by Bill Yenne
Once there had been the day when Heinrich Himmler had looked up at Captain Ernst Röhm and seen a powerful warrior, a man to be admired. Over time, as Himmler’s own star in the NSDAP and within the Reich spiraled upward, the infatuation flickered and faded, resettling on a new Führer—the Führer. Nevertheless, Himmler had continued to believe that the SS and the SA could coexist. As Himmler himself described it, “The SA is the infantry of the line, the SS the Guards. There has always been a guard; the Persians had one, the Greeks, Caesar and Napoleon, Frederick the Great, right up to the world war; the SS will be the imperial guard of the new Germany.”
By the beginning of 1934, however, Röhm’s pretensions of grandeur were making coexistence impossible. Göring understood it as well. Indeed, part of the back-room deal that he cut in order to hand control of the Gestapo to Himmler was the latter’s agreement to coexist with Röhm no longer. A clandestine plot to oust Röhm emerged. It was not merely a scheme involving more political maneuvering; it was an assassination plot. The conspirators included Göring and his inner circle allied with Himmler and his.
Röhm’s own outspoken arrogance made it easy to convince the führer that Röhm was planning a putsch against Hitler himself. Though this was not literally true, it was not a stretch for Hitler to believe such a thing. Viktor Lutze, an SA officer loyal to Hitler, had been whispering in the Führer’s ear about the derogatory things that Röhm was saying about him personally.
With Reinhard Heydrich and his SD playing the key role in operational planning, the scheme called for the simultaneous elimination of most of the SA hierarchy. Target lists were compiled by Himmler, Göring, and Heydrich, and then cross-checked with meticulous detail. It was a plan that was ambitious as it was sinister, and even Hitler was initially apprehensive at the thought of crossing the large and powerful SA.
On June 30, 1934, the operation code named Kolibri (Hummingbird) swung into action. Röhm and much of the key SA leadership had previously been summoned to the hotel Hanselbauer at Bad Wiessee, a spa resort located on the Tegernsee, south of Munich. Hitler himself, accompanied by Goebbels, led a large contingent of SS to the hotel to arrest Röhm and the others. Other raids were conducted simultaneously throughout Germany. Secret orders were given, and SS death squads, especially the men of the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, plied their trade with brutality and efficiency. The deliberate and ruthless carnage was called the Nacht der Langen Messer (Night of the Long Knives).
For those not killed in the raids that night, summary executions followed. The death toll included around eighty prominent SA leaders, as well as many other perceived enemies of Hitler’s hopes and dreams. Some estimates put the total number in the hundreds. Taken to Stadelheim Prison in Munich, Ernst Röhm was given an opportunity to commit suicide. He refused and was shot on Hitler’s orders on July 2. The next day, Hitler’s cabinet promulgated a decree giving retroactive legal sanction to the bloodshed, proclaiming that these measures had been necessary to suppress a treasonous assault on the sovereignty of the Reich. The proclamation was signed by Reichskanzler Hitler himself.
In the aftermath, Hitler installed Viktor Lutze to head the SA. Thereafter, it declined greatly in membership and even more steeply in prestige. The SA never again threatened Hitler, the Nazi Party, or the primacy of the SS as the paramount elite warrior caste within the Third Reich.
During 1933, thanks to the ballot box, Adolf Hitler had finally achieved the power he craved. In 1934, thanks to everything that came to a head on the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler’s power was secure and unthreatened from within.
Thanks also the Night of the Long Knives, Heinrich Himmler, the man whom Heinrich Hossbach called Hitler’s “evil spirit,” now wielded power, mainly still unseen, that assured him his place as the second most powerful man in the Third Reich.
A dramatic display of uniformed German troops at the 1937 Reichsparteitag rally at the massive Luitpoldhain amphitheater in Nuremberg. U.S. National Archives
As the Night of the Long Knives faded to black, the Nazis entered an era in which their power was celebrated in a night of an entirely different sort. Thanks to the award-winning documentary filmed just three months later by Leni Riefenstahl, an enduring image of the pagan splendor of the Third Reich entered and remained part of the lasting visual legacy of the civilization Hitler created for Germany. Riefenstahl’s movie, Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), considered one of the most effective propaganda films, documents the second of the annual Reichsparteitag, or mass rallies, that were held at the massive Luitpoldhain amphitheater in Nuremberg between 1933 and 1938, and prior to those years on a smaller scale in other cities.
