The founding of the SS

On 4 April 1925, in Munich, a few trusted followers of Adolf Hitler formed a new bodyguard for the leader of the newly re-founded Nazi Party. There were eight of them, almost all from the former Stoßtrupp Adolf Hitler (Adolf Hitler Shock Troop), which had taken part in the Beer Hall Putsch a year and a half earlier. They were commanded by Julius Schreck, a former soldier and Freikorps member who later became Hitler’s chauffeur. At first the unit was called the Stabswache, the “staff guard”, and its task was to protect Hitler and party meetings. In the autumn of 1925 its squads across Germany adopted the common name Schutzstaffel, “protection squadron”, abbreviated to SS. Nothing then suggested that this handful of bodyguards would grow into an organisation that during the Second World War would run the concentration and extermination camps, the police and security services of the entire Reich and an army of its own, and that would become the principal perpetrator of the Holocaust.

4 April or 9 November

War chronologies give 4 April 1925 as the date the SS was founded. The date is well documented but needs explaining. On 1 April Hitler instructed Schreck to organise a new formation to protect meetings, and on 4 April the first squad of eight men was formed. It was not yet called the SS, however. Similar squads set up in other cities over the following months went by various names, such as Schutzkommando (“protection commando”) or Sturmstaffel (“assault squadron”). The name Schutzstaffel was introduced uniformly for all of them in the course of 1925, and the SS itself later adopted 9 November 1925, the second anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch, as its official founding day. That is why some sources give the November date. The Historisches Lexikon Bayerns and most scholars, however, regard April 1925 as the beginning of the SS.

Some accounts state that the name Schutzstaffel was proposed by “Hermann Göring, then head of the SA”. This is doubtful: Hermann Göring had commanded the SA in 1923, but from his flight after the putsch until the amnesty of 1927 he was abroad – in Austria, Italy and Sweden – and had no influence on party affairs.

The bodyguard before the putsch

The SS had a forerunner. The party’s strong-arm squad, the SA, was formed in 1920–1921 to protect meetings and soon grew into a paramilitary formation in which the tone was set by officers from the Freikorps and from Captain Hermann Ehrhardt’s organisation, and by Captain Ernst Röhm. Its commanders regarded Hitler as the movement’s orator and “drummer”, but not as their superior. Hitler therefore wanted a small unit that would obey him alone. In March 1923 the so-called Stabswache was formed, a guard of a few men wearing the death’s head on their caps. In May 1923 it was turned into the Stoßtrupp Adolf Hitler, which in time numbered about a hundred men. It was commanded by Joseph Berchtold, and Schreck was among its founders.

During the Beer Hall Putsch of 8–9 November 1923 the Stoßtrupp secured the hall in the Bürgerbräukeller, where Hitler proclaimed the “national revolution”, wrecked the offices of the Social Democratic newspaper Münchener Post and seized city councillors as hostages. The next day its members marched in the front ranks of the column that the police stopped with gunfire at the Feldherrnhalle. Five of the sixteen Nazis killed belonged to the Stoßtrupp. After the putsch the party and all its formations were banned, and 38 members of the Stoßtrupp were sentenced to fortress confinement in Landsberg, where Hitler too was held. The months spent together there, in lenient conditions, bound them still more closely to their leader. The Stoßtrupp veterans later met as “old fighters” and went into action once more on Hitler’s personal orders: on the evening of 9 November 1938, the anniversary of the putsch, they set out from Munich’s town hall to smash Jewish shops and set fire to the Ohel Jakob synagogue. It was one of the first actions of Kristallnacht.

Rebuilding the party

The verdict of 1 April 1924 sentenced Hitler to five years’ fortress confinement, but he was released as early as 20 December 1924. The Nazi movement was by then split into warring factions, and during his absence Röhm had built a new organisation, the Frontbann, numbering some thirty thousand men, from former SA members and other paramilitary leagues. Hitler had concluded that he would not win power through an armed coup against the state, but only through elections and propaganda – although the street was still to play an important role. After the ban on the party’s activity in Bavaria was lifted, he announced the re-founding of the NSDAP in the Bürgerbräukeller on 27 February 1925. On 9 March the Bavarian authorities, alarmed by his speech, banned him from speaking in public.

Röhm wanted the re-founded SA to be a military formation independent of the politicians; Hitler wanted it to be a party stewarding and propaganda service, unconditionally subordinate to him. The dispute ended in the spring of 1925 with Röhm’s departure, but Hitler had already decided to have a guard of his own alongside the SA, which he did not trust. That is why at the beginning of April he entrusted its creation to Schreck. The first squad of eight included, besides Schreck, Emil Maurice, Ulrich Graf – who had shielded Hitler with his own body during the putsch – Christian Weber, Julius Schaub and Erhard Heiden. On 16 April 1925 the new formation made its first public appearance. At the funeral of Ernst Pöhner, the former Munich police president and participant in the putsch, who had been killed in a car accident, its members carried torches on either side of the coffin.

