Many of the SS leadership, including Himmler and Heydrich, imagined they belonged to a line of Nordic knights from Germany’s mythical past
Hitler’s Infamous Legions of Death
Al Cimino
Introduction
Chapter One – The Schutzstaffel
Chapter Two – Heinrich Himmler
Chapter Three – The Night of the Long Knives
Chapter Four – Making War
Chapter Five – The Waffen-SS
Chapter Six – The SS-Allgemeine
Chapter Seven – The Holocaust
Chapter Eight – The SS in Retreat
Chapter Nine – Nuremberg
Chapter Ten – ODESSA
Picture Credits
To this day it still beggars belief that right here in the 20th century a civilized European country such as Germany could descend into the unimaginable abyss that was Nazism. Leading this march through the gates of hell was the SS – the Schutzstaffel, or ‘Protection Squadron’. Its members were the black-uniformed elite of the Nazi Party, who looked down on the Sturmabteilung (SA) – the brown-shirted thugs who ruled the streets. One member of the SS, a young man named Horst Mauersberger, carried an annotated copy of Goethe’s Faust in his pocket. Germany, it seems, had sold its soul to the devil in exchange for power and worldly pleasures.
Mauersberger came from Weimar, once the poet Goethe’s home. As an SS sergeant major, he worked at Buchenwald concentration camp. This repulsive symbol of man’s inhumanity to man was built on Ettersberg hill outside Weimar, the very place that Goethe used to visit when he sought inspiration. Yet Mauersberger was a normal young man from a decent home.
This is the most chilling thing about the SS. While the force contained more than its share of psychopaths, most of its members seemed to be ordinary men who in other times would have gone on to become book-keepers, accountants, lawyers, bank managers, general practitioners, academics and even priests and theologians. But when they became part of an organization in which the normal rules and constraints of society had been abandoned, they turned into some of the most vicious killing machines the world has ever seen. It is true that a handful of SS members were brave soldiers who faced their military opponents on equal terms, but many of them killed babies and children and liquidated millions of innocent citizens without a qualm.
Some committed their heinous crimes for personal gain or power. Others were sucked into a spiral of evil because they did not dare to disagree with Adolf Hitler, the man to whom the SS had sworn a personal oath, or Heinrich Himmler, the second-most powerful man in Germany. Even worse than that, many SS members derived pleasure from inflicting all kinds of degradation and humiliation on their victims. They raped and tortured anyone who fell into their hands and they practised cruel and fatal medical experiments on selected subjects.
But the real horror of the situation is that the entire SS organization was directed towards murder and oppression. The SS was a law unto itself. It was answerable to no one except Hitler, or his henchman Himmler. Every member of the SS was complicit. If they did not commit crimes against humanity themselves, they stood by and watched them take place. Simply being a member of the SS was to be part of a huge criminal conspiracy. This was the banality of evil writ large.
‘All my life I have wrestled with one question,’ said Mauersberger. ‘How could it be that a man from such a respectable home, with those humanist ideals, with those visions and aspirations, could end up in the SS?’
It cannot be said that the answer can only be found deep within the German psyche. When we look into the glass we are met with our own reflection. As well as German nationals, the ranks of the SS were swollen by French, Dutch, Belgian, Danish, Latvian, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Italian, Croatian and even Bosnian Muslim recruits. A number of Britons and Americans also joined, though they tended to be half-hearted in their approach. Most SS men did not appear to be at all discouraged by the losses they sustained and, when it became clear that Germany was going to lose the war, they went about their murderous activities all the more fanatically.
When the war was over, only a handful of SS murderers showed any remorse. Those who were executed often went to the gallows protesting the justness of their cause. Many did not pay such a high price, however. A large number of war criminals had their death sentences commuted. After a relatively short period of imprisonment they were allowed to resume their daily lives in the normal world, a million miles away from their hideous crimes. Others fled to South America or the Middle East, where they continued to extol the virtues of National Socialism. Some even found safe havens in Britain, the United States and Canada, where they lived out their lives in comfort, without ever having to answer for their foul crimes.
The story of the SS has been told before, but it is well worth telling it again before the events fade from living memory. Hopefully we can all take heed of this warning from history. Germany is a country that has produced some of the greatest scientists, philosophers, musicians and artists the world has ever seen and yet it was able to experience a moment of terrifying madness. It could all happen again somewhere else if we do not remain vigilant. We must make sure that the seeds that blossomed as the stinking flower of the SS are not sown again. The people who joined the SS were not monsters or aliens but human beings who were not so very different from ourselves.
