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

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

Bibliography

Birn, R. B. , Die Höheren SS-und Polizeiführer. Himmlers Vertreter im Reich und in den besetzten Gebieten (Düsseldorf, 1986).
Buchheim, H. , et al., Anatomy of the SS State (London, 1968).
Koehl, R. L. , The Black Corps. The Structure and Power Struggles of the Nazi SS (Madison, Wis. 1983).
Stein, G. H. , The Waffen SS. Hitler's Elite Guard at War, 1939–1945 (London, 1966).
Wegner, B. , The Waffen-SS. Organization, Ideology and Function (tr. R. Webster , Oxford, 1990).

SS (Schutzstaffel) (Germany) Founded in 1925 as the internal police of the SA and the Nazi Party, it became an independent organization following the Röhm Putsch in 1934, under its leader, Himmler. It developed an internal security service (the Sicherheitsdienst) under Heydrich, which from 1936 was responsible for uncovering opposition within the German population. During World War II, it formed an SS task force (Einsatzgruppen), which killed hundreds of thousands of Jews and Eastern Europeans in the occupied territories. In 1933, the Order of the Skull (Totenkopfverbände) was formed, which supervised the concentration camps. In 1939, it formed the nucleus of the Waffen-SS, which recruited an increasing number of voluntary members as well as conscripts as it grew from 100,000 to 900,000 men. Many of these (particularly the conscripts) fought as regular troops, but a large number also committed atrocities, while some went to reinforce the concentration-camp guards. Given the administrative confusion in Nazi Germany, which was heightened to near-chaos in the eastern occupied territories, it was its simple command structure which made the SS so effective. Responsible only to Himmler and then to Hitler, the organization effectively stood above the law.

SS (Schutzstaffel; German, ‘protective echelon’) The élite corps of the German Nazi Party. Founded (1925) by HITLER as a personal bodyguard, the SS was schooled in absolute loyalty and obedience, and in total ruthlessness towards opponents. From 1929 until the dissolution of the THIRD REICH in 1945 the SS was headed by Heinrich HIMMLER, who divided it mainly into two groups: the Allgemeine SS (General SS), and the Waffen-SS (Armed SS). Subdivisions of the SS included the GESTAPO and the Sicherheitsdienst, in charge of foreign and domestic intelligence work. The Waffen-SS administered the CONCENTRATION CAMPS. After the fall of the Third Reich, Himmler committed suicide and the whole corps was condemned by the court at the Nuremberg trials.

SS¹ • abbr. ∎  Saints: the Church of SS Peter and Paul. ∎  Baseball shortstop. ∎  social security. ∎  (in prescriptions) in the strict sense. ∎  steamship: the SS Canberra. ∎  Sunday School. SS ² the Nazi special police force. Founded in 1925 by Hitler as a personal bodyguard, the SS provided security forces (including the Gestapo) and administered the concentration camps.

SS (Schutzstaffeln, guards unit) Chief paramilitary force of Nazi Germany. It was originally Adolf Hitler's bodyguard but expanded after 1928, under Heinrich Himmler, to become the Nazi Party militia and internal police force. With its distinctive black uniform, the SS controlled the Gestapo and the SD (security organization). It ran the concentration camps and, from 1936, controlled the police. After the outbreak of war it formed its own fighting units, notorious for their ferocity, known as the Waffen SS.

SS, the prefix placed before the name of a ship to indicate that it is a merchant ship. Originally the two letters stood for screw steamer—a steamer driven by a propeller or propellers—to distinguish it from a paddle steamer. But with the disappearance of the latter the designation came to be accepted as meaning steamship, and continued to be used even after the introduction of the marine diesel engine.

SS the Nazi special police force, the Schutzstaffel ‘defence squadron’. Founded in 1925 by Hitler as a personal bodyguard, the SS provided security forces (including the Gestapo) and administered the concentration camps. It was headed by Heinrich Himmler 1929–45.

SS 2 the Nazi special police force. Founded in 1925 by Adolf Hitler as a personal bodyguard, the SS provided security forces (including the Gestapo) and adminstered the concentration camps.
abbreviation of German Schutzstaffel 'defense squadron.'

SS

An abbreviation used in the portion of anaffidavit, pleading, or record known as the statement of venue.

The abbreviation is read as "to wit" and is intended to be a contraction of the Latin term scilicet.

SS 3 abbr.steamship: the SS Canberra.

SS 1 see submarine.