The 2010 book The Crimes of the Wehrmacht dismantled the myth that the regular army were beyond reproach as opposed to the actions of the blood-stained SS and we know that the two often acted in unison, but the Battle of Castle Itter in Tyrol, Austria, was a verified case of Wehrmacht soldiers fighting the Waffen-SS in the field. But none of these factual or fictional events involved a direct battlefield engagement. In real life, Claus von Stauffenberg and his comrades in the July 20 plot killed several of their German officer peers in the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair and to take control of Berlin in the foiled Operation Valkyrie plot involving high-ranking officers, designed to disarm the SS and trigger the arrest of the Nazi leadership. There are several examples, from Michael Caine’s parachute detachment squaring off with the SS in a fruitless attempt to save a young Jewish girl in The Eagle Has Landed to The Dirty Dozen, Where Eagles Dare and Tobruk to Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, but in many of these those doing the fighting are allied soldiers in German uniforms. Soldiers of the German regular army, the Wehrmacht, fighting against troops of the combat branch of the SS, the Waffen-SS, is something that perhaps we thought only happened in fiction.
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