Schutzstaffel

:For other uses of the abbreviation SS, see SS (disambiguation)

History of the SS

Origins

The predecessor to the SS was first formed in 1923 as a company of the Sturmabteilung (SA) tasked with protecting senior leaders of the Nazi Party at rallies, speeches and other public events. Commanded by Emil Maurice, and known as the Stabswache (Staff Guard), the original group consisted of 8 men and was modeled after the Erhardt Naval Brigade, a violent Freikorps of the time.

Related Topics:
Sturmabteilung - Emil Maurice - Stabswache - Erhardt Naval Brigade - Freikorps

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After the failed 1923 Putsch by the Nazi Party, the SA and the Stabswache were abolished, yet returned in 1925. At that time the Stabswache was reestablished as the Stosstrupp Adolf Hitler tasked with the personal protection of Hitler at Nazi Party functions and events. That same year, the Stosstrupp was expanded to a national level, and renamed as the Schutzstaffel. The new SS was delegated to be a protection company of various Nazi Party Leaders throughout Germany.

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Development

Between 1925 and 1929, the SS was considered merely a battalion of the Sturmabteilung and numbered no more than 280 personnel. On January 6, 1929 Hitler appointed Heinrich Himmler as the leader of the SS and, by the end of 1932 the SS had 52,000 members; by the end of next year, it had over 209,000 members. Himmler's expansion of the SS was based on models from other groups, such as the Knights Templar, Jesuit Order, and the Italian Black Brigades.

Related Topics:
Sturmabteilung - January 6 - 1929 - Heinrich Himmler - 1932 - Knights Templar - Jesuit Order - Italian Black Brigades

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Before 1932, the SS wore the same uniform as the SA, except for a black tie and a black cap with a Totenkopf death's head symbol on it. Later they adopted a black uniform and then, just before the war, a dove grey uniform. The Waffen ("armed") SS wore a field grey (feldgrau) uniform similar to the Reichsheer. During the war Waffen-SS units wore a range of camouflage uniforms (platanenmuster, telo mimetico, erbenmuster etc.). In 1945 some were issued with uniforms in the leibermuster disruptive pattern that were the predecessors to most of modern battledress.

Related Topics:
Cap - Totenkopf - ''Waffen'' ("armed") SS - Battledress

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Their motto was "Meine Ehre heißt Treue ("My honor is called loyalty.") The SS rank system was unique in that it did not copy the terms used in the Wehrmacht, but instead used the ranks of the SA.

Related Topics:
SS rank - Wehrmacht

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Heinrich Himmler, together with his right-hand man Reinhard Heydrich, consolidated the power of the organisation. In 1931 Himmler gave Heydrich the assignment to build an intelligence service inside the SS, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD). By the time World War II began the number of members rose to 250,000 and the Waffen-SS was formed in December 1940 to fight alongside the Wehrmacht, Germany's regular military. The SS also received control of the Gestapo in 1934 and, that same year, Adolf Hitler had given the SS jurisdiction over all concentration camps.

Related Topics:
Reinhard Heydrich - 1931 - World War II - 1940 - 1934 - Concentration camps

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Fall of the SS

Upon the suicide of Adolf Hitler, and the assumption of Karl Dönitz as the new President of Germany, one of the first official acts of the new government was to abolish the SS. Just prior to Hitler?s death, the organization had become a ?headless horseman? in that several senior SS Generals (Heinrich Himmler among them) had been denounced by Hitler as traitors for attempting to negotiate with the Allies to surrender. In addition, in the last months of the war, the SS began suffering mass desertions in particular from the concentration camps and security organizations such as the Gestapo and SD. This was due in part to the fact that many SS members saw that the end was near, and deserted their posts rather than risk capture and trial as war criminals.

Related Topics:
Karl Dönitz - President of Germany - Gestapo - SD

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On September 30, 1946, the judges of the Nuremberg Trials (Tribunal) sentenced the SS-organization, declaring it a criminal organization. The judges underpinned this sentence by stating that "the SS was used for purposes which were criminal, involving the persecution and the extermination of the Jews, brutalities and killings in concentration camps, excesses in the administration of occupied territories, the administration of the slave labour programme and the maltreatment and murder of prisoners of war" (IMT, 1946, Vol. XXII, p.516, in: Höhne, 1969, p.3). The sentence continued by declaring that suspicion of crime was to be attached to all persons "who had been officially accepted as members of the SS... who came or remained members of the organization with knowledge that it was being used for the commission of acts declared criminal by Article 6 of the Charter" (IMT, 1947-1949, Vol. XXII, p.517 in: Höhne, 1969, p.3). According to Höhne, 50,000 of the one million SS-men had committed crimes, such as involvement in the Holocaust (page 537 of the German version).

Related Topics:
September 30 - 1946 - Nuremberg Trials - Criminal organization - The Holocaust

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Postwar Activity

According to Simon Wiesenthal, towards the end of World War II a group of former SS officers went to Argentina and set up a Nazi fugitive network code-named ODESSA, (an acronym for Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen, "Organization of the former SS members") with ties in Germany, Switzerland, Italy and the Vatican, operated out of Buenos Aires. ODESSA allegedly helped Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele, Erich Priebke and many other war criminals find refuge in Latin America. The writer Gitta Sereny who interviewed SS-men considers the story about ODESSA untrue and attributes the escape of notorious SS-men to post war chaos, to an individual bishop in the Vatican, and to the lack of means of the Vatican to check the stories of the people who came to them for help.

Related Topics:
Simon Wiesenthal - Argentina - ODESSA - Germany - Switzerland - Italy - The Vatican - Buenos Aires - Adolf Eichmann - Josef Mengele - Erich Priebke - Latin America - Gitta Sereny

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In the modern age, several Neo-Nazi groups claim to be successor organizations to the SS. There is no one group, however, that is recognized as a continuation of the SS and most such present day organizations are loosely organized with separate agendas.

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