Concept in Definition ABC

The SS (acronym for Schutzstaffel, "Protection squad" in German) were born in 1925 as a group of volunteers to protect Adolf Hitler and senior officials of the NSDAP, and were evolving, hand in hand with Heinrich Himmler (who enlisted in 1925 and became its boss in 1929) until it became a kind of state parallel.

In this process, the armed branch of the SS, the so-called Waffen SS (In German, "SS combat or armed", which does not mean that the other branches are not as well).

The Waffen SS were the military branch of the SS organization, a true army with infantry or armored units, which fought in the different fronts during World War II, and which became infamous both for their ferocity in combat, and for the numerous crimes committed.

The loyalty of the SS towards Hitler, demonstrated with the Night of the long knives of 1934, next to the distrust that the German Chancellor felt towards the commanders of the army, led him to seek to create a structure different from that of the army, although it did not replace it due to the impossibility of doing so in the moment.

Anyway, the plan of the hierarchy Nazi was going through to get rid of the army and that its function happened to be carried out exclusively by the Waffen SS.

As part of the SS, the members who recruited the Waffen SS swore direct allegiance to Hitler, and not to the German homeland, in this way the Nazi hierarchs ensured the fanatical obedience of this Body.

The friction with the army was inevitable from the beginning; the military did not trust militarized elements who, despite having former members of the armed forces, were mostly unprofessional (and, in some cases, fully into amateurism), and they were also highly fanatized.

Such fanaticism, in combat, was shown as a double-edged sword, dangerous to enemies because of its combativeness, but also taking a lot of casualties from his overly thrown attacks and defense to outrage.

Some military commanders came to appreciate the quality of these troops, although in other cases they were reviled as war criminals. And indeed, as Nazi fanatics, the Waffen SS's record is littered with war and anti-war crimes. humanity, as the vestiges of the French town of Oradour-sur-Glane, devastated by the division Das Reich of the Waffen SS.

It must be understood that the Waffen SS were a world apart but interrelated with the army.

Thus, they had their own structure of discipline, alien to that of the army, and its own rank system, although the latter could be homologated to its equivalents of the Heer, the ground army.

In the Waffen SS there were infantry, mechanized infantry, and armored troops, never having had a navy or force aerial.

The first formally constituted unit of the Waffen SS was the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, in 1933, and which depended directly on the führer.

Their leader, SS General Josef Sepp Dietrich was a fanatic Nazi who was charged with war crimes, but who managed to evade the death sentence. Likewise, the unit he led, the Leibstandarte, became infamous for her crimes committed on the eastern and western fronts.

The baptism of fire in combat of the Leibstandarte and the Waffen SS was the Polish campaign of September 1939, despite the fact that previously had participated in the occupations of Austria and the Sudetenland (something that we cannot categorize as baptism of fire, since they did not enter combat).

In this campaign also fought other regiments united later to form the second SS division Das Reich, in addition to other units that would participate, from 1939, in all theaters of operations in which the Reich troops fought.

Although originally, both the SS and its branch of combat only admitted Germans or proven Aryans (the procedure of recruitment was very strict), the needs of the war - especially in its final stretch - led to this premise being relaxed totally.

Thus, for example, and in addition to having divisions made up of Scandinavian soldiers (Nordland), Latvian (Lettische numbers 1 and 2), or Dutch (Nederland), whose members were regarded by the Nazis as racially similar to Aryans, or full Aryans right, the Waffen SS also included members of ethnic groups that the National Socialists considered as "inferior".

Among these divisions, we find the Handschar and the Skanderbeg, of Yugoslav Muslims and Albanians, or the Galizische of Ukrainian volunteers (and therefore Slavs, considered an "inferior race" by the Nazis).

With this, we can see that pragmatism and logic of the war he imposed on the purity of ideals among the Nazi ranks, by accepting human beings whom they considered as inferior and not as equals among his elite troops.

After Hitler's assassination attempt in 1944, and planned by army commanders, the German dictator's confidence in the armed establishment plummeted.

This led to various measures that favored the Waffen SS such as that, for example, most of the foreign divisions that fought with the Wehrmacht were transferred under your authority, and that new divisions would be recruited from this corps instead of for the Heer.

With the end of the war and the German defeat, the SS was declared a criminal and illegal organization.

Many of the former Waffen SS commanders were hunted down to pay for their war crimes, in some cases they were hunted down, and in others they managed to escape.

Photos: Fotolia - M-SUR / Grigory Bruev

Themes in Waffen SS