The SS

Himmler's Schutzstaffel
"Loyalty is my Honor"
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/holoprelude/aboutthess.html
The Early Days
The Schutzstaffel, better known as the infamous SS, were established by Hitler, to act as
protection force at Hitlers mass meetings in public. Many of these meetings were violent and
ugly, during the Nazis early quest for power.
As such it formed part of the Nazi militia, the brown shirted Sturmabteilung, also better known
by the initials SA. Unlike the SA, however, whose origins derived from the
nationalist Freikorps of the post Great War period, the SS owed its loyalties to Hitler alone and
was neither conceived as, nor permitted to become a mass movement.
Heinrich Himmler who was appointed Reichsfuhrer- SS in 1929 and from its very inception he
saw the SS as an elite force, as an elite unit, the party's "Praetorian Guard," with all SS personnel
selected on the principles of racial purity and unconditional loyalty to the Nazi Party.
In the early days of the SS, officer candidates had to prove German ancestry to 1750. They also
were required to prove that they had no Jewish ancestors. Later, when the requirements of the
war made it impossible to confirm the ancestry of officer candidates, the proof of ancestry
regulation was dropped.
Between 1925 and 1929, the SS was considered merely a battalion of the SA and numbered no
more than 280 personnel. On January 6, 1929, Adolf Hitler appointed Heinrich Himmler as the
leader of the SS, and by the end of 1932, the SS had 52,000 members.
By the end of the next year, it had over 209,000 members. Himmler's expansion of the SS was
based on models from other groups, such as the Knights Templar and the Italian Blackshirts.
According to SS- Obergruppenfhrer and General of the Waffen-SS, Karl Wolff, it was also
based on the model from the Society of Jesus of absolute obedience to the Pope or in this case
Heinrich Himmler.
Heinrich Himmler himself though, was a pale and dull, man. He was a chicken-farmer who wore
glasses, with receding hair, and whose disposition was mild mannered and prim. Indeed Himmler
resembled nothing like the blond Aryan superman, who featured so heavily in his outpourings of
Nordic supremacy and half-baked mythology.

Himmler wanted the uniforms to be more elegant, the black uniforms looked impressive, its
behaviour impeccable, its discipline more strictly enforced than those of the SA. It was an
organisation that actively sought well educated men, University professors, the social elite within
the Nazi Party.
This perverted elitism of the SS as created by Himmler that was the core of the SS, represented
by Himmler himself with curious leanings towards Nordic mysticism to such absurd lengths.
Much of how the SS was moulded into a brutal and feared organisation can be laid at the door of
Himmlers deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, and no history of the SS can be complete, without
reference to the considerable contribution made by him, a man who clearly met the Teutonic hero
vision, unlike the Reichsfuhrer himself.
Reinhard Heydrich joined the SS in 1931, he was of middle-class origin and had been a naval
officer but in 1931 he had been cashiered for conduct unbecoming a gentleman, after
compromising the virtue of a shipyard directors daughter. During his time in the German Navy
he had served for a time under Admiral Canaris, who nurtured his taste for intelligence work.
Heydrichs personality was ice-cold, utterly ruthless - he was a first class fencer, excellent
horseman and a skilled pilot and musician. First he directed his lucid intellect to the internal
organisation of the SS, and the creation of the Sicherheitsdient the SS intelligence service.
Heydrich never succeeded Himmler as Reichsfuhrer-SS, as he was assassinated by Czech agents,
who had been trained by the British, in Prague in June 1942. The SS carried out harsh reprisals
for this act, and erased the village of Lidice, from the face of the earth, killing all the male
inhabitants, the children who could not be Germanised and the women were incarcerated in
concentration camps.
The Night of the Long Knives
From 1931 onwards Himmler and Heydrich worked tirelessly to build up the SS but it was still
in the shadows of the SA, whilst the SS protected Hitlers personal well-being, it was the SA
who fought in the streets in the interests of the Nazi Party, and paved the way for its electoral
success.
The SA at the time were under the command of its original founder, Ernst Rohm, he believed, as
did the other SA leaders, that they had brought Adolf Hitler to power and now they expected
suitable reward and recognition.
They expected that the SA who now numbered approximately four and a half million members
would assume the position of the new democratic army of the Reich displacing the hundred
thousand professional army allowed by the Treaty of Versailles.
By the time Hitler had become Chancellor the SS had grown in numbers to 50,000, which
Himmler detested, he was fearful the SS might suffer the same fate as the SA. He therefore