Many of the SS leadership, including Himmler and Heydrich, imagined they belonged to a line of Nordic knights from Germany’s mythical past
Hitler was a complete nonentity until 1919, yet he ended up dominating the political landscape of the 20th century. A number of factors contributed to his meteoric rise to power, but a significant part of his success can be attributed to the physical intimidation of his opponents, and the German people, by the Sturmabteilung (SA) and the Schutzstaffel (SS).
Although he was an Austrian by birth, Hitler served in a Bavarian infantry regiment during the First World War. He never rose above the rank of corporal, but he was awarded the Iron Cross and several regimental decorations. Hitler’s war experiences turned him into a zealous German patriot and he was incensed by what he saw as Germany’s premature surrender in 1918.
The peace treaty that ended the war, the Treaty of Versailles (see p.22), had imposed a number of onerous conditions on Germany – such as the restriction of the newly-named Reichswehr (German Defence Force) to a complement of 100,000 men. As a result the German army was anxious to compensate for its military shortcomings by forming a ‘Black Reichswehr’, or secret army. But first of all it would have to find out where its support lay. As a member of the Reichswehr intelligence arm, Hitler was given the job of penetrating small right-wing groups to check on their political reliability.
The recently formed National Socialist German Workers’ Party (DAP) was still very small, but its activities had come to the attention of the authorities, so Hitler was sent along to check it out. Although he was not very impressed with the organization of the party, he was greatly taken with its ultra-nationalist, anti-Semitic views, which mirrored his own. At that time, a document known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was being taken seriously in racist circles. A fraud fabricated in Russia in 1895 and published in Germany in 1920, it suggested that the whole of recent history, including the First World War, was caused by a conspiracy of Jews who sought to rule the world.
Having impressed the party members with his oratorical skills, Hitler was persuaded to join the organization. In September 1919 he became its propaganda chief. He immediately changed its name to the National Socialist Workers’ Party (NSDAP) – the words ‘national’ and ‘socialist’ were a cynical ploy to attract new members from both the right and the left. More commonly known as the Nazi Party, the membership of the NSDAP had grown to around 3,000 by 1921 and it operated from a dozen branches outside its Munich powerbase.
Hitler was rapidly becoming the natural leader of the NSDAP, thereby undermining the status of Anton Drexler, the party’s founder. Stung into action, Drexler tried to rid himself of Hitler by proposing a move to Berlin, where he would merge the NSDAP with the German Socialist Party, but he had unwittingly played into Hitler’s hands. After calling for a ballot of the membership, Hitler resigned. As a charismatic propagandist, Hitler had a considerable following within the party, but he declared that he would only rejoin if he could take over as chairman. With the party in turmoil, Drexler had no option but to agree. Hitler then placed his own henchmen in all of the key positions. In 1923, Drexler left the party he had founded.
Hitler was born in Austria on 20 April 1889. He dreamt of becoming an artist but after being refused entry to the Academy of Fine Art in Vienna he became a down-and-out.
After five years of living from hand to mouth in Vienna, a small inheritance enabled him to move to Munich in 1913, where his life was as aimless as before. However, everything changed when the First World War broke out in 1914. Although Hitler had been declared unfit to join the Austrian army he managed to get into the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment. He then served in the trenches of the Western Front, where he enjoyed the discipline and camaraderie of combat and won several awards for bravery. On 15 October 1918 he was temporarily blinded by mustard gas, but he was left with a belief in the heroic virtues of war.
After the war, Hitler joined the German Workers’ Party. He quickly changed its name to the NSDAP or Nazi Party and then became its head. His confrontational political style meant that his life was often in danger, so he always carried a gun. Following a failed attempt to take over the government of Bavaria, known as the Beer Hall Putsch, he was imprisoned in Landsberg Castle. It was there that he dictated Mein Kampf (My Struggle), a book in which he combined his autobiography with a statement of his political ideology. He condemned the politicians who had ended the war before Germany had been decisively beaten on the battlefield; repudiated the Versailles Treaty; called for revenge on France; attacked Marxism; demanded Lebensraum, or living space, in the east at the expense of the Slavs; and spelt out a racist creed which maintained that so-called ‘Aryans’ were a race of geniuses while Jews were parasites.
