Original subtitles

[THEME MUSIC]

ROD FOUST: Bavarian politics of the early 1920s were

a particularly violent subculture of the larger German

political scene and revolved around meetings

in Munich's famous beer halls.

Fueled by strong beer and fiery rhetoric,

bloody street fights between rival groups were common.

The Nazi party was in the thick of this maelstrom.

To take the fight to his Communist rivals, in 1921,

Hitler organized a party militia dubbed the Sturmabteilung,

literally "storm detachment," or SA.

It was under the command of a former army captain, Ernst Röhm.

Soon nicknamed the Brownshirts because

of their distinctive uniforms, SA stormtroopers

were in the thick of riots and other trouble.

Hitler also moved to set up a new ultra-loyal paramilitary

group that would have the job of protecting him

and other senior Nazi leaders.

Since many SA members were former freikorps,

he needed men who would give him unquestioning loyalty.

In March 1923, he set up the Stabswache

or "headquarters guard," which initially

consisted of just two men.

Within weeks, this group was reorganized as the Stosstrupp,

or "shock troop," Adolf Hitler.

The group's distinctive black uniforms soon became a feature

of Nazi party meetings.

And its members were always ready to do

their master's bidding.

At this point, Hitler's bodyguards never numbered

more than a few dozen men.

By early November 1923, Hitler was

convinced that the Weimar Republic

was on the verge of collapse.

And he declared that the Nazi party

was to lead a march on Berlin to overthrow Germany's government

of Jewish Marxist traders.

The first stage of the Nazi revolution

would take place in Munich, where Hitler and the SA

planned to depose the Bavarian state government

and win over local army units to their cause.

After a rabble-rousing speech in a beer hall from their leader,

Hitler's supporters spread out through the city

with the intention of seizing key buildings.

This resulted in the coup d'état attempt being

dubbed the Beer Hall Putsch.

The small Stosstrupp Adolf Hitler

was given the task of ransacking the offices

of the Social Democratic Munich Post newspaper.

In the meantime, Hitler and the main column of Nazis

headed for the Bavarian War Ministry building.

Unfortunately for Hitler, he had misjudged the mood

of the country, which was now starting to recover

from the post-war chaos.

The army soldiers outside the ministry stood their ground

and opened fire on the Nazi plotters.

Some 16 Nazis were killed in the confusion

and Hitler dislocated his shoulder as he dived for cover.

The putsch ended in fiasco.

Hitler and several other plotters were arrested.

But during the 13 months he served of his five-year sentence

in Landsberg Prison for conspiracy to commit treason,

Hitler's bodyguard was disbanded.

The period of imprisonment did nothing to dampen

Hitler's quest for power.

Rather, he emerged from jail with a long-term plan

to achieve his aims.

Germany was now a more prosperous and stable place,

so Hitler's apocalyptic vision of future struggles

had to be tempered.

He now talked about using legal methods to gain power

and tried to portray himself as a normal

constitutional politician.

[PATRIOTIC MUSIC]

Hitler was still convinced that his opponents,

both within and outside the Nazi party,

would try to kill him if they had the opportunity.

On his release from prison, he moved quickly

to re-establish his bodyguard.

[PATRIOTIC MUSIC]

In April 1925, only eight men were in the group

that was soon renamed the Schutzstaffel

or "protection squad."

This title was quickly abbreviated to SS,

creating the infamous name.

Because of their distinctive black uniforms,

they were soon nicknamed the Black Guard or Black Order.

Their uniforms were adorned with the letters SS, stylized

as distinctive Nordic runes.

For the next four years, the SS was

a small, elite group of bodyguards that traveled

with Hitler wherever he went.

They were initially volunteers who did their security work

in the evenings or on weekends.

Only a small number of the 300 or so SS men

were full time and on the Nazi party payroll.

As Hitler moved to establish the Nazi party as a national body

outside of his Bavarian power base, the SS was expanded

and small detachments were set up in every major German city

to protect local leaders and party meetings.

The SS was deliberately kept small so its total loyalty

to Hitler could be assured.

Already, Hitler was growing suspicious of Röhm and the SA

because their hotheaded behavior was threatening

his attempts to rebrand the Nazi party as

a respectable political force.

In January 1929, Hitler appointed a chicken farmer,

Heinrich Himmler, as head of the SS

with the blessing to build it up as a force to rival the SA.

Even though the SS was nominally part of Röhm's force,

Himmler was totally loyal to Hitler

and threw himself into expanding his new fiefdom.

Over the next four years, he expanded the SS to some 52,000

men, which not only included bodyguards but also a covert

secret intelligence organization called

the Sicherheitsdienst, translated as the "security

service" or SD.

