HIAG

HIAG

Hilfsgemeinschaft auf Gegenseitigkeit der Angehörigen der ehemaligen Waffen-SS
Kurt Meyer (standing, left) cheers the crowd at a HIAG convention, while Paul Hausser (seated, centre) looks on. The photograph originally appeared in HIAG's official periodical Der Freiwillige.
Successor	War Grave Memorial Foundation "When All Brothers Are Silent" (Kriegsgräberstiftung 'Wenn alle Brüder schweigen') (informal)
Formation	1951
Founded at	Bonn, West Germany
Extinction	1992
Type	Advocacy group; right-wing group; in later history: far right group / neo-Nazi group
Purpose	Legal, economic and historical rehabilitation of the Waffen-SS
Methods	Lobbying, outreach to political parties, annual conventions, historical revisionism
Membership	20,000 in the early 1960s
Key people	Paul Hausser, Otto Kumm, Felix Steiner, Kurt Meyer, Herbert Gille, Sepp Dietrich, Wilhelm Bittrich, Erich Kern, Hubert Meyer
Main organ	Der Freiwillige () ("The volunteer")

HIAG (German: Hilfsgemeinschaft auf Gegenseitigkeit der Angehörigen der ehemaligen Waffen-SS, literally "Mutual aid association of former Waffen-SS members") was a lobby group and a revisionist veterans' organisation founded by former high-ranking Waffen-SS personnel in West Germany in 1951. Its main objective was to achieve legal, economic and historical rehabilitation of the Waffen-SS.

To achieve its aims, the organisation used contacts with political parties and employed multi-prong historical revisionism and propaganda efforts, including periodicals, books and public speeches. A HIAG-owned publishing house, Munin Verlag (), served as a platform for its publicity aims. This extensive body of work—57 book titles and more than 50 years of monthly periodicals—has been described by historians as revisionist apologia.

Always in touch with its Nazi past, HIAG was a subject of significant controversy, both in West Germany and abroad. The organisation drifted into right-wing extremism in its later history; it was disbanded in 1992 at the federal level, but local groups, along with the organisation's monthly periodical, continued to exist into the 21st century.

While HIAG only partially achieved its goals of legal and economic rehabilitation of Waffen-SS, its propaganda efforts led to the reshaping of the image of Waffen-SS in popular culture. The results are still felt, with scholarly treatments being out-weighed by a large amount of amateur historical studies, memoirs, picture books, websites and wargames.

The Potsdam Conference held by the Soviet Union, United Kingdom and United States from 17 July to 2 August 1945 determined the occupation policies that the Allied-occupied Germany was to face. These included demilitarisation, denazification, democratisation and decentralisation. The Allies' attempts were often perceived by the population as "victors' justice" and met with limited success. For those in the Western zones of occupation, the arrival of the Cold War undermined these policies further by reviving the ideas of the necessity to fight against Soviet communism, echoing those of Hitler.