The SS

12 Key excerpts on "The SS"

• 

  eBook - PDF

  The Nazi Holocaust. Part 3: The "Final Solution". Volume 2

  • Michael Robert Marrus(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Saur

    (Publisher)

  Historians concerned with the evolution of political parties, armies, economic or religious institutions, may look back over decades, even centuries, and thereby get to the heart of the matter. But The SS lasted hardly 20 years: a ridiculously short time which becomes even shorter when one realises that in its first seven years the organisation led at best a shadow existence. But what a breathtaking development during those two decades: from the bodyguard of an initially rather unsuccessful völkisch politician named Hitler to the 'party police' of the NS movement; from the party police to the keystone of German domestic policy; from this domestic springboard to a controlling influence in the German war effort and to a mastery over large parts of German-occupied Europe. The climax of this unique expansion of power was The SS s vain attempt to establish itself as a new elite, and as the chief organising force of a new 'Germanic Europe'. The development of The SS was like an historical brush fire: never in its short history was there a period of constancy or stability, or a moment of calm; every objective that was achieved was swallowed up by its ever-expanding appetite. A third problem for the historian of The SS is its enormously varied character. The SS was a conglomeration of loosely connected offices and branches, which often had little to do with one another, and which fulfilled radically different duties. The historian's judgement is therefore shaped by whichever aspect or branch of the 'SS State' he studies: the concentration camp system or the Waffen-SS , the organisation's economic enterprises or the SD {Sicherfuitsdienst) , The SS s secret service, the so-called 'General SS ( Allgemeine SS) or The SS authorities in German-occupied countries. In addition, as each section of The SS had its own distinctive domain and flavour it is difficult to draw any general conclusions on the 'Black Order' as a whole.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Hitler's Followers (RLE Nazi Germany & Holocaust)

  Studies in the Sociology of the Nazi Movement

  • Detlef Muhlberger(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  7

  The SS

           

  Along with the SA, from which it was to recruit many of its members before 1933, The SS was one of the oldest Nazi specialist organizations by the time of the Nazi seizure of power.1 The SS emerged in 1925 when Hitler ordered the creation of a Stabswache (Staff Guard) to act as his personal bodyguard and to protect the party leadership in general, a task assigned by him to Julius Schreck in April 1925. The Staff Guard recruited by Schreck, which made its first public appearance in Munich on 16 April 1925 at the funeral of Ernst Pöhner, was essentially the successor of the Stosstrupp Hitler which had existed briefly in 1923,2 a formation in which Schreck and many members of the new Stabswache had formerly been active, and one from which the new Staff Guard also copied its death’s head insignia. It was this Munich organization which was re-christened Schutzstaffel , a term also applied to similar formations which gradually emerged in various other localities in Germany by the autumn of 1925. Conceived very much as an ‘elite’ organization within the Nazi Movement, Schreck and his successor Josef Berchtold, who took over The SS on 15 April 1926, recruited the more active and reliable party members (initially only those between 23 and 35 years of age), who were charged with the protection of the movement and its meetings, as well as with furthering the propaganda activities of the party. These tasks were virtually identical with those of the SA, to which the fledgeling organization was subordinated following the appointment of Franz Pfeffer von Salomon as ‘Supreme SA Leader’ on 1 November 1926. For much of the late 1920s The SS grew only very slowly in the shadow of the SA. There is some uncertainty as to the actual size of The SS in the years immediately following its formation. It is estimated that the organization had enrolled around 800 men by the end of 1925, its total strength rising to about 1,000 by the end of 1928, reaching the 2,000-mark by the end of 1929 and a strength of 2,727 by the end of 1930.3 According to statistics furnished by the Nazis themselves (and these included a small number of Austrian SS members), it was only in the course of 1931 – two years after the appointment of Heinrich Himmler as Reichsführer-SS – that The SS began to grow in size, a beneficiary of the general expansion of the Nazi Movement in the early 1930s, with a strength of 14,964 by the end of 1931, rising to 52,048 by the end of 1932. A membership spurt in 1933 following Hitler’s elevation to the chancellorship took its total strength to 209,014 by 31 December.4

