The SS, the Schutzstaffel or Protection Squadron, was the principal organisation responsible for the planning, coordination, and execution of the Holocaust. Founded as Hitler’s personal bodyguard in April 1925 with eight men, it grew under Heinrich Himmler from January 1929 into a state within a state with approximately 800,000 members by 1944. The SS controlled the concentration and extermination camps through its Death’s Head units, fielded its own military formations, ran the principal intelligence and security services of the Third Reich, and held the operational responsibility for the murder of European Jewry. To understand how the Holocaust happened operationally is to understand how the SS was structured, how it recruited, and how it indoctrinated its members into the work.
The branches
By the war years the SS had divided into several distinct branches, each with its own responsibilities and culture, but all reporting up the chain to Himmler.
The General SS, the Allgemeine-SS, was the original organisation: a uniformed political and ideological corps drawn from across German society, organised into regional formations, and used for ceremonial and political duties. By 1939 it numbered around 240,000 men, most serving part-time alongside their civilian occupations. Its function was ideological and symbolic; its members rarely participated directly in killing.
The Waffen-SS was the military wing, formed in stages from 1934 onwards. By 1944 it numbered approximately 900,000 men and fielded thirty-eight divisions on the Eastern and Western fronts. Some Waffen-SS divisions were elite formations, recruited and equipped to standards higher than the regular army; others were composed of foreign volunteers or conscripts from occupied territories. Waffen-SS units were involved in numerous wartime atrocities, including the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane in June 1944 and the murder of American prisoners at Malmédy in December 1944. Several Waffen-SS divisions also performed concentration camp duties or anti-partisan operations that included the murder of civilians.
The SS-Totenkopfverbände, the Death’s Head Units, were the concentration camp guards. Founded in 1934 under Theodor Eicke, who had run Dachau as the model camp from June 1933, the Death’s Head Units carried the camp system as their distinctive responsibility. Eicke trained his men in what he called “hardness”, a deliberate stripping away of ordinary moral inhibition through routinised brutality. By 1939 around 25,000 men had been processed through the Death’s Head training, and graduates of that system formed the core staff of every concentration and extermination camp the SS subsequently established.
The Sicherheitsdienst, the SD, was the intelligence service of the Nazi Party and from 1934 of the SS, headed by Reinhard Heydrich. The SD compiled racial and political dossiers, ran a network of agents and informers, and produced the situation reports on public opinion in occupied territories that survive as one of the most important sources for the social history of the Third Reich.
The Reichssicherheitshauptamt, the Reich Security Main Office or RSHA, was created on 27 September 1939 by Himmler’s order, consolidating the Gestapo, the criminal police, and the SD under a single organisation. Heydrich was its first chief; after his assassination in Prague on 4 June 1942 he was succeeded by Ernst Kaltenbrunner. The RSHA’s Department IV-B-4, headed by Adolf Eichmann, was the office responsible for the deportation of Jews from across occupied Europe to the killing centres. The administrative coordination of the Final Solution was an RSHA function.
Recruitment and racial selection
Until the war forced changes, SS recruitment was governed by the racial criteria Himmler considered essential to the organisation’s character. Applicants were required to prove Aryan ancestry back to 1750 for officers and 1800 for enlisted men, a level of genealogical scrutiny exceeded only by the requirements for Himmler’s planned racial elite. They were measured against published physical standards: minimum height (initially 1.74 metres for officers), Nordic features, dental health. Those with visible Slavic, Mediterranean, or Jewish characteristics were excluded.
The criteria were tightened or relaxed according to recruitment needs. Before 1939, when Himmler was building the General SS as an ideological aristocracy, the standards were exacting and rejection rates high. After 1940, when Waffen-SS formations needed to expand for the eastern campaign, the racial criteria were progressively diluted, first to admit ethnic Germans from outside the Reich, then to admit other Germanic peoples (Dutch, Norwegians, Flemish), and eventually, by 1942 to 1943, to admit Bosnian Muslims, Ukrainians, Latvians, Estonians, and others whose connection to Nordic racial categories was nominal at best. The dilution was a wartime expedient that Himmler privately regretted but accepted as necessary.
Ideological training
SS recruits underwent ideological training distinct from their military or police training. The curriculum, set out in the SS-Leitheft, the SS leadership pamphlets, covered racial theory, Germanic history, the Jewish question, and the SS’s own founding mythology. Recruits were taught that they were the racial vanguard of the German nation, that ordinary moral rules did not apply to their work, and that ruthlessness in pursuit of racial goals was a virtue. The annual ceremonies at Wewelsburg Castle, the SS racial-cultural centre in Westphalia, gave the indoctrination a quasi-religious character.
The most important document of SS self-understanding is Himmler’s speech to SS officers at Posen on 4 October 1943, recorded on phonograph and surviving in transcript. In it Himmler addresses the killing of European Jews directly and at length: “Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying side by side, or five hundred, or a thousand. To have endured this and at the same time to have remained a decent person, with exceptions due to human weakness, has made us hard. This is an unwritten and never-to-be-written page of glory in our history.” The Posen speech is the perpetrator’s own statement of what the SS understood itself to have done. It survives as Nuremberg Document PS-1919.
The organisational achievement of the Holocaust
The SS made the Holocaust operationally possible because it combined, in a single command structure under a single ideologue, the four functions a programme of industrialised mass murder requires. It had the intelligence service to identify and locate the targets (the SD and Gestapo). It had the bureaucratic apparatus to organise the deportations (RSHA IV-B-4 under Eichmann). It had the trained personnel to run the killing facilities (the Totenkopfverbände, hardened by Eicke’s training). And it had the ideological framework to make the work appear, to those carrying it out, as a duty rather than a crime. No other organisation in any twentieth-century state combined those four functions in the same way.
The judgement of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, delivered on 1 October 1946, declared the SS as a whole a criminal organisation, the only such finding made against any of the major Nazi institutions. The judgement specifically excluded the Reiter (cavalry) units, who had been formed in part from non-political horsemen; everything else, the Allgemeine-SS, the Waffen-SS, the Death’s Head Units, the SD, was found criminal. The finding meant that membership in the SS, taken with knowledge of its criminal purposes, was itself a crime under international law. It is the only such finding in international jurisprudence and it has not been overturned.
See also
- Heinrich Himmler
- The Nuremberg Trials
- Reinhard Heydrich
- Adolf Hitler
- Adolf Eichmann
- Ernst Kaltenbrunner
Sources
- Heinz Höhne, The Order of the Death’s Head: The Story of Hitler’s SS, Coward-McCann, 1969
- Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, Oxford University Press, 2001
- Bernd Wegner, The Waffen-SS: Organization, Ideology and Function, Blackwell, 1990
- Karin Orth, Das System der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, Hamburger Edition, 1999
- Heinrich Himmler, Posen speech of 4 October 1943, Nuremberg Document PS-1919, in International Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals, Volume XXIX, pages 110 to 173
- International Military Tribunal, Judgement of 1 October 1946, IMT Volume I, pages 256 to 273 (criminal organisation finding on the SS)
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, encyclopedia entries on the SS, the Waffen-SS, the SS-Totenkopfverbände, and the RSHA