In 1930, the Nazi Party won 18 per cent of the vote and 107 seats in the Reichstag, Germany’s federal parliament. Hitler took German citizenship in 1932 and in the following year he became chancellor, after winning 44 per cent of the vote. He then assumed dictatorial powers over what he called the Third Reich. The Holy Roman Empire, which lasted from 800 to 1806, was known as the First Reich (realm or empire) and the German Empire, which lasted from 1871 to 1918, was the Second Reich.
In contravention of the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler then began to rearm Germany. After sending troops into the demilitarized Rhineland, he signed treaties with Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan. He then annexed Austria in 1938 and demanded the return of the Sudetenland, an area of Czechoslovakia that was populated by Germans. The territory was conceded by Britain and France in the Munich Agreement, but it was still not enough for Hitler. In the following year he seized the rest of Czechoslovakia.
After signing a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, Hitler invaded Poland. France and Britain responded by declaring war on Nazi Germany. The German army then invaded much of western Europe, but Britain remained unconquered. In 1941, Hitler invaded Russia and when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor he declared war on the United States.
Germany’s progress was eventually halted by the Russians in the east and the British in North Africa. After an Anglo-American force had established a toehold in Italy, the Western Allies landed in Normandy in June 1944. Germany was besieged from all sides. Hitler committed suicide on 30 April 1945, as the Soviet army fought its way into Berlin.
After the failed Munich Putsch in 1923, Hitler is driven away by his supporters
On 28 June 1914, Serbian nationalists sought to liberate the southern Slavs of the Austro-Hungarian Empire by assassinating Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. In retaliation, Austria declared war on Serbia. As a Slavonic nation, Tsarist Russia came to Serbia’s defence. The German Kaiser, Wilhelm II (1895–1941), urged Austria–Hungary to attack, while warning Russia not to mobilize. He also insisted that the French stay neutral in any war between Germany and Russia. Both Russia and France ignored these demands, so Germany declared war on France. Germany then attacked France through Belgium, whose neutrality was guaranteed by Britain. Italy and Japan sided with Russia and the Western Allies, while Turkey and its Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers.
After the development of the machine gun had halted Germany’s western advance, the German and Allied armies built barbed wire barricades, and dug lines of trenches, that ran across northern France from the Channel to the Swiss border. Then a prolonged stalemate followed, during which the opposing armies stood facing each other. Periodic battles resulted in massive slaughter, but few gains. At sea, the British sought to blockade Germany, while the Germans used submarines in an attempt to cut Britain’s supply lines. There was more fighting in the Dardanelles, the Middle East, Germany’s African colonies and along the Italian front.
In the east, the battle was more fluid. The Germans’ superior tactics and high industrial output brought them battlefield victories, but the Russians could call on massive manpower reserves. Tsar Nicholas II took command of the Russian forces in September 1915, but he proved to be an inept commander. In the following year, he launched an offensive that cost a million Russian lives. This senseless slaughter sounded the death knell for the Russian monarchy.
The tsar was deposed by the February Revolution of 1917. When the Communist Party leader, Vladimir Lenin, seized power in the following October, the new Soviet government withdrew from the war by signing a peace treaty. With the Soviet Union out of the way the German army seemed set for victory, but by then the United States had entered the war on the side of the Allies. By that time, Britain had developed the tank, which broke the battlefield stalemate and proved a war-winning weapon, and its naval blockade had brought Germany to its knees.
The German sailors mutinied when they were ordered to break the blockade. Councils of soldiers and workers took over in some places, following the Soviet example, and then on 8 November 1918 the Bavarian Soviet Republic was proclaimed. The German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, went into exile in the Netherlands where he lived until his death. An armistice was called on 11 November 1918 and the German troops marched home to a country where the old order had been destroyed. Many of them, including Hitler, felt that they could have fought on if they had not been betrayed by politicians and agitators back in Germany.
But the NSDAP had a rival in the form of the German Communist Party (KPD). Despite their failure to take over in Berlin and Bavaria, the communists had been buoyed by the success of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Fearful of a Bolshevik uprising, the German authorities organized a huge army of unemployed First World War veterans into more than 65 Freikorps groups which were secretly armed by the Reichswehr. Their task was to secure political stability by opposing the communist threat. The Freikorps units were unswervingly loyal to their commanders, whose names they bore. Brigade Ehrhardt was led by Hermann Ehrhardt, for instance. However, they were often hostile to the government because they felt that the politicians had foisted a treasonous peace on them. In 1920, a monarchist element in the Freikorps tried to overthrow the new Weimar Republic, but the putsch was thwarted by a strike of socialist and communist workers.
