Army of Evil: A History of the SS (9 page)

The entire strength of the SS at this time was approximately 280 subscription-paying members,
¹
who comprised fewer than 75 protection squads. The largest of these was attached to party headquarters in Munich and commanded by Josef “Sepp” Dietrich, who would later be a key figure in the militarised Waffen-SS. Many of the others consisted of just two or three members, so it is scarcely surprising that few other party members were inspired to join an organisation that was a long way from being a dynamic elite.

Dietrich, an earthy ex-soldier and -policeman, was a relatively recent addition to Hitler’s inner circle of gophers, drivers and bodyguards—the so-called
Chauffeureska
. He was born in the village of Hawangen in the Bavarian province of Swabia on 28 May 1892.
²
After some eight years of schooling, he was employed as a farmworker before
travelling a little in Europe, eventually becoming an apprentice in the hotel trade in Switzerland. The Dietrich legend has it that he then served in the Bavarian Army as a cavalryman and professional NCO, before joining the elite Storm Troops
*
during the Great War and ending up as a senior NCO in Germany’s first tank unit. The truth is somewhat more prosaic: he did indeed join the Bavarian Army, in October 1911, but served in an artillery regiment and was invalided out little more than a month later, after falling from a horse. Thereafter, he worked as an errand boy for a baker. When he rejoined the army on the outbreak of war, he again served in an artillery regiment. He transferred to the Storm Troops only in late 1916. Just over a year later, he became a crewman in captured British Mark IV tanks, and he served in that capacity to the end of the war. He was certainly awarded the Iron Cross (second class) in November 1917, and was wounded several times before the armistice, but aside from that his Great War history is murky. By 1945, he was one of Germany’s most highly decorated soldiers, and he claimed to have received several of those decorations during the First World War. However, his biographer could find no record of Dietrich being awarded either the Iron Cross (first class) or the Austrian Bravery decoration.
³

Similarly, his post-war career was somewhat obscure. He claimed to have served in various Free Corps—including the
Oberland
, during the Munich
Putsch
—but he also spent some time as a regular policeman. In short, it seems that his record was significantly edited in the late twenties and early thirties to paint him in a more politically favourable light. Again, there is no evidence to support his claim that he took part in the
Putsch
, even though he was awarded the Blood Order, instituted by Hitler in 1933 to honour participants. Indeed, there is no evidence that he was politically active at all until he joined the NSDAP in May 1928 at the urging of Christian Weber, who was employing
him at a filling station. Dietrich joined the SS a week later. This lack of any obvious political hinterland has led Dietrich’s biographer to suggest that he was essentially apolitical,
⁴
but such a claim cannot be supported. Dietrich did not disagree in any meaningful way with the verbose monologues that Hitler tried out on the
Chauffeureska
. Just like the other members of the inner circle, he retained his place at the table in Munich’s Café Heck every afternoon because of his soldierly good humour
and
his unquestioning acceptance of the corrosive, racist gibberish that was bandied around.

Dietrich’s protection squad was vibrant and healthy, but this was certainly the exception rather than the rule. Outside of Munich, no one could realistically expect such a tiny organisation to fulfil its primary function of protecting the party’s leadership. Indeed, many within the NSDAP saw the SS as little more than a group of newspaper salesmen and canvassers, rather than a quasi-military elite. However, at least they could not claim it was a drain on resources, as it was entirely self-funded. Most of the money came from members’ subscriptions, but there were also
Fördernde Mitglieder
(FM—sponsoring members), who contributed to SS funds without taking part in its activities. A smattering of Jewish names in this group suggests that becoming an FM was not always voluntary, and that the SS may have followed the custom of the SA and other paramilitary groups in operating shakedowns and protection rackets. Nevertheless, the SS operated on a shoestring budget, which was reflected in its relative lack of administrative and clerical support.

The central organisation and administration of the SS, such as it was, seems to have been almost entirely the responsibility of Himmler himself. He operated from party headquarters at 50 Schellingstrasse, Munich, and was the only member of the SS to receive a salary (albeit just RM200 per month, which was not really a living wage) from central party funds. In his first few months as National Leader, anything emanating from SS “headquarters” was invariably drafted, edited and typed by Himmler. At first, this was probably not too much of a stretch
for him, but as the organisation expanded he began to be overwhelmed. Eventually, although he maintained an intense disdain for bureaucracy, he was forced to sanction the growth of an enormous and complex network of offices and staff.

