Waffen-SS Read online

  Once out of the asylum, Eicke went from strength to strength. He put the camp on a sound footing, replacing corrupt and incompetent guards with more capable men dedicated to the Nazi cause. There was no letup in the camp’s brutal discipline, but with Eicke at the helm the application of violence was orderly rather than arbitrary. The poor unfortunates in Dachau may have seen little or no amelioration in their suffering, but Himmler was impressed with Eicke’s skills in prison management.

  Rudolf Hoess, who subsequently achieved infamy as the commandant of Auschwitz, worked alongside Eicke at the time. He described Eicke’s methods: “The prisoners were sworn enemies of the state, who were treated with great severity and destroyed if they showed resistance. He installed this attitude of mind into his officers and men.” Eicke issued this stark warning to his guards: “Behind the wire lurks the enemy, watching everything you do, so he can he use your weaknesses for his own advantage. Anyone who displays the slightest sympathy with these enemies of the state must vanish from our ranks. My SS men must be tough and ready for all eventualities, and there is no room among us for weaklings.”9

  Himmler encouraged Eicke to develop the methods achieved in Dachau as a template for other concentration camps now under construction. Himmler agreed with Eicke that the camp guards should be more than simple turnkeys; they were to receive military training and take their place on the front line against the state’s enemies outside the confines of the camps. According to camp regulations, they were to adopt a military bearing at all times: “A guard who shelters from the rain becomes a figure of fun and does not behave like a soldier. The SS man must show pride and dignity.”10 During 1934 the first Totenkopf units were raised to become a constituent part of the armed SS.

  AS HITLER CONSOLIDATED his position during 1934, he faced a growing problem with the SA and its leader, Ernst Röhm. The storm troopers of the SA had acted as the vanguard in Hitler’s rise to power, but now that Hitler had achieved this goal their role was largely redundant. With around 3 million members, many in the SA believed that the National Socialist revolution they had fought for had failed them. As they saw it, Hitler was making deals with industrialists, the army, and other sections of the German establishment at the expense of the SA foot soldiers, many still unemployed or in the most menial of occupations.

  In attempting to find a new role for his followers, Röhm loudly and persistently argued that the German Army should be integrated into the SA as a “People’s Army”—under his command. The army was unsurprisingly horrified at the prospect of losing its vaunted position to an ill-disciplined rabble and repeatedly petitioned Hitler to restrain Röhm’s demands. Although suspicious of the army, Hitler needed it to back his future foreign-policy ambitions, and, encouraged by Himmler and Hermann Göring, he decided to eliminate Röhm and the SA leadership. The SS was chosen for the operation, to be conducted with the utmost secrecy.11

  During the last week of June 1934, the SS made preparations to destroy its rival. Reinhard Heydrich—head of the SS Security Service—drew up bogus legal charges against Röhm, while Dietrich’s Leibstandarte was entrusted to take the lead in apprehending and killing the chosen SA victims. Röhm and several senior SA officers were known to be vacationing in the Alpine resort of Bad Wiessee, to the south of Munich. On 29 June Hitler ordered Dietrich to send two companies of Leibstandarte to arrest the SA men. While the Leibstandarte contingent traveled by train from Berlin to Munich, Dietrich rendezvoused with Hitler to await his direct orders.

  On the evening of the twenty-ninth, a visibly strained Hitler took matters into his own hands. He flew to Munich in a Ju-52 and then with a few personal bodyguards drove to Bad Wiessee. It was a potentially rash move, as the Leibstandarte soldiers had yet to arrive. Hitler’s entourage could easily have been overcome by Röhm’s own guards, but Hitler was determined to deal with the matter without delay.

  Hitler and his bodyguards arrived at Röhm’s hotel at 6:30 A.M. and took the SA men completely by surprise. Offering no resistance, they were arrested and taken to Munich’s Stadelheim prison. Röhm was kept in custody, while Hitler instructed Dietrich to have six of the SA leaders shot without delay. As Hitler returned to Berlin, Dietrich reluctantly assembled a firing squad from the waiting Leibstandarte. It was a difficult assignment, especially as he knew some of the condemned men as old comrades in the struggle for power. By the evening, however, the order had been carried out.