Loyalty to Hitler was at the core of the SS ethos.

The expanded SS organization was essentially

a shadow internal security apparatus,

which would help the Nazis gain and keep power in Germany.

Events across the Atlantic soon intervened

to change the fortunes of Hitler and his Nazi party.

The Wall Street stock market crash of October and November

1929 rapidly sent ripples of economic crisis

around the world.

Germany's fragile recovery was stopped in its tracks.

Millions were soon unemployed, and the value

of Germany's currency went through the floor.

There were 1.6 million unemployed in October 1929.

By February 1932, this figure had increased to 6.12 million.

The Great Depression gave Hitler the chance he was looking for.

And again, he portrayed himself as Germany's new messiah.

From having only 12 seats in the Reichstag--

the German parliament-- in 1928, the Nazis

managed to win 107 seats and 6 million

votes in the 1930 election.

Over the next three years, as Germany's economic crisis

worsened, the Nazi party's vote increased, as did the votes

going to the communists.

Squeezed from left and right, the center parties

found themselves unable to form governments

without the support of either of the political extremes.

Governments lasted only a few months,

preventing the implementation of the necessary measures

to restore the economy.

Germany's democracy was locked into a spiral of

economic and political decline.

By the middle of 1932, the Nazis were the largest

party in the Reichstag.

Even though they did not have the necessary majority of seats

to allow them to form a government,

they held the balance of power.

And Hitler was now a key power broker.

For six months, Germany was in political turmoil

as the aging president, Paul Von Hindenburg,

tried to form a government that excluded Hitler.

The former field marshal despised Hitler because

of his lowly Austrian birth.

In January 1933, Hindenburg bowed

to the inevitable and appointed Hitler as Germany's chancellor.

Hitler was the leader of a coalition

with other right-wing parties, which represented

big business interests.

[PATRIOTIC MUSIC]

Over the next year, Hitler moved systematically to consolidate

his grip on power and eventually appointed

himself Germany's Führer with unlimited dictatorial powers.

The SS played a key role in this move to dictatorship.

Once in control of the levers of political power,

Hitler moved to put his loyal lieutenants into key positions

of influence.

Himmler was made police chief in Munich.

The SS was also authorized to act

as an official police unit alongside established state

police forces.

Money from the interior ministry budget

was diverted to pay for the SS expansion.

Now, many of the part time SS men could become full time

employees of the German state.

SS units around the country were established

on a permanent basis, with battalions

or political readiness squads being

set up in every major city for so-called heavy police tasks.

These were, in effect, paramilitary squads

which owed their loyalty directly to Hitler.

The SA organization, by the end of 1933,

had mushroomed to 3 million men, and Hitler was looking for ways

to bring it under his control.

A crucial development was the setting up in Berlin

in March 1933 of a new elite grouping within the SS

under the command of one of Hitler's

old henchmen from Munich.

Josef Sepp Dietrich was an old party crony of Hitler

whom he trusted implicitly.

The new group was initially only 120 men strong

and was dubbed the SS-Stabswache Berlin.

Its job was to guard Hitler and his official residence

in the Reich chancellery.

In September 1933, it became the SS

Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler or "SS Bodyguard

Regiment Adolf Hitler."

And in November that year, members of this new life guard

swore an oath of loyalty unto death to their new Führer.

Under the leadership of Dietrich,

the Leibstandarte would later rise to be Germany's

Premier Armored Division.

However, in its early days, the unit

would gain infamy for its role in one of Hitler's

first extralegal acts as he moved

to establish his dictatorship.

[TENSE MUSIC]

By June 1934, Hitler had outwitted most political

opponents, banned all parties except for the Nazis,

and placed his supporters in key positions

in the German government.

The SA remained the last bastion of potential opposition

to Hitler, and he was soon to neutralize this threat.

He had decided to remove the socialist elements

from the party.

Hitler carefully concocted a bogus coup plot involving

Röhm and other SA leaders.

Orders were issued for the plotters to be arrested.

The Leibstandarte and SS units provided

the force for the operation.

Hitler himself led the raid in Munich

that caught Röhm and several of his key lieutenants.

Sepp Dietrich then oversaw their execution in Stadelheim Prison

by a Leibstandarte firing squad.

A rising SS star, Theodore Eicke,

the inspector of concentration camps,

shot Röhm after he refused to commit suicide.

In Berlin, other SS units arrested some 150 SA leaders.

They were then shot, four at a time,

by a Leibstandarte firing squad in Berlin's

Lichterfelde Barracks.

