The Story of the SS

Hitler's Infamous Legions of Death

Nigel Cawthorne

• Publisher: Arcturus
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781848589476
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Allemagne

'The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Cruelty commands respect. Men may hate us. But, we don't ask for their love - only for their fear.'
-Heinrich Himmler The Schutzstaffel, or SS - the brutal elite of the Nazi Party - was founded by Hitler in 1925 to be his personal bodyguard. From 1929 it was headed by Heinrich Himmler, who built its numbers up from under 300 to well over a million by 1945. The SS became the very backbone of Nazi Germany, taking over almost every function of the state.SS members were chosen not only to be the living embodiment of Hitler's notion of 'Aryan supremacy', but also to cement undying loyalty to the F ü hrer at every level of German society. Merciless fanatics in jackboots, the SS systematically slaughtered, tortured, and enslaved millions. This is the story of the rise and fall of one of the most evil organizations the world has ever seen.

Chapter One

The Schutzstaffel

Hitler was a complete nonentity until 1919, yet he ended up dominating the political landscape of the 20th century. A number of factors contributed to his meteoric rise to power, but a significant part of his success can be attributed to the physical intimidation of his opponents, and the German people, by the Sturmabteilung (SA) and the Schutzstaffel (SS).

Although he was an Austrian by birth, Hitler served in a Bavarian infantry regiment during the First World War. He never rose above the rank of corporal, but he was awarded the Iron Cross and several regimental decorations. Hitler’s war experiences turned him into a zealous German patriot and he was incensed by what he saw as Germany’s premature surrender in 1918.

The peace treaty that ended the war, the Treaty of Versailles, had imposed a number of onerous conditions on Germany – such as the restriction of the newly-named Reichswehr (German Defence Force) to a complement of 100,000 men. As a result the German army was anxious to compensate for its military shortcomings by forming a ‘Black Reichswehr’, or secret army. But first of all it would have to find out where its support lay. As a member of the Reichswehr intelligence arm, Hitler was given the job of penetrating small right-wing groups to check on their political reliability.

Political beginnings

The recently formed National Socialist German Workers’ Party (DAP) was still very small, but its activities had come to the attention of the authorities, so Hitler was sent along to check it out. Although he was not very impressed with the organization of the party, he was greatly taken with its ultra-nationalist, anti-Semitic views, which mirrored his own. At that time, a document known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was being taken seriously in racist circles. A fraud fabricated in Russia in 1895 and published in Germany in 1920, it suggested that the whole of recent history, including the First World War, was caused by a conspiracy of Jews who sought to rule the world.

Having impressed the party members with his oratorical skills, Hitler was persuaded to join the organization. In September 1919 he became its propaganda chief. He immediately changed its name to the National Socialist Workers’ Party (NSDAP) – the words ‘national’ and ‘socialist’ were a cynical ploy to attract new members from both the right and the left. More commonly known as the Nazi Party, the membership of the NSDAP had grown to around 3,000 by 1921 and it operated from a dozen branches outside its Munich powerbase.

Hitler was rapidly becoming the natural leader of the NSDAP, thereby undermining the status of Anton Drexler, the party’s founder. Stung into action, Drexler tried to rid himself of Hitler by proposing a move to Berlin, where he would merge the NSDAP with the German Socialist Party, but he had unwittingly played into Hitler’s hands. After calling for a ballot of the membership, Hitler resigned. As a charismatic propagandist, Hitler had a considerable following within the party, but he declared that he would only rejoin if he could take over as chairman. With the party in turmoil, Drexler had no option but to agree. Hitler then placed his own henchmen in all of the key positions.

In 1923, Drexler left the party he had founded.

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945)

Hitler was born in Austria on 20 April 1889. He dreamt of becoming an artist but after being refused entry to the Academy of Fine Art in Vienna he became a down-and-out.