undertook a purge of unqualified members and set up for Hitler in Berlin, the equivalent of a
Praetorian Guard.
This was called the Stabswache and was commanded by Sepp Dietrich, an ex-sergeant and
former butcher and a man, in Hitlers words simultaneously cunning, energetic and brutal.
By early 1934 the unresolved conflict between the Nationalist and Socialist elements in the Nazi
Party had reached a crisis. The right led by Hermann Goring was content with securing power
and now sought only to extend the Partys appeal to the classes of tradition.
But the left represented by three million noisy and still violent brown-shirts were demanding a
second and genuinely social revolution. As a first step Ernst Rohm, the leader of the SA, had
called for the armys amalgamation with the SA.
This was a crisis Hitler had long foreseen, he knew the generals loathed and feared the SA, and
the generals were placated by assurances from Hitler that the SA would never challenge the
Armys supremacy.
Despite all the evidence of Rohms personal corruption and his SA mens excesses, gathered by
Heydrich, and presented to Hitler by Himmler, Hitler hesitated to use it against one of his oldest
comrades
It was not until the weekend of the 30 June 1934 when Goring and Himmler at last succeeded in
convincing Hitler that Rohm was planning a coup detat which was quite untrue, did Hitler
decide to act against his old friend.
Hitler acted characteristically on impulse and having no plan of his own gave carte blanche to
Goring and Himmler, who had been secretly plotting murder over many months. The German
army generals were aware and approved of this action but they refused to have soldiers fire on
the SA members.
Himmler had therefore accordingly arranged for his SS to arrest the victims and when Hitler had
ticked off their names had them taken out into backyards and stairwells to be shot. Rohm was
arrested in a private hotel at Bad Wiessee, south of Munich, where he was enjoying a holiday
with other SA leaders. He was taken to Stadelheim prison, and after refusing to commit suicide
he was shot by Theodore Eicke, in his cell.
By Monday 1 July 1934 most of the SA leaders and many of Himmlers and Gorings personal
enemies had been done away with. The Blood Purge which would shortly make Hitler
Chancellor was the making of the SS.
It was exclusively its work, planned by Heydrichs intelligence service and executed by
Dietrichs Stabswacheand Eickes Totenkopfverbande (Deaths Head Units). Hitler was not to
forget his debt.

Heydrich soon had under his hand all three German police forces, civil, criminal and secret, the
latter as the Gestapo was to become infamous. Even more so the Totenkopfverbande, became a
symbol of terror, which had now been raised, to guard the new concentrations camps.
But it was the Stabswache, now renamed the Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler which profited most. For
in doing for the army what the army would not do for itself, it had broken the armys unique right
to bear arms. The Liebstandarte which was the nucleus of the future Waffen-SS - was set to
become a rival far more menacing than the SA, could ever dream of.
The rise of the SS from this point on was assured, the great impetus was built up after the
Reichstag fire on the 27 February 1933, the German Communist Party was banned and its
members arrested by the police and incarcerated into the newly established concentration camps,
which were run not by the police but the SS.
Ten days after the fire, Himmler was appointed head of the Munich police, with Heydrich in
charge of its political branch, in order to secure loyal adherence to Nazi rule. So began a steady
take-over of the police throughout the Reich.
By the summer of 1934 Himmler controlled the political police of every state except Prussia,
which was controlled by Hermann Goering, and who had built up in it his own state secret
police, better known as the infamous Gestapo.
Thanks to his control of the police Himmler was able to build up the concentration camps, in
order to provide protective custody for political suspects. One must mention here the role
played by Theodore Eicke, the Inspector of Concentration Camps and SS Guard Formations.
Eicke was energetic and brutal and under his regime no pity was shown to enemies of the state.
Some of these camps such as Dachau, Sachsenhausen, were official, under the Minister of the
Interior, others were wild controlled by the SS and SA, and many of them were shut down.
After the Rohm purge of June 1934, Himmler took over control of the camps, and these were to
be run by the SS, right up to the end of Nazism in 1945, both Hitler and Himmler would never
abandon these particular pillars of the Fuhrer State.
In recognition of its services during the night of the long knives it was freed from its old
subordination to the SA and declared an independent organisation. The SA were broken by the
purge, sank into relative obscurity.
By 1936 Himmler had obtained full control of the police in Prussia, he was then
declared Reichsfuhrer SS und Chef de Polizei, and with this the entire German police force was
removed from the control of the state and incorporated into the SS.
The SS goes to War.

