Schutzstaffel (SS): origins, organization, and legacy

Staff guard and shock troop Adolf Hitler

In May 1923, Adolf Hitler had a Saal-Schutz called Stabswache set up for the NSDAP. A few weeks later, after Hermann Ehrhardt had fallen out with Ernst Röhm and Hitler, this Saal-Schutz was disbanded and the Stoßtrupp Adolf Hitler was formed. After the failed Hitler-Ludendorff putsch of November 1923, this troop and the NSDAP were banned.

Formation of the SS and later assumption of leadership by Heinrich Himmler

On April 1, 1925, the SA functionary Julius Schreck received Hitler's order to form a new squad that was to take over the hall protection (protection of the event rooms) of the NSDAP events. As early as April 4, a new unit was formed from eight members of the former Stoßtrupp Adolf Hitler. Among them, in addition to Schreck, were Ulrich Graf, Christian Weber, Emil Maurice, Julius Schaub and Erhard Heiden, a former member of the Freikorps Marine Brigade Ehrhardt. The new troop was initially given the designation "Stabswache".

Two weeks later, on 16 April, it made its first public appearance during the funeral of Ernst Pöhner, the former Munich police chief and a participant in Hitler's Ludendorff Putsch. Anticipating later ceremonial functions of the SS, the unit acted as torchbearers during the funeral procession. Four men each flanked the coffin of the deceased on the right and left.

The force was then rapidly expanded and extended to other places in the German Reich. Through various name stages such as Saal-Schutz, Schutzkommando and Sturmstaffel, the name Schutzstaffel was finally still officially introduced in 1925, which the former SA leader Hermann Göring had suggested in reference to one of Manfred von Richthofen's air escort squadrons. Schreck now became commander of the SS as Oberleiter. However, he did not succeed in establishing the SS. Competitive battles with self-proclaimed other SS units and lack of support from the SA led to his dismissal by Hitler in 1926 and the appointment of Joseph Berchtold.

He succeeded in noticeably enlarging and upgrading the SS: by the time of the Reich Party Congress in 1926, he had succeeded in raising 75 squadrons with a total of about 1,000 members, and in recognition of this, Hitler entrusted the SS with the supervision of the so-called "blood flag" on November 9, 1926.

The SA, which until then had been subordinate to the respective Gauleiters, was placed under the command of Franz von Pfeffer as Supreme SA Leader in September 1926. In return for relinquishing his previous position as Gauleiter, Pfeffer demanded and received the subordination of all Nazi combat units, including the Hitler Youth and the SS.

Dissatisfied with his thus reduced room for maneuver, Joseph Berchtold resigned as Reichsführer SS in 1927. Berchtold was succeeded by Erhard Heiden, who appointed a 27-year-old member of the Bund Reichskriegsflagge as his deputy: Heinrich Himmler. Heiden, under whom the SS had stagnated - even its abolition had been considered - resigned as Reichsführer SS on January 5, 1929, for reasons as yet unexplained. On January 22, 1929, Heiden wanted to be completely deleted from all SS membership and organization lists and turned back to the SA. His successor was the former deputy Heinrich Himmler, who, however, still held this then subordinate office in addition to his duties as deputy Reich propaganda leader. Himmler shaped and led the SS until its end and decisively shaped it in terms of structure and personnel.

Hitler described the tasks of the organization in a Fuehrer order of November 7, 1930, as follows: "The task of the SS is first of all to perform the police service within the party."

The symbol of the Schutzstaffel was formed in 1930 from two side-by-side, lightning-like white sig runes in a black field.

Proximity and incipient competition with SA

Until the Röhm Putsch in 1934, the SS was very close to the SA in terms of organization and personnel. Contrary to its later elitist position, it differed from the SA in appearance and brutal street violence for a long time only insofar as its members were even more violent and came into conflict with the law proportionately more often.

The SA itself served as the SS's most important recruiting reservoir and, after Heinrich Himmler's appointment as Reichsführer of the SS in 1929, initially promoted its rise. Supreme SA leader Franz von Pfeffer ordered that the newly formed squadrons of the SS be filled with five to ten transferred SA men each, and after a short time the SS existed throughout Germany. In 1931, Ernst Röhm limited the target strength of the SS to ten percent of the Sturmabteilung. Since the strength of the SS at that time was about 4,000 men (the SA, by contrast, had 88,000 members), this limitation was in reality an ambitious "growth plan." To fulfill it, Röhm ordered that each newly formed SS squadron be replenished with 50% of its target number from the SA. Further voluntary transfers from the SA to the SS beyond this target remained possible. The pressure from the top SA leadership and Heinrich Himmler on units of the SA to massively expand the SS led to the first quarrels and conflicts between the SS and SA, which competed for the best men.