After five years of living from hand to mouth in Vienna, a small inheritance enabled him to move to Munich in 1913, where his life was as aimless as before. However, everything changed when the First World War broke out in 1914. Although Hitler had been declared unfit to join the Austrian army he managed to get into the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment. He then served in the trenches of the Western Front, where he enjoyed the discipline and camaraderie of combat and won several awards for bravery. On 15 October 1918 he was temporarily blinded by mustard gas, but he was left with a belief in the heroic virtues of war.

After the war, Hitler joined the German Workers’ Party. He quickly changed its name to the NSDAP or Nazi Party and then became its head. His confrontational political style meant that his life was often in danger, so he always carried a gun. Following a failed attempt to take over the government of Bavaria, known as the Beer Hall Putsch, he was imprisoned in Landsberg Castle. It was there that he dictated Mein Kampf (My Struggle), a book in which he combined his autobiography with a statement of his political ideology. He condemned the politicians who had ended the war before Germany had been decisively beaten on the battlefield; repudiated the Versailles Treaty; called for revenge on France; attacked Marxism; demanded Lebensraum, or living space, in the east at the expense of the Slavs; and spelt out a racist creed which maintained that so-called ‘Aryans’ were a race of geniuses while Jews were parasites.

In 1930, the Nazi Party won 18 per cent of the vote and 107 seats in the Reichstag, Germany’s federal parliament. Hitler took German citizenship in 1932 and in the following year he became chancellor, after winning 44 per cent of the vote. He then assumed dictatorial powers over what he called the Third Reich. The Holy Roman Empire, which lasted from 800 to 1806, was known as the First Reich (realm or empire) and the German Empire, which lasted from 1871 to 1918, was the Second Reich.

In contravention of the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler then began to rearm Germany. After sending troops into the demilitarized Rhineland, he signed treaties with Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan. He then annexed Austria in 1938 and demanded the return of the Sudetenland, an area of Czechoslovakia that was populated by Germans. The territory was conceded by Britain and France in the Munich Agreement, but it was still not enough for Hitler. In the following year he seized the rest of Czechoslovakia.

After signing a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, Hitler invaded Poland. France and Britain responded by declaring war on Nazi Germany. The German army then invaded much of western Europe, but Britain remained unconquered. In 1941, Hitler invaded Russia and when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor he declared war on the United States.

Germany’s progress was eventually halted by the Russians in the east and the British in North Africa. After an Anglo-American force had established a toehold in Italy, the Western Allies landed in Normandy in June 1944. Germany was besieged from all sides. Hitler committed suicide on 30 April 1945, as the Soviet army fought its way into Berlin.

Sturmabteilung (SA)

But the NSDAP had a rival in the form of the German Communist Party (KPD). Despite their failure to take over in Berlin and Bavaria, the communists had been buoyed by the success of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Fearful of a Bolshevik uprising, the German authorities organized a huge army of unemployed First World War veterans into more than 65 Freikorps groups which were secretly armed by the Reichswehr. Their task was to secure political stability by opposing the communist threat. The Freikorps units were unswervingly loyal to their commanders, whose names they bore. Brigade Ehrhardt was led by Hermann Ehrhardt, for instance. However, they were often hostile to the government because they felt that the politicians had foisted a treasonous peace on them. In 1920, a monarchist element in the Freikorps tried to overthrow the new Weimar Republic, but the putsch was thwarted by a strike of socialist and communist workers.

Unsurprisingly, there was a continuing struggle between the left and the right, which often erupted into violence at political meetings. Determined to maintain order, the Nazi Party created a troop of stewards, the Ordnertruppe – also known as Saalschutz or ‘assembly-hall protection’. In practice, however, the Nazi thugs took things a stage further by physically ejecting anyone who disagreed with the National Socialist speaker. When quasi-military formations were banned in an attempt to suppress the Freikorps, who were becoming troublesome, the Ordnertruppe became the Turn- und Sportabteilung (athletics and sports detachment).

