-SS versus Waffen-SS membership, or whether any real or perceived difference even matters. Nor is it the reviewer's place to present evidence that the Waffen-SS were not "soldiers, just like the others." MacLean's books have finally laid to rest Hausser's protestations of innocence on the part of the Waffen-SS once and for all. It is however the reviewer's duty to upbraid an author for presenting incomplete or unfinished work as though it were the "find" of the decade. There are also numerous problems with the page layout, such as odd page breaks in the volume, as on page 9, where the title for 4th SS Panzerkorps appears all by itself at the bottom of the page, making things difficult for the reader. The annotations contain numerous typos and other physical errors such as incomplete sentences. I am still baffled by the occasional in-text notation "THIS SPACE LEFT BLANK," which I haven't seen since the early days of computer manuals.
   After his in-depth presentation in Forgotten Legions, I expected far more than this volume delivered. I would recommend this book as a starting point, raw material if you will, for anyone who is interested in compiling a history of many SS officers, and the units they belonged to, starting backwards from near the end of the war. It is by no means exhaustive in examining SS officers and their positions at this point in the war. Mr. Munoz would have provided a far greater service to the scholarship of the period had he simply presented facsimile pages of the dienstalterliste, as Schiffer recently has with their presentation of the January 1942 dienstalterliste, and spent the obviously great amount of time and energy he put into recompiling this list into a greater and more balanced breadth of annotation of the careers of these men and their organization at this point of the war.
   Available from online booksellers, local bookshops, or directly from Axis Europa Books.
   Thanks to Axis Europa for providing this review copy.