Although the NSDAP was publicly shaped primarily by the SA, to which the SS continued to be subordinate, the mutual relationship between the SA and the SS did not remain unclouded. Particularly in Berlin and East Germany, parts of the SA around Walther Stennes showed an independence from the party leadership around Adolf Hitler and the Gauleiter of Berlin, Joseph Goebbels, which bordered on insubordination and repeatedly led to sometimes violent, sometimes only with difficulty peacefully manageable confrontations. In the so-called Stennes Putsch by parts of the Berlin SA, even the party headquarters of the NSDAP was violently occupied by SA men and the SS guards - raised there at Goebbels' request - were beaten up.

In contrast, the SS was loyal to Adolf Hitler, who noted this positively. Hitler's "special relationship" with the Schutzstaffel made it a "serious power factor" within the Nazi movement. In a letter of thanks to Kurt Daluege, who had been instrumental in the conflict on the Berlin SS side, Hitler used the words, "SS man, your honor means loyalty!" - Words which, after Himmler had learned of them, became, in a modified form, the motto of the SS and were recorded on the belt buckles of SS uniforms as early as 1931 (Meine Ehre heißt Treue).

ascendency

Foundation of the SD

In 1931, Heinrich Himmler began to build up the SS's own intelligence service, the "Security Service of the Reichsführer SS" (abbreviated SD), which was to support the task of the SS as a kind of police force within the NSDAP. His closest collaborator Reinhard Heydrich, who also headed the SD from 1932, was in charge.

After Hitler came to power in 1933, the SD was given a central office and a special organizational structure. The German territory was divided into sections to be monitored and upper sections. At this time, the SD, like the General SS, was an independently organized substructure within the overall SS. The budget of the SD was fed from the budget of the Reich Treasurer of the NSDAP.

Merger with the police in Bavaria

After the seizure of power, the SS under Heinrich Himmler and his closest associate Reinhard Heydrich seized police powers. In Bavaria, the Bavarian Political Police (BPP), established by both, institutionally combined state police forces with the SS's intelligence service, the SD; this model was later extended to the entire empire and became the basis of the SS's position of power.

The SS now also competed for police power with the SA, which provided various police chiefs after the seizure of power. Likewise, many concentration camps were in the hands of the SA, which administered them as it saw fit and sometimes chaotically, while the SS ran the Dachau concentration camp, which it had founded, certainly not more humanely, but more regularly, and had an interest in gaining control of more concentration camps.

Disempowerment of the SA as the basis for the rise of the SS

Crucial for the further rise of the SS under Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich was the disempowerment of the SA, which the SS carried out under the pretext of an alleged "Röhm putsch". As early as April 20, 1934, Himmler had also been appointed inspector of the Prussian Gestapo (and thus its de facto head) in anticipation of a coming conflict with the SA. From June 30 to July 2, 1934, sections of the armed SS units, namely the First and Second Rifle Companies of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler and the Dachau SS Guards "Oberbayern," assassinated the leadership of the rival SA under the direction of SD officers. The pretext was a supposedly planned putsch by the SA. Conservatives, other political opponents and bystanders were also among the casualties.

For the SS, their actions paid off institutionally. On July 20, 1934, Hitler separated the SS from the SA: "In view of the great merits of the SS, especially in connection with the events of June 20, 1934, I elevate it to an independent organization within the framework of the NSDAP." On 23 August 1934, Himmler became personally subordinate to Hitler with the award of the position of "Reichsleiter SS". This meant that the SS was only bound by Hitler's instructions.

Expansion of the position of power gained - police system, concentration camps and own military units

The SS rounded out its control over the concentration camps with the appointment of Theodor Eicke, who became the first Reich-wide inspector of concentration camps after the SA was disempowered.

Beginning in 1934, the SS established its own military-trained units, the SS-Verfügungstruppe and the SS-Totenkopfverbände, with which the SS undermined the military monopoly of the Reichswehr.

