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To what extent and in
what ways did the SS control the German state and German society under the
Third Reich?
This essay was part of my Third Year course, when I took Professor
Christopher Andrew's 'Secret World' paper. The SS are a very complicated topic, and I am
not sure that this essay does justice to the diversity of their roles, or their impact.
The SS is a body that it is
extremely difficult to generalise about. As Robert Lewis Koehl says, ‘both the SS and
the Nazis went through very rapid development, changing and growing so fast that
generalisations for periods shorter than a decade are often inadequate.' Partly of the
Nazi party, but increasingly also of the German state, by the time Germany had been
defeated in the Second World War the SS had generated a bureaucracy and organisational
structure of Byzantine complexity, taken part in the war on all fronts through the armed
Waffen-SS, and undertaken the bulk of the activity in a project with which its name will
probably be forever associated, the so-called ‘Final Solution to the Jewish
Question.’ Key elements of the SS included the SD, its security service arm, and the
SIPO security police organisation. The Gestapo, the main German political police
organisation also came under the auspices of Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, as did
more or less all German police organisations to a greater or lesser extent (even
fire-fighters and rural gendarmes). In addition, there were a myriad other sections with
military, economic, social and cultural objectives. For instance, there was the Lebensborn
organisation, which assisted racially sound pregnant women in finding homes for their
babies, as well as projects researching the background to Aryanism and the connection
Aryans and the Nordic races. All of this was contained within a complex administrative
structure based around ‘Main Offices’, with empire building just as common
inside the SS as it was outside. Bernd Wegner sums up the diversity of the SS: ‘The
SS was a conglomeration of loosely connected offices and branches, which often had little
to do with one another, and which fulfilled radically different duties.’ This
conglomeration managed to have a huge effect on some aspects of the operation of the
German state, while merely interfering in others. As we shall see, the SS became a key
part of the machinery of tyranny in Hitler’s Germany.
First
we must consider the General SS. This was a body of men who passed the initially demanding
racially-based entrance standards set by the SS, which was founded originally as an elite
corps of the SA (Stormtroopers or Brownshirts). Once Hitler began to gain real power with
his appointment as Chancellor in 1933, the role of the SS as his bodyguard continued.
However, a member of the General SS probably did not have a specific job within the Nazi
party, and the large majority were not paid with Nazi party funds. Rather, the General SS
became a club, whose members might be found in all branches of both state and party
administration, as well as in private enterprise. By the end of the war, the General SS
had reached its highest level of membership, 800,000, and did resemble a club, even coming
close to looking like an organisation that Nazism detested, Freemasonry – both were
selective members’ organisations, whose members peppered the civilian, military and
party administrations of Germany, organised into a system of lodges. Their impact upon the
German state was perhaps less than that of other branches of the SS with more specific
roles, such as the SD, RHSA (Reich Security Main Office) and so on – these were the
organisations that Hitler and Himmler used to circumvent the role of the traditional
administration, and their impact was more crucial than the leavening of General SS members
spread throughout Germany. That is not to say that they did not play specific role:
members of the General SS who joined the political police and Gestapo played a valuable
role in infiltrating those organisations long before they were subordinated to the power
of the Nazi Party, and the swearing in of both SA and SS men as auxiliary police put the
stamp of officialdom on their thuggery and anti-Semitic violence during the early years of
Nazi power. Their impact upon German society, on the other hand, may have been more
significant – the General SS were highly visible, and their position as the
‘aristocracy of national socialism’ may have intimidated many, as their
paramilitary uniforms, functions and manner were intended to do. Moreover, their
prominence, especially following the fall from grace of Ernst Roehm’s SA with the
Night of the Long Knives in June-July 1934, as the defenders of the National Socialist
party, as well as their presence in many departments of the government, and in other
posts, such as doctors and lawyers, may have played a part in keeping German society in a
state of fear. The role played by SS members in the Night of the Long Knives, can only
have enhanced their fearsome reputation, and it is worth noting that the odium from the
deeds and ventures the SS in all its forms undertook, such as running concentration camps,
implementing the Final Solution, and even the martial reputation of the
Waffen-SS, may
well have attached itself to the General SS despite the fact that the vast majority of its
members were probably not involved in such aspects of the SS’s operations.
