Waffen SS German Grenadier Advancing with K-98 wearing Kharkov Parka, 1944-45

By the winter this figure depicts, the Waffen-SS was no longer the force of its own legend. It had begun as a small volunteer corps with strict physical and racial entry standards; by 1944-45 it had swollen toward 900,000 men and those standards had quietly collapsed. Conscription filled the ranks. Whole divisions were raised from foreign recruits and ethnic Germans across occupied Europe — Dutch, Baltic, Balkan, French — until well over half the Waffen-SS was not German at all, and one armored division was built around seventeen-year-olds from the Hitler Youth. The elite was a story the SS told about itself, and by the last winter of the war it was mostly just a story.

The grenadier drives forward with his 98k held low, the hooded Kharkov parka worn green-side-out over camouflage trousers, a scarf wound at his throat. Though the parka takes its collectors' name from the Eastern Front, garments like it were still being worn in the winter of 1944-45 in the West, in the snow of the Ardennes. He falls in with the other men in the same parka — the Rifleman Advancing with Caution and the Grenadier Getting Up to Move — and with his opposite number in camouflage smock, the SS Grenadier Advancing with K98. Three men advancing at different tempos make a more convincing diorama than three men firing.

W. Britain model 25338. 1/30 scale, matte-painted metal. Single figure — a Waffen-SS grenadier in a Kharkov parka advancing with a 98k. Boxed.