In 1936, Himmler was elevated to the rank of State Secretary by the decree establishing a Chief of the German Police in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, thus placing him on an equal footing with the commanders of the branches of the Wehrmacht. Nominally, he was subordinate to Reich Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick; in fact, the SS led the German police independently. With the establishment of the Security Police and the later Reich Security Main Office and the subordination of the Order Police as well as the expansion of the SS's own military units, the special position of the SS in National Socialism was consolidated.

Its fusion of party structures with structures of the state, a central element of the Nazi system, decisively shaped the Third Reich from then on. Within the drifting apart Nazi polycracy, which was characterized by the fraying of state power in favor of party structures and individuals personally responsible to Hitler, such as Reich Commissars or Gauleiters, the SS was an element of centralization that could enter into direct competition with the party and the state. Although a subdivision of the NSDAP, it was in fact in some competition with the party, since under Himmler's leadership it consciously saw itself as the leading elite of the NS.

When Heinrich Himmler also succeeded Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick in 1943, it became officially clear that the state Reich Interior Ministry was being integrated into the SS rather than the SS into the normal executive branch of the state.

Acts of war and the beginning of a war of extermination

Anschluss of Austria and occupation of Czechoslovakia

On 12 March 1938, units of the SS Verfügungstruppe also took part in the Wehrmacht's invasion of Austria. The SS-Standarte Der Führer was formed in Vienna.

In October 1938, the SS Verfügungstruppe also took part in the occupation of the Sudetenland, which Czechoslovakia had to cede to the German Reich under the Munich Agreement imposed on it at the end of September. In March 1939, the so-called "Rest of Czechoslovakia" was occupied and organized as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The SS was charged with crushing the resistance. The head of the Reich Security Main Office, Reinhard Heydrich, later became deputy Reich protector of the occupied territory. In 1942 he fell victim to an assassination attempt, whereupon the Nazi leadership had the inhabitants of Lidice killed in "retaliation".

Summary on the Waffen-SS

In the fall of 1939, the Leibstandarte, the Verfügungstruppe and the Totenkopfverbände were slowly merged into the Waffen-SS. Heinrich Himmler, as Reichsführer SS, wanted to expand his Schutzstaffel into a comprehensive state protection corps that would fight the internal and external enemies of the Nazi state on all fronts. Despite all the differences within the ramified SS organizational structure, the SS remained focused on a unified ideological goal. Accordingly, there was uniform training of leaders in the two SS Junker Schools in Bad Tölz and Braunschweig. The military and ideological training did not distinguish whether the executives were to be deployed in the SS administration, on the military front, in the SD or in the concentration camps.

The first combat deployment of the SS took place during the invasion of Poland in 1939. The Wehrmacht feared increasing competition from the SS Verfügungstruppe, but was unable to prevent the merging of the previous regiments Germania, Der Führer, Totenkopf and the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler into the SS-Verfügungsdivision. The fighting SS units of this SS-VT Division continued to be subordinate to the High Command of the Wehrmacht and were now distributed among different parts of the army; i.e., the SS-VT Division did not fight as a unified unit.

By the time of the attack on France, the Waffen-SS, which had been formed in the meantime, already had three divisions (Das Reich, Totenkopf and the SS Police Division) and the motorized regiment LAH. Some of the SS divisions suffered heavy losses at the front. Highly motivated as volunteer troops, with equipment generally superior to that of the Wehrmacht units, these elite units were often used in the most dangerous theaters of operations. As in Poland, numerous war crimes were committed by SS units in the French campaign. Massacres of hundreds of surrendered soldiers and of a large number of prisoners of war are documented, as are "reprisals" for actions of the "Résistance". On 10 June 1944, shortly after the Allied landings in Normandy (see Operation Overlord), members of the SS division "Das Reich" committed the massacre of Oradour near Limoges before perishing themselves in northern France.

During the German-Soviet War, SS units took part in the fighting in the East, such as the Totenkopf Division in the Kesselschlacht of Demjansk, which was very costly for them, or their tank units in the Orel-Kursk battle as part of the Zitadelle enterprise.

