SS

SS. The SS (Schutzstaffeln, or protection squads) became, from 20 July 1934, an independent organization within the German National Socialist, or Nazi, Party (NSDAP). Like no other institution of the Third Reich, the SS represents the arrogance of Nazi ideology and the criminal nature of Hitler's regime.

Origins and general character

The early history of the SS dates back to 1923, when Hitler founded a so-called Stabswache (Headquarters Guard), which was banned, after his abortive Munich Beer Hall putsch of 9 November 1923. With the re-launching of the Nazi Party in 1925 a small Stabswache reappeared, named Schutzstaffel soon after. From then on, it expanded more or less continuously, albeit in decentralized form, with the establishment of new tiny echelons (Staffeln) in various cities of the Reich. Placed from their very beginning directly under Hitler's command, these SS squads functioned primarily as bodyguards, orderlies for mass meetings, and party propagandists. Thus, in contrast with the stormtroopers (Sturmabteilungen, or SA) under Ernst Röhm, they were originally party cadres, not offshoots of the tradition of the Weimar Republic's paramilitary Wehrverbände.

The growth of the SS accelerated with the appointment of 29-year-old Himmler as its head (Reichsführer-SS) on 6 January 1929. Membership sharply increased from a few hundred in early 1929 to about 52,000 in December 1932 and reached 209,000 by the end of 1933. At the same time, the areas of SS activity expanded rapidly. By crushing a revolt of Berlin SA formations (the so-called Stennes-Revolte) in 1930 and creating the following year an intelligence bureau of its own, Ic-Dienst, the SS developed beyond its original functions into a kind of party police within the growing Nazi movement. In addition, the establishment of an SS Race and Settlement Office (SS-Rasse-und Siedlungsamt) in 1931 indicated Himmler's ambition to create out of the SS a new, biologically-defined, aristocracy, a modern knighthood, destined to become the ideological avant garde of National Socialism.

The core of the SS was the General SS (Allgemeine SS), a term introduced to distinguish the bulk of the organization from its various special branches such as the SD and the armed SS formations. Its structure was modelled partly on military organizations, partly on monastic orders, and its members were given special ranks (see Table 1). While its unarmed formations were organized on lines somewhat resembling a regimental system, the SS as a whole regarded itself as an exclusive order: candidates for admission had, as a rule, to meet special demands as to their racial origin, physical appearance, political loyalty, and character. They had to undergo pseudo-religious initiation rites and were, as members of the order, subject to a quasi-monastic rule which governed questions of honour, obedience, and social behaviour. All this, as well as a great number of obscure Germanic rituals and military symbols, served to create among SS members the self-image of a chosen few and to justify their pretensions to domination.

Fields of activity

During the first months of the Third Reich, the SS, despite the expansion of its membership and its loyalty to the Führer, did not play a particularly decisive role. In the shadow of Röhm's powerful SA until the so-called ‘Night of the Long Knives’ on 30 June 1934, the SS did not look like one of the real winners from Hitler's accession to power. Starting from the apparently modest position of temporary chief constable of Munich, Himmler nevertheless managed quietly to build up the most impressive power base for the further development of the SS. Within fifteen months he had gained control over the political police in all the German states. (The political police were special departments each state had during the Weimar Republic to defend the constitution against politically motivated attacks. In Prussia this department developed in 1933 into the Gestapo.) After another two years he controlled the police apparatus as a whole and on 17 June 1936 was given the title ‘Reichsführer-SS and Head of the German Police’. In the following years, step by step, the police forces were integrated into the administrative structure of the SS. This process, the aim of which was the complete amalgamation of both organizations into a gigantic state Protection Corps (Staatsschutzkorps), which never actually materialized, led to a fundamental change in the function of the police service. It now gradually lost its character as an institution of public service and became—as the SS always had been—an instrument of the Führer's personal will. The SS, on the other hand, now acquired the position of a quasi-state agency and, as a result, benefited from many of the privileges usually reserved for the country's civil service.

All this helped to increase the efficiency of SS operations, most obviously so in the case of the Ic-Dienst, the SS intelligence bureau, which became known as the Sicherheitsdienst or SD. Having managed, since 1934, to monopolize all intelligence activities within the Nazi movement the SD, from late 1938, also officially operated on behalf of the Reich minister of the interior. One year later, the administration of the SD and the Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei, or Sipo) was combined in the newly established Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or RSHA).

