Nicknamed “bloody Walter,” SS Obersturmführer Walter Hauck embodied the [Fascist] 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.

Fig. 1. Private photograph from the early 1940s of SS Obersturmführer Walter Hauck as a comrade. Source: Author’s collection.

He enjoyed a reputation for being a reckless, if not ruthless, soldier, the model of a “warhorse” and “political soldier,” a dedicated [Fascist] 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.)

Fig. 2. Private photograph from the early 1940s of SS Obersturmführer Walter Hauck as a father. Source: Author’s collection.

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 [Fascist] ideology and [Fascist] 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 rôle [Fig. 2]. He pushes a baby carriage, a symbolically loaded gesture that, at that time, was widely considered to be an ostensive violation of the common (not specifically Nazi) code of manliness. Men pushing baby carriages were mocked or frowned upon, and the [Third Reich’s] Stormtroopers (Sturmabteilung, or SA) formally banned such unmanly activity.²

The photo reproduced here was taken in a private setting, but it was part of a collection that “bloody Walter” used to show his comrades.

Though the basis of Hauck’s manly self-certainty was his tough and relentless soldiering, the pride of being a family father nurtured it as well. The point is that the code of manliness [under Fascism] was not as unambiguous as it might seem to modern observers.

In sharp contrast to the SA ban, the SS journal Das Schwarze Korps advised its readers that it was, by no means, “unmanly” for a man to care about and nurse his children in public. A man, the SS journal averred, “doesn’t lose a bit of his manliness by doing so, but simply proves that his love for his wife and his children is not just lip service.”³

This advice was part and parcel of Heinrich Himmler’s homophobic family policy, of course—of his obsessive fear of homosexuality, and of his definition of the SS as an exclusively “Aryan” order that included women and did not shy away from empowering them, if only symbolically.⁴

But that this advice seemed to be necessary—and, moreover, its decisive tone—suggest that not even SS men were confident about what “manliness” meant precisely, or about how one must behave to be considered a man.

(Some emphasis added.)