  Hitler’s own bonds of friendship with Röhm caused him qualms, and it was only on the following day, after promptings from Göring and Himmler, that he gave the order for the execution. Theodor Eicke was personally chosen to carry out the killing, although Hitler insisted that Röhm should be given a prior opportunity to commit suicide. Eicke, along with SS aides Michael Lippert and Heinrich Schmauser, drove the short distance from Dachau to Stadelheim. On entering Röhm’s cell, Eicke exclaimed, “You have forfeited your life! The Führer gives you a last chance to avoid the consequences.”12 Eicke then placed a revolver on the prison-cell table and before leaving the cell told Röhm that he had ten minutes to make good on Hitler’s offer. After waiting for a quarter of an hour without hearing any sound from the cell, Eicke and Lippert marched in and shot Röhm at point-blank range.

  While the operation in Bavaria was underway, the order for action in Berlin was issued. As well as the arrest of SA leaders, old scores were settled, with both armed SS and Gestapo prominent in a series of gangster-style killings. These included Hitler’s old enemy Gregor Strasser (leader of the left-wing faction of the Nazi Party), conservative anti-Nazi politicians such as former chancellor Kurt von Schleicher, and Gustav von Kahr, the man who had suppressed the Munich Beer Hall Putsch.

  In Dietrich’s absence, Sturmbannführer Martin Kohlroser was responsible for assembling the execution squads in the regiment’s Lichterfelde barracks. How many were killed in the purge was never revealed. A minimum number of eighty-three murders was recorded, but the figure was possibly several times higher.

  Concerned by potential criticism from home and abroad, Nazi leaders covered their tracks: official records were destroyed, and those involved were sworn to secrecy. The Nazi-dominated German cabinet gave a spurious legal cover to the killings: to “suppress treasonable activities . . . taken in emergency defense of the state.” At a speech delivered to senior SS officers in 1943, Himmler declared: “We did not hesitate on June 30, 1934, to do the duty we were bidden and stand comrades who had lapsed up against the wall and shoot them. We have never discussed it among ourselves. It appalled everyone, and yet everyone was certain that if it is necessary and such orders are issued, we will do it again.”13

  What would be called the “Night of the Long Knives” marked the end of the SA’s involvement in German political life. Röhm was replaced by Victor Lutz, who owed his position to Hitler and was persuaded to accept the new settlement. The army congratulated Hitler for removing the SA threat and extended thanks to the SS for carrying out the dirty work in the purge. The SS was the clear winner in this affair, and with the SA in the background it was now the prime arbiter of violence in Nazi Germany. The SS had demonstrated both unquestioning obedience and efficiency in carrying out the Führer’s orders. A grateful Hitler declared it to be a completely independent organization within the Nazi Party and agreed to its immediate expansion.

  Hitler rewarded Dietrich by promoting him to Obergruppenführer, with Himmler awarding him one of his most coveted ceremonial daggers. That Eicke had been chosen by Hitler to carry out the difficult task of killing Röhm reflected his faith in the man, who was promoted to the rank of Gruppenführer. He was also appointed as inspector of concentration camps and leader of SS guard formations. The SS was now the coming force in Nazi Germany.

  Chapter 2

  CREATING AN ELITE

  THE DESTRUCTION OF the SA leadership on the Night of the Long Knives cleared the way for the expansion of the SS-Verfügungstruppe (SS-VT). Yet Himmler faced a quandary: Who would train these men to th
e standards necessary for a genuine elite? Dietrich and Eicke were hardened street fighters, but if the armed SS was to become an effective force, Himmler would need men with greater military knowledge. Inevitably, if somewhat reluctantly, he turned to former officers from the German Army.

