Himmler’s SS Knights: Who Were They? Part 1

*Note: Quotes, statistics and graphs in this piece are taken from Herbert F Ziegler’s work Nazi Germany’s New Aristocracy: The SS leadership, 1925-1939, published in 1989.*

Everyone has heard of the SS. Everyone knows what the SS looks like. If asked about them, most people would probably say they were the elite ‘Nazi’ soldiers and the ‘evil ones’ who ran the camps. This is, of course, partly true; they did run the camps and they were the most powerful organization in the Reich. But very few, even those sympathetic to National Socialism, know exactly what kind of people were recruited into Himmler’s legions–other than maybe ‘the best people’ (truth).

Before digging into the data, it is important to understand what an SS man was meant to be. He was more than just a ‘super-soldier’ Navy Seal for the military. An SS leader was meant to be a political soldier, ‘a Kampfer (warrior or fighter) who was engaged in an eternal struggle for existence’. For the SS, the war didn’t begin in 1939. It wasn’t confined to a battlefield or fought solely with arms. Their theatre of war was the entire world and their battle ground was Life itself. The SS officer was to be the complete Aryan man; equal parts leader, scholar, and warrior. Guardians of the Volk, who took an oath of loyalty unto death for their Fuhrer.

Himmler’s SS organization was to fulfill their mission through a three-step process;

First [the SS] would serve as the implement responsible for the establishment of the Greater Reich as a political fact…Second, the SS would embark on the task of bringing back in to the racial fold all the racially valuable Germanic peoples of Europe. Finally, the SS would assume the role of a vanguard, indeed a model community, in which the Greater Germanic Empire was already realized in some measure. As one historian put it, the SS was ‘at one and the same time both means to another end, and also the ends which is realized in the means.’

The SS was National Socialism—in its purest form. So, who had the privilege of joining this vanguard? The SS was meant to be a new kind of elite—a racial elite. Recruits were drawn from the entire society, provided they met the strict hereditary, physical and ideological standards. The elite of NS Germany was to be popular [volkish] and meritocratic. Age, title, money and formal education were no longer barriers to entry as they were for the old traditional German elite. Despite this new openness, patterns did emerge as some segments of the German popualiton were more likely to be recruited into the Order than others. I will address these factors from the least significant to the most.

Geography

Though the SS drew fighters from across Europe during the war, it was initially made up entirely of Germans. Recruitment drew equally among the many regions of Germany; the number of southern Germans to northern Germans mirrored their respective populations in the Reich. However, Austrians and German who lived in the eastern Europe as minorities where somewhat over-represented.

The urban/rural divide is most striking; only 25% of recruits came from rural areas (towns with less than 2k people), at a time when over 40% of Germans lived in the country. Most came from the cities–large cities in particular.

Religion

Most SS men were not Christian, but rather claimed the title of “God-Beliver”. Among the leader of the SS this trend was even more pronounced; more than 75% didn’t belong to a church. This is unsurprising considering the open hostility that Himmler had to the church and the religion as a whole. Himmler viewed all of Christianity and the priest hood as nothing but an indecent union, with the majority of its priesthood constituting ‘an erotic homosexual league of men’ whose only purpose was to create and maintain a ‘twenty-thousand-year-old Bolshevism’.

However, Himmler also opposed atheism, as he perceived it to be a selfish and anti-social viewpoint. Recruits had to accept the concept of a higher power, a power that had created this world and endowed it with the laws of struggle and selection that guaranteed the continued existence of nature and the natural order of things. By promoting this “God Believer” option he was able to square the circle so to speak; God (or Fate) could stay and the anti-Christian orientation of the SS could be justified as a struggle against the clergy as an institution rather than against acceptable religiosity of people in general.

This position also lined up with his emergent belief in the old Germanic god Wotan, which the SS would gradually move towards; the SS more than any other formation of the third Reich tried to replace traditional Christianity with neo-paganism.

Looking at specific denominations, the Catholics were unrepresented among SS leaders. As a group, Catholics had always been more hostile to National Socialism than Protestants, perhaps due to the more ‘international’ nature of their church. The Roman Church also had more of a stranglehold on its German adherents than the Protestant churches did at that time (Protestants were considered ‘less religious).

look forward to part 2 later this week

From series: Part two and Part three