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10-03-2015, 22:26

SS: The Empire Within

The SS (Schutzstaffel meaning protection squads) first showed their strength in the Night of the Long Knives, the moment chosen by Hitler to eliminate the SA. With their violent and rowdy demonstrations the Brownshirts had dominated the streets of Germany and, indeed, Germany’s political life, throughout the 1920’s. They were to do so no longer. On 30th June 1934 the main leaders of the SA were arrested, executed on the spot, or handed over to improvised execution squads. The instrument of this savage purge was the SS, which now became the custodian of Party values.



Although created in 1923, the SS had less than 300 members when Himmler was appointed Reichsfuhrer-SS in 1929. Under his leadership the SS greatly increased in size and importance but it remained, until 1934, a force withirt a force, nominally subordinate to the general organization of the SA. 'Made up of men at the peak of physical fitness, the most trustworthy and the most faithful to the Nazi movement’, its role was to keep an eye on the Party and to guarantee the Fiihrer’s personal safety. The latter task was entrusted to a guard of 120 select men of absolute reliability under the command of Sepp Dietrich, a Bavarian ex-sergeant, former waiter and butcher’s boy, who had made a veritable cult of the person of Hitler. At the end of 1933, the Fiihrer gave his personal guard the official title of Leib-standarte (bodyguard regiment) SS Adolf Hitler.



The SS, in their elegant black uniforms, were the evil guardian angels of the Nazi



Left: Dutch civilians in a Gestapo jail



Regime. Recruited from a higher social class than the SA, they were more discreet and avoided rowdy demonstrations; they had other means of proving their terrible efficiency. Completely dominated by Nazi ideals their prime characteristic was absolute fidelity and blind obedience to Hitler’s orders; 'On 30th June 1934,’ Himmler said later, 'we did not hesitate to do the duty laid down for us and put guilty friends up against the wall and shoot them. . .



. . . Each of us found it appalling, yet we are all sure that if such orders were ever necessary again, we would carry them out as we did then.’



On the eve of the war, the SS, with its 250,000 members, constituted the elite of the Party and of the Third Reich. Already the formidable organization created by Himmler was taking on its definitive form with its three main branches: the intelligence service of the Party, or SD (Sicher-heitsdienst), which towards the end of the war absorbed the armed forces intelligence services (Abwehr); the police, including the regular police (Ordnungspolizei or Orpo) and the security police (Sicherheits-polizei or Sipo), itself composed of the state criminal police (Kripo) and the state secret police (Geheimestaatspolizei or Gestapo); and finally the military section of the SS. When war broke out the latter consisted of four regiments: Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, Deutschland, Germania, and Der Fiihrer. Deutschland and Germania had been formed in 1936, and Der Fiihrer in 1938 after the Anschluss. These four regiments were known as the Verfiigungs-truppe (troops at Hitler’s disposal). After the Polish campaign, Deutschland, Germania, and Der Fiihrer were brought together in the Verfiigungsdivision, and two other divisions were raised: Totenkopi', from the concentration camp guard units, and Polizei, from the police. These three divisions, together with the Leibstandarte which remained an independent regiment until 1941 when it was raised to division strength, became known as the Waffen-SS (armed SS) in 1940. Together they constituted an autonomous branch of Himmler’s organization.



Himmler planned to expand the military SS into a group of shock troops which would attract the greater part of German youth, become an army in its own right, and constitute the 'racial’ elite of the Third Reich. But from 1938 onwards Hitler resisted these ambitions and the Waffen-SS thus remained a militarized police force, though very well armed. Its main task was to quell any attempts at a coup d’etat and maintain law and order in occupied territories. To acquire the necessary prestige in the eyes of the German population, Waffen-SS members shed blood on the battlefield —in compliance with Hitler’s orders — alongside regular army units. Limited to five per cent of the army’s total strength, the Waffen-SS acted as a model, embodying the ideals which National Socialism intended to instil into the army.



 

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