In terms of the alternative judicial system established by the
Nazis, the SS were to play a key role. The concentration camp system was a key element of
Nazi policy for the control of the population, and like many ventures, it was set up as an
alternative to the normal, legal means of dealing with criminals. This establishment of
parallel systems, in all fields of state affairs, including, eventually, the military, was
a key method of government for Hitler – it was easier than changing the law, and
allowed him a greater degree of control. This was especially the case with the
concentration camp system, which after the purge of the SA in 1934 and its corresponding
decline in importance, was largely administered by the SS (some camps were initially
administered by police authorities, which ran them as proper internment camps, and did not
rely on brutality for control. However, the police were usurped and infiltrated by the SS,
which took over the role). Because both political prisoners and common criminals were
liable to be detained in the camps without trial, they posed a significant deterrent to
dissent, especially as their reputations worsened, with the consolidation of Nazi power
from 1934 onwards and the outbreak of war in 1939. The SS provided both the guards and the
administrators for these camps, whose importance to the lack of resistance offered to
Hitler was vital; most citizens of the German Reich learned to fear them, despite the
propaganda to the contrary circulated by the Nazis. The control of the SS over the
concentration camps also gave them a stake in the economic situation of Germany after the
war began: concentration camp labour was employed in a wide range of enterprises, many in
collaboration with big German business interests such as Krupp and
I.G.Farben. While the
conditions in which concentration camp inmates were held ultimately turned out to be
unsuitable for fostering productive labour, especially when conditions worsened during the
war, the ready supply of such inmates meant that the SS underfed them, housed them poorly
and ultimately worked them to death. The effect of this SS self-sufficiency during the war
should not be underestimated – it allowed the SS to become largely self-financing,
which as the burdens of war mounted up can have been no bad thing for German finances in
general. This unique financial status also increased the autonomy enjoyed by an already
independent-minded organisation, perhaps exacerbating its empire-building tendencies.
Having examined the role of the SS in the concentration camps, this
might be the pertinent point to examine their role in a policy that followed on from the
concentration camps: the Final Solution and the extermination camps. The SS was
undoubtedly important to this policy, although we should not believe that it was solely
responsible for carrying it out: Raul Hilberg in his book Perpetrators, Victims,
Bystanders has identified numerous bodies that were partly responsible for the
implementation of Nazi Jewish policy. These include the Interior Ministry, Finance
Ministry, big business (companies such as I.G.Farben), the Foreign Ministry, and so on.
The idea that the SS was solely responsible is erroneous. However, there were many aspects
of policy that it did administer: the death camps, the policy of ‘euthanasia’
for the seriously disabled and mentally ill, the organisation of the notorious
Einsatzgruppen extermination squads that operated in the rear of the German advance in the
East. While there may have been many agencies involved in the Final Solution, the SS was
at the organisational sharp end, and was largely responsible for the actual killings that
took place. The fact that the SS operated this policy in a clandestine fashion was
invaluable for other members of the German state who preferred not to know what was
happening to the Jews: Hitler himself preferred to be kept at one remove from the policy
of extermination, even though it certainly had his seal of approval. The SS, and
Himmler,
understood that the role of the SS was to carry out tasks for which they would receive
little recognition or glory, probably not even acknowledgement – this approach to
affairs made the SS a key component of the apparatus of the Fuehrer state. The effect of
the extermination policy on German society would have depended very much on people’s
roles in it. Firstly, if you were Jewish, suffering the increasing torment of life in
Germany following the Nazi seizure of power, then you might well find the SS your
principle tormentors, especially after the eclipse of the SA. The effects of the SS’s
role in deportation policy on non-Jewish members of German society, however, may have been
more limited – it is likely that the vast majority of both the populace and the armed
forces were simply glad that the Nazis had an agency through which to do their dirty work,
and thought of the SS as a necessary evil, because it spared them direct involvement in
the process that, especially during the closing stages of the war, many civilians must
have had ever increasing knowledge of.