The sight of more than a half million uniformed Germans, marching by torchlight beneath massive swastika banners to the sounds of stirring martial music and Hitler’s hocus-pocus speeches, was a dramatic signal to the world that the Third Reich had arrived—and that the world was best advised to watch out.
CHAPTER 7
Black Knights of the Master Race
FAR FROM UNSEEN, the Black Knights of Himmler’s Schutzstaffel now became as he had imagined them: the stern face of the new Germany, marching beneath their banners at Nuremberg, the sinister, flickering light of the torches playing upon their hard faces and their polished black leather. With their roots in the murky past of Germanic lore, they were like Armanen princelings or the warriors of the Nibelungenlied, suddenly reborn to a new calling.
The Night of the Long Knives turned out to be an extraordinary SS recruiting tool, in that it removed the SA as a rival to the SS in the minds of potential volunteers. Among those who flocked to the SS were the upper crust and nobility of the old elite of Imperial German society. Among them was Josias Waldeck, the hereditary prince of Waldeck and Pyrmont, a nephew of Wilhelm of Württemberg, cousin of Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands and of Charles Edward, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, who was related to the British royal family. As an enthusiastic SS man, Waldeck rose quickly to the rank of Oberturmbannführer and later to general.
Young blonde men with the obligatory duelling scars on their cheeks and “vons” in their Nordic family names flocked to the SS as their fathers had to the best regiments of the old guard. Indeed, the stark flags with their runic heraldry and the stern and stirring martial music that accompanied SS rituals were reminiscent of the bygone days of knightly pomp. So too, of course, were the striking uniforms, solid black from cap to jackboot, with their runes and death’s heads.
The cap and dagger of the SS officer, emblazoned with winged Hakenkreuz and the Totenkopf. The latter had the dual symbolism of striking fear into enemies and affirming that the SS man would rather die than submit to his enemies. Many did. Photo by Kris Simoens, used by permission
The uniforms were designed by Walther Heck, the graphic designer that had come up with the runic SS logo, and Dr. Karl Diebitsch, an SS Oberführer at the time. Diebitsch had earlier taken a top ribbon at the 1938 Nazi art show at the Haus der Deutschen Kunst (House of German Art) in Munich with a painting celebrating heroic Germanic motherhood. Diebitsch was also the designer of much of the regalia that the SS used, including the dagger and chained scabbard that each SS man wore as part of his dress uniform to underscore the warrior image that Himmler craved in his Black Knights.
The uniforms themselves, nearly a million of them, were manufactured from 1933 through 1945, mainly at the textile factory in Metzingen owned by a man named Hugo Boss, who had joined the NSDAP in 1931. Boss died in 1948, and the company evolved into a respected manufacturer of very high-end apparel later in the twentieth century. The company’s past SS involvement was forgotten—even within the company itself—until a Nazi-era Swiss bank account in Hugo Boss’s name turned up in 1997. According to an article in the New York Times of August 15, 1997, “Before Hugo Boss AG became known for classic men’s suits and flashy ties, the clothing manufacturer made uniforms for the Nazis.”
“We are trying to get a handle on the situation,” Boss spokeswo
man Monika Steilen told the paper. “This is a very new theme for us. We have nothing in our archives.”
Boss suits were flashy even in the 1930s and 1940s. For the Völkisch romantics, and to the nationalist on the street that yearned for the lost glories of another age, the SS men in black were a thrilling sight. For those who didn’t fall within the strict parameters of Ariosophic doctrine, they would prove to be a nightmare.
In fact, many who had yearned to be part of the SS world felt the sting of disappointment when they discovered that they themselves didn’t fall within the strict parameters of Ariosophic doctrine. Once Himmler had been strict about membership requirements, but now he could afford to actually purge the SS of those who did not meet his increasingly exacting standards. Of course, these precepts were not so much a man’s IQ or the number of pushups that he could do, but the Aryan purity of the blood in his veins and his Nordic appearance. Had DNA testing existed in the 1930s, Himmler would have used it.
