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— CH. 1 · INTRODUCTION —

Schutzstaffel

~10 min read · Ch. 1 of 8
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  • The Schutzstaffel, known to history by its initials SS, began in Munich in 1923 as a unit of eight men. Twenty years later, it had become the most feared organisation in Nazi-occupied Europe. How did a small bodyguard detail transform into the primary engine of the Holocaust, responsible for the murder of an estimated six million Jews and millions of other victims? And how did it come to control police forces, run death camps, build a business empire, and wage war on two fronts simultaneously? Those questions sit at the heart of what the SS was, and why it matters to understand it.

  • Julius Schreck and Joseph Berchtold commanded the original eight-man unit that Adolf Hitler formed to serve his personal security. Hitler was explicit about why he wanted it: he did not trust the broader paramilitary Sturmabteilung, or SA, which he regarded as a "suspect mass." The new unit was designated the Stabswache, then renamed the Stoßtrupp in May 1923. It was dissolved after the failed Beer Hall Putsch that same year.

    In 1925, Hitler ordered Schreck to build a new unit from scratch. This one was called the Schutzkommando, then the Sturmstaffel, and finally the Schutzstaffel. Its official founding date was set as the 9th of November 1925, the second anniversary of the Putsch. Berchtold became its second chief in April 1926 and introduced the title Reichsführer-SS, but he grew frustrated by the SA's authority over the SS and handed leadership to his deputy Erhard Heiden in March 1927.

    The organisation was struggling. Between 1925 and 1929, membership fell from 1,000 to 280. That changed when Heinrich Himmler joined as Heiden's deputy in September 1927 and then assumed the Reichsführer-SS position in January 1929. In his first year, Himmler expanded membership to 3,000. By the end of 1933, it stood at 209,000. Himmler's declared vision was a "conflation of Teutonic knights, the Jesuits, and Japanese Samurai." He reorganised the SS main office into five divisions covering administration, personnel, finance, security, and race. The legal principle binding it all together was the Führerprinzip: Hitler's will was above the law, and the SS answered only to Hitler.

  • Early SS officer candidates were required to prove Aryan ancestry back to 1750; for enlisted men, to 1800. Once the war made documentation harder to obtain, the requirement was reduced to proving only that one's grandparents were Aryan, in line with the Nuremberg Laws.

    Himmler tried to add physical height requirements, but these were only loosely enforced and over half the SS men did not meet them. What was never relaxed was ideological conformity. SS members were expected to renounce Christianity; Christmas was replaced with a solstice celebration. Church weddings gave way to SS Eheweihen, pagan ceremonies that Himmler invented. In 1933, he bought Wewelsburg, a castle in Westphalia, initially as a training centre but soon as a site for SS dinners and neo-pagan rituals.

    The official motto was "Meine Ehre heißt Treue" (My Honour is Loyalty). In 1936, Himmler articulated the SS's self-image in the pamphlet "The SS as an Anti-Bolshevist Fighting Organisation," writing that never again would "the Jewish-Bolshevik revolution of subhumans" be allowed to kindle in the heart of Europe. Himmler also wrote that an SS man "hesitates not for a single instant, but executes unquestioningly" any Führer order. To reinforce this culture, the SS established officer candidate schools at Bad Tölz and Braunschweig from 1934 onward, with further schools opening at Klagenfurt and Prague during the war. The training stressed ruthlessness and toughness as explicit values.

  • Hermann Göring created the Gestapo in 1933 in his role as Minister President of Prussia, appointing Rudolf Diels as its head. Concerned that Diels was insufficiently ruthless, Göring transferred control to Himmler on the 20th of April 1934. Two days later, on the 22nd of April, Himmler named Reinhard Heydrich chief of the Gestapo. Heydrich already headed the Sicherheitsdienst, the SS's internal intelligence service.

    The Gestapo transfer set the stage for the Night of the Long Knives, in which the SA leadership was arrested and executed, with the SS and Gestapo carrying out most of the murders. On the 20th of July 1934, Hitler formally detached the SS from the SA. The SS became answerable only to Hitler, and Himmler's title of Reichsführer-SS became his actual rank, equivalent to field marshal.

    On the 17th of June 1936, all police forces throughout Germany were unified under Himmler. The SD, Gestapo, Kriminalpolizei, and Ordnungspolizei all fell under his administrative control. In September 1939, the security and police agencies were consolidated into the Reich Security Main Office, the RSHA, under Heydrich's command. The SS thus ran both the secret police and the uniformed police, making it a state within the state. Historian Karl Dietrich Bracher described the SS court system, which placed SS members beyond the reach of civilian legal authority, as a key factor in creating the Nazi totalitarian police state.