The total number of people killed in the so-called "blood

purge" or "Night of the Long Knives" is still unclear,

but it was probably nearly 200.

Most were SA cronies of Röhm, but some were leading

political opponents of Hitler such as General

Kurt Von Schleicher, the last chancellor

of the Weimar Republic.

The audacious nature of the killings

and the lack of response from Hindenburg

confirmed Hitler's place as the supreme political power

in Germany.

Within weeks, the president was dead

and Hitler assumed the powers of his office.

He declared himself to be the German Führer.

He then forced army officers to take an oath of loyalty

to him rather than to the German constitution.

Hitler removed the SS from control of the SA

as a reward for their loyalty during the blood purge.

Himmler's SS became an independent organization.

During the next two years, Himmler

proved himself an archetypal Nazi baron,

expanding his organization and personal power.

Hitler made great efforts to keep his subordinates squabbling

among themselves by setting up rival power

structures that ensured they had to come

to him to broker disputes.

So even though Himmler was nominally boss of the SS,

it was, in turn, broken up into competing fiefdoms.

The first major reorganization of the SS occurred in March 1935

when Hitler formally announced the establishment

of the first armed SS units.

The term Waffen-SS--

Waffen is translated as "armed"--

would not come into widespread usage until early 1940.

The description of these units had to be carefully packaged.

This was done not to upset the army generals.

They had been promised a year earlier that the Wehrmacht would

be Germany's sole arms bearer.

This was in return for their support

during the blood purge against the SA.

The armed SS units were used for special internal tasks

allotted by the Führer.

The SS was described as a militarized force

ready for police action within the Reich boundaries

when dissident forces are too strong for the normal security

services.

The armed SS was initially termed the SS-Verfügungstruppe

or SS-VT.

These so-called special disposal troops

included all the old heavy police

units that were grouped into three regiments or standarten.

Himmler was keen to provide the new SS-VT with the best training

and weapons, so he persuaded a number of ambitious army

officers to transfer to the new force

to provide a corps of professional officers.

The most famous of these was Paul Hausser, who was appointed

the commander of the SS-VT.

In 1936, he was given a headquarters

staff, dubbed the SS-VT Inspectorate,

to coordinate the growth of the military arm of the SS.

Hausser was also in charge of the first SS officer cadet

or "junker" school at Bad Tölz, which

was set up in 1935 to train a new type of SS officer.

Bad Tölz and a second Junkerschule at Braunschweig

turned out a generation of aggressive officers

that would rise to command the SS armored divisions

during World War II.

At the same time as the SS-VT was set up,

Himmler also established a rival branch,

eventually dubbed the SS-Totenkopfverbande,

SS-TV, or "death's head unit."

This branch was the responsibility

of the head of the concentration camp guard force, Eicke,

who set up the first of these infamous camps

at Dachau outside Munich in 1933.

By early 1938, in addition to guarding a string of prison

camps around Germany which held thousands of inmates

in poor conditions, the SS-TV mustered

three regiments of fully motorized troops

equipped with light weapons.

The Oberbayern regiment was based at Dachau in Bavaria.

The Brandenburg regiment operated

from Oranienburg concentration camp outside Berlin.

And the Thüringen regiment ran the Buchenwald camp near Weimar.

It was intended that they would reinforce the SS-VT troops

in times of crisis.

But this arrangement also allowed

Himmler and Hitler to pit rival SS officers against each other.

Eicke was a brutal thug who showed

no pity toward the inmates of his camps.

He indoctrinated his men to believe

they were responsible for imprisoning

Germany's most dangerous enemies and instructed

them to show no mercy.

The most minor infringements of his camp rules

were to be dealt with by severe beatings

and other forms of torture.

This period also saw Himmler move

to spread the tentacles of the SS

into every sphere of German life.

In June 1936, Hitler designated Himmler

as head of the unified German police system

as well as head or reichsführer of the SS

and chief of the secret police, the infamous Geheime

Staatspolizei or Gestapo.

[TENSE MUSIC]

In this capacity, the SS became responsible

for all the apparatus of the Nazi police state.

Its members were now the masters of terror in Hitler's Germany.

By 1939, all the security police organizations of Hitler's Third

Reich were brought under the control

of Himmler's loyal henchman, Reinhard Heydrich,

via the Reich central security office.

This included the SD, the Gestapo,

the ordinary criminal police, and security police.

Heydrich epitomized the Nazi police state.

He was ambitious, ruthless, and totally loyal to Hitler.

As well as its armed and security branches,

the SS also eventually boasted unusual organizations

such as the SS Marriage Bureau.