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  SS: Hell On The Western Front

  • Chris Bishop(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Amber Books Ltd

    (Publisher)

  ORIGINS OF THE WAFFEN SS

  T hey were the original ‘Men in Black’, the personification of the Nazi state. In their sombre uniforms adorned with swastikas and death’s heads, the members of the Schutzstaffeln, or SS, cast their shadow over Germany in the 1930s, and they grew in power during the war. Offering the Führer loyalty to the death, SS members were committed to National Socialism long after it became obvious that the Nazis were pulling Germany down into ruin.

  Even today, they have a curiously compelling image: black-clad Aryan supermen, executors of the Final Solution, the cruel and merciless soldiers of the Nazi state, who were armed with the latest weapons that Germany’s scientists and engineers could devise. Like many commonly held notions, this picture of The SS does not tell the whole story. The SS did wear black, but only in the pre-war years. SS men were responsible for some of the worst atrocities of the war – but they were also Germany’s toughest soldiers.

  Hitler’s SS bodyguard, the Leibstandarte, parades past its master on his birthday in 1939. Born out of a need for hard men to protect Nazi political meetings, The SS grew into an all-powerful state within a state.

  INSPIRED BY HITLER

  The original shape and form of The SS owed much to Adolf Hitler. It was he who formed the specially selected bodyguard units that would evolve into The SS; gave them their sense of being chosen men; selected men who took pride in their unquestioning obedience and who would do anything he asked – whether legal or not.

  The origins of The SS date back to the early 1920s, when for the first time the National Socialist German Worker’s Party (NSDAP) was making its presence felt in the rough-and-tumble of Bavarian politics. Violence played a major part in the politics of the time, so a paramilitary wing was set up by the Nazis for street fighting. By the end of 1922, this had become the Sturmabteilung,

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The Business of Genocide

  The SS, Slave Labor, and the Concentration Camps

  • Michael Thad Allen(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • The University of North Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 1: Origins of The SSThe Ideology is the Modern Organization

  The SS began as a small clique of Nazi street fighters in the SA (Sturmabteilung, or Storm Division) and swiftly became the dominant organ of executive power in the Third Reich. It ballooned after 1933 into a nationwide organization almost overnight. Many historians speak of a “pragmatic” and a “fanatic” side of National Socialism, of coldly rational, officious functionaries and a lunatic fringe of propagandists. But the dividing line is hard to draw between such pragmatic and fanatic “sides” in The SS. Its founders sought to make the very structure of their organizations embody National Socialism. At first it may seem contradictory to note that Nazis set out to institutionalize their self-proclaimed dynamism in hierarchical institutions. What other name for such institutions is there than bureaucracy, which the Nazis so loudly derided? But The SS identified its own hierarchies with the regeneration of “German” values. “Vision” was supposed to set them apart, and this was no empty rhetoric. The SS’s conception of an ideal society shaped the personnel that Heinrich Himmler recruited no less than the offices they inhabited. Conversely, incoming individuals with a strong sense of purpose could shape The SS. The relation was mutual, especially in the flux of the early, formative years when The SS achieved rapid successes. Once The SS became more than a street fighters’ club, the coordination of even the most rudimentary information necessarily demanded modern bureaucracy. Here too ideology and organization ran together because the will to “be modern” itself motivated SS men (though it was hardly unique to them).