  • On the 31st of July 1941, Göring gave Heydrich written authorisation to organise the cooperation of all relevant government departments for the genocide of Jews in territories under German control. Heydrich convened the Wannsee Conference on the 20th of January 1942 to coordinate implementation. The instrument he had already deployed was the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing units formed from SS, SD, and police personnel.

    Historian Raul Hilberg estimates that between 1941 and 1945, the Einsatzgruppen and related agencies murdered more than two million people, including 1.3 million Jews. The largest single operation was at Babi Yar outside Kyiv, where 33,771 Jews were massacred on the 29th and the 30th of September 1941. In the Rumbula massacre of November and December 1941-25,000 victims from the Riga ghetto were killed. Historian Richard Rhodes wrote that the Einsatzgruppen were "outside the bounds of morality," acting as "judge, jury and executioner all in one."

    The killing methods evolved under pressure. After Himmler observed the shooting of 100 Jews at Minsk in August 1941 and grew concerned about the psychological toll on his men, he sought alternatives. Gas vans were introduced, though SS men found removing and burying the bodies distressing and often assigned that task to prisoners or auxiliaries. By late 1941, the SS began constructing stationary gassing facilities. Under Operation Reinhard, three extermination camps opened in occupied Poland: Bełżec by March 1942, Sobibór by May 1942, and Treblinka by July 1942. Auschwitz was greatly expanded in early 1942 to include gas chambers using the pesticide Zyklon B.

    An SS-Sonderkommando led by Herbert Lange murdered 1,201 psychiatric patients at the Tiegenhof hospital in the Free City of Danzig, along with thousands of others at facilities in Owińska, Kościan, and Działdowo. Lange then established the first extermination camp at Chełmno, where 152,000 Jews were killed using gas vans. Adolf Eichmann's task force arrived in Budapest on the 19th of March 1944. From the 14th of May, four trains carrying 3,000 Jews per day left Hungary for Auschwitz. By the time the Hungarian government halted deportations on the 6th of July 1944, over 437,000 of Hungary's 725,000 Jews had been murdered.

  • In 1934, Himmler founded Nordland-Verlag, a publishing house for propaganda and training manuals, as the SS's first commercial venture. He subsequently acquired Allach Porcelain to produce SS memorabilia. As the camp system grew, so did the economic ambitions behind it.

    Oswald Pohl established the Deutsche Wirtschaftsbetriebe GmbH in July 1940 as an umbrella corporation for SS commercial enterprises. By 1942, Himmler had consolidated these into the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office, the WVHA, which then controlled the entire concentration camp system. Camp labour was sold to outside factories at a rate of three to six Reichsmarks per prisoner per day. The SS confiscated inmates' property, investment portfolios, and cash, and, after death, melted their dental work for gold and sold their hair to make felt.

    The scale of looting was documented in detail. The total value of assets seized during Operation Reinhard alone, not including Auschwitz, was listed by Odilo Globocnik as 178,745,960.59 Reichsmarks. Among the items seized were 2,909.68 kilograms of gold, 18,733.69 kilograms of silver, 1,514 kilograms of platinum, and 249,771.50 American dollars, along with diamonds and pearls.

    Himmler took a personal interest in supplying labour to IG Farben, which was constructing a synthetic rubber factory at Auschwitz III-Monowitz. The life expectancy of inmates at Monowitz averaged about three months. The SS also acquired a monopoly in brick production in occupied Eastern territories by seizing all 300 existing brickworks. By 1944, it controlled 75 per cent of Germany's mineral water producers and was working toward a complete monopoly. The SS eventually founded nearly 200 holding companies across its business operations.

  • In the September 1939 invasion of Poland, the LSSAH became notorious for torching villages without military justification. Members murdered 50 Polish Jews in Błonie and machine-gunned 200 civilians, including children, in Złoczew. By the end of 1939, SS units and ethnic German auxiliaries had killed approximately 50,000 Poles, including 7,000 Polish Jews, with broader estimates of civilian deaths reaching up to 65,000.

    The Battle of France in May 1940 brought further atrocities. On the 27th of May, the 4th Company of SS-Totenkopf machine-gunned 97 men of the 2nd Battalion, Royal Norfolk Regiment after they surrendered, then finished off survivors with bayonets, in what became known as the Le Paradis massacre. Two men survived. At Wormhoudt, soldiers of the 2nd Battalion murdered 81 British and French prisoners on the 28th of May. Historian Charles Sydnor described the "fanatical recklessness in the assault, suicidal defence against enemy attacks, and savage atrocities" of the SS-Totenkopf during the invasion as typical of SS troops as a whole.