A crucial role for the SS was that of intelligence gatherer. Without
its intelligence function, the role of the concentration camps and the Final Solution
would have been less effective, as would the SS’s increasing role as maintainer of
the internal status quo, suppressing political dissidents and Communists. The intelligence
section of the SS was known as the SD. Originally conceived as an internal police force of
the Nazi movement, the SD, under the command of Reynhard Heydrich, began as a small
organisation of only a handful of operatives and administrators, whose role was to monitor
dissent and factionalism within the Nazi movement. It was only one of many Nazi
intelligence agencies during the early 1930s, competing with the SA and with organisations
run by other party luminaries, such as Goebbels and Gregor Strasser. The need for the
monitoring of the movement was paramount, and the party leadership, especially Hess, the
Party Secretary, decided to confer that role upon the SD, to the chagrin of other sections
of the movement. At the time of the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, though, the SD was a
small and insignificant intelligence operation which had no bearing on affairs of state or
government, but was only just capable of monitoring the politicking of competing Nazi
Party bosses. The role of the SD gradually increased as Himmler gained a hold on the
political police forces of the various German states; by 1934 he had become chief of
almost all of them, and in that year too Goering, the Prussian Prime Minister, appointed
him as an Inspector of the Prussian Gestapo as part of a move designed to counter the
influence of Roehm’s SA. By 1934 Himmler thus found himself at the head of a large
conglomerate of political policemen, of which a proportion would have been members of the
General SS, with the SD as a bureau increasing in power and influence. By the end of the
Nazi period and the end of the war, Himmler was the ultimate police authority in the
German Reich, having not only the above-mentioned forces at his disposal, but also a vast
collection of militias: Order Police (ORPO), Police Reinforcements, etc., which he had
founded to maintain internal control of the Reich when the Wehrmacht was concentrating on
the fighting on the front lines (organisations such as the Police Reinforcement Battalions
eventually mutated into the Waffen-SS, parts of which developed during the war into an
effective military force. The nature of Waffen-SS recruitment policy, its subordination to
the Wehrmacht in strategic matters, and its role in the conduct of the war means that it
should not be considered in terms of the broader SS, as the relationship was a distant one
by the end of the war, both in terms of administration and membership).
The effect of this control over the various police forces of the
Reich was to allow Himmler to create a new police force, an amalgam of the all the
political police forces that had come into his control. This was christened the Security
Police, or SIPO, and consisted of all plainclothes policemen under his jurisdiction, both
political and criminal, with Heydrich becoming effective head of SIPO and SD. This control
was complete by 1936, and Himmler’s final move before he turned his attention to
developing the Waffen-SS was to designate all political police officers in the Reich part
of a new Reich Gestapo, the first ever ‘federal’ police force in Germany. By
1936, therefore, a paramilitary party political organisation had completely taken over all
of the functions of the police in Germany, by absorbing and assimilating the various
forces, and by infiltrating its members into the command structures of the various state
police forces and Land governments. This was a remarkable achievement for Himmler given
his often uncertain power base. It was also to provide a change in the way that the Third
Reich was policed, and by the outbreak of war in 1939 Germany was rapidly evolving into a
genuine police state. The Night of the Long Knives in 1934 had given an indication of the
illegal means that the Nazis would employ to maintain party discipline, and once the
apparatus of national political police control became available in 1936 it was
unscrupulously employed, in conjunction with the concentration camp system, to silence
opponents, remove rivals and maintain a strictly enforced status quo. The conjunction of a
political police force with a system of internment camps, over which no judge controlled
admission, moved entirely outside the judicial system and was to prove extremely
effective, a fact testified to by the scarcity of resistance to Nazi rule, and the fact
that there was only one near-successful non-military plot to assassinate Hitler between
1933 and his death.