  This chapter focuses on three aspects of The SS’s early push: its financial administration under the leadership of Oswald Pohl, Himmler’s first industrial ventures, and the foundation of the concentration camps by Theodor Eicke. Eventually, the exploitation of slave labor after 1942 brought them all together, but in the mid-1930s they remained distinct. By 1936 Pohl promptly built a modern administrative corps after Himmler recruited him to oversee The SS’s expanding budgets. At the same time Himmler founded the fledgling SS companies within his own Personal Staff that were the precursors to The SS’s industrial empire. Initially they were run in such a dilettante manner that, by 1938–39, Pohl had to step in and take them over completely. From 1933 to 1936 the concentration camps grew exponentially as Theodor Eicke established their legitimacy as new prisons, secured funds for their expansion, and recruited officers with a self-proclaimed mission to protect the Nazi body politic; his guards, specially named the Death’s Head Units, established a firm identity as the Third Reich’s appointed punishers.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Heydrich, Hitler's Most Evil Henchman

  • Charles Wighton(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Arcole Publishing

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER THREE — IN The SS

  The SS, like every other German institution ever devised, was a highly bureaucratic organization. Despite Himmler’s personal interest it took him almost a month to transfer his brilliant new recruit to The SS headquarters in Munich. In the interval Heydrich got his first taste of what membership of The SS meant. At Heydrich’s funeral, twelve years later, Himmler told how the former naval officer, an ordinary SS man in a tiny Hamburg SS platoon, fought with his comrades, chiefly unemployed youths, in the beer cellars and streets of the red light district of the great Hanseatic city.

  On 10 August Heydrich was posted officially to the Munich SS. At the same time he was commissioned with the rank of Sturmführer, or platoon leader. As the protégé of Heinrich Himmler promotion was rapid. At the beginning of December he was given The SS equivalent of his former substantive naval rank, SS Hauptsturmführer. Less than a month later, on Christmas Day—perhaps to mark the occasion of his wedding which took place twenty-four hours later—Heydrich was further promoted to the rank of Sturmbannführer, or major of The SS. At that time the Schutzstaffel numbered less than one thousand officers and men.

  The SS was originally founded around 1922, eighteen months or so before Hitler’s first abortive putsch in Munich. It was formed from the small group of strong-arm men whom Hitler had gathered around him in the first years of the Nazi Party and who acted variously as personal bodyguards, secretaries, chauffeurs—and chuckers-out at the turbulent Party meetings. At this time The SS was known as the “Adolf Hitler Shock Troops” and Hitler himself has given the best account of how The SS was founded:

  Being convinced that there are always circumstances in which élite troops are called for, in 1922-23 I created the Adolf Hitler Shock Troops. They were made up of men who were ready for revolution and who knew that some day events would come to hard knocks. When I came out of Landsberg [where Hitler was interned after the Munich putsch] everything was broken up and scattered—sometimes in rival hands. I told myself that I needed a bodyguard, even a very restricted one. But it had to be made up of men who would enlist without conditions, willing to march even against their brothers—only twenty of them to a city—and of absolute reliability rather than a doubtful mass.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Hitler's Armed SS

  The Waffen-SS at War, 1939–1945

  • Anthony Tucker-Jones(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Pen and Sword Military

    (Publisher)

  Similarly, the Sicherheits- dienst (SD – Security Service) security police wore grey uniforms, while the Gestapo secret police worked in plain clothes. In addition, The SS-Totenkopfverba ¨nde (Death’s Head Units) were responsible for running the concentration camps in Poland and Russia; they also dressed in field-grey uniforms. It was they who oversaw Hitler’s Final Solution and the wholesale murder of Europe’s Jewish population. The ‘Jewish question’ had come firmly into focus during the evolution of Germany as a unified state during the mid-nineteenth century. Hitler ordered on 18 September 1939 that the Death’s Head units give up their younger recruits for service in SS regiments, which were to be formed into divisions. This meant that there was a direct link between the Waffen-SS and the Holocaust. Then there was a vast range of other brutal auxiliary police and security units raised within occupied Europe and controlled by The SS. Callously, Himmler felt it was simpler to go to war than to deport help- less Jewish and Polish civilians from the provinces annexed by Germany. In mid-1940 he told members of the Leibstandarte-SS, ‘Gentlemen, it is much easier in many cases to go into combat with a company than to suppress an obstructive population of low cultural level, or to carry out executions or to haul away people or to evict crying hysterical women.’ Introduction 5 The deployment of armed SS units during the invasions of Poland and the West was designed to allow Himmler’s power base to share in Germany’s military triumphs. ‘It was necessary that The SS should make war,’ said Hitler, ‘otherwise its prestige would have been lowered.’ Keen to expand the Waffen-SS but blocked by the Wehrmacht, Gottlob Berger decided that his only alternative would be to recruit from outside Germany.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Underground Humour In Nazi Germany, 1933-1945

