Hausser continued to deny that there was any connection between the Waffen-SS and Nazi atrocities. In 1957, he wrote an open letter in "Der Freiwillige", HIAG's official publication, to West Germany's minister of defence, stating that Death's Head troops "merely served as external guards in the concentration camps without the possibility of interfering with the internal procedure". He did not mention that the guards accompanied prisoners on external labor details and that commanders of concentration camps generally came from the Waffen-SS. This apologist position also ignored the fact that the organizational structure of the SS tied the Waffen-SS to the Nazi annihilation machine through transfer of personnel between various SS units and the shifting responsibilities of the units themselves, as they may perform frontline duties at one time and then be reassigned to "pacification actions", the Nazi term for punitive operations in the rear.