The combat value of the Waffen-SS cannot be assessed uniformly. While Wehrmacht commanders were not enthusiastic about their units in the French campaign, because training deficiencies and reckless fighting had led to heavy losses, they later proved themselves better, but not uniformly, because the units of the Waffen-SS were too different for this. Elite units stood next to quickly formed and poorly equipped units. The Waffen-SS was more highly ideologized than the Wehrmacht, and was instructed in Nazi ideology by the SS Training Office. However, the SS's involvement in crimes also played a not insignificant role - its soldiers knew that they could expect revenge and worse treatment in captivity and fought accordingly, especially in the final phase of the war.

Starting in 1943, conscripted Germans and men from northwestern Europe were also drafted into the SS-VT Division to fight alongside Wehrmacht soldiers at the front, and later SS units from other countries such as Albania were also raised. As a result, about half of the total of about 900,000 Waffen-SS soldiers were not from the Reich territory: "The Waffen-SS had become a multi-ethnic army in blatant contradiction to its own ideology." Non-German SS units, however, had mixed value; for example, the Albanian SS Division "Skanderbeg" disintegrated before its first combat mission, while members of the SS Division Charlemagne were among the last defenders of Berlin in 1945.

Task Forces

During the invasion of Poland and the war against the Soviet Union, further SS units were deployed as so-called Einsatzgruppen behind the front in "cleansing operations" and began the systematic persecution and murder of Jews and members of the Polish and Russian intelligentsia. In accordance with the guidelines for cooperation between the Army and the Einsatzgruppen, the SS units moved into the conquered towns immediately after the Wehrmacht. Numerous executions and massacres followed, Wehrmacht soldiers often witnessed these executions. German police battalions (which were subordinate to the SS) and Wehrmacht units also carried out mass executions. In the Wehrmacht, the Feldgendarmerie and the Geheime Feldpolizei (the latter was heavily interspersed with conscripted personnel from the Sicherheitspolizei) in particular cooperated with the SS and their Einsatzgruppen.

The mobile Einsatzgruppen played a very important role in the extermination of the Jews of Eastern Europe. In addition to the Einsatzgruppen of the RSHA, however, SS units (such as the SS Cavalry Brigade) also operated in the hinterland, which were directly subordinate to the Command Staff of the Reichsführer SS and drove forward the extermination of the Jews in some competition with the Einsatzgruppen. With about 19,000 men, they were stronger in numbers than the approximately 3,000 members of the Einsatzgruppen, and battalions of the Ordnungspolizei were also available. Himmler himself had close contact with the units involved through direct orders, inspection tours and his HSSPF, and he urged Einsatzgruppen and his other units to take increasingly radical action.

War Crimes, Holocaust and Genocide

In the further course of the Second World War, the Einsatzgruppen, set up and led by the Reich Security Main Office, with the involvement of units of the Waffen SS and the Order Police, and also in cooperation with the Wehrmacht and local auxiliaries, committed countless war crimes such as mass executions of civilians in extermination and holocaust, torture and murder of prisoners of war, and the expulsion of numerous people from occupied territories in the wake of ethnic cleansing. The actions of the SS were so barbaric that they initially seemed unacceptable even to the Wehrmacht. However, the prosecution of such crimes by SS members was stopped as early as 1939 on Adolf Hitler's orders.

The SS was both a driving factor and a tool in the Holocaust and other crimes such as the Porajmos, which were intended to prepare an ethnically cleansed Eastern Europe for the time after the Nazi's final victory.

By appointing Higher SS and Police Leaders (HSSPF) with their own staff, task forces and, if necessary, further access to SS power resources in their area, the SS consolidated its position behind the front and in the civilian-administered occupied territories. As Himmler's "envoys", the HSSPF and SSPF supervised, executed and intensified the occupation and extermination policy pursued by the SS.

In addition to the mobile mass murder through mass shootings, to which mainly Jews on the territory of the USSR fell victim, the SS also operated extermination camps such as the Auschwitz concentration camp, to which they deported people over long distances and where the majority of the victims of the Holocaust perished. The administration of the extermination camps was carried out by the SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt with the Inspektion der Konzentrationslager (IKL), or by the SSPF. The difference can be derived from the fact that the SS radicalized the methods of extermination experimentally in stages, with regional and personal ambition playing a role. For example, the SSPF of Lublin, Odilo Globocnik, founded three extermination camps (Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka) in which he experimented with mass murder in gas chambers, which was then adopted by other camps such as Auschwitz as part of Aktion Reinhardt. The guarding and the exercise of the camp's internal police power and extermination practices were carried out by the SS Totenkopf guard units directly and with the help of so-called Trawniki. The SS was thus responsible for the industrial murder of millions of people.