Himmler was at last in a position to exercise all of his notions of race and blood. Just as the nineteenth-century ethnocentrists had decided that Aryans were the superior race and, therefore, the master race, Himmler, like Hitler, could now proclaim that the Aryan race had the divine right—and duty—to “master” the inferior races. The knights of the SS would be bred as the vehicle of that mastery.
As Hitler was forming his government, Ricardo Walther Oscar “Richard” Darré reappeared on the scene. The author of the narrowly influential Peasantry as the Life-Source of the Nordic Race, who had spent the Nazi power-grabbing years organizing farm folk on behalf of the party, was brought to Berlin as the new Reichsminister of Food and Agriculture. His Blut und Boden (blood and soil) philosophy had gotten Himmler’s attention earlier, and Darré would now be instrumental in crafting racial policies for the SS. Splitting his time between his ministry and Himmler’s office, he helped come up with the specific criteria for guaranteeing Aryan credentials.
In the absence of the airtight credentials of DNA, the SS now required that an applicant prove that his family tree contained neither Slavs nor Jews back to 1800. If one wanted to be considered as an SS officer, this proof had to be pushed back a couple of generations to 1750. The full genealogical chart was kept in a document called a Sippenbuch, a kinship or clan book, not unlike the sort of stud book that owners keep for racehorses. At one point, under the Sippenbuch rules, a non-SS man who’d had a Jewish ancestor in 1711 was forbidden to marry the daughter of an SS officer. Any drop of tainted blood kept a man out or was grounds for expulsion if he had somehow slipped into the SS.
The SS leadership, decked out in their black uniforms and Totenkopf caps. Heinrich Himmler is in the center of the front row, with glasses and mustache. The tall man to his right is Kurt Daluege. At the far right of the front row is SS Gruppenführer Josef “Sepp” Dietrich, who headed the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, the Führer’s bodyguard detail. Author’s collection
Die SS Ausleseprinzip (The SS Selection Principle)
by Heinrich Himmler, 1943
We [the SS Order] are the result of the law of the selection. We have been selected from among our people. The [Germanic] people are the culmination of fate and history developed from long ago, from primeval times, through many generations and centuries. Over these years, other peoples have evolved, and their genetic make-up sidetracked. The other bloodlines have led into ours, but our people have nevertheless succeeded, despite most terrible challenges, and most terrible strokes of fate, because of the strength of our bloodline. With this, the whole people with Nordic-Germanic blood is held together, so that one could still speak of a German people. From this people, with variously mixed hereditary factors, we consciously select those with the Nordic, Germanic blood, since we can assume this blood to be the carrier of the life-supporting characteristics of our people.
We partly used outside appearance [in the SS selection process], and have continued to examine this appearance always through new means, always through new samples, physically and mentally. We selected again and again, and discarded those who were not suitable, which did not fit us. In addition, for a long time we have sought strength, so for the health of our Order.
We are obligated, whenever we meet, to deliberate on our principles of blood, selection, and hardness. The law of nature is evenly this: That which is hard, which is strong, is good.
Gentlemen, from you, the German people expect tremendous hardness.
(Translated from material in the collection of the United States National Archives in College Park, Maryland)
While Himmler specifically did not give extra consideration to the aristocrats, those with “vons” in their Nordic names, most such men were from families that passed the pedigree test. Eventually, between 10 and 20 percent of SS officers with ranks equivalent to generals were from the nobility. Then, too, such families were able and willing to contribute significantly to SS fundraising events. Himmler, the Aryan idealist, was a realist when it came to turning blue bloods into Black Knights when there was money involved.
From a membership of around 3,000 in 1930 and 50,000 in 1932, the SS grew to over 240,000 by 1939, not counting the Gestapo and a complex web of other police agencies that were under SS control.
Among these other agencies were the regular police, the Ordnungspolizei (Order Police), the national police force that superseded the formerly independent police forces of the individual lander. Though they were part of Wilhelm Frick’s Interior Ministry, the Ordnungspolizei, like the Gestapo, answered to Himmler’s chain of command. Also in Himmler’s chain of command were the Kriminalpolizei, or criminal investigation police, and the Sicherheitspolizei, or Security Police.
