43 Facts About SS

The Allgemeine SS was responsible for enforcing the racial policy of Nazi Germany and general policing, whereas the Waffen-SS consisted of combat units within Nazi Germany's military.

Additional subdivisions of the SS included the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst organizations.

SS was the organization most responsible for the genocidal murder of an estimated 5.

The SS was involved in commercial enterprises and exploited concentration camp inmates as slave labor.

SS wished it to be separate from the "suspect mass" of the party, including the paramilitary Sturmabteilung, which he did not trust.

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Except in the Munich area, the SS was unable to maintain any momentum in its membership numbers, which declined from 1,000 to 280 as the SA continued its rapid growth.

SS considered the SS an elite, ideologically driven National Socialist organization, a "conflation of Teutonic knights, the Jesuits, and Japanese Samurai".

SS expanded the SS to 3,000 members in his first year as its leader.

In 1929, the SS-Hauptamt was expanded and reorganized into five main offices dealing with general administration, personnel, finance, security, and race matters.

The SS grew in size and power due to its exclusive loyalty to Hitler, as opposed to the SA, which was seen as semi-independent and a threat to Hitler's hegemony over the party, mainly because they demanded a "second revolution" beyond the one that brought the Nazi Party to power.

Over time the SS became answerable only to Hitler, a development typical of the organizational structure of the entire Nazi regime, where legal norms were replaced by actions undertaken under the Fuhrerprinzip, where Hitler's will was considered to be above the law.

Commitment to SS ideology was emphasized throughout the recruitment, membership process, and training.

SS ideology included the application of brutality and terror as a solution to military and political problems.

SS established a police state within Nazi Germany, using the secret state police and security forces under Himmler's control to suppress resistance to Hitler.

The SS became an elite corps of the Nazi Party, answerable only to Hitler.

In practice, since the SS answered only to Hitler, the de facto merger of the SS and the police made the police independent of Frick's control.

In September 1939, the authority of the SS expanded further when the senior SS officer in each military district became its chief of police.

Two other SS units composed the inner ring of Hitler's protection.

Later the SS-Begleitkommando was expanded and became known as the Fuhrerbegleitkommando.

The Waffen-SS evolved into a second German army alongside the Wehrmacht and operated in tandem with them, especially with the Heer.

The SS gained control over its own recruitment, logistics, and supply systems for its armed formations at this time.

SS troops did not take part in the thrust through the Ardennes and the river Meuse.

In Greece, the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS encountered resistance from the British Expeditionary Force and Greek Army.

SS was built on a culture of violence, which was exhibited in its most extreme form by the mass murder of civilians and prisoners of war on the Eastern Front.

SS decided that alternate methods of murder should be found, which led to the introduction of gas vans.

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The SS oversaw the collection of the harvest, which was deemed critical to strategic operations.

The SS owned Sudetenquell GmbH, a mineral water producer in Sudetenland.

SS owned experimental farms, bakeries, meat packing plants, leather works, clothing and uniform factories, and small arms factories.

Under the direction of the WVHA, the SS sold camp labor to various factories at a rate of three to six Reichsmarks per prisoner per day.

The SS confiscated and sold the property of concentration camp inmates, confiscated their investment portfolios and their cash, and profited from their dead bodies by selling their hair to make felt and melting down their dental work to obtain gold from the fillings.

The creation of the SS-Hitlerjugend was a sign of Hitler's desperation for more troops, especially ones with unquestioning obedience.

Arthur Nebe was chief of the Kripo, and the two branches of SD were commanded by a series of SS officers, including Otto Ohlendorf and Walter Schellenberg.

The SS-Sonderkommandos enlisted the aid of antisemitic elements from the Hungarian gendarmerie and pro-German administrators from within the Hungarian Interior Ministry.

SS Court Main Office was an internal legal system for conducting investigations, trials, and punishment of the SS and police.

Many of the SS doctors conducted inhumane medical experiments on camp prisoners.

SS-Frauenkorps was an auxiliary reporting and clerical unit, which included the SS-Helferinnenkorps, made up of female volunteers.

SS established its own symbolism, rituals, customs, ranks, and uniforms to set itself apart from other organizations.

The SS developed its own field uniforms, which included reversible smocks and helmet covers printed with camouflage patterns.

The Austrian SS was founded in 1930 and by 1934 was acting as a covert force to bring about the Anschluss with Germany, which occurred in March 1938.

Some SS members were subject to summary execution, torture, and beatings at the hands of freed prisoners, displaced persons, or Allied soldiers.

Piotr Cywinski, the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, estimates that of the 70,000 members of the SS involved in crimes in concentration camps, only about 1,650 to 1,700 were tried after the war.

SS was deported to Germany in 1967 and was sentenced to life in prison in 1970.

British writer Gitta Sereny, who conducted interviews with SS men, considers the story untrue and attributes the escapes to postwar chaos and Hudal's Vatican-based network.