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.

In 1945 Waffen-SS veterans faced an uncertain future. Those who were not German were generally treated as traitors in their own countries. Thousands of Waffen-SS veterans, spread across Europe, formed veterans’ associations and groups to protect their rights, self-image, and reputation. Along the way, they developed an ‘alternative’ war narrative, one that was anchored in public celebrations of Waffen-SS battlefields and grave sites, especially in post-1989 eastern Europe. The veterans established a counter-narrative in which the Second World War was portrayed as a ‘just’ war for Europe and against Bolshevism. Such narratives had a particular resonance in post-1989 eastern Europe, where countries had suffered for decades under Soviet-sponsored Communist regimes. Popular SS commemorations after 1989 were also important for passing on the Waffen-SS’s legacy to a younger generation of right-wing extremists.