  In November 1934 Himmler persuaded Paul Hausser, a recently retired army lieutenant general, to take command of the SS-VT. The lean, long-faced Hausser was a career officer, far removed from the likes of Dietrich and Eicke. Born into a Prussian military family, Hausser had entered the German General Staff in 1912, taking up various staff appointments on both Western and Eastern Fronts during World War I. After the war he had continued to serve in the new Reichswehr until retirement in 1932, when he joined the right-wing nationalist ex-soldiers association Stahlhelm. Hausser’s career had been solid if unspectacular, but his steady hand and detailed military knowledge were exactly what Himmler required.

  At the start of 1935 Hausser founded the SS Junkerschule (officer cadet school) at Braunschweig. He also developed the curriculum for the other cadet school at Bad Tölz in Bavaria. Hausser was no military radical, however, stating that “the SS force must be formed on the well-tried training regulations of the Reichswehr.”1

  Himmler accepted the necessity of his soldiers receiving sound military training, but he also had more ambitious aims, as he explained in an address to SS officers in January 1935: “Never forget that we have far greater tasks to perform than just to be troops. We are a volk, a tribe, clan, community, a knighthood from which one cannot resign, into which one has been accepted on the basis of blood, and within which we remain with body and soul as long as we walk the earth.”2

  Himmler’s musing on the SS and race would have meant relatively little to Hausser, who primarily saw himself as a military technician, a trainer and leader of frontline soldiers. He looked around for a suitable staff, attracting a small group of gifted officers who included such future luminaries as Felix Steiner, Matthias Kleinheisterkamp, and Wilhelm Bittrich. They would establish a training regime that would become the foundation for the wartime Waffen-SS.

  These officers, brought up in the Kaiser’s Imperial Army and forged as soldiers in the trenches of World War I, were military professionals to the core. They were also keen supporters of the Nazi regime, even if they possessed limited understanding of the finer points of its ideology. They certainly found it difficult to embrace Himmler’s own vision for the SS as a modern-day order of Teutonic Knights. From the outset they demonstrated surprisingly casual attitudes to SS rules and regulations, which included their use of army ranks instead of the prescribed SS system, their refusal to formally renounce religious affiliations, as well as an often barely concealed disregard for the Reichsführer himself. Himmler, however, was sufficiently in their debt to overlook such shortcomings.

  As for the lower ranks of the armed SS, Himmler had no difficulty in attracting recruits. Very much in the vanguard of the Nazi movement, the armed SS acquired a glamorous aura, priding itself on its separateness from the other armed forces in Germany. The smart black uniforms of Leibstandarte SS “Adolf Hitler,” complete with polished white leather accouterments, caught the eye of many a German schoolboy.3 On a practical level, following the introduction of conscription in 1935, enlistment in the SS-VT (including Leibstandarte) counted as the fulfillment of universal military service.

  Unlike the Wehrmacht—the combined armed forces of army, navy, and air force—the armed SS was a volunteer organization that set its own criteria for selection. Himmler decreed that he only wanted men with a confirmed Aryan pedigree and a high level of physical fitness. In Leibstandarte, with its ceremonial guard duties under constant public scrutiny, a minimum height was set at 180cm (5′11″)—later raised to 184cm (6′½″)—with well-chiseled Aryan features considered an asset. Racial purity for all volunteers was essential, proved by appropriate marriage and birth certificates dating back to at least the year 1800 (1750 for officers). This was followed by a visual assessment of the potential recruit. The tester—apparently an expert in divining racial characteristics—employed a five-point scale that ranged from the very acceptable “purely Nordic” down to the ominous “suspicion of extra-European blood mixtures.”4

  If the recruit had the appropriate racial ancestry, Himmler argued, then he would also display the correct political outlook. Membership in the Nazi Party was by no means essential but nonetheless demonstrated dedication to the cause. More important was to bar those who had erred through membership in communist or left-wing organizations, as well as former Freemasons or members of the clergy. In the main, however, recruits came naturally from such suitable organizations as the Allgemeine-SS, the Hitler Youth, the Reich Labor Service, and the SA. This helped make the ideological transition from civilian to SS soldier a relatively seamless process.

