The SS in Nazi Germany

Among the institutions operating in Nazi Germany, the most sinister and feared of them all was the SS. Originally subject to the SA, this collection of soldiers began as a small elite bodyguard that protected the Fuehrer and developed into a number of different institutions as it grew in size. The different roles it later assumed are (1) a party police force; (2) a terrorist police force; (3) a regular army within the army commanding its own forces, the Waffen SS; (4) a huge economic conglomerate with its influence heavy in big business in Germany and later in the conquered territories; and (5) a huge killing machine that supervised a horrifying system of concentration camps in which people were tortured and annihilated.

The SS had its origins in Bavaria in the 1920s, led by the short, unathletic, and near-sighted Bavarian, Heinrich Himmler. With great dedication and careful skill, Himmler assembled the major instruments of Nazi terror-SS, police, and concentration camps. The goals of his efforts was not to plainly administer terror for its own sake but to create a racially pure machine. The sterilization, euthanasia of those considered "not worth living", and medical experiments were all for the sake of achieving this ideal, of creating a race of uebermenschen, supermen. Therefore, his terror machine was the product of both his and Hitler's racial beliefs. It was these beliefs that Himmler would believe in and follow religiously and expect similar devotion of his beloved SS troops.
The SS in Poland (from the National Archives)

The SS in Poland. Photo from the National Archives.
In June 1931, Himmler would also meet his closest and most ruthless henchman, Reinhard Heydrich. Ironically, in all the ways that Himmler fell short of his "pure" racial appearance, Heydrich fullfilled them; he was tall, slender, blond, and athletic. In the spring of 1933, Himmler and Heydrich began their grab for power. It was that March that Himmler became police president of Munich and would use this position as a base of operation to expand the SS and his police system. While Himmler gained more and control, Heydrich also solidified the apparatus that helped make Himmler's efforts possible-the Security Service Branch(SD) of the Nazi Party, which he had built up since 1931.

In expanding their system of control, Himmler and Heydrich not only built up the SS, especially the Security Service, but also focused on infiltrating the German Police. During the Night of the Long Knives, Himmler permanently incapacitated the SA and as a reward for eliminating Roehm, the SS was made an autonomous organization and was given complete control of the Gestapo. On June 28, Himmler would reorganize the German police system and form a new security police. Under the former Weimar Republic, the police had been divided in to two branches: the administrative police and the executive police. The executive police was then divided into four major enforcement and political branches: (1) the Kripo(crime); (2) the Schupo (urban constabulary); the political police, and the gendarmerie. Himmler split off from this executive police the two more important branches - the criminal police and the political police - and formed the security police (Sipo), added the newly obtained Gestapo, and place them under Heydrich. The rest he left to Kurt Dalugue and meged them into a new Ordnungspolizei (the ordinary police [Orpo]).

In the years following, Himmler would make use of several indivuals to carry out his agenda. Bruno Sreckenbach, former chief of the Hamburg police, for example, would set up the first gettos in Polland and put together the infamous Einsatzgruppen that rounded up and murdered Jews and "Asiatic inferiors". Also, there was SS-Obergruppenfuehrer Oswald Pohl, who destined to build up a huge economic conglomerate of SS business enterprises based on slave labor, extortion, and murder. Arthur Neve, head of Kripo, would be the first to volunteer enthusiastically to exterminate Jews in Poland under the cover of employment duty to the east. Finally, Theodor Eicke, a sadistic sociopath, would run the whole Nazi system of concentration camps.
The Dead
Naturally, as Himmler's system of totalitarian terror developed, the crowning structure would be the concentration camp. Himmler groomed a special volunteer unit of SS men for long-term service as concentration camp guard and named them Death's-Head Units. In charge of this system was Theodor Eicke, a brutal psychopath who standardized a set of cruel and unusual punishment in all of his camps.

By 1939, the SS was organized in to four major branches: (1) the General SS, consisting largely of part-timers who combined their regular occupations with evening and weekend service in the SS on a voluntary basis; (2) the SD or Security Service; (3) the SS Military Formations, later renamed the Waffen SS; (4) the concentration camp guard units named Death's Head Units. That year, the state police and Gestapo agencies were all merged under one roof, administered by Heydrich and called the Reich main Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt [RSHA]). Such a proliferation of SS institutions gave the SS a menacing aura, made all the more sinister by the fact htat no outsider knew anything in detail about Himmler's empire. It was through this vast organized system of terror that we see Hitler would indirectly be able to carry out his final solution and distorted world vision of conquest. It was through this cold order that vast chaos would be administered through out the war.