  • Dr F K M Hillenbrand, F. K. M. Hillenbrand(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  36

  [19] Early in 1933, an SA man jumps on to a bus and accidentally steps on the big toe of one of the passengers, who at once clouts him. The Stormtrooper promptly retaliates, but then a third man attacks him. Summoned to defend himself in court, the third participant in the fight tries to exonerate himself by saying, ‘I thought it was already starting.’37

  [20] What is the difference between a steak and a Stormtrooper? Very little: both are brown on the outside, and red inside.

  SS, POLICE AND CONCENTRATION CAMPS

  In Nazi Germany The SS had the reputation of recruiting its members from a physical elite of the young men most loyally devoted to Nazi ideology. In fact, the real origin of The SS was rather different. During the Nazi Kampfjahre 38 The SS came from the lowest strata of urban society. Hence, perhaps, Henderson’s quip that in English, The SS were often referred to as Black Guards, which might also be written as one word.39 The leaders of The SS were to a large extent drawn from a postwar hotchpotch of ex-soldiers, Free-Corps men and frustrated, uprooted types with a criminal past and not infrequently homosexual inclinations. The quarrels and feuds typical of such an environment reduced these men’s dependence on Hitler in the early years of his rise to power and he was understandably anxious to obtain a bodyguard bound to him by a special oath of loyalty.40 One of its first leaders when the organization came into being in 192241 was a certain Erhard Heiden, a former stool-pigeon for the police. It was not until 1929 that Hitler entrusted the mild-mannered Heinrich Himmler, then a chicken farmer in the village of Waldtrudering near Munich, with the leadership of his SS or ‘Protective Squad’,42 then numbering little more than a couple of hundred men. Since The SS was described as ‘an organization of the NSDAP for the personal protection of the Führer’, to which definition was later added ‘and of the internal security of the Reich’,43 Himmler’s title of ‘Reichsführer SS’ was absurdly high-falutin in 1929 when one considers the small number under his command. Yet only four years later, Himmler – by dint of ambition, ruthlessness, and a superb talent for organization – had managed to increase these numbers to six figures. During the war he and his SS ‘struck terror throughout occupied Europe’,44 and by then his ‘Waffen SS’45

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The Third Reich

  Charisma and Community

  • Martin Kitchen(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 7 The SA, SS and Police The SS

  T he brown-shirted Storm Section (SA) was founded on 3 August 1921. Organized by Captain Ernst Röhm, its officers came mostly from Captain Hermann Ehrhardt’s murderous gang Organisation Consul (OC), the rank and file from various paramilitary groups in Bavaria. It specialized in political murder, beating up anyone who dared heckle Hitler in his beer hall meetings, terrorizing the infant NSDAP’s opponents and parading truculently through the streets of Munich. The SA was closely associated with the local army (Reichswehr) units, which trained them in basic military skills. From the outset the SA was fiercely independent, resentful of any control by Hitler and the party. Hitler put Hermann Göring, a highly decorated air ace, in charge of the SA in 1923, hoping thereby to rein in Ehrhardt’s men, and selected a small gang of thugs as his personal bodyguards. Their uniform was field grey with black ski caps and a death’s head badge. Shortly thereafter Ehrhardt broke with Hitler and withdrew his men from the SA. Hitler renamed his bodyguard Adolf Hitler’s Raiders (Stosstrupp Adolf Hitler) and placed it under the command of Joseph Berchtold, a dwarfish stationer who was deputy party treasurer.

