The Himmler's SS Read Online Free PDF Page A

government. On 28 February, less than a month after the assumption of power, the Reichstag building was razed to the ground by fire and the communists were blamed. The next day, Hitler issued a decree ‘For the Protection of People and State’, giving police powers to the SA and SS. Firearms were issued to 25,000 SA and 15,000 SS acting as Hilfspolizei or auxiliary policemen, and left-wing opponents began to be arrested and herded into makeshift prisons and camps. Soon, 27,000 people were being held in protective custody. In March, Himmler became Police President of Munich and opened the first concentration camp, or Konzentrationslager (KL), at Dachau, as a roughly organised labour camp in which to ‘concentrate’ persons who were deemed to be a danger to the state but had not been legally sentenced to prison by a court of law. Other camps were soon established at Sachsenhausen outside Berlin and at Buchenwald near Weimar. Mean-while, a number of company-sized SS detachments were being armed and put on a full-time paid footing, growing to become the Leibstandarte-SS ‘Adolf Hitler’, the Führer’s close bodyguard, and the SS-Verfügungstruppe or SS-VT, barracked troops at the special disposal of the new Nazi régime. Another new branch of SS volunteers, the Wachverbände, was recruited to guard the concentration camps and later became known as the Death’s Head Units, or Totenkopfverbände (SS-TV), because of their distinctive collar insignia.

    â€˜Sepp’ Dietrich in 1930, as Standartenführer and head of the SS in Upper Bavaria. He wears an impressive array of decorations, including the Bavarian Military Merit Cross with Crown and Swords, the Iron Cross 1st and 2nd Classes, the Silesian Eagle and the Tank Battle Badge instituted on 13 July 1921. The latter was awarded to the 100 or so surviving combat veterans of the First World War German Panzer Corps, which in its entirety had comprised a total of only twenty A7V tanks and some captured British armoured vehicles. Dietrich served as an NCO on tank no. 560, codenamed ‘Alter Fritz’, which was blown up the day before the war ended. He wore the Tank Battle Badge with pride throughout his service in the SS.

    Julius Schreck in his capacity as Hitler’s personal SS bodyguard and chauffeur, April 1932. Political uniforms were banned at the time, hence the civilian clothes.

    Hitler on the election trail in the autumn of 1932, accompanied by, from left to right, Julius Schaub, ‘Sepp’ Dietrich and Kurt Daluege.
    While the SS was consolidating its position and controlling its membership and recruitment by a constant purging process, the brown-shirted SA began to throw its weight about noisily. Denied a position in the state to which it felt entitled, the SA talked of a ‘Second Revolution’ which would sweep away the bourgeois in the party and the reactionaries in the Reichswehr. Among the SS, the SA leaders became known as ‘Fleischschnitten’ or ‘beef steaks’, because they were brown on the outside but red on the inside. Röhm, who now commanded a force over forty times the size of the regular army and which included SA cavalry regiments, SA naval battalions and SA air squadrons, demanded the formation of a people’s army in which the SA would simply replace the Reichswehr. Röhm, of course, would be Commander-in-Chief. The army Generals called upon Hitler to intervene and the Führer could not refuse their request. Ever since November 1918, the Reichswehr had been the very incarnation of continuity in the state, which had been maintained despite defeat, revolution and civil war. Hitler knew he would never achieve supreme power without the backing of the military, and so decided that the SA would have to be cut down to size. The danger it posed was just too great – not simply the threat of a putsch but the ever-present disorder created by the very men who should have