This was known as the Central Office for Race

and Resettlement, which had the responsibility

of confirming the racial purity of the brides of SS men.

There was also the German Racial Assistance Office,

which was charged with protecting

the well-being of ethnic Germans living outside the borders

of the Reich.

These groups then helped in the establishment of the Reich

Office for the Consolidation of the German Nationhood, which

was nominally responsible for the movement of ethnic Germans

back into Reich territory.

But it was really a cover for the deportation and eventual

extermination of Jews, Slavs, and other

groups considered untermenschen or "subhumans" by Hitler.

It finally spawned the SS Economic and Administrative

Central Office, which was in charge

of the concentration camp system and the "Final Solution"

of the Jewish problem.

The leaders of these organizations

developed bland euphemisms for the mass murder

of most of Europe's Jews.

By the end of the 1930s, the SS organization had ballooned

to some 200,000 men, of whom the vast majorities were in its

police, security, and concentration camp guard

units rather than in the SS-VT.

During this period, the SS became central to Hitler's folk

myth, with senior figures in the organization

being portrayed as Nordic gods in Nazi propaganda.

The racial purity of SS recruits was given great prominence,

and Hitler tried to build on this as a way

to indoctrinate the German people with his theories

of racial superiority.

[TENSE MUSIC]

The SS also had its own rank system that gave members

prestige and power over ordinary mortals

in the army, the Nazi party, and in civilian branches

of government.

The growth of the armed SS during

the later years of the 1930s was one of slow evolution.

Much of the groundwork for the development of the armed SS

was undertaken in great secrecy to allow

the opposition of the army high command

to be bypassed or ignored.

Hitler was still unwilling to stage an open confrontation

with the army's generals and preferred to dispose

of problematic commanders in a series of dirty tricks

operations to discredit individuals who opposed him.

The early development of the armed SS

was characterized by a series of deals

with the army high command.

[OMINOUS MUSIC]

In May 1935, joining the armed SS

was classified as military service

and it exempted the SS recruit from being

conscripted into the army.

At the same time, however, the army

retained control of the flow of new manpower into the SS-VT.

And during most of the 1930s, that

effectively limited it to a total of fewer than 10,000 men.

The army also retained control of military aspects

of SS training and had the right to inspect SS-VT units.

To get around these restrictions,

Himmler allowed the Totenkopfverbande

to mushroom into a force of some 25,000 men by 1939.

He groomed the concentration camp guard to become almost

a ghost reserve for the SS-VT.

He stretched its role as a force for special tasks of a police

nature to the limit.

Because it had no formal military role,

the army could not claim any right

to interfere in its affairs.

Totenkopfverbande units were fully

motorized, had heavy machine guns, and other light weapons.

Plans were drawn up so SS police reservists aged over 45

could be quickly mobilized to guard the concentration camps.

This released the Totenkopfverbande motorized

regiments for combat duties.

While on paper, Eicke's private army

seemed a powerful and heavily-armed force, in reality,

it did not undertake intense combat training.

It was nowhere near the quality of the mainstream

armed units of the SS-VT.

During the invasion of Poland and France,

for example, its lack of military skills

would become very apparent.

Over the next three years, a tug of war

took place as the army tried to strangle the SS-VT at birth.

The effort was to little avail as the growth of the elite force

had the personal backing of Hitler.

In 1938, he issued instructions codifying the role of the SS-VT.

It was to be a permanent armed force at his disposal

and a formation of the Nazi party

recruited and trained in ideological and political

matters by the reichsführer SS in accordance

with directives given by Hitler.

In case of an emergency, it was to be

used by the commander-in-chief of the army

within the framework of the army,

subject to military law and instruction.

Politically, though, the armed SS

was to remain part of the Nazi party

even if army commanders had operational control

in the field.

Ultimately, Hitler envisioned the armed SS

as being an armed state police that

was to enforce the authority of the Reich

in the interior of the country.

He declared that this duty can only be carried out by a state

police containing, within its ranks,

men of the best German blood and identified unquestionably

with the ideology upon which the greater German Reich is founded.

Only a formation constituted upon these lines

will be able to resist subversive influences

in times of crisis.

After the setting up of the SS-VT unit,

a frantic effort began to train the new formations

in military skills.

While they were already drilled in the use of small arms,

they were lacking in expertise in military tactics. .

Hitler insisted that the new force be fully motorized,

in line with his view that his elite troops had to have

the best equipment available.

To speed up the process of training,

each armed SS unit was twinned with a local army unit

to allow it to share experience and conduct joint training.

Relations between the two organizations

were frosty at first, but improved as armed SS and army

units participated in joint operations

during the reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936

and the union with Austria in 1938.

