Watch Gladiators Of World War II online: Episode 1 Waffen SS

What began as an elite boydguard unit grew to become Nazi Germany's toughest and most feared fighting force. Although part of the ordinary SS, with all the accompanying horrors of the Gestapo, concentration camps and extermination squads, the men of the Waffen SS saw themselves as soldiers. Respected for their courage -- feared for their ruthlessness and fanaticism. For these were political soldiers. Men chosen for their physical perfection and their Aryan origins. They were trained inm the ideology of Nazism, and learned to see themselves as the master race and their enemies as sub-human. They became the cormerstone of German defence, and fought on long after all hope of victory had been extinguished. But they are remembered for their brutality. They killed British, Canadian and American soldiers in cold blood, and massacred unarmed Soviet, Belgian and French civilians. They were battlefield warriors who fought against insuperable odds, but the Waffen SS will be forever branded by the crimes they carried out in the name of Nazism.

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