Organizational Development

Initially subordinate to the SA, the SS developed into an organization with "police functions" within the NSDAP. With the appointment of Heinrich Himmler as Reichsführer SS in 1929, a fundamental change of the organization began. Previously a small grouping of a few hundred men within the SA, Himmler wanted it to be developed into the fighting force of the NSDAP, "a National Socialist, soldierly order of Nordic-determined men, each of whom will unconditionally obey any order that comes from the Führer." The SS was developed by him simultaneously into an "elite" and a mass organization.

The elitist character was reflected in the racial-biological and ideological criteria that had to be fulfilled in order to belong to the SS. As a "clan community," the SS was to represent an embodiment of the National Socialist ideology of the master race and, as the "preservers of blood purity," was to become the nucleus of Nordic racial dominance. The selection criteria were therefore not limited to the applicants themselves; wives of SS members were also checked for their "racial purity". In reality, the required large Aryan certificate could usually not be produced with feasible effort, let alone verified; as a rule, from 1936 onwards, people were content for the time being with the small certificate of descent. Nevertheless, the SS was thus the only Nazi organization that attempted to completely exclude even traces of Jewish ancestry in the breadth of its membership. The ideology of the SS as a leading order also manifested itself in the borrowing of ideas from medieval knightly communities, with the help of which it attempted to give itself a quasi-religious dimension - for example, through rituals in places of consecration or symbols such as the SS skull ring and the use of various runic symbols (today colloquially referred to as "SS runes") or the dagger of honour.

After the National Socialists came to power, the SS, like the SA and Stahlhelm, received police privileges to persecute political opponents. In April 1933, more than 25,000 opponents of the regime were already in "protective custody". The SA and SS began to establish the first concentration camps (KZ) in Dachau and Oranienburg.

After the Röhm Putsch, there was a permanent shift of power to the SS. The SS now assumed sole responsibility for all early concentration camps (KZ) in the Reich, some of which had until then still been controlled by the SA. The SS-Totenkopfverbände were now charged exclusively with guarding the camps. The early, improvised places of detention and concentration camps were gradually closed, with the exception of Dachau concentration camp. The systematic development of the Nazi camp system began; Hitler had camps built based on the Dachau prototype.

In November 1934, the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais at Wilhelmstrasse 102 in Berlin was included in the complex of buildings at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8 and became the headquarters of the Security Service of the Reichsführer SS.

From 1935, the administrative units of the SS renamed themselves the Allgemeine SS. By doing so, they wanted to distinguish themselves from their meanwhile armed units, the SS-Verfügungstruppe and the SS-Totenkopfverbände, which later formed the Waffen-SS. This Allgemeine SS, now also called Heimat- or Schwarze-SS, was now under the control of the new Kommandoamt der Allgemeinen SS in Berlin.

This resulted in the classic three-way division of the SS, which informally lasted until 1945:

1. General SS
2. SS skull standards
3. SS-Verfügungstruppe

Final organizational structure

From 1939/40, the term "SS" formed the "umbrella organization" for various main offices and their subdivisions:

• Contrary to its name, the SS Main Office lost the main part of its responsibility over time through spin-offs to other offices. In 1940, it was still responsible for the armed units (Waffen-SS) and the General SS, but their management was transferred to the Führungshauptamt, while the Hauptamt remained responsible for the important SS-Ergänzungsamt.
• The Führungshauptamt (FHA) was the operational staff office (headquarters) of the SS. It directed and administered the officers' schools, medical care, transport operations, wage payments and equipment. In 1944 it was responsible for both the Kommando-Amt der Allgemeinen SS and the Kommando-Amt der Waffen-SS, thus leading the Waffen-SS.
• The Personal Staff of the Reichsführer SS was responsible for all matters of the Reichsführer that did not fall within the delimitable sphere of another main SS office. The staff was primarily responsible for the organizations Lebensborn, Freundeskreis Reichsführer SS, Ahnenerbe, and Fördernde Mitglieder der SS, which were organized under the law of associations and with which Heinrich Himmler on the one hand realized ideological ideas and on the other hand operated his extensive network of (often influential) persons assigned to the SS.
• The Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) was created by merging the Security Service (SD) and the SiPo and was the central office for exercising the police functions of the SS.
• Reinhard Heydrich's SD office served as a secret service to combat external and internal opponents and to spy on the population.
• The Security Police (Sipo) was responsible for the criminal investigation and the Secret State Police (Gestapo).
• Gestapo
• CID
• From 1939 onwards, the Hauptamt Ordnungspolizei bundled the leadership of the uniformed police in Germany and its close and personnel links with the SS. Police battalions were heavily involved in occupation and the Holocaust.
• The Main SS Court was the central instance of the entire SS and police judiciary. Originally responsible for internal SS disciplinary offences, from the beginning of the war in 1939 the SS Courts stood alongside the Wehrmacht courts martial, which were explicitly not responsible for them, as a special jurisdiction in criminal cases for the entire area of the SS and the police, including civilians. Up to 38 regional SS and police courts were subordinate to the Main SS Court. They were each established at the official residence of a higher SS and police leader, who also acted as the head of the court in the proceedings.
• The National Political Educational Institutes (NPEA) were subordinate to the Hauptamt Dienststelle SS-Obergruppenführer Heißmeyer. Their students were to be deliberately raised as the next generation of leaders, and the SS thus gained direct access to the school system.
• The Race and Settlement Main Office (RuSHA) had the task of forming a leadership elite composed according to racial criteria. It conducted training and racial examinations of SS members, issued (or refused) marriage licenses, and took on planning tasks of expulsion, resettlement, and racial selection (Germanization) of the populations of the occupied territories.
• The Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle was responsible for so-called ethnic Germans living outside the German Reich. As the central office, it took over the administration and distribution of considerable aid funds for the so-called Volkstumsarbeit. Between 1939 and 1940, the main task of this central office was to organize the resettlement of German ethnic groups under the slogan "Home to the Reich". It resettled about one million ethnic Germans, mainly in the annexed territories - among others in the Reichsgau Wartheland (Posen) and Danzig-Westpreußen (Danzig).
• The Staff Office of the Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationality, which worked closely with the Main Office of the Ethnic German Central Office, was concerned with the re-Germanization of former German population groups. However, Slavic parts of the population that were considered good for "Germanization" according to racial criteria were also registered in this main office. Together with the Central Office, it compiled the target persons into German National Lists.
• The Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt (WVHA) controlled and operated the concentration and extermination camps through the inspection of the concentration camps and administered the substantial and growing SS-owned industries, commercial and agricultural enterprises.

training of junior drivers

The SS trained its young leaders independently at various schools of its own. In the schools of the SS, the SD and the Security Police, attention was paid to an elitist and ideologically consolidated self-image in the sense of the National Socialist worldview.

Well-known training institutions were the SS Junker Schools in Bad Tölz and Braunschweig. The military and ideological training of the officer candidates there did not initially distinguish whether the executives were to be deployed in the SS administration, in the Waffen-SS, in the SD, in the security police or in the concentration camps - later permanent or temporary transfers and changes between the uses were common and also desired with regard to deployment experience and complicity.

Women in the SS

Women could serve as civilian employees without belonging to the SS in the SS retinue or in the elite-oriented SS-Helferinnenkorps (SS Helpers Corps), where they were also formally members of the SS and "regular members of the SS clan community". Women worked as supervisors in the concentration camps and in the administration, as intelligence and staff assistants, in which capacity they kept communication lines open and assisted the staff administration. Hedwig Potthast, an employed secretary in the Reich Security Main Office, became Heinrich Himmler's mistress.

SS-Wirtschaftsbetriebe

The SS founded numerous companies, including Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke GmbH (DEST) in 1938, which it merged into Deutsche Wirtschaftsbetriebe (DWB) in 1940. The DWB were run by senior members of the SS administration. In 1942, all economic affairs were concentrated in the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office. Through the Main Office of Administration and Economy, this office ran the administration of the concentration and extermination camps, including the economic exploitation of prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates. In 1943/44, about 30 companies with more than 100 enterprises, in which more than 40,000 concentration camp prisoners had to work, belonged to the economic empire of the SS. The DWB's headquarters were located in Oranienburg near Berlin.

