Moving this from the Dick Winters thread, because I don’t want to shit that one up. Sentiments like this drive me bananas - it’s not like the SS troops had some sort of magic bullet shields issued during training. There was a company milling about in an open field with absolutely no security, and they were massacred by better trained and prepared troops. There’s nothing about them being SS that makes this story any better than it already is (keep in mind, by 44 the Waffen SS was hardly a volunteer force). I’m not necessarily picking on the OP here, because this idea seems to permeate a lot of these discussions. They weren’t any more supermen than the bog standard Wermacht, and when they didn’t secure their flanks, they got hit hard just the same.
Hugo Boss certainly designed some scary uniforms, though!