The effect of the Gestapo and the SIPO / SD upon the German state
and society was extremely important. The setting up of extra-legal means of detention, the
concentration camps, drastically widened the scope of the political police, who could now
operate without constraints imposed by judges, and without legal limitations. The
feasibility of detaining suspects without charge (so-called ‘protective
custody’) made wide-ranging round-ups of Communists, Socialists, Catholics and Jews
possible. The nature of the camps also helped to deter dissent (especially the rumours
that circulated about the ‘wild’ SA camps in 1933-4). The very range of such
round-ups ensured that everybody, everywhere in Germany was touched in some way by the new
‘justice’ of the Nazis: either they had directly experienced detention and
torture, or they knew someone who had. Denunciation of neighbours was widespread, and the
Gestapo managed to project the impression of omniscience and omnipresence: people believed
that there was a Gestapo agent on every street corner. The SS’s role in the
development of the Gestapo is important: not only was Himmler the head of the Gestapo, but
the Gestapo was subsumed within the wider brotherhood of the SS (although Gestapo
membership of the General SS was only about one in ten). The SS’s gradual evolution
into a police power for the whole of Germany and newly occupied territories outside
Germany meant that its frankly illegal approach and the zeal with which it went about
pursuing the enemies of the National Socialist revolution both filtered down to the
Gestapo, which, despite the fact that most of its officers had been in the police before
the Nazi seizure of power, nonetheless adopted Nazi / SS objectives and methods, to
produce a German society that spent a large amount of time looking over its shoulder for
the Gestapo / SIPO agent who might or might not be there.
The SS turned out to be a crucial tool for Hitler in his
consolidation of Nazi power after the Reichstag fire in 1933. Firstly, it supplanted the
rebellious SA, who had initially provided vital muscle but who had become too volatile to
be safely allowed their existence. In doing so, it continued to provide the show of force
that was part of the Nazi approach, but with a considerably more civilised veneer. It also
acted as a showpiece for Hitler and Himmler’s ideas on racial purity, having as it
did an admission procedure based on racially sound principles. But its ceremonial and
symbolic value to Hitler was quickly outstripped by the numerous practical functions its
undertook. Hitler’s reluctance to openly overturn elements of pre-Nazi German
administration (the judicial system, civil service, etc.) meant that his favoured tactic
was to bypass those elements: while the SS was by no means the only organisation that
undertook such bypassing moves for Hitler, it was the principle body for a number of
functions, all of which were vital to the maintenance of the Nazi regime in power: the
first was the elimination of the SA leadership in the 1934 purge, and the assumption of
its duties by taking over the running of SA concentration camps; the second was the
provision of new apparatus for the policing of Nazi Germany, partly by the provision of
alternative agencies, and partly by the absorption of existing agencies into a superior
police force, comprising the SS, SD, SIPO, KRIPO (Criminal Police), ORPO and Gestapo, a
formidable array of tools with which to combat dissent. The effect of this
‘super-police’ organisation on German society should not be underestimated: it
stressed the dominance of the party in all spheres of public life, and deterred dissent
with the application of liberal doses of terror, creating a truly terrifying police-party
state. In addition, of course, the SS provided numerous other functions, such as its role
in the implementation of the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question’, its use of
concentration camp labour to make itself a self-supporting organisation, its contributions
to Hitler’s racial obsessions with the Lebensborn organisation, and its attempts to
foster Nazi-Aryan culture. In short, the SS, often described as a state within a state,
should perhaps be viewed rather as one state alongside another, the extra-legal partnering
the conventional to allow unprecedented control to the Nazi party over the administration
of Germany and the territories occupied after the outbreak of war in 1939.
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