The SS independent of the SA

On 20 July 1934, three weeks after the Night of the Long Knives, Adolf Hitler signed a brief order that changed the balance of power in the Third Reich. “In view of the great services of the SS, especially in connection with the events of 30 June 1934, I raise it to the status of an independent organisation within the NSDAP,” it read. It went on to state that the Reichsführer-SS, like the SA Chief of Staff, was directly subordinate to Hitler as Supreme Leader of the SA. The formation, which since 1926 had formally been part of the SA and had had to obey its chief, ceased to be subordinate to it. From then on Heinrich Himmler answered to Hitler alone.

Independent of the SA, not of the party

Some war chronologies state that on 20 July the SS became “an organisation independent of the Nazi Party”. This is inaccurate. The order spoke explicitly of an independent organisation “within the NSDAP”: the SS remained one of the party’s formations, like the SA, the Hitler Youth or the NSKK motor corps, and its members belonged to the movement headed by Hitler. It became independent of the SA and its Chief of Staff – that is, of the organisation whose leadership it had just murdered. In August 1934 Himmler was given the party rank of Reichsleiter, joining the top leadership of the NSDAP on an equal footing with the heads of its great offices. The title of Reichsführer-SS, until then merely the name of a post within the SA, became the highest rank in the SS.

In practice the SS was more independent of the party than the regulations said, but this was owed not to the order but to the fact that Himmler combined party and state posts. As head of the political police of the German states and de facto head of the Prussian Gestapo he was a state official, while as Reichsführer-SS he commanded a party formation. This interpenetration of party and state, in which neither ministers nor party officials could control Himmler, became the hallmark of the SS.

From bodyguard to victor

The SS was founded in 1925 as Hitler’s small bodyguard, and in 1926 it was placed under the command of the SA. For years afterwards it remained in the shadow of the great paramilitary force. When Himmler took it over in January 1929, it numbered about three hundred men. Under his direction it grew as the “elite” of the movement: candidates had to prove “Aryan” descent, and from the end of 1931 SS men could marry only with the permission of the Race and Settlement Office. By the end of 1933 the SS had more than 200,000 members, but it was still more than ten times smaller than the SA, which under Ernst Röhm had grown to several million men.

Röhm’s conflict with the army and with Hitler was Himmler’s opportunity. In the spring of 1934 the SS and its security service, the SD, headed by Reinhard Heydrich, gathered material against the SA and fabricated evidence that Röhm was planning a putsch. Between 30 June and 2 July it was above all SS men, together with the Gestapo, who arrested and shot the SA leaders and other opponents of Hitler. Röhm was shot in his cell in Stadelheim Prison by the commandant of the Dachau camp, Theodor Eicke, and his subordinate. Himmler thereby sacrificed the two men to whom he owed his career, Röhm and Gregor Strasser, and so proved his absolute loyalty to Hitler. The order of 20 July was his reward.

Summer and autumn 1934

The independence of the SS was only part of the changes. The SA, deprived of its leaders, passed under the command of a new Chief of Staff, Viktor Lutze, who had neither Röhm’s authority nor his ambition. Within a few months hundreds of thousands of men were removed from the SA, and its strength fell from about 4.5 million in June 1934 to 2.6 million in September and about 1.6 million a year later. From then on it devoted itself to sports and pre-military training, collections and parades.

The SS, by contrast, grew and acquired new tasks. On 4 July 1934 Eicke became Inspector of Concentration Camps and of the SS guard units. He took over one camp after another, closed those run by the SA and introduced the regulations developed at Dachau. The guard units later grew into the SS-Totenkopfverbände. Alongside them, permanently armed SS units living in barracks were formed: on 24 September 1934 Hitler informed the Reichswehr command of the creation of the SS-Verfügungstruppe, “dispositional troops” the size of three regiments, while at Lichterfelde in Berlin was stationed the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, whose firing squad had shot the SA commanders on 30 June. The generals who had helped Hitler get rid of the SA in the name of the army’s monopoly of arms had to accept, a few months later, a new rival in uniform. Therein lay a paradox that historians often stress: the army had rid itself of the large but chaotic SA, and received in exchange the smaller but far more dangerous SS.

The role of the security service also grew. As early as 9 June 1934 Rudolf Hess had declared the SD the party’s sole intelligence service, and after the Night of the Long Knives the other party information services, including the SA’s intelligence branch, were abolished. Heydrich, who since April had headed both the SD and the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, could now build a network of informers and card indexes covering the whole of Germany. In the second half of 1934 Himmler also began to set up his own SS officer schools, the first at Bad Tölz and soon afterwards at Brunswick, where future commanders were taught not only soldiering but above all racial ideology and unconditional obedience. The General SS (Allgemeine SS), made up of men who held civilian jobs and served in their spare time, stopped growing as fast as before. Himmler preferred quality to numbers: according to historians of the SS, between 1933 and 1935 he expelled tens of thousands of members deemed unsuitable – drunkards, men with criminal records and those who had joined only to further their careers.

Significance

20 July 1934 marked the birth of the SS as an independent force in the Nazi state. In the years that followed Himmler built it into what historians call a state within a state. In June 1936 Hitler appointed him head of the entire German police. In September 1939, during the war against Poland, the Security Police and the SD were merged into the Reich Security Main Office under Heydrich. The dispositional troops and the Death’s Head units gave rise to the Waffen-SS, which during the war numbered hundreds of thousands of soldiers and fought alongside the Wehrmacht. The SS directed the Einsatzgruppen that murdered the Polish intelligentsia and the Jews, the expulsions and Germanisation of occupied Poland, and the concentration and extermination camps. It was the chief organiser and perpetrator of the Holocaust.

All this required an organisation answerable to no one but Hitler: not to ministers, not to the courts, not to party rivals. The SS won that position in the summer of 1934, paying for it with the blood of its former superiors in the SA. After the war the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg declared the SS a criminal organisation.