A small guard in the shadow of the SA

In the summer and autumn of 1925 Schreck sent out appeals to the party’s local branches to form similar squads. They were to be small – ten men and a leader – and to accept only men who were healthy, disciplined and absolutely devoted to Hitler. According to the Historisches Lexikon Bayerns, at the end of 1925 the SS had almost a thousand members, but their number soon fell to about two hundred. Schreck failed to build an effective organisation, and in April 1926 he was replaced by Berchtold, who took the title of Reichsführer-SS. Hitler showed his guard special trust: at the party rally in Weimar in July 1926 he entrusted it with the “Blood Flag”, the banner carried during the putsch which, according to party legend, had been soaked in the blood of the fallen. From then on the SS was the guardian of the movement’s most important relic.

That same year the new head of the SA, Franz Pfeffer von Salomon, took command of all the party’s formations, including the SS. The SS formally became part of the SA and remained in its shadow for years. Berchtold, unhappy with this subordination, left in March 1927, and his successor, Erhard Heiden, could not halt the formation’s decline. In 1928 the SS had only about 280 members, and in the party leadership there was even talk of disbanding it.

Himmler

From the autumn of 1927 Heiden’s deputy was Heinrich Himmler, an agronomist not yet thirty. The son of a Munich schoolteacher, he had been too late to reach the front at the end of the Great War; in August 1923 he joined the NSDAP, and during the putsch he carried the banner of Röhm’s organisation, the Reichskriegsflagge. After the party was re-founded he worked as its official and propagandist in Lower Bavaria, and in August 1925 he joined the SS. On 6 January 1929 Hitler appointed him Reichsführer-SS.

Himmler took over a formation of roughly three hundred men and resolved to make it the elite of the movement. Candidates had to prove “Aryan” descent and meet physical requirements, and from the end of 1931 SS men could marry only with the approval of the Race and Settlement Office. In 1930 Hitler defined the task of the SS as “police service within the party”. When in 1930–1931 part of the Berlin SA rebelled against the party leadership, the SS sided with Hitler, who thanked it in words that gave rise to its motto: “My honour is loyalty” (Meine Ehre heißt Treue). In 1931 Himmler also created his own intelligence service, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), and put the former naval officer Reinhard Heydrich at its head. By the end of 1933 the SS had more than two hundred thousand members.

From bodyguard to a state within the state

After Hitler came to power in 1933, Himmler, as acting police president of Munich, set up the Dachau concentration camp outside the city in March; it soon came under SS administration and became the model for other camps. Within a year Himmler had taken control of the political police forces of one German state after another, including the Prussian Gestapo. At the turn of June and July 1934 SS units carried out the killings of the Night of the Long Knives, murdering Röhm and other SA leaders. As a reward, on 20 July 1934 the SS became an independent party organisation answerable directly to Hitler. In 1936 Himmler became chief of the entire German police. Alongside the General SS (Allgemeine SS), made up of members in civilian employment, there grew up the armed special-purpose troops (SS-Verfügungstruppe), from which the Waffen-SS emerged, and the concentration camp guard units, the SS-Totenkopfverbände.

The long shadow of the SS

The Second World War showed what the formation founded in 1925 to protect beer-hall meetings had become. In September 1939 the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the SD followed the Wehrmacht into Poland, murdering members of the Polish intelligentsia, clergy, activists and Jews. On 27 September 1939 Himmler merged the Security Police and the SD into the Reich Security Main Office under Heydrich. The SS directed the expulsion of Poles from the territories annexed to the Reich and the plans for the Germanisation of the East, which in 1941–1942 took shape as Generalplan Ost. After the invasion of the USSR in June 1941 the Einsatzgruppen shot, by estimates, more than a million Jews, as well as Roma, prisoners of war and the sick. The SS ran the concentration and extermination camps, among them Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibór and Bełżec, and was the chief organiser and perpetrator of the Holocaust, in which about six million people were murdered. The Waffen-SS, through whose ranks an estimated nearly 900,000 soldiers passed, many of them foreigners, fought on every front and committed numerous war crimes, among them during the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising in 1944.

Himmler took his own life in British captivity on 23 May 1945. In 1946 the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg declared the SS a criminal organisation. An organisation founded in April 1925 by eight Munich thugs had within twenty years become the symbol of Nazi genocide. Its path – from the leader’s bodyguard, through party police, to a state within the state – shows how, in a system built around one man, boundless obedience to him turned into readiness for any crime.