Alongside the police and the SD, the concentration camps, taken over from the SA in the summer of 1934, formed the third pillar of SS power. Theodor Eicke, a notorious former commander of the Dachau camp, was appointed inspector of concentration camps and reorganized them within a few years into a centralized and strictly regulated repressive machine. To guard the camps he also formed special armed units, the Death's Head Units (SS-Totenkopfverbände), which had rudimentary military training. By early 1939 they reached an overall strength of about 9,000 men; later in that year they were incorporated into the military formations of the new Waffen-SS (Armed SS) as the nucleus of the SS Death's Head division while their original duties were taken over by members of the General SS who were too old for military service.

Through its control of the police, the SD, and the concentration camps the SS had already achieved before the war a monopoly of domestic security and kept it until the collapse of the regime. Perhaps the most important aspect of this monopoly was that it gave the SS almost unlimited freedom of action, independent of the existing law and administration of justice. It was this parallel existence of traditional public service organs and SS-agencies which led Ernst Fraenkel to describe it as the ‘Dual State’ ( E. Fraenkel, The Dual State, New York, 1941).

The range of SS activities went far beyond mere terror. Claiming to be not only the pioneers of the Nazi movement but also a model for, and the educator of, the German people, the SS did much to promote ideological indoctrination and propaganda. Convinced that Germany had been led astray for the last thousand years by Christianity, Himmler saw the restoration of the old pre-Christian, Germanic culture and lifestyle as a main task of the SS. To this end, the SS sponsored many different cultural and scientific activities. Countless articles, books, and films were produced for ideological indoctrination. Through a special office, headed by SS-Obergruppenführer August Heissmeyer, it also exerted a considerable influence on the Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalten, a system of élitist National Socialist schools, and established a network of student hostels at the German universities. Moreover, it encouraged research on Germanic history and archaeology and founded a research society of its own, the Ahnenerbe (literally, ancestral heritage), exclusively for this purpose. Another institution formed by the SS was the Lebensborn, which encouraged the birth of ‘racially sound’ babies.

Quite another sector in which the SS contrived, unobtrusively, to gain some measure of influence was the economy. The economic plans of the SS sprang from its desire to use the concentration camps and their large manpower reservoirs more systematically and efficiently. In this endeavour it founded a few enterprises of its own and after 1938 began systematic expansion in certain key fields of production. By the end of the war, the SS owned more than 40 different businesses embracing about 150 plants and factories. It was involved in quarrying, in the production of food and drink, in agriculture and forestry, in timber and iron processing, in leather and textiles, and in publishing. All these activities were co-ordinated by the Main office for Economy and Administration (SS-Wirtschafts und Verwaltungshauptamt) into which in March 1942 the concentration camp system was also integrated.

This official entrepreneurial activity was supplemented by semi-official contacts with influential circles in the German economy. These contacts were supported mainly by the Freundeskreis Reichsführer-SS (Circle of Friends of the Reichsführer-SS), a group of a few dozen industrialists, bankers, and high-ranking civil servants who were interested in having some degree of connection with the SS without actually joining it. For the SS, these contacts paid off—literally—as members of the Freundeskreis supported its work with substantial sums of money and were also prepared to help in other ways, for example in granting cheap loans.

The Waffen-SS

Of all activities of the SS, the ‘black order’ as it was called, its penetration into the prerogative of the Wehrmacht, while unspectacular at first, eventually had the greatest impact on the German war effort, as by May 1945 more than 800,000 men, formed into 38 divisions (see Table 2), had served in the ranks of the armed SS, the Waffen-SS, some 20 or 25% of whom had been killed in battle. SS formations fought on all battle fronts with the exception of the Western Desert campaigns, and frequently played a critical role in the German–Soviet war and in the fighting in north-west Europe. Names such as Rostov, Kharkov, Demyansk, Kursk and Cherkassy, Caen and Falaise (see Normandy campaign) are closely associated with important offensive, and even more defensive, successes of Waffen-SS divisions. More than 400 officers of the Waffen-SS were awarded the Ritterkreuz (see decorations); several of them even commanded armies and army groups.