  Himmler placed little store in educational qualifications, once again believing in race as the ultimate determinant of ability, military or otherwise. This belief extended to SS officer recruitment, so that in contrast to the army the right social or educational background counted for little. Until 1938 some 40 percent of officer candidates possessed only a basic education without any formal academic qualifications.5 This had the advantage of opening up the officer corps to a wider social group, allowing such rough diamonds as Kurt Meyer to flourish in a way impossible in the more socially stratified army. Yet this otherwise enlightened approach was subsequently to fail in the rigorous test of combat, with far too many cadets unable to master the technical aspects of military command. From 1940 onward, more stringent educational qualifications were introduced.

  Whatever the selection criteria chosen for entry into the officer cadet schools at Bad Tölz and Braunschweig, the recruit was immediately made aware that he was part of an elite institution whose aim was to produce a vanguard of political soldiers for the Nazi cause. The move of the Bad Tölz cadet school to Bavaria in October 1937 underlined Himmler’s commitment to the armed SS. The finely proportioned, castle-like main building was set at the foot of the Bavarian Alps, a suitably Wagnerian setting with peaks rising to 6,000 feet in the background.

  No expense was spared in providing the finest facilities for the officer cadets, with an Olympic-size indoor swimming pool, a large athletics field that included an electric scoreboard, and a 400-seat theater with a descending film screen. Servants were supplied by inmates from the nearby Dachau concentration camp, quartered in cells underneath the barracks.6 New arrivals would typically have served for two years as an enlisted soldier within the SS. They would then spend the next ten months undergoing an intense ideological and military education.

  Postwar apologists for the Waffen-SS—notably Hausser and Steiner—made a point of downplaying the ideological aspects of the cadet training programs. Initially, political indoctrination was carried out by specialists from the SS Schulungsamt (education office). They instructed their charges in the fundamental tenets of National Socialism, concentrating on what they saw as the multiple evils of Judaism, Bolshevism, Christianity, and Western liberalism, and the violent struggle to be waged by the German people to overcome these evils, before establishing their rightful supremacy over Europe. But the instruction was heavy-handed, boring the students and irritating the military trainers.

  From 1936 onward, instruction in ideological matters began to be reassigned to the unit commanders. They displayed a lighter touch that was welcomed by the students, helping develop their already authoritarian beliefs toward a more structured Nazi worldview. Indeed, formal lectures played a relatively small part in the ideological conditioning of the SS officer cadet; more important was the largely unnoticed socialization of the recruit through shared experience, adroitly shaped by Nazism from childhood onward.

  Military training was based squarely on the model established by the Army War College in Munich. Much has been made of the uniqueness of the Waffen-SS approach to war, but the differences between army and SS were confined to specific areas and were large
ly matters of degree. It could hardly have been otherwise, as most SS instructors were former army officers. And it would have been perverse to have rejected the existing system out of hand, given that it produced Europe’s best-trained armed forces.

  SS officer training emphasized an aggressive “can-do” approach, with the more academic or theoretical subjects that might be studied at West Point or Sandhurst discounted in favor of straightforward problem-solving exercises. Sports and physical exercise played a larger part in the officer’s development than was customary in the Wehrmacht. As well as the traditional track and field sports, the cadet was encouraged to engage in horse riding, sailing, skiing, fencing, boxing, and swimming. This was not only to improve physical fitness but also to encourage teamwork among the cadets.

  During the war, new cadet schools were established to meet increased demand, so that by 1945 more than 15,000 men had graduated as Waffen-SS officers. While the higher ranks were staffed by older officers originally commissioned into the army, the graduates from the cadet schools would provide the vital core of field-officer leadership throughout war.

  THE BASIC TRAINING of the ordinary soldier followed the pattern set in the officer cadet schools, physical fitness being central to the program. The distinctions that existed between officers, noncommissioned officers (NCOs), and enlisted men in the German Army had little place in the armed SS. All ranks played sports together to encourage both competition and comradeship, and, most significantly, they ate at the same communal tables. Differences in rank were deemed as meritocratic rather than class based, with the lowliest recruit made aware of the SS as a career open to talent. Indicative of this approach was the way an SS man addressed a superior: instead of the traditional “sir,” he called him by his rank and name.