Its members were recruited from the Sturmabteilung (storm troopers; SA), which had been organized by Chief of Staff Ernst Röhm. Stormtroopers – small squads of men using infiltration tactics – had originally been used on the Western Front instead of employing costly mass frontal assaults. Röhm’s SA was made up of former members of the Freikorps, which had been officially disbanded after its failed 1920 putsch. SA troops wore distinctive brown shirts, in emulation of the black shirts worn by the followers of Benito Mussolini, who came to power in Italy after the March on Rome in 1922. As well as ‘keeping order’ at Nazi Party meetings, the SA also used coshes and knuckledusters to disrupt the meetings of rival parties. On one occasion in 1922, Hitler himself stormed on to a rival’s platform and physically assaulted the speaker. He was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment.

First World War (1914–18)

ON 28 June 1914, Serbian nationalists sought to liberate the southern Slavs of the Austro-Hungarian Empire by assassinating Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. In retaliation, Austria declared war on Serbia. As a Slavonic nation, Tsarist Russia came to Serbia’s defence. The German Kaiser, Wilhelm II (1895–1941), urged Austria–Hungary to attack, while warning Russia not to mobilize. He also insisted that the French stay neutral in any war between Germany and Russia. Both Russia and France ignored these demands, so Germany declared war on France. Germany then attacked France through Belgium, whose neutrality was guaranteed by Britain. Italy and Japan sided with Russia and the Western Allies, while Turkey and its Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers.

After the development of the machine gun had halted Germany’s western advance, the German and Allied armies built barbed wire barricades, and dug lines of trenches, that ran across northern France from the Channel to the Swiss border. Then a prolonged stalemate followed, during which the opposing armies stood facing each other. Periodic battles resulted in massive slaughter, but few gains. At sea, the British sought to blockade Germany, while the Germans used submarines in an attempt to cut Britain’s supply lines. There was more fighting in the Dardanelles, the Middle East, Germany’s African colonies and along the Italian front.

In the east, the battle was more fluid. The Germans’ superior tactics and high industrial output brought them battlefield victories, but the Russians could call on massive manpower reserves. Tsar Nicholas II took command of the Russian forces in September 1915, but he proved to be an inept commander. In the following year, he launched an offensive that cost a million Russian lives. This senseless slaughter sounded the death knell for the Russian monarchy.

The Tsar was deposed by the February Revolution of 1917. When the Communist party leader, Vladimir Lenin, seized power in the following October, the new Soviet government withdrew from the war by signing a peace treaty. With the Soviet Union out of the way the German army seemed set for victory, but by then the United States had entered the war on the side of the Allies. By that time, Britain had developed the tank, which broke the battlefield stalemate and proved a war-winning weapon, and its naval blockade had brought Germany to its knees.

The German sailors mutinied when they were ordered to break the blockade. Councils of soldiers and workers took over in some places, following the Soviet example, and then on 8 November 1918 the Bavarian Soviet Republic was proclaimed. The German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, went into exile in the Netherlands where he lived until his death. An armistice was called on 11 November 1918 and the German troops marched home to a country where the old order had been destroyed. Many of them, including Hitler, felt that they could have fought on if they had not been betrayed by politicians and agitators back in Germany.

The Treaty of Versailles (28 June 1919)

The peace treaty that ended the First World War attributed all of the guilt to Germany alone. Germany was in no position to resume hostilities, so the nation’s politicians were forced to accede to the harsh terms within the contract. For a start, it was ordered that reparations totalling 132 billion gold marks should be paid to the Allies. In addition, a number of European territories had to be surrendered. These were handed over to the newly re-established state of Poland and newly created Czechoslovakia. The Rhineland, lying between Germany and France, was demilitarized and the German army was reduced to 100,000 men. Germany would not be allowed to possess tanks, military planes or poison gas and the naval fleet could only retain a dozen battleships. All submarines were banned. On a...