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The SS: a New History

GMD	BOOK
Classification	943 WEA
Publisher	Little Brown GBR, 2010
Subject	GermanyGermany - Politics and government - 1933-1945The SSNazi GermanyNazisHitler, Adolf, - 1889 - 1945GestapoAnti-SemitismFascismRacismGenocideMass MurdersTerrorismWar CrimesCrimeHate CrimeHistory / HolocaustHolocaustHolocaust (1939 - 1945)Concentration campsMurderCriminalsEuropean HistoryHistory / Europe / GeneralWorld War II, 1939-1945
Description	The SS was one of the most important institutions of Third Reich Germany, yet it is also among the least well understood. From the end of 1935, the SS had control over all police and internal security duties in Germany and the militarised Waffen SS had more than eight hundred thousand men serving in the field, in direct rivalry with the traditional German armed forces, the Wehrmacht. Making use of material not previously available, this definitive book refocuses attention on and enhances understanding of the hard-nosed political fanatics and opportunists who were responsible for one of the most appalling crimes in human history, the attempted execution of the Jews of Europe. Yet at the same time members of the SS were subverting Nazi racial and foreign policy, associating with the Nazi resistance and even attempting to seek a separate peace with the western allies in direct defiance of Hitler's orders. This thought-provoking new book argues that as the ideological 'engine room' of National Socialism, a study of the SS is the best way of gaining insight into how Nazism would have evolved if Germany had not lost the war. Packed full of the exceptional detail that comes from careful new research, this book will be the book to buy on the SS for a generation.
ISBN	9781408703045
Additional ISBN	1408703041
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Notes

The double initials of the Schutzstaffeln (protection squads) have achieved a unique notoriety in twentieth-century history: the graphical embodiment of Nazi evil. And yet the SS is a poorly understood organisation, the truth of its activities obscured by its sheer complexity, and by its self-made myths and those assigned to it by others. In this new account, Adrian Weale acts as a sure-footed guide in disentangling those myths from the reality.

Although it acted as a bodyguard for Adolf Hitler – as its name suggested – the SS soon expanded into other areas. Under the control of the capable and intensely ambitious Heinrich Himmler it began the process of taking over the police and security services, organising the concentration camp system, developing its own industrial concerns (using slave labour from the camps), becoming an arbiter of race and euthanasia, and playing a key role in the extermination of European Jewry. And, with the onset of war in 1939, its small, military element developed into the Waffen (armed) SS, which by 1944-45 was a vast if largely ramshackle force that rivalled the German Army itself.

The author makes the case that as well as drawing upon the more thuggish types who populated the Nazi cause, the SS attracted well-educated, opportunistic professionals who realised that membership of such an organisation was a quick route to preferment in the new Germany. This, of course, meant embracing Hitler’s warped ideology to the full, although it did not seem to be an insuperable problem for many, as evidenced in Martin Davidson’s recent biography of his German SS dentist grandfather (The Perfect Nazi) who enthusiastically embraced National Socialism and prospered as a result.

As well as describing the origins and development of this multi-tentacled monstrosity, Weale’s informative history also explains its warped, nihilistic ideology, which included Himmler’s ludicrous vision of the SS as the recreation of a chivalric order from a mythical German past. The author has produced a readable and clear account of this most sinister organisation from Germany’s darkest hour.