SS (Shutzstaffeln) (Ger., protection squads), the name reflecting its origin as a protection force for Hitler. The SS was commanded from April 1929 by Heinrich Himmler who had served towards the end of WW I, qualified as an agricultural chemist in 1922, and taken part in the Munich putsch. He was convinced by theories of ethnic superiority advocated by Rosenberg and Darré, and had an obsessive interest in heredity. Although his receding chin, poor eyesight, and pear-shaped body made him an unlikely champion of Nordic manhood, Himmler sought to make the SS racially exclusive, and during its expansion from 400 to 50, 000 between 1931 and 1933 rejected candidates if they had one filled tooth.
In 1933 Himmler was appointed police president in Munich, and extended power by gaining control of police forces in other states. He set up a concentration camp at Dachau, and staffed it by Totenkopf (death's head) guards. He had already set up an armed Stab Wache (Staff Guard), under the command of Sepp Dietrich, an ex-NCO and early Nazi, and it soon became Hitler's black-clad guard with the title Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler.
The status of the Reichswehr was threatened by Hitler's early paramilitary Sturmabteilungen (SA) which embodied the old Freikorps traditions and had incorporated thousands of ex-servicemen. In the ‘night of the long knives’ in 1934 he used the SS, with army logistical support, to eliminate the SA leadership. On the death of Hindenburg, Hitler fused the offices of president and chancellor, and required servicemen to swear an oath to him. The army, already compromised by its support for the purge, was now bound by honour to obey, while the SS was granted the status of ‘an independent organization within the National Socialist Workers' Party’.
In 1935 Himmler raised the Verfügungstruppe (Reserve Force), ancestor of the Waffen-SS (Armed SS). The SS now looked increasingly like an alternative army, with its own officer cadet school at Bad Tolz and a programme based on rigorous military training, physical fitness, and political indoctrination. In early 1938 the Waffen-SS received formal approval for ‘special internal political tasks or for use with the wartime army’. Although they were to come under army command when deployed, Himmler, as Reichsführer SS, was responsible for recruitment, administration, and peacetime control. The SS developed its version of the army's field-grey combat uniform, with its own distinctive badges of rank on the collar, retaining black for full dress.
SS units served in Poland in 1939, and in the 1940 campaign regiments (Standarten) fought under army command. Their performance gave an indication of what was to come. Standarte Deutschland carried out a courageous assault crossing of the river Lys, but SS men massacred British POWs at Le Paradis and Wormhoudt. By early 1941 the Waffen-SS had four divisions, one of which, Wiking, was raised from volunteers (freiwillingen) from Norway, Denmark, and the Low Countries, and two brigades. Expansion continued throughout the war, and no fewer than 38 divisions had been raised by 1945. Many never attained full strength, and some were composed of foreign volunteers whose enlistment made a mockery of notions of racial purity.
Courage on the battlefield was matched by severity off it. Three SS panzer divisions, Leibstandarte, Totenkopf, and Das Reich, participated in Manstein's counterstroke at Kharkov, suffering 12, 000 casualties in the process and taking few prisoners. In Normandy Das Reich and Hitler Jugend (65 per cent of the latter were 18 years old) formed Dietrich's I SS Panzer Corps. The Corps' historian tells how ‘The combined effects of brave officers and senior NCOs and brave, dedicated soldiers made for an extremely formidable military machine. Wounds were to be borne with pride and never used as a reason to leave the field of battle; mercy was seen as a sign of weakness and normally neither offered nor expected.’ Battlefield performance was impressive but atrocities were commonplace: on the way to Normandy one of Das Reich's regiments murdered 642 civilians at Oradour-sur-Glane.
After the war the SS was declared a criminal organization, and many of its members were prosecuted for war crimes. On the one hand its best divisions were superb, though they often had better equipment than army counterparts, and, like other élites, frequently lost more men than was necessary. On the other its reputation is poisoned by its racist murderousness. Although research has shown that the Wehrmacht was also involved in murder, the record of the SS was especially shocking. Apologists suggest that units like the Dirlewanger and Kaminski brigades, rather than the Waffen-SS proper, carried out the worst atrocities like the reduction of Warsaw in 1944. There has even been a suggestion that the concentration camp personnel were somehow distinct from the Waffen-SS, a patently false distinction. As Bernd Wegner observes: ‘the Waffen-SS cannot be considered in isolation from the history of the SS as a whole, which in turn is inseparable from the story of national socialism.’
Bibliography
- Reynolds, Michael, Steel Inferno: 1st SS Panzer Corps in Normandy (Staplehurst, 1997).
- Sydnor, Charles, Soldiers of Destruction (Princeton, 1977).
- Wegner, Berndt, The Waffen SS (Oxford, 1990)
— Richard Holmes