Together with the Gestapo, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the Kriminalpolizei, and the Sicherheitspolizei comprised the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA, or Reich Main Security Office). Commanded by Himmler and managed by Heydrich, the RSHA was the coordinated security apparatus designed to protect the Third Reich from all threats, foreign or domestic, real or imagined. (At this time, Heydrich also became the head of Interpol, the International Criminal Police Organization. Originally founded in 1928, this well-known entity still exists and is now the second largest intergovernmental organization in the world after the United Nations.)
As the Geheime Staatspolizei was known as the Gestapo for short, the Ordnungspolizei, Kriminalpolizei, and Sicherheitspolizei were known respectively as Orpo, Kripo, and Sipo. As such, they sound almost comical, like a gaggle of missing Marx brothers. However, there was nothing amusing about these organizations or the work they did in keeping Hitler’s subjects from becoming enemies of the state.
Often characterized as an SS inside the SS, Heydrich’s sinister SD fiefdom kept tabs on potential threats to the NSDAP and its leadership from whatever source—even from within the party itself. In this role, Heydrich and his faithful counterintel man, Walther Schellenberg, maintained a vast network of over 50,000 spies, counterspies, and snitches. These rats infested every corner and every level of the elaborate NSDAP and Reich government hierarchy. Schellenberg was an attorney who joined the Nazi Party and the SS in 1933.
Heydrich was one of the Third Reich’s most cunning characters. His ruthless methods would earn him the name “Hangman of Europe.” Even the SS feared Heydrich. His own protege, Schellenberg, described him as a man with “a cruel, brave and cold intelligence” for whom “truth and goodness had no intrinsic meaning.” Though a firm believer in the Ariosophy doctrine of the Nazi Party, Heydrich payed but lip service to the cult of adoration that most of its elite felt toward the Führer. Heinz Höhne writes in The Order of the Death’s Head: The Story of Hitler’s SS, “Heydrich obviously had none of that blind faith in Hitler which was the elixir of life to Himmler, the stimulant enabling the small-timer to grow to supernatural size.”
Young and Aryan, an SS man gazes away from the camera, as if toward future glory—or an ancient magnificence of which he fancies himself an inheritor. Note the Totenkopf insignia
on his collar. Author’s collection
A colorful story of SD intrigue that is often retold is that of Salon Kitty. A high-class Berlin whorehouse that catered to the domestic and international political and diplomatic elite, it was taken over and operated by the SD. This house of pleasure was like any other, but with a microphone in every room. The secrets whispered by ministers and ambassadors while in flagrante at Salon Kitty all wound up in transcription on Heydrich’s desk. The microphones worked 24/7—except of course when Heydrich or Schellenberg made a personal “inspection tour.”
Heydrich’s marriage to Lina von Osten, quite an attractive woman in her own right, never stopped the Obergruppenführer from stepping out and about. He was a bit like contemporary celebrities who, though married to beautiful women, cannot control their addictive hunger for call girls and cocktail waitresses. Lina, meanwhile, used Reinhard’s position to usurp power for herself on the Berlin social scene.
The dossiers that Heydrich kept on everyone in Germany made him the third most feared man in the Third Reich—after his boss and his boss’s boss, the Reichsführer and the Führer.
Heydrich’s dalliances notwithstanding, within the SS, there was a code of conduct analogous to that of a religious order. There were vows to be made and holy days to be kept sacred. There were rituals to attend, oaths to repeat, and chants to be recited. It was as though the Völkisch solstice rituals of the Guido von List Gesellschaft or Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels’s New Templars were reborn for thousands of acolytes instead of mere dozens.
Like any growing organization, the SS had its own inhouse magazine. Known as Das Schwarze Corps (The Black Corps), the SS house organ was edited by Gunter D’Alquen, an eager young former staffer on the NSDAP rag, the Völkischer Beobachter; the SS weekly began publication in March 1935. During the first two years, circulation mushroomed from 40,000 to nearly 190,000, and SS membership grew. As it was required reading for an organization whose members did what was required, Das Schwarze Corps was eventually selling between one-half and three-quarters of a million copies every week. Editorially, Das Schwarze Corps obviously toed the party line, with articles glorifying the Völkisch and decrying all the sinister faults that the Nazis found in the Jews. The paper also closely served the SD. D’Alquen dutifully published scandalous gossip about supposedly upstanding Germans that was “leaked” to the paper by the SD. This gossip served to keep potential enemies of the state off balance and in line.