Within the framework of the NSDAP, the biggest obstacle in the way of expansion of the SS was the SA, of which it was still nominally a subordinate formation. By bringing in a number of former military and Free Corps comrades as regional leaders, Pfeffer von Salomon had given Hitler what he had demanded back in 1926: a more controllable and disciplined SA that was still large enough to project the NSDAP’s “strength” on the streets. However, in return, Pfeffer von Salomon had demanded authority over the nascent SS. When he had still been Heiden’s deputy, Himmler had attempted to assert the independence of the SS from the SA, but on 12 April 1929 the following order was issued from SA headquarters: “The SS is a special formation of the SA. The basic regulations of the SA are thus valid for the SS, provided no special instruction has been enacted.”
⁵

The only solution seemed to be to build up the SS’s strength through a recruitment drive. By the end of 1929, Himmler, almost single-handedly, had got membership up to the thousand mark; and the following month, he wrote to his old colleague Röhm, with whom he had remained in correspondence during Röhm’s absence in South America, to say that he expected to reach two thousand by the end of April.
⁶

Running in parallel with this expansion was a process of organisational restructuring that would continue throughout the SS’s existence. Up to this point, each individual protection squad had been commanded by an “officer” who reported directly to the National Leader. With no intermediate ranks or organisational strata, each unit should, in theory, have received equal attention from the National Leader. However, this became impossible as the organisation grew, so, from August 1929, the SS began to ape the organisational model of the SA. The smallest unit became the
Schar
(squad), which comprised
approximately eight men and roughly corresponded to a military section. This squad was commanded by a
Scharführer
(squad leader)—equivalent to an NCO. Three squads formed a
Trupp
(troop) of between twenty and sixty men—equivalent to a military platoon. This was commanded by a
Truppführer
(troop leader). Three troops then formed a
Sturm
(company), which was commanded by the lowest “officer” rank:
Sturmführer
(company leader). Three companies constituted a
Sturmbann
(battalion), which was led by a
Sturmbannführer
(battalion leader). Three or four battalions formed a
Standarte
(regiment), which was commanded by a
Standartenführer
(regimental leader). Two or more regiments formed an
Untergruppe
(sub-group)—later renamed a
Brigade
(brigade) and then an
Abschnitt
(division)—which was commanded by an
Oberführer
(senior leader). Several sub-groups constituted a
Gruppe
(group).
*

To help him implement all of this, in 1930 Himmler acquired a business manager, a treasurer and an adjutant in the shape of Josias Erbprinz zu Waldeck-Pyrmont.

Waldeck-Pyrmont was born in 1896—the son and heir of the ruler of the principality of Waldeck-Pyrmont. He was also a nephew of the Dutch queen Emma and was related by marriage to the British royal family. He served as an infantry officer in the First World War and then studied agriculture before taking over the management of his family estates. He joined the NSDAP in November 1929 and the SS—as one of Himmler’s earliest aristocratic recruits—in March 1930. In some respects, this was a coup for Himmler: he was anxious to promote the notion that the SS constituted an elite within both the movement and the Germanic race as a whole, and what better way to do
this, in class-conscious Germany, than by the recruitment of members of the hereditary nobility? Within a month of joining the SS, Waldeck-Pyrmont was promoted to the rank of battalion leader; and within two months he was a regimental leader and adjutant of the SS-Brigade Bayern.
⁷
In September, he became Himmler’s adjutant and head of the National Leader’s personal staff.

I
N THE
1928 general election, the NSDAP had gained 810,000 votes, which meant it secured just 12 out of the 491 Reichstag deputies. In the September 1930 elections, it garnered 6,371,000 votes and 107 seats in the Reichstag, which meant it was now the second-largest party in the parliament after the Social Democrats. Several factors lay behind this extraordinary turnaround in the party’s fortunes.

