The SS

Himmler's Schutzstaffel

"Loyalty is my Honor"

The Early Days 

The Schutzstaffel, better known as the infamous SS, were established by Hitler, to act as protection force at Hitler’s mass meetings in public. Many of these meetings were violent and ugly, during the Nazis early quest for power.

As such it formed part of the Nazi militia, the brown shirted Sturmabteilung, also better known by the initials SA. Unlike the SA, however, whose origins derived from the nationalist Freikorps of the post – Great War period, the SS owed its loyalties to Hitler alone and was neither conceived as, nor permitted to become a mass movement.

Heinrich Himmler who was appointed Reichsfuhrer- SS in 1929 and from its very inception he saw the SS as an elite force, as an elite unit, the party's "Praetorian Guard," with all SS personnel selected on the principles of racial purity and unconditional loyalty to the Nazi Party.

In the early days of the SS, officer candidates had to prove German ancestry to 1750. They also were required to prove that they had no Jewish ancestors. Later, when the requirements of the war made it impossible to confirm the ancestry of officer candidates, the proof of ancestry regulation was dropped.

Between 1925 and 1929, the SS was considered merely a battalion of the SA and numbered no more than 280 personnel. On January 6, 1929, Adolf 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 the 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 and the Italian Blackshirts.

According to SS- Obergruppenführer and General of the Waffen-SS, Karl Wolff, it was also based on the model from the Society of Jesus of absolute obedience to the Pope or in this case Heinrich Himmler.

Read more about the SS here: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/holoprelude/aboutthess.html

The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team

www.HolocaustResearchProject.org



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