Werner Volkner (born 1924) was a German-British soldier who served as an SS-Rottenfuehrer in the 3rd SS Panzer Division Totenkopf during World War II and in the British Army's Westminster Dragoons after the war.
Biography[]
Werner Volkner was born in Berlin, Germany in 1924. He joined the Waffen-SS in 1942 as a graduate of the Hitler Youth, and he was trained to man a machine-gun on a half-track vehicle during World War II. He was sent to the Eastern Front, where he fought in the Third Battle of Kharkov and the Battle of Kursk in 1943. On 20 July 1944, he was awarded the Iron Cross, second class for saving the lives of wounded colleagues under fire near Grodnow in Poland. He was wounded not long after, and he and was sent to a hospital in Budapest before being evacuated to Germany as the Soviets advanced. He rejoined his regiment in Munich, and he was taken prisoner by American troops when the war ended, but not before giving a defiant Nazi salute. He was imprisoned in England and held at a POW camp in New Haw, Surrey until 25 December 1948, when he was released. He went on to marry an English woman and had a son, but their marriage did not last, and he remarried in 1958 and worked as a school caretaker. He joined the British Army within a year in order to show his commitment to Britain and help his application for citizenship, and he served in the Westminster Dragoons, 2nd Royal Tank Regiment in Northern Ireland for five years, reaching the rank of corporal. Volkner settled in St. Austell, Cornwall after leaving the military, and he retained his pride in his SS service and was a member of secretive Waffen-SS veterans' organizations. He dismissed many of the accusations of atrocities levelled at the SS, once visiting the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and placing a note reading "We did not do everything we were accused of" between the bricks. He continued to fill his home with Waffen-SS memorabilia such as his Iron Cross while also remaining a paid member of the Royal British Legion and retaining his British Army memorabilia. Volkner considered himself a friend of the Austrian far-right politician Jorg Haider, whom he met at a German veterans' reunion in Austria, and whom he defended when Haider was embroiled in controversy for expressing the sentiment that not everything in Nazi Germany was bad. However, Volkner stressed that he was not anti-Semitic and criticized "Hollywood Nazis" such as Combat 18, which he called "a menace".
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