As we have seen, the Dawes Plan of 1924 had helped resolve the hyperinflation crisis and had given a much-needed boost to the country. However, by the end of the decade, Germany’s reparations payments were still hobbling the economy, so another attempt to address the issue was made by the American lawyer Owen D. Young. The Young Plan, signed in June 1929, reduced the total reparations bill to thirty-seven billion gold Reichsmarks and extended the payment period to fifty-nine years. Internationally this was widely seen as a good deal for Germany, but the nationalist right, who had never accepted the concept of German war guilt, was outraged. The media magnate Alfred Hugenberg led a campaign against the Young Plan,
and he made his considerable newspaper resources available to Hitler. The more radical and anti-capitalist elements within the NSDAP—led by Gregor Strasser’s younger brother, Otto—expressed their distaste at this alliance, but Hitler exploited it to great political and personal advantage. The militant, radical NSDAP was able to reach a much wider audience, and it also gained an aura of respectability and credibility that had previously eluded it.

In the midst of this right-wing campaign against the Young Plan, two events occurred that had great significance for the future of the NSDAP and Germany. On 3 October, Gustav Stresemann, Germany’s foreign minister, died suddenly of a stroke at the age of fifty-one. He had steered Germany’s foreign relations throughout most of the 1920s with good sense and moderation, and his death left the country without a statesman of any particular international stature. That might not have been critically important, were it not for what happened three weeks later.

On 24 October, in a wave of panic selling, the value of shares on the New York stock market crashed. Individuals, businesses and banks faced bankruptcy, and the repercussions were severe all around the world, especially in Germany. The fragile German economy depended on loans from the United States, but threatened American bankers now began to call these in. Consequently, Germany was plunged into chaos. The hyperinflation of 1923 had pauperised the non-property-owning classes in Germany by destroying their savings. Now the process began again through unemployment.

This situation was the best possible recruiting sergeant for the NSDAP. It was the third major catastrophe in Germany in eleven years—first defeat in the war, then inflation, now the depression—so the NSDAP’s claim that the democratic Weimar system had failed seemed highly credible. Membership of the party and its various organisations soared as Germans looked for a solution to their problems. Moreover, because Hitler had chosen the path of legality rather than revolution after the
Putsch
, ordinary people were not afraid to throw in their lot with the National Socialists.

In reality, much of the NSDAP’s programme was old hat. Its anti-capitalism was shared by the Communists and Social Democrats; its nationalism was typical of the parties of the right; and it did not even have a monopoly on anti-Semitism. However, the National Socialists seemed to offer a degree of dynamism, vitality and action that the other parties lacked. They explicitly identified themselves as the movement of the “front generation”—the men who had taken Germany to
the brink of victory only to be cruelly “stabbed in the back” by Jews, communists and other “November criminals.” And they offered a break with the failures of the Weimar system by harking back to the values that had supposedly made Germany great.

While the depression pushed the struggling and unemployed towards the NSDAP, the National Socialists’ propaganda techniques penetrated areas of German society that had hitherto been out of reach—sporting clubs, churches, businessmen’s associations—and this especially benefited the SS. As the praetorian guard of this new, dynamic movement, aloof from the violence and corruption of the SA rabble, Himmler’s SS cultivated an image of respectability, exclusivity and discipline. This soon proved very attractive to the educated, middle-class Germans who were now being drawn into the party.

The NSDAP’s 1930 election campaign was the first to be centrally coordinated by Josef Goebbels (in accordance with guidelines laid down by Hitler). Goebbels was born in Rheydt, on the edge of the Ruhr district, in 1897 into a lower-middle-class Catholic family. A childhood illness left him with a deformed right foot and lower leg, which meant he was turned down for military service in the First World War. Instead, he studied literature and philosophy at the universities of Bonn, Freiburg, Würzburg and Heidelberg, gaining a Ph.D. in eighteenth-century romantic literature in 1921. He joined the NSDAP in 1924 in response to the French occupation of the Ruhr, and soon gained a reputation as a highly intelligent, charismatic orator. Initially, he was associated with Strasser’s more “socialist” wing of the party, but Hitler recognised his ability in the mid-1920s and soon made him a key ally.