SS, Table 2: List of armies, corps commands, and division of the Waffen-SS, 1944–5

Key to Symbols
Source: Stein, G. H., The Waffen SS (Oxford, 1966).
a Units that were divisions in name only, often no larger than regiments
F+	Units composed largely of foreign personnel
F−	Units including a sizeable number of foreign personnel
V+	Units composed largely of Volksdeutsche
V−	Units including a sizeable number of Volksdeutsche
Army and Corps Commands
Armee-Oberkommando 6th SS-Panzerarmee
Generalkommando Ist SS-Panzerkorps ‘Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler’
Generalkommando IInd SS-Panzerkorps
Generalkommando IIIrd (German) SS-Panzerkorps
Generalkommando IVth SS-Panzerkorps
Generalkommando Vth SS-Gebirgskorps
Generalkommando VIth SS-Freiwilligenkorps (Latvian)
Generalkommando IXth Waffen-Gebirgskorps der SS (Croatian)
Generalkommandos XIth-XVth SS-Armeekorps (mixed Army-SS staffs)
Generalkommando XVIIIth SS-Armeekorps (Rhine front)
Divisions
1st	SS-Panzerdivision ‘Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler’
2nd	SS-Panzerdivision ‘Das Reich’
3rd	SS-Panzerdivision ‘Totenkopf’
4th	SS-Polizei-Panzergrenadierdivision
5th	SS-Panzerdivision ‘Wiking’	F− (Norwegians)
6th	SS-Gebirgsdivision ‘Nord’
7th	SS-Freiwilligen-Gebirgsdivision ‘Prinz Eugen’	V+ (Croatia)
8th	SS-Kavalleriedivision ‘Florian Geyer’	V−
9th	SS-Panzerdivision ‘Hohenstauffen’
10th	SS-Panzerdivision ‘Frundsberg’
11th	SS-Freiwilligen-Panzergrenadierdivision ‘Nordland’	F− (Norwegians and Danes)
12th	SS-Panzerdivision ‘Hitler Jugend’	F+ (Latvians)
13th	Waffen-Gebirgsdivision der SS ‘Handschar’	F+ (Croatians)
14th	Waffen-Grenadierdivision der SS	F+ (Ukrainians)
15th	Waffen-Grenadierdivision der SS	F+ (Latvians)
16th	SS-Panzergrenadierdivision ‘Reichsführer SS’	V−
17th	SS-Panzergrenadierdivision ‘Götz von Berlichingen’	V−
18th	SS-Freiwilligen-Panzergrenadierdivision ‘Horst Wessel’	V+ (Hungary)
19th	Waffen-Grenadierdivision der SS	F+ (Latvians)
20th	Waffen-Grenadierdivision der SS	F+ (Estonians)
21st	Waffen-Gebirgsdivision der SS ‘Skanderbeg’.	F+ (Albanians)
22nd	Freiwilligen-Kavalleriedivision der SS ‘Maria Theresia’	F+/V−(Hungarians/Hungary)
23rd	Waffen-Gebirgsdivision der SS ‘Kama’;
	dissolved late in 1944, and numerical designation given
	to SS-Freiwilligen-Panzergrenadierdivision ‘Nederland’	F+ (Croatians then Dutch)
24th	Waffen- Gebirgskarstjägerdivision der SS	F+ (Italians, Slovenes,
		Croats, Serbs, Ukrainians)
25th	Waffen-Grenadierdivision der SS ‘Hunyadi’	F+ (Hungarians)
26th	Waffen-Grenadierdivision der SS	F+ (Hungarians)
27th	SS-Freiwilligen-Grenadierdivision ‘Langemarck’	F+ (Belgians)
28th	SS-Freiwilligen-Grenadierdivision ‘Wallonien’	F+ (Belgians and Walloons)
29th	Waffen-Grenadierdivision der SS; transferred
	to the Vlasov Army, and numerical designation given to
	Waffen-Grenadierdivision der SS as of April 1945	F+ (Belorussians)
30th	Waffen-Grenadierdivision der SS	F+ (Russians and
		Ukrainians)
31st	SS-Freiwilligen-Panzergrenadierdivision ‘Böhmen-Mähren’
	(established in 1945, around a nucleus of personnel from
	the various Waffen-SS schools and training establishments
	in Bohemia-Moravia)	F−/V− (Hungarians/Hungary)
32nd	SS-Panzergrenadierdivision ‘30. Januar’ (created by
	mobilizing the students and instructors at the various panzer
	and panzergrenadier schools)
33rd	Waffen-Kavalleriedivision der SS; annihilated early in 1945
	during the battle for Budapest, and numerical
	designation given to Waffen-Grenadierdivision der
	SS ‘Charlemagne’	F+ (Hungarian then French)
34th	SS-Freiwilligen-Grenadierdivision ‘Landstorm Nederland’	F+ (Dutch)
35th	SS-Polizei-Grenadierdivision (created in 1945 by mobilizing
	members of the Ordnungspolizei)
36th	Waffen-Grenadierdivision der SS (a titular upgrading of the
	notorious Dirlewanger penal brigade)
37th	SS-Freiwilligen-Kavalleriedivision ‘Lützow’	F+
38th	SS-Panzergrenadierdivision ‘Nibelungen’ (composed in
	part of the staff and students of the SS-Junkerschule
	‘Bad Tölz’)