Unsurprisingly, there was a continuing struggle between the left and the right, which often erupted into violence at political meetings. Determined to maintain order, the Nazi Party created a troop of stewards, the Ordnertruppe – also known as Saalschutz or ‘assembly-hall protection’. In practice, however, the Nazi thugs took things a stage further by physically ejecting anyone who disagreed with the National Socialist speaker. When quasi-military formations were banned in an attempt to suppress the Freikorps, who were becoming troublesome, the Ordnertruppe became the Turn- und Sportabteilung (athletics and sports detachment).
Its members were recruited from the Sturmabteilung (stormtroopers; SA), which had been organized by Chief of Staff Ernst Röhm. Stormtroopers – small squads of men using infiltration tactics – had originally been used on the Western Front instead of employing costly mass frontal assaults. Röhm’s SA was made up of former members of the Freikorps, which had been officially disbanded after its failed 1920 putsch. SA troops wore distinctive brown shirts, in emulation of the black shirts worn by the followers of Benito Mussolini, who came to power in Italy after the March on Rome (see box, p.30) in 1922.
As well as ‘keeping order’ at Nazi Party meetings, the SA also used coshes and knuckledusters to disrupt the meetings of rival parties. On one occasion in 1922, Hitler himself stormed on to a rival’s platform and physically assaulted the speaker. He was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment.
Street fighting man: Ernst Röhm (centre) was the leader of the SA, which specialized in beerhall brawls, a key tactic in the early days of the Nazis
The peace treaty that ended the First World War attributed all of the guilt to Germany alone. Germany was in no position to resume hostilities, so the nation’s politicians were forced to accede to the harsh terms within the contract. For a start, it was ordered that reparations totalling 132 billion gold marks should be paid to the Allies. In addition, a number of European territories had to be surrendered. These were handed over to the newly re-established state of Poland and newly created Czechoslovakia. The Rhineland, lying between Germany and France, was demilitarized and the German army was reduced to 100,000 men. Germany would not be allowed to possess tanks, military planes or poison gas and the naval fleet could only retain a dozen battleships. All submarines were banned. On a more personal note, the Kaiser was declared a war criminal, together with a number of other Germans.
Germany was already heavily in debt after the war, so it could not pay the reparations. As a result, France and Belgium occupied the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland, in 1923. The German workers went on strike in the same year, but the government continued to pay them, thereby pushing the already devalued currency into a state of hyperinflation. For example, a loaf of bread that cost 20,000 marks in the morning cost 5 million marks by nightfall. The German state experienced complete economic collapse on 15 November 1923, when the exchange rate stood at over four trillion marks to $1. A lifetime’s savings would not even buy a ticket for the U-bahn (the rapid transit railway in Berlin).
Catastrophe was averted when the Allies ended the occupation of the Ruhr and granted Germany 800 million gold marks in loans. The situation was eased still further when reparations were cut by two-thirds and the payments were rescheduled. This was not good enough for press and movie baron Alfred Hugenberg, leader of the German National People’s Party. He employed Hitler to lead a campaign against the settlement, in which he demanded the end of all reparations and the removal of the so-called guilt clause.
From the very start Hitler realized that he was constantly in personal danger. He had upset too many people for things to be otherwise. At first he had looked to Röhm’s SA for protection, but by 1923 he began to see the SA as a threat. Röhm could call on the support of his brown-shirted thugs whenever they were needed, even against Hitler if he so desired. Unnerved by this thought, Hitler ordered the formation of a personal bodyguard, which would be commanded by two of his trusted comrades, Julius Schreck and Joseph Berchtold. At first it was called the Stabswache (Security Guard), but it was quickly renamed Stosstrupp Adolf Hitler (Adolf Hitler Shock Troop).
As Hitler said:
Being convinced that there are always circumstances in which elite troops are called for, I created in 1922–3 the ‘Adolf Hitler Shock Troop’. It was made up of men who were ready for revolution and knew that some day things would come to hard knocks.
Hitler described his Stosstrupp as ‘the first group of toughs’. Its original members were:
Julius Schreck (1898–1936)
Veteran of the First World War and the Freikorps, he had helped form the Stabswache. As Hitler’s bodyguard and chauffeur, he took part in the Beer Hall Putsch and was incarcerated with Hitler in Landsberg Prison. A founder member of the SS, he was given a state funeral.
