The SS had begun as a personal guard of Hitler. They quickly changed the balance of forces in the Nazi regime and pioneered the Holocaust. Organizer and first leader of the notorious HS (SS), the organization that was later identified with the worst crimes of Nazism, was a … failed actor. His name was Yulius Shrek. Hitler entrusted Hitler in the spring of 1925 to set up a team of absolutely devoted and ruthless warriors. It was “Schutzstaffel”, Hitler’s military “Squadron”, which became more widely known for the SS Arctic (“SS”).

With the establishment of the SS, Hitler wanted “to have at least one small group of men who would be ready to flee to violence at all times,” says historian Bastian Hain at the Catholic News Agency (KNA). The first members of the SS came from the “Sturmabteilung”, “SA” (SA), founded in 1923 and in the middle of the decade “already functioning as Hitler’s personal guard, who starred in the beatings”, as Basti Haine points out.

Himmler’s critical role

Both SA members and those of SS passed through intensive military and sports education. They were gathering donations for the Nazi party. They pioneered the posters, but also on the street fighting with political opponents in the troubled period of the Weimar Republic. From the beginning the SS showed an extremely aggressive behavior, but other few could distinguish the differences between SS and SA. In 1934 the newspapers spoke of the “Hitler murderers”, but they estimated that “so far a few things are known” for the SS.

The balances of forces would be changed under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler, who, as historian Bastian Hain notes, managed to emerge “the second most powerful man of the third Reich” in a few years after Hitler.

His predecessor, Earhard Heiden, had been removed for two reasons: First, he was considered guilty of disrupting resources by party funds. Secondly (and much worse for the Nazi criteria …) he was accused of ordering SS uniforms to Jewish suppliers. So it’s time for Himmler. When he took over, on January 6, 1929, the SS had only 280 members. After three years they had already reached 50,000.

‘Object to Death’

The SS became “the most extreme, the most racist organization of the National Socialist regime,” observes Bastian Hein. Those who served there were sworn in “obedience to death” in Hitler and who would appoint Hitler as their head. Under Himmler’s instructions, SS men and women pioneered the design and operation of concentration camps, watched “internal enemies”, neutralized dissidents. They quickly gained total control of the police. And when World War II began, in the fall of 1939, the SS was found on the front of the “Vermacht”, the German regular army.

In 1943, in the infamous “Pozen’s speeches” (in today’s Pozan, Poland, under German occupation at that time), Himmler was talking about the “extermination of the Jewish people” and praised the members of the SS, who were in front of thousands of corpses, but ” A glorified chapter in our history … “.

Himmler’s perverted logic resonated, not just the Holocaust. As historian Bastian Hein points out, high -ranking SS executives were not just opportunists who wanted to make a career. They were “believing perpetrators”, completely in the struggle for the “vital space” of the Germans and the extermination of the Jews.

Curated by: Yiannis Papadimitriou