  The Stosstrupp was banned after the comic opera Hitler Putsch of November 1923 and Göring and Berchtold fled to Austria. While Hitler was in prison at Landsberg Ernst Röhm built up a new paramilitary organization on a national level called Vanguard (Frontbann) whose patron was Hitler’s co-conspirator, General Ludendorff. Röhm was determined to keep his organization completely separate from the party and was thus on a collision course with Hitler, who decided to found a rival organization that would be utterly loyal to him. In April 1925 he ordered his chauffeur, Julius Schreck, to recruit a bodyguard. Schreck found eight former members of the Stosstrupp in a Munich beer hall, Torbräu, and gave them the title Protection Squad (Schutzstaffel –

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  The Third Reich

  Then and Now

  • Tony Le Tissier(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • After the Battle

    (Publisher)

  9 Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse [1] in Berlin. This was actually the old Prinz Albrecht Hotel which Hitler had often used before he became Chancellor. Since 1931 The SS had its own internal intelligence department called the Sicherheitsdienst — the SD for short. Its chief was Reinhard Heydrich who was installed just round the corner in the former Prinz-Albrecht-Palais in Wilhelmstrasse [3]. Right: A totalitarian state needs its secret police force and when Göring was the Prussian Minister of the Interior he established such an organisation in April 1933 called the Geheime Staats-polizei — the dreaded Gestapo. Its headquarters set up next door at No. 8 Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse [2] which was formerly the Arts and Crafts Museum. When Göring handed over to Himmler in 1934, he just moved across the road to the new Air Ministry [4]. 1 2 3 4 (5) The SS-Führungshauptamt (Oper-ational Department) serving as head-quarters of the Waffen-SS under Hans Jüttner. (6) The SS-Personalhauptamt (Per-sonnel Department) under SS-Grup-penführer Maximilian von Herff. (7) The SS-Wirtschaftsverwaltungs-Hauptamt (WVHA, Economic and Administrative Head Office) under SS-Obergruppenführer und General der Waffen-SS Oswald Pohl, which ran the vast business empire developed during the war using labour from the concen-tration and forced-labour camps. Next door at No. 8 were the Gestapo headquarters in what had been the Kunstgewerbemuseum (Arts and Crafts Museum), cellars of which contained the cells where prisoners were deprived of light and sleep, beaten and tortured to extract information. The role of the Gestapo had been defined in Prussian State Law: ‘The Secret State Police have the task of investigating and com-batting throughout the state all attempts to endanger the state.’ There were no legal means of redress against arrest by the Gestapo, which was a law unto itself, and arrest in most cases led to either summary execution or confine-ment in a concentration camp.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Building a Nazi Europe

  The SS's Germanic Volunteers

  • Martin R. Gutmann(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  30 This view is widely propagated. In addition to literature already cited, see Norman Davison, “The Myth of the European Army: Foreign Nationals in the German Waffen- SS During World War Two” (PhD thesis, Kean University, 1975), 17–18. 31 Eugen Kogon, Der SS-Staat. Das System der Deutschen Konzentrationslager (München: Kindler, 1974), 290. 32 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 1994); see also Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1961). 33 Jeffrey Herff, Reactionary Modernism. Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), especially 152– 88; Aly and Heim, Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction; Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Perennial, 1993), especially his description of men such as Martin Luther, 27. Understanding the Waffen-SS 13 and ambitious men who were eager not only to conceptualize but also to implement murderous policies. 34 The traditional caricature of the neutral volunteer is as outdated as that of the old SS perpetrator. This book provides a more nuanced sketch of the neutral men, showing them not as social misfits and or followers, but as highly intellectual and ambitious men whose belief in National Socialist ideas existed not despite of, but in fact grew from, their complex understanding of the world they lived in. Like many German SS officers, they too were “fighting bureaucrats.” They saw themselves, and were seen, both as ‘thinkers’ and ‘doers.’ This book therefore attempts to uncover the essence of the neutral volunteers by combining “biographical” and “institutional” approaches.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  War Volunteering in Modern Times