    At the Battle of Kursk in July 1943, three SS armoured divisions of the II SS Panzer Corps fought alongside Wehrmacht units in Germany's last major offensive in the east. Hitler halted the attack on the 12th of July and cancelled the operation on the 17th, after which the Germans were on the defensive.

    During the Normandy landings of June 1944, members of the SS-Hitlerjugend division, composed of 17- and 18-year-old Hitler Youth members, shot and killed twenty Canadian prisoners of war on the 7th-8th and the 17th of June in the Ardenne Abbey massacre. On the 21st of August, 50,000 German troops, including most of the LSSAH, were encircled in the Falaise Pocket. During the Ardennes Offensive of December 1944, SS-Obersturmbannführer Joachim Peiper's forces murdered American prisoners of war and unarmed Belgian civilians in the Malmedy massacre. Peiper was later imprisoned for eleven years for his role. The final German offensive in the east, Operation Spring Awakening, ended in defeat by the 16th of March 1945. Enraged, Hitler ordered Waffen-SS units to remove their cuff titles as a mark of disgrace. Dietrich refused.

  • drich was attacked in Prague on the 27th of May 1942 by a British-trained team of Czech and Slovak soldiers acting on orders from the Czechoslovak government-in-exile, in an operation called Anthropoid. He died from his injuries a week later. Ernst Kaltenbrunner took over command of the RSHA from the 30th of January 1943 onward.

    After the 2nd of May 1945 Berlin garrison surrender, SS members who expected no mercy from the Red Army attempted to move west and surrender to the western Allies. At the Nuremberg trials, both the SS and the Nazi Party were judged to be criminal organisations. Kaltenbrunner, the highest-ranking surviving SS main department chief, was found guilty of crimes against humanity and hanged in 1946.

    Twenty-four Einsatzgruppen commanders were tried for war crimes after the war. After the Battle of Stalingrad ended in February 1943, Himmler had anticipated Germany's defeat and ordered Sonderkommando 1005 under Paul Blobel to exhume bodies from mass graves in the East and burn them to conceal the evidence. The task was never completed, and many mass graves remain unmarked and unexcavated to this day.

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Heinrich Himmler

Common questions

What was the Schutzstaffel (SS) and what was its role in Nazi Germany?

The Schutzstaffel, or SS, was a major paramilitary organisation under Adolf Hitler that grew from a bodyguard unit of eight men in 1923 into the primary security, police, and genocide apparatus of Nazi Germany. It controlled the Gestapo, ran concentration and extermination camps, fielded its own military divisions, and was the organisation most responsible for the Holocaust, which killed an estimated six million Jews and millions of other victims.

When was the Schutzstaffel founded and who led it?

The SS officially marked its foundation on the 9th of November 1925. Heinrich Himmler became Reichsführer-SS in January 1929 and led the organisation until the end of the war in 1945, transforming it from a 280-member unit into an organisation numbering 209,000 by the end of 1933.

How many people did the SS kill during the Holocaust?

The SS was responsible for the murder of more than 20 million people during the Holocaust, including approximately 5.2 to 6 million Jews and 10.5 million Slavs. Historian Raul Hilberg estimates that the Einsatzgruppen alone, between 1941 and 1945, murdered more than two million people, including 1.3 million Jews.

What were the Einsatzgruppen and what did they do?

The Einsatzgruppen were mobile killing units drawn from the SS, SD, and police, deployed to murder Jews, Romani people, communists, and others in occupied territories. The largest single operation they carried out was at Babi Yar outside Kyiv, where 33,771 Jews were massacred on the 29th and the 30th of September 1941.

How did the SS profit from concentration camp prisoners?

The SS sold prisoner labour to outside factories at three to six Reichsmarks per prisoner per day, confiscated inmates' property and investment portfolios, and after death sold their hair and melted their dental work for gold. The total value of assets looted during Operation Reinhard alone was documented at over 178 million Reichsmarks.

What happened to SS leaders after World War II?

At the Nuremberg trials, the SS and the Nazi Party were both judged to be criminal organisations. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the highest-ranking surviving SS main department chief, was found guilty of crimes against humanity and hanged in 1946. Twenty-four Einsatzgruppen commanders were also tried for war crimes following the war.

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  151. 151bookSoldiers of Evil: The Commandants of the Nazi Concentration CampsTom Segev — McGraw Hill — 1988