The SS also acquired - out of concern about the dangers of alcohol abuse - several mineral water companies, such as Heinrich Mattoni AG and Apollinaris Brunnen AG.

Furthermore, there were the "artistic" undertakings of the SS:

• Porcelain Manufactory Allach
• Nordland Publishing
• Swordsmiths of the SS

SS Public Relations

The SS conducted its own public relations work, with which it represented its interests and addressed potential new members and recruits, but with which it was also able to initiate or influence discussions within the regime.

The weekly newspaper Das Schwarze Korps - Zeitung der Schutzstaffeln der NSDAP - Organ der Reichsführung SS represented the world view of the SS internally and externally, it was read beyond the circle of the SS and could - within narrow limits - also express partial criticism of party and state leadership. With over 750,000 copies sold, it had a considerable reach. It worked closely with the Security Service.

The SS-Standarte Kurt Eggers was a propaganda company in which the SS war correspondents were organized. The Nordland-Verlag was the third largest publishing house in the Reich.

In addition, the SS took advantage of the popularity of the sport. After the Olympics, it began building its own Olympic squad of quasi-state amateurs to make up the majority of the German Olympic team at the next Olympics. The SS also acted as a supporter of the National Socialist naturist movement, which believed that there was no need to hide the beautiful Aryan body.

Human Resources Development

When Heinrich Himmler took over the leadership of the SS from Erhard Heiden on 6 January 1929, this organization contained 280 men as "active members". (Adolf Hitler was listed in the SS with the membership number 1 and outside the SS-DAL (Dienstalterslisten der SS). There, on the first page, he was referred to as the Chief of Service of the Schutzstaffel and the actual membership list began from the membership number) After the National Socialist takeover of power, the number of SS members increased from 52,174 (January 1933) to 209,014 (December 1933) within one year. Since the end of 1934, the SS consisted on the one hand of the barracked units of the armed SS (since 1939: Waffen-SS), and on the other hand of the General SS, whose members were not barracked. The membership of the General SS increased only slowly in the following years. Its peak at the end of 1941 was 271,060 members. The armed SS developed into a quantitatively significant factor only during the war. Its membership increased from 23,406 (end of 1938) to 594,443 (June 1944).

At the beginning of the war (1939), about 60% of the members of the General SS were drafted into the Wehrmacht. This meant that of the 260,000 SS members at that time, 170,000 did their war service in the three Wehrmacht branches: Army, Air Force and Navy. Only about 36,000 were taken over by the Waffen-SS. The remaining members were either too old for war service or were assigned to "indispensable posts" in the civil service or police forces. SS-Zugehörige was the internal term. This collective term included all SS men who fulfilled their service obligation with the Reich Labor Service (RAD) or the Wehrmacht. For this period they were excluded from the command relationship of the SS and were listed there as "SS-Zugehörige". Within the General SS, a distinction was made between age groups (SS-I and SS-II, which formed the so-called Active SS, SS-Reserve and SS-Stammabteilung). In contrast, there were no SS members in the SS-Verfügungstruppe, since service in this unit was considered to be the completion of compulsory military service and was recognized as such. Due to the character of the Verfügungstruppe as an active, barracked force, the SS-typical and age-related distinction into SS-I, SS-II, SS-Reserve, and SS-Stammabteilung was also omitted. Until Adolf Hitler's decree of August 17, 1938, the members of the SS-Totenkopfverbände, who were serving in the RAD or the Wehrmacht, were listed as SS members, analogous to the General SS. This regulation was abolished by the above-mentioned decree, since from 1939 onwards only men who had already fulfilled their service obligation in the Wehrmacht were allowed to be recruited. There was no age-based division of the SS-Totenkopf units into SS-I, SS-II, SS-Reserve and SS-Stammabteilung. It was considered the same as the Verfügungstruppe as an active, barracked troop unit of the SS.

In June 1944, the SS had 794,941 members. Of these, 264,379 belonged to the General SS. Before the International Court of Justice in Nuremberg, Robert Brill, former head of the "Supplementary Office of the Waffen-SS", provided information on the personnel development of the Waffen-SS on 5 and 6 August 1946:

During the course of the war, there was an increasing use of foreign nationals in Waffen-SS units. At "the end of the war, 19 of its 38 divisions consisted largely of foreigners," mostly from Eastern Europe.