Though it undoubtedly achieved an impressive military record, the Waffen-SS (a name adopted only in late 1939) was neither an ordinary army nor, as has been often suggested, merely a fourth service of the Wehrmacht. Rather, the first armed SS units had been established as so-called Political Readiness Squads (Politische Bereitschaften) independently of the government by the regional SS commands (SS-Oberabschnitte). Only Hitler's personal guard (Leibstandarte), under the command of Sepp Dietrich, was formed on Hitler's direct order in March 1933, and that, too, was done unconstitutionally. Before the war, all these squads seemed to serve primarily internal political purposes; this was clearly demonstrated in June 1934, when some of them were used in the liquidation of the SA leadership. Moreover, Hitler confirmed in various decrees that the Political Readiness Squads, known as the SS-Verfügungstruppe from autumn 1934, were intended to be the Führer's personal instrument ‘for special internal political tasks’. Himmler's ambition, however, went far beyond that. While pretending to create a kind of police force, he militarized his formations and transformed them into a professional military body. Recruited exclusively from volunteers, the Verfügungstruppe was supposed to outshine the army by achieving higher standards of training and better equipment as well as through political loyalty and attempts to abolish the more antiquated customs which characterized the German Army at that time (see also rivalries). However, efforts to realize these goals met with considerable difficulties, for their success depended heavily on the professional support of the Army High Command (OKH). After its experience with SA Stormtroopers in 1933–4, the OKH rejected, for obvious reasons, the idea of a competing SS army outside its control. Thus, the pre-war years were dominated by a perpetual struggle between the army and the SS on the strength, organization, and function of the Verfügungstruppe. The result was that numerically the OKH's policy of limiting SS growth was fairly successful; until the eve of the war, the overall strength of all armed SS units, including the Death's Head formations, did not exceed about 23,000 men. On the other hand, the military establishment had had to recognize service in the Verfügungstruppe as the equivalent of military service. In a decree of 17 August 1938 Hitler finally confirmed the military character of armed SS forces as well as their formal independence. He thus abandoned the principle that the Wehrmacht was to be the nation's only bearer of arms (einziger Waffenträger), which he himself had repeatedly stressed on earlier occasions.

With the approach of war the scales shifted further in favour of the SS. It was now no longer a question of whether the SS formations would be allowed to share in military conquests; the disputes now concerned only their assignments, size, and organization. As the first months of the war demonstrated, the SS was well prepared for a rapid expansion of its armed formations. All of them—including the Death's Head units and two Junker cadet schools at Braunschweig and Bad Tölz—were united in November 1939 under the collective term Waffen-SS. At about the same time, in October 1939, the first three SS divisions were formed, one each from the Verfügungstruppe (later called SS-Division Das Reich), the Death's Head units (SS-Divisions Totenkopf), and the police (Polizeidivision, which became formally part of the Waffen-SS only in 1942). As a reinforced motorized regiment, Hitler's Leibstandarte formed the nucleus of a fourth division (Leibstandarte-SS-Adolf-Hitler, or LSSAH), raised in 1941.