  From the French Revolution to the Second World War

  • C. G. Krüger, S. Levsen, C. G. Krüger, S. Levsen(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The ideological conviction of these “new types of political combatants” was declared as more important than their professional value. Furthermore, through the successful enlistment of foreigners, the Waffen-SS gave the illu- sion that patriotism was henceforth transcended by ideological edu- cation. Given this example, the German Army was intended by the government to evolve in the same direction. The army’s Volksgrenadier- Divisionen, which were set up under the aegis of The SS even before the 242 Jean-Luc Leleu attempt on Hitler in July 1944, and later the Volkssturm were means of copying this ideological “success”. They were a direct extension of the social model of the Waffen-SS to the regular army, and by the end to a whole society at war. Notes I would like to thank Karen Weilbrenner for proofreading the English. 1. For a general perspective: G. H. Stein (1967) La Waffen-S.S., American edn 1966 (Paris); B. Wegner (1997) Hitlers politische Soldaten. Die Waffen-SS, 1933–1945, 5th edn (Schöningh); J. L. Leleu (2007) La Waffen-SS. Soldats politiques en guerre (Paris). 2. B. Wegner (1997); G. C. Boehnert (1978) A Sociography of The SS Officer Corps, 1925–1939 (Ph.D., University of London), V; H. F. Ziegler (1989) Nazi Germany’s New Aristocracy. The SS Leadership, 1925–1939 (Princeton/ New Jersey), XX. A sociological study about NCOs and all ranks of the Kommandostab Reichsführer-SS units is available in M. Cüppers (2005) Wegbereiter der Shoah. Die Waffen-SS, der Kommandostab Reichsführer-SS und die Judenvernichtung 1939–1945 (Darmstadt). 3. For bibliographical accounts about Berger, see G. Rempel “Gottlob Berger – ‘Ein Schwabengeneral der Tat’ ”, in R. Smelser and E. Syring (eds.) (2000) Die SS: Elite unter dem Totenkopf, 30 Lebensläufe (Paderborn), p. 45–59; J. Scholtysek (1997) “Der ‚Schwabenherzog”. Gottlob Berger, Obergruppenführer’ in M. Kiβener, J. Scholtysek Die Führer der Provinz. NS-Biographien aus Baden und Württemberg (Konstanz), p.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  The Vienna Gestapo, 1938-1945

  Crimes, Perpetrators, Victims

  • Elisabeth Boeckl-Klamper, Thomas Mang, Wolfgang Neugebauer(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Berghahn Books

    (Publisher)

  As Himmler and Heydrich were not satisfied with the idea that the SD should be merely an intelligence service and ‘Reich polling institute’, Best ultimately concentrated on developing the SD into the ‘internal elite’ of an ideologically defined ‘state security corps’. The problem therefore arose of effectively con-necting The SS, which saw itself as a ‘pillar of the National Socialist movement called upon to shape political will’, 33 with the security police, whose members consisted mainly of officials who had served the Weimar Republic, in confor-mity with the NSDAP line. Heydrich therefore wanted to replace Sipo officials with members of the SD, who could not, however, compete with Sipo officials trained in the latest police and forensic methods. In a decree issued on 4 July 1934, Himmler had already confirmed that the SD had ‘no police powers’, and that fundamentally ‘the police 70 | The Vienna Gestapo, 1938–1945 should combat opponents of National Socialism, and the SD should identify enemies of the National Socialist idea’. 34 As the future was to show, this princi-ple was never systematically implemented, and competences were constantly ex-ceeded, resulting in conflicts between the rival institutions. The Funktionsbefehl (function order) issued by Heydrich on 1 July 1937, 35 in which the competences of the Gestapo and SD were redefined, failed to fully eliminate the conflict po-tential. Heydrich stated that the SD and Gestapo should form ‘a unified whole … in the results of their work’ and that their relationship should not be one of ‘rivalry or superiority and subordination but of complementarity with the avoid-ance of duplication’. The regulation whereby the SD was responsible for ‘all gen-eral and fundamental questions’ and the Gestapo for ‘all individual incidents (in which state police enforcement is applicable)’ was once again emphasized in the Funktionsbefehl.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book