The Second World War of 1939 -1945 which was Hitlers ultimate aim, could not have happened
without the internal transformation of Germany into a police state and the absolute power
wielded by the SS.
The SS were even charged with organising the fabricated attacks by Poles to justify the German
invasion, it was Heydrichs intelligence service which fabricated the staged Polish attack on the
German radio transmitter at Gleiwitz on the German Polish border.
It was Himmlers concentration camps which supplied the canned goods that is corpses of
political prisoners, murdered for the occasion and dressed in Polish army uniforms. The corpses
were left as evidence of aggression.
Following the invasion of Poland on the night of the 31 August / 1 September 1939 it was
Heydrichs SS Einsatzkommandos which followed theWehrmacht in order to exterminate
brutally the Polish aristocracy, intelligentsia, Priests and Jews, and thereby ensure that Polish
resistance would be stifled.
After the Polish campaign and the period known as the phoney war the SS considerably built
up its numbers and the success of the field-divisions, more commonly known as WaffenSS proved its worth in the French campaign, this Hitler attributed to its fierce will the sense
of superiority which put them on an elite footing with the German army.
When Hitler ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union, under the code name Operation
Barbarossa, Hitler knew the German army were not up to waging such a brutal war on the
Soviets, and he acted accordingly.
On the 30 March 1941 Hitler in his speech, put Communist Commissars and officials, military
and civilian, beyond any law save one which automatically sentenced them to summary
execution (through the 13 March directive established Reich Commissars, using the identical
words); and at the beginning of the month (3 March), Hitler had already ordained that courts
martial would be applicable only for military personnel.
Commissars when captured would be shot out of hand, if not by German combat troops then by
the murder-squads to whom they would be handed over, as the draft of the infamous Commissar
Order put it: Political leaders and Commissars who are captured will not be sent to the rear.
The war on the Ostfront was to bleed the German forces like no other struggle in the Second
World War, and Himmler looked to strengthen the Axis forces by recruiting suitable volunteers
for the SS from occupied countries and satellite states loyal to the Nazi cause.
Hitler gave permission to Himmler to raise divisions consisting of Germanic peoples of
Western Europe. The victories in Scandinavia and the Low Countries had introduced the SS to
several local Fascist parties, Musserts in Holland, Quislings in Norway and Degrelles in
Belgium, and whose young followers had readily volunteered to serve in the SS.

In all 50,000 Dutchmen, 40,000 Belgians Flemish and Walloons equally, 20,000 Frenchmen
and 6,000 Danes and Norwegians were to enlist before the wars end, enough to form a second
full
division Nordland,
and
several
nominal
divisions, Langenmarck (Flemish),
Wallonien, Nederland (Holland) and Charlemagne(French).
The third reserve of free manpower was discovered by the SS in its next and most successful
campaign, that of the Balkans in 1941. The Balkans was the home of the largest ethnic German
community in Europe, the so-called Volksdeutsche, over one and a half million strong.
Those from the satellite states of Hungary, Rumania and Bulgaria were liable to conscription by
their own governments but those in occupied Yugoslavia were not. In either case Himmler found
means of enlisting all who volunteered and when volunteering ceased he imposed conscription in
Yugoslavia and secured the transfer to the SS of all Volksdeutsch conscripts in the armies of the
other States. By 1944 theWaffen-SS was to include 150,000 Volksdeutsch, nearly a quarter of its
strength.
The Waffen-SS fought with ferocious tenacity, often rescuing seemingly lost situations on both
the Eastern and Western fronts, particularly in the re-occupation of Kharkov in March 1943, and
the Hitler Jugend divisions fought with particular bravery in Normandy, following the Allied
invasion during June 1944.
Extermination of the Jewish Race in Europe
It was the SS who ran the concentration camps first in Germany, then in Poland, with brutal
efficiency, camps like Auschwitz which started its existence as a camp for Polish political, before
being transformed into a dual death camp with gas chambers and crematoria and labour camp,
where millions of Jews perished.
But it wasn't until 1936, that the SS absorbed the regular German police forces and incorporated
all local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies into the Ordnungspolizei.
SS-Oberstgruppenfhrer Adolf Von Assenbach became commander of the Ordnungspolizei
(known as the Orpo), and Heinrich Himmler became Chief of the German Police.
Himmler was then charged by Hitler to carry out the extermination of the Jewish race in Europe,
and the SS carried out this inhuman task, the so-called Final Solution. To accomplish this goal:
On July 31, 1941, Reichsmarschall Hermann Gring authorized Reinhard Heydrich, then acting
RSHA chief, to coordinate the resources of the Reich for a total solution of the Jewish Question
in the area of German influence in Europe.
Heydrich was to submit a draft of the measures he proposed to undertake to implement the
desired final solution of the Jewish Question. In the following six months, as regional Security
Police and SD commanders coordinated the annihilation of the Soviet Jews, the first trainloads of
German, Austrian, and Czech Jews rolled eastwards to killing sites in the so-called Reich
Commissariat Ostland (a German civilian occupation region that included the Baltic States and
most of Belarus).