As the Waffen-SS had no general staff training programme, the commander and senior officers for the new formations were largely recruited from former Wehrmacht and police officers, who for personal, career, or political reasons had transferred to the SS. Former Army NCOs (non-commissioned officers) made up part of the junior officer corps, the majority of which was provided by the SS Junker cadet schools.

The SS front line divisions were deployed by the army in various operational theatres and fully integrated into its command structure. At the same time they remained subordinate to the SS High Command in all other respects (personnel, replacement training, indoctrination, court-martial matters, and so on). This division of responsibility led not only to further friction with the Wehrmacht, but also to a permanent power struggle within SS Headquarters. The main reason for this was the failure of its organization to keep pace with the growth of the ‘black empire’ as a whole. In 1939–40 Himmler had created several new Hauptämter, or Main Offices, which functioned as an SS equivalent to ministries, without defining clearly their respective jurisdictions. This policy of ‘divide and rule’ helped to strengthen Himmler's personal position, but it caused serious frictions between the various Main Offices. The competition was particularly acute between the old SS Central Bureau (SS-Hauptamt) under the command of SS-Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger and the new Leadership Main Office (SS-Führungshauptamt), a kind of SS general staff, headed by SS-Obergruppenführer Hans Jüttner.

One of the major disputes between Berger's and Jüttner's agencies concerned the question of how rapidly the Waffen-SS should grow. The Leadership Main Office, responsible for the SS formations' military training and organization, argued for moderate growth in order to preserve the image of the Waffen-SS as a professional élite force. But Berger's institution, with Himmler's support, tried to recruit as many volunteers as possible. Since its arrangements with the Wehrmacht allotted the SS only a small share of German conscripts, Berger, from 1940 onwards, enlisted more and more volunteers from outside the German borders. Two manpower pools proved to be particularly responsive: the so-called Volksdeutsche, ethnic Germans living abroad (especially in Hungary, Romania, and the Balkans), and foreign volunteers from ‘Germanic’ countries such as the Netherlands and Flanders, Norway and Denmark. Though up to 1945 several hundred thousand Volksdeutsche and ‘Germanic’ men were recruited for the Waffen-SS, these figures still proved insufficient to compensate for the dramatic casualties suffered in the German–Soviet war and, at the same time, expand the Waffen-SS into a pan-Germanic mass army. So, from 1943, ‘non-Germanic’ volunteers from France and Italy, and in much greater numbers from eastern Europe (Ukraine, Belorussia, Latvia, Estonia) and the Balkans, were accepted to fill the ranks of the Waffen-SS, though without becoming members of the ‘SS order’ in the strict sense. Towards the end of the war, more than half of all Waffen-SS soldiers were either foreigners or ethnic Germans recruited from abroad. Some of the foreign formations such as the Muslim divisions (Handschar, Skanderbeg, and Kama), the Indian Legion, or the tiny British Free Corps, served from the outset almost exclusively for propaganda purposes and the combat effectiveness of most other SS formations raised after 1941 did not usually correspond to the élitist claim of the Waffen-SS. The reasons for this were not only shortcomings in training and equipment, but often also lack of motivation. A growing number of Germans, and particularly Volksdeutsche, were more or less pressed into ‘volunteering’ by bribery and intimidation. Foreigners, too, were often seduced to join the SS forces by false promises. For them, political frustration often caused a further decline in motivation, for Hitler and the other Nazi leaders refused to make any binding statement about the political future of the volunteers' native countries after Germany's final victory. For all these reasons, the number of first-class fighting formations barely exceeded half a dozen, among them being the LSSAH, Das Reich, Totenkopf, and Wiking. Receiving preference in equipment, these were transformed into panzer divisions in 1942–3 and henceforth deployed mainly as a kind of ‘fire brigade’ at any trouble-spots on the front. Their endurance in battle soon became as legendary as their involvement in a number of  war crimes and atrocities.

