SS

The SS was founded in Munich in 1925 from a handful of men who guarded Hitler and party meetings. Until 1934 it was formally part of the SA. When Heinrich Himmler took it over in 1929 it had fewer than 300 members; by the time the Nazis came to power it had more than 50,000. Himmler turned it into an elite chosen by ‘racial’ criteria and political loyalty, and after the Night of the Long Knives the SS became an independent organisation within the Nazi Party.

In time the SS took control of the political and criminal police, the SD security service, the concentration and extermination camps, settlement policy and its own army, the Waffen-SS. Its leadership planned and carried out the murder of Europe’s Jews, much of it on occupied Polish soil. The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg declared the SS a criminal organisation.