In late 1919 when protestors tried shouting down Hitler during one of his beer hall speeches, his army friends brutally beat the protesters, and threw them from the building. In early 1920, the ex-soldiers turned beer hall brawlers, armed themselves with truncheons and started calling themselves Schutz Abteilung, or hall protectors. They were a constant presence at Hitler’s rallies, guarding against disruptions, especially by the rough-neck workers comprising two other parties, Social Democrats and Communists. Hall protectors sometimes went on the offensive to disrupt the other parties’ meetings. People were killed. In 1921 after one battle in a Munich beer hall, the hall protectors took the new name, Sturm Abteilung (SA), or storm troopers. They wore brown shirts as though it were a uniform. Always difficult for Hitler to control, the Brown Shirts grew in number. By June 1934 they amounted to between 3 million and 4 1/2 million members. That’s when their leadership was murdered by Hitler’s Protection Squads, the Schutz Staffel or (SS), during the Night of the Long Knives.
The SS started in 1925 with ten hand-picked Brown Shirts sworn only to Hitler. This squad eventually held control of a blood spattered flag called the Blood Banner. SS recruit number 168, a publicity-shy man named Heinrich Himmler, had carried the banner in Munich, during a failed November 1923 Nationalist attempt to take over the War Ministry. This failed Beer Hall putsch resulted in Hitler spending six months in prison, where he was able to write his book, Mein Kampf. Himmler was a gifted organizer, who believed persons of Aryan ancestry were a master race. By 1929, certain that he possessed Himmler’s personal loyalty, Hitler placed Himmler in charge of the SS. He accepted Himmler’s intent to make the SS an elite racially pure organization. Prospective SS members were required to produce evidence of Aryan ancestry going back three generations. The first Protection Squad spawned others in every district of Germany, each with 10 men and one officer. Though smaller in numbers, the SS were more disciplined than SA Brown Shirts. These SS political purpose units of men, 25 to 35 years old, in good physical condition and of sober habits, also swore their personal loyalty to Hitler. As with every SS organization that followed, each SS squad’s flag touched the Blood Banner.
In 1932, Hitler secured an emergency decree that gave both the SA and the SS government police powers. Himmler became head of the Nationalist Party’s police in Munich. The number of SS elite exploded to 30,000. One of these, a former naval officer named Reinhard Heydrich, impressed Himmler enough to be given the job of forming a state security and intelligence service of secret SS spies. This new entity, called the Sichereits Dienst (SD), reached into every part of every German’s personal life. At nearly the same time Prussia’s Minister of Interior, Hermann Goring, took command of the Prussian Police Force and, from its seasoned police officers, formed a secret state police with unlimited arrest powers. He called this new entity the Gestapo. The Gestapo, aided by armed SA and SS, began hunting whomever they considered Communists or sympathizers, and herded them into camps.
Hitler was appointed to be Chancellor of Germany with full powers on January 30,1933, and was welcomed by many Germans as a force against the “secular humanist values of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.” Those are the values underlying our American Revolution, our Declaration of Independence and our U.S. Constitution. The Nazis had already added the word Socialism to the word Nationalism, as spin to attract workers away from the Social Democrats and the Communists. To gain support of self-identified Christians the Nazis lied by