The SS and German occupation policy

The war brought massive expansion not only for the Waffen-SS but also other branches of Himmler's empire. With the extension of German rule over large parts of Europe, the concentration camp organization changed most dramatically both in scope and in structure. The increase in the number of camp inmates, from about 25,000 in 1939 to more than 700,000 in January 1945, indicates the magnitude of this change. Seen in the total context of SS policy of repression and extermination, these figures represent, however, only the tip of the iceberg: they do not include those hundreds of thousands who died in the camps from inhuman living and working conditions, let alone those millions of Jews and gypsies, murdered by the mobile Einsatzgruppen of the SD and the security police, or gassed in the specially designed extermination camps of OPERATION REINHARD.

The expansion of the concentration camp system was accompanied by a fundamental change in its role. Before the war, the camp's main purpose was to neutralize the regime's internal enemies. After 1942 this function was increasingly superseded by two other tasks: mass extermination and economic exploitation. These were mutually contradictory: while the latter required the preservation of the prisoners' capacity for work, the former meant its destruction. The SS never managed to solve this problem.

With the rapid expansion of its military and repressive instruments, the SS tried to carve for itself a key position in German occupation policy. As a political tabula rasa, the occupied countries offered the SS a unique opportunity for realizing most of its administrative, economic, military, racial, and settlement ambitions. By seizing this chance, Himmler hoped to ensure a decisive share for the SS in the future reconstruction of post-war Europe according to the tenets of Nazi ideology. The main executive organ created to achieve these goals was a network of territorial Higher SS and Police Leaders (Höhere SS- und Polizeiführer, or HSSPF). These tried to extend and consolidate the power of the SS High Command, often in fierce competition with the civil and military administration in the occupied areas, and their efforts, particularly in eastern Europe, met with considerable success. Following special agreements with the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW), the SS became largely responsible for ‘pacifying’ the rear areas. This euphemism meant in reality not only the containment of partisan and resistance movements but also a rule of terror, characterized by ruthless economic exploitation and enslavement of the Slavic population and the annihilation of real or apparent opponents on an unprecedented scale. Initially justified as ‘war necessity’, these mass killings soon became part of the Final Solution programme as envisaged at the Wannsee conference. At the same time the Reichsführer-SS, who in 1939 had also been appointed Reichskomissar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums (Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of Germandom), worked out far-reaching plans for the colonization of the conquered Polish and Soviet territories. According to the Generalplan Ost (1941–2), many millions of Slavs were to be deported to western Siberia, while a small minority of the native population was to be selected for ‘Germanization’. As the pillar of German rule in the east, the SS correspondingly intended to create a network of settlements, for which it hoped to attract not only German farmers and veterans, but also Volksdeutsche and ‘Germanic’ volunteers from the Reich's neighbouring countries. The selection and Eindeutschung (Germanization) of the settlers as well as their transfer into the annexed eastern territories was largely the task of the Liaison Office for Ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle), headed by SS-Obergruppenführer Werner Lorenz. Due to the unfavourable course of the war, the SS was forced first to postpone, then give up most of these plans.

Given the megalomaniac character of its ambitions in the east, it is hardly surprising that the SS developed a special interest in northern and western Europe as well. Occupied Norway and Denmark, the Netherlands and Flanders were seen as integral parts of a future Greater Germanic Reich and as an additional manpower pool for populating the Lebensraum (living-space) in the east. Consequently the SS did not confine its role in these countries to merely supporting the German occupation authorities. By close co-operation with, and control of, the various collaborationist movements, and even the creation of a Germanic SS—the equivalent to the General SS in the ‘Germanic’ countries—Berger's Central Bureau tried, with only partial success, to establish a political power base for a lasting influence of the ‘black order’.

Undoubtedly the Second World War offered the SS a historically unique chance to extend dramatically its power on a European scale. Paradoxically, Himmler's empire owed this increase in power not only to the victories of German weapons but also to their defeats. The more the bad news from the battlefields accumulated to become a threat to existence of the Nazi rule the faster the SS increased its power. It was to this tendency that Himmler and the SS owed their last triumphs. In the summer of 1944—after the attempted putsch against Hitler, the breakdown of the central sector of the Eastern Front, and the Allied invasion in Normandy (see OVERLORD) had led the Nazi regime to the brink of ruin—the power of the SS reached its zenith. The consequence of this was another intensification of National Socialist terror, which was now directed primarily against supposed ‘defeatists’, without being able, however, to prevent Hitler's thousand-year empire from collapsing earlier than almost any other in German history.

Bernd Wegner

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