The armed SS, however, retained control over the selection

of its recruits, their ideological training,

and their transformation into true Aryan warriors,

soldiers who would be the vanguard of national socialism.

Hitler saw his SS troops as Aryan supermen

who would lead the racial struggle with the untermenschen.

"To judge morality properly, it must be replaced by two concepts

borrowed from zoology--

the taming of a beast and the breeding of a species,"

wrote Hitler.

"The SS man must be hard, unemotional, fiercely loyal.

The SS man's basic attitude must be that

of a fighter for fighting sake.

He must be unquestionably obedient

and become emotionally hard.

He must have contempt for all racial inferiors

and for those who do not belong to the order.

He must feel the strongest bonds of comradeship

with those who do belong, particularly

his fellow soldiers.

And he must think nothing impossible."

Loyalty to Hitler was at the heart of the SS code,

with the force having the motto, "Loyalty is my honor."

Leibstandarte chief Dietrich told new SS recruits, "We

ask for and give complete loyalty to the Führer and those

he has set above us.

To you recruits, I say even the smallest wish expressed by one

of your non-commissioned officers must be interpreted

as an order from the Führer."

To mold these supermen, the armed SS training regime

emphasized physical toughness and moral supremacy

over all enemies.

Even before recruits were allowed to begin training,

they had to pass rigorous racial and physical selection.

Himmler insisted that potential SS soldiers

had to be aged between 17 and 22,

be at least 5 feet 9 inches tall,

and be of the highest physical fitness.

Every SS man had to be of a well-proportioned

build, with no disproportion between the lower leg and thigh

or between the legs and body, to allow an exceptional load

to be carried on long marches.

The Aryan recruit also had to show no traces of Jewish

or other untermenschen blood in his ancestry--

in the case of ordinary soldiers,

back to 1800, and to 1750 for officers.

Those with undesirable blood were refused entry.

And if racial impurities came to light during his service,

an SS man could be summarily dismissed.

The future brides of SS men were also subjected

to the same level of racial profiling

to ensure any offspring were pure Aryans.

With the strength of the armed SS also limited by the army,

these restrictions meant that it was

very hard to join the armed force of the Nazi party.

However, such was the mystique built up around the armed SS

that every place was oversubscribed,

which helped to build its image as an elite force.

Unlike army conscripts, ordinary enlisted SS men

had to serve a minimum of four years,

non-commissioned officers 12 years, and officers 25 years.

Senior armed SS Commanders wanted their men

to be supple, adaptable soldiers, athletic of bearing,

capable of more than average endurance on the march

and in combat, and to be as much at home on the battlefield as

on the athletic field.

Recruits were roused from their beds at 0600 hours each morning.

They were subjected to extensive physical training

to toughen them up so that, eventually, they

could run almost two miles in 20 minutes wearing full combat kit.

Extra physical training was put on the schedule

during bad weather to harden up the recruits.

Later in the morning, recruits underwent training with

their weapons on firing ranges.

Afternoons were spent on sports and athletics

to help build up recruits' stamina and team spirit.

Military skills had a high priority, so drill and parades

were heavily emphasized during the training of SS recruits,

especially for potential Leibstandarte men who had

to parade in public in Berlin.

The final ingredient of SS training

was ideological indoctrination.

This was to ensure that recruits were fully prepared

to be foot soldiers in the coming war for racial supremacy

against the untermenschen.

As training progressed, recruits underwent increasingly

sophisticated training, including fire and maneuver

training with live ammunition.

This taught them how to assault enemy strongpoints using

the aggressive stormtrooper tactics perfected in

the later years of World War I.

The SS put great emphasis on the selection

and training of its officers.

Although the first generation of senior SS men,

such as Dietrich and Eicke, were old hands from the Nazi party's

street fighting days, it was recognized

that a more professional officer corps

was needed to turn the armed SS into an elite fighting force.

The recruitment of professional staff officers, such as Hausser,

to set up the SS-VT inspectorate helped

improve the quality of the armed SS's higher echelons.

There was still, however, a big skills gap at the junior

and middle ranking level.

Only SS men who had served two years in the ranks

were accepted for officer training.

This meant they were already highly trained before they

attended either of the Junkerschules

at Bad Tölz or Braunschweig.

Potential SS officers were put through an incredibly rigorous

training regime, which included far more extensive

use of live ammunition in training

than for ordinary SS recruits.

The results were impressive.

The training turned out highly aggressive and self-confident

young officers who soon proved themselves

in the early blitzkrieg campaigns of the war.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[MUSIC PLAYING]