Joseph Berchtold (1897–1962)
Former second lieutenant and stationery salesman, he succeeded Schreck as Reichsführer of the SS, the only holder of the post to survive the Second World War.
Ulrich Graf (1878–1950)
Former butcher and amateur wrestler, he joined Hitler in confronting the communists in Coburg in 1922. He saved Hitler’s life during the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 and was elected to the Reichstag in 1936. After the war, he served five years in a labour camp.
Emil Maurice (1897–1972)
Watchmaker and convicted embezzler, he was imprisoned in Landsberg Prison after the Beer Hall Putsch. There he acted as Hitler’s secretary when he dictated Mein Kampf, until Rudolf Hess took over. He fell out with Hitler over his relationship with Hitler’s niece Geli Raubal, but was reconciled. Himmler tried to have him expelled from the SS over his Jewish ancestry, but Hitler stood by him. He participated in the Night of the Long Knives and after the war he served four years in a labour camp.
Christian Weber (1883–1945)
Former army sergeant, horse dealer and publican, he participated in the Beer Hall Putsch and the Night of the Long Knives. He gradually fell from favour and was killed in Bavaria at the end of the war.
Rudolf Hess (1894–1987)
He served in the same regiment as Hitler in the First World War and then he joined the Freikorps and the NSDAP. After marching beside Hitler in the Beer Hall Putsch, he was imprisoned in Landsberg Prison, where he took over the transcription of Mein Kampf from Emil Maurice. Tried at Nuremberg, he died in Spandau Prison in 1987.
Josef ‘Sepp’ Dietrich (1892–1966)
After serving in the fledgling German tank unit during the First World War, he became a runner and a hatmaker. Following his participation in the Beer Hall Putsch and the Night of the Long Knives, he went on to become a Panzer commander and Nazi Germany’s most decorated soldier. At the end of the war, he was first jailed for ordering the massacre of United States prisoners of war at Malmédy, during the Battle of the Bulge, and then for murder during the Night of the Long Knives.
Stosstrupp members wore the same uniform as the SA – a khaki brown shirt with a swastika armband on the left arm and khaki brown trousers with a brown belt and brown combat boots. However, instead of brown forage caps they wore black ski caps, adorned with a skull-and-crossbones badge.
The Totenkopf or death’s head was an important symbol in the German military, for it had been the traditional badge of the elite hussar units of the Imperial Guard.
In 1916, Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia conferred the right to wear the death’s head on the elite unit, whose troops operated flame-throwers ahead of the front line. They were known as men who had a particular relish for battle.
The Stosstrupp-Hitler in September 1923 shortly before the Munich Putsch; five men were killed in the uprising and the squad was disbanded
Although some members of the SA harboured left-wing sympathies, the Stosstruppen were fanatically right-wing in their beliefs. Confident of their backing, Hitler began planning a coup – a March on Berlin that would be similar to Mussolini’s successful March on Rome. He found a willing ally in General Erich Ludendorff, who had been the German military leader during the First World War. When faced with the punitive terms of the armistice, Ludendorff’s knee-jerk reaction had been to urge the continuation of the war.
On the evening of 8 November 1923 the SA surrounded the Bürgerbräukeller, a large beer hall in Munich, where a right-wing meeting was being addressed by the leader of the Bavarian government, Gustav Ritter von Kahr. Brandishing a pistol, Hitler burst in with his men. He announced that the revolution had begun and that the governments in Bavaria and Berlin had been deposed. Röhm took over a number of key government buildings in Munich while Ludendorff released von Kahr and his officials, after securing a gentleman’s agreement from them.
On the following morning, Hitler and Ludendorff led their men out of the beer hall with the Stosstrupp in the vanguard. They marched on the War Ministry, which had been occupied by Röhm but was now beginning to be besieged by the Reichswehr. Outside the Feldherrnhalle (field marshals’ hall), a military memorial in the Odeonsplatz (a square in Munich), the 2,000 marchers were met by a force of 100 armed policemen. Wearing the death’s head badge, Stosstrupper Ulrich Graf stepped forward.
‘Don’t shoot,’ he said. ‘His Excellency Ludendorff and Hitler are coming.’
A shot rang out and a police sergeant fell dead. The policemen replied with a salvo. Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, who had linked arms with Hitler, was shot through the lung. Mortally wounded, he dislocated Hitler’s arm as he fell. Graf threw himself in front of Hitler and was peppered with bullets, but he survived. Hermann Göring was shot in the groin and Joseph Berchtold was also wounded. A total of three policemen and 16 Nazis were killed – five of the Nazi dead were members of the Stosstrupp.
Hitler left the Odeonsplatz without a word while Ludendorff continued the march, believing Hitler to be a coward. This drove a wedge between the two men.
The failure of the Beer Hall Putsch led Hitler to seek power by legitimate means, but it also provided the Nazi Party with a revered relic. The swastika flag that had been carried at the head of the column became the Blutfahne, or ‘Banner of Blood’.
After being left behind in the square it was kept for a short time in the vaults of the Munich police headquarters. It was then used to consecrate the new flags of the SA and the SS. Anyone who had participated in the abortive putsch was awarded the badge of the Blutorden or ‘Blood Order’, and from 1933 the SS mounted a ‘guard of honour’ at the Feldherrnhalle. It remained there until the last SS guards were captured by the incoming American troops in 1945.
On the day after the putsch Hitler was arrested and charged with treason. A sympathetic judge gave him the minimum sentence of five years’ imprisonment, but he served just eight months in considerable comfort in Landsberg Castle, accompanied by some of his closest cohorts. The Nazi Party and the SA were then briefly outlawed. With Hitler in prison, Röhm countered the ban by creating an organization called the Frontbann, which was the SA under a different name, to all intents and purposes. And in its temporary form the membership of the SA mushroomed from 2,000 in November 1923 to 30,000 at the time of Hitler’s release in December 1924.
Although Hitler did not escape imprisonment, a badly wounded Göring managed to flee. Born in Bavaria, Göring trained as a soldier before joining the embryonic German Imperial Air Force. In 1918 he took command of Manfred von Richthofen’s celebrated fighter squadron after the Red Baron was killed.
After the war, Göring moved to Scandinavia where he married a Swedish baroness. Returning to Munich in 1921, he met Hitler and joined the Nazi Party. As a former officer, he was given command of the SA. He took part in the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, was wounded and fled into exile in Austria. When he returned he was addicted to morphine.
In 1928 he was elected to the Reichstag, where he helped manoeuvre Hitler into a position of authority, and in 1933 he was instrumental in passing the Enabling Act, which gave Hitler absolute power. Göring then founded the Gestapo – the secret police – and set up concentration camps for the ‘corrective treatment’ of political opponents. Later on he became head of the Luftwaffe, which was disguised as a civilian operation until 1935. After the Luftwaffe’s failure to win the Battle of Britain, Göring was given the special title of Reichsmarschall des Grossdeutschen Reiches.
Seen as Hitler’s successor, he tried to take over when Hitler was encircled in Berlin. He later surrendered to the Americans. At Nuremberg he denied complicity in the Holocaust, but he could not deny the evidence of the orders he had signed, in which he had authorized the murder of Jews and prisoners of war. He was sentenced to death for his crimes, but he cheated the hangman by committing suicide with the aid of a cyanide capsule.
Athough Italy was on the winning side in the First World War, the hostilities had left the country in a state of social and economic turmoil. This situation was exploited by the radical journalist and politician Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) and his Fascist Blackshirts. On 30 October 1922 the Blackshirts marched on Rome in a show of strength, forcing the Italian king, Victor Emmanuel III, to invite Mussolini to form a government. This event greatly inspired the Nazi Party.
When Hitler came to power he proclaimed the Rome–Berlin axis with Mussolini, which in 1939 became the ‘Pact of Steel’. Once France was on the verge of collapse Mussolini declared war, which led to the Italian forces in North Africa being routed by the British.
After an Anglo-American invasion force landed in Sicily in July 1943, Mussolini was deposed and imprisoned. That September he was rescued by the SS, but by then the Allies had established a presence in southern Italy. The Nazis then installed Mussolini as the ruler of the Italian Social Republic in northern Italy, a German puppet state. When it collapsed, Mussolini was captured by partisans and shot.
Hitler and Göring at Tempelhof airport, Berlin in 1932: Hitler was on the campaign trail against President Hindenburg
Shortly after Hitler had been released from Landsberg Castle he realized that the SA had become too unwieldy and too unruly to control while Röhm had become dangerously powerful. In fact the SA was now an embarrassment to him. He no longer needed a paramilitary force because he now sought power by peaceful means. His only requirement was a small squad of men to protect him at public meetings. In 1925 a disgruntled Röhm resigned from the SA and emigrated to Bolivia.
Hitler explained his reasoning later:
I said to myself at the time that I needed a bodyguard which, though small, would be made up of men unquestioningly dedicated to me, ready even to go into action against their own brothers. Better to have just twenty men from a single city – provided they could be relied on absolutely – rather than an unreliable mass.
Hitler had been impressed by the behaviour of the Stosstrupp during the putsch, but it had been officially disbanded while he was in prison. Unsure of the SA and now without a personal bodyguard, he quickly ordered Schreck to recruit a new elite unit. At the suggestion of Göring it would be called the Schutzstaffel (‘protection squad’; SS) – a reference to the aeroplanes that had flown on escort duties during his time with the elite Richthofen squadron. Initially it consisted of only eight men, all former members of the Stosstrupp, but on 21 September 1925 Schreck sent out a circular asking all Party cells to form SS squads.
But the SS would remain a select band. While the SA continued to accept just about anyone, SS recruits had to undergo a rigorous selection process. They could be no younger than 23 years old and no older than 35 and they had to be healthy and powerfully built. And their personal characters needed to be unblemished. They were required to have been resident in the same area for five years and they had to provide two personal guarantors, be of good standing and have no criminal record. According to the guidelines issued by the SS, ‘Habitual drunkards, gossip-mongers and other delinquents will not be considered.’
While the SA continued to grow, the SS was restricted to units of ten men under one officer in each district, with twenty men under two officers in Berlin. Each man would have to swear his unswerving loyalty, not just to the Nazi Party but to Hitler personally.
The SS troops wore a distinctive black-bordered swastika armband and a black ski cap which bore the death’s head badge of the Stosstrupp. Early recruit Alois Rosenwink said: ‘We carry the death’s head on our black cap as a warning to our enemies and an indication to our Führer that we will sacrifice our lives for his concept.’
Using one of his favourite tactics – divide and rule – Hitler sought to stir up the rivalry between the SS and the SA. At a national meeting of the Nazi Party in Weimar in 1926, the Blutfahne was delivered into the ‘loyal hands’ of the SS – much to the resentment of the SA, whose members were there at the time. Its new bearer would be Jakob Grimminger of the Munich SS, a tall, imposing man with a Hitler moustache.
A veteran of the First World War, Grimminger joined the Nazi Party in 1922. As a member of the SA he took part in the Beer Hall Putsch. He was seen carrying the Blutfahne in the 1935 Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will. After surviving the war he was tried for being a member of the SS. Although he managed to escape imprisonment, his property was confiscated. He later became a city councillor in Munich, but his past stood in the way of his political progress and he died in poverty.
Nevertheless, Hitler left the SS under the control of the new SA Reichsführer, Franz Pfeffer von Salomon. Predictably, the SS did not fare too well under an SA man’s command. It was forbidden to form squads in situations where the SA was not fully up to strength, while local SA men used the SS troops as errand boys. The hand-picked elite force was reduced to selling newspapers and subscriptions, pasting posters on walls and soliciting for new Party members from door to door.
Throughout all of this period the SS troops were not allowed to waver from the strict rules of conduct that had been imposed upon them, though they occasionally involved themselves in brawls.
In Dresden, the local SS chief boasted that his men had not only beaten off an attack by 50 communists ‘but they threw some of them out of the window’. Normally, though, the SS avoided the limelight. The Munich police noted the discipline that was demanded of SS men:
Even the slightest infringement of order, according to SS regulations, is threatened with cash fines, the withdrawal of the armband for a specified period, or dismissal from the service. Particular emphasis is placed on the conduct and dress of the individual SS man.
When his papers were checked, each SS man was found to be carrying a Nazi Party membership card, an SS card and a song book. The words of one of the songs were:
When all are becoming disloyal
We ourselves stay true
So that forever on this soil
A flag will fly for you.
Marching songs formed a central part of the SS culture.
March on, SS, the road is clear!
The storm-troop ranks stand firm!
Freed from the grip of tyranny
They’ll tread the path to liberty.
So up and ready for the final thrust,
Just as our fathers were,
Let death be our comrade-in-arms,
We are the black-clad hordes!
But while the SS might sing, they did not talk. When Berchtold recovered from his injuries he took over from Schreck as Reichsführer-SS. In 1926, he set up the SS-Fördernde Mitglieder (SS Supporting Members; SS-FM), a group of people who supported the SS financially and wore a tiny silver pin in their lapels. But Berchtold could not bear the thought of subordinating himself to the SA, so he stood down in favour of his deputy, former Stosstrupp member Erhard Heiden. The following order demonstrates his perception of the role of the SS:
The SS never participates in discussions at members’ meetings. For the duration of the lecture no SS man shall smoke and none is allowed to leave the building. The purpose of these evenings is political education. The SS man must remain silent and never become involved in a matter that does not concern him.
There were no such strictures on the SA.
But Heiden was no more able to withstand the pressure from the SA than Berchtold. Under Heiden, SS membership dwindled from 1,000 to 280 and there was talk of the unit being disbanded. However, Heiden then took on a deputy who would not only prove to be his nemesis – he would also become the saviour of the SS. That man was Heinrich Himmler. A former member of Röhm’s Reichskriegsflagge (Imperial War Flag) unit, who had carried the imperial flag at the War Ministry during the Beer Hall Putsch, Himmler was now a chicken farmer. But he was gifted with exceptional organizational abilities.
Heiden fell into disgrace after allegations surfaced that parts of his uniform had been customized by a Jewish tailor. On 5 January 1929 he was dismissed by Adolf Hitler and his position was taken by Himmler. Four years later, in April 1933, the now all-powerful Himmler ordered Heiden’s arrest. Members of Reinhard Heydrich’s SS-Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service; SD) went off to capture him. He was killed shortly afterwards, presumably at the SD headquarters in Munich, though his discarded corpse was not found until five months later.
In 1930 Hitler asked former SA leader Röhm to return from his voluntary exile, so that he could reorganize the SA. Röhm had always been close to Hitler, not least because both men had been deeply involved in the creation of the Nazi Party. Röhm began his autobiography History of a Traitor with the sentence: ‘On 23 July 1906, I became a soldier.’ Wounded three times during the First World War, he rose to become a major. After the war, he joined the Freikorps and the German Workers’ Party and then organized the Sturmabteilung. As a homosexual he used the organization to acquire lovers. Arrested after the Beer Hall Putsch, he was discharged from the Reichswehr and sentenced to 15 months’ imprisonment, but he was released after sentencing.
However, by 1934, and with SA membership running at around a million, Röhm had become Hitler’s main rival. His army of brown-shirted thugs was much larger than the Reichswehr and his troops were behind him to a man. Furthermore, he wanted to push the Reichswehr aside and turn the SA into the new German army, with himself at the helm. As an old friend, Röhm thought Hitler would support him in his endeavours – but Hitler had other ideas. On the Night of the Long Knives, 30 June 1934, Hitler personally oversaw the arrest of Röhm from a hotel at Bad Wiessee and on the following day Röhm was shot without trial.
In the absence of any significant rivals, Himmler and his SS could now race forward to a position of unassailable power.
Although Reichsführer-SS Erhard Heiden saw Heinrich Himmler as little more than a gifted clerk with no leadership potential, it was Himmler who saved the SS from extinction. He was not content for the SS to be merely a unit of the Sturmabteilung. He established it as a separate force with its own distinct identity, greatly expanding it until it eclipsed, then snuffed out, Ernst Röhm’s SA.
Born in Munich to a middle-class Catholic family in 1900, Himmler was too young to fight in the First World War, though he was eager to do so. By 1918 he had become an officer cadet, but the war ended before he could be commissioned. His lack of front line experience remained an embarrassment, particularly in view of the fact that his godfather and namesake, Prince Heinrich of Bavaria, had died on the battlefield in 1916.
After the war, Himmler studied agriculture at the Munich Technical Institute, where he took a special interest in breeding and genetics. Although he did not know it at the time, he would eventually have the power to put his theories into practice. A small, sallow man with a pince-nez, he tried unsuccessfully to prove himself on the sportsfield, but he only succeeded in obtaining a small, though highly prized, duelling scar. He still fantasized about becoming a soldier but without an outlet for his passion he became a fertilizer salesman. It was at about this time that Himmler began to develop his obsession with Teutonic mythology and racial purity.
Robbed of physical prowess by nature, Himmler became fascinated with the myth of the Nordic warrior, particularly the version that appeared in the operas of Richard Wagner. Himmler shared his passion for Wagner’s works with Hitler. Bursting with Germanic mythology, the operas were the embodiment of both men’s vision for the German nation.
SS-Panzer Battalion 11