In this article we examine how a particular 'Gypsy friend' persona was adopted and developed by two pioneering pre-war Gypsylorists, the Finn Arthur Thesleff (1861-1920) and the Dane Johan Miskow (1862-1937). The 'Gypsy friend' persona, we argue, was a compound of the fearless explorer, the missionary's selfless paternalism, the disinterested, questing scientist and the eccentric anti-bourgeois bohemian. After looking at how this masculine persona was expressed in earlier scholarship, not least the influential Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, we turn to Thesleff and Miskow to see how they adopted, applied and revised the trope, with attention, finally, to its implications for inter- and postwar treatment of Scandinavian Roma.

Heinrich Himmler created the Waffen-SS in part as a multinational force, willing to fight for a New Europe based on Germanic blood. After the war, many international Waffen-SS units formed veterans' associations (VAs). Like other VAs, these provided veterans with the chance to engage in ‘memory work’ and to keep alive a sense of comradeship and of valiant sacrifice, as well as an emotional commitment to the fallen. Waffen-SS veterans were, however, alone in celebrating their ‘sacrifices’. Others shunned them for their participation in atrocities. To defend themselves, they developed a counter-hegemonic Second World War narrative that presented the Waffen-SS as uniquely heroic ‘European’ volunteers' against Bolshevism. This counter-narrative, however, only gained resonance with the fall of the Berlin Wall. After 1989, in fact, veterans could seek out and establish sites of public commemoration, not in Western but in Eastern Europe. Hurd and Werther use veterans' journals and books to explore the redeployment of SS ideology in a revisionist version of history. They examine the resurrection of a mass Waffen-SS graveyard in East Ukraine as a telling case history, discussing, not least, the implications of a ‘reconciliation’ of the former German soldiers with both Ukrainian villagers and Red Army veterans. Finally, they explore the significance of the veterans' ‘European’ counter-history for a younger generation of neo-Nazis.

Book abstract: This is the first systematic pan-European study of the hundreds of thousands of non-Germans who fought ― either voluntarily or under different kinds of pressures ― for the Waffen-SS (or auxiliary police formations operating in the occupied East). Building on the findings of regional studies by other scholars ― many of them included in this volume ― The Waffen-SS aims to arrive at a fuller picture of those non-German citizens (from Eastern as well as Western Europe) who served under the SS flag. Where did the non-Germans in the SS come from (socially, geographically, and culturally)? What motivated them? What do we know about the practicalities of international collaboration in war and genocide, in terms of everyday life, language, and ideological training? Did a common transnational identity emerge as a result of shared ideological convictions or experiences of extreme violence? In order to address these questions (and others), The Waffen-SS adopts an approach that does justice to the complexity of the subject, adding a more nuanced, empirically sound understanding of collaboration in Europe during World War II, while also seeking to push the methodological boundaries of the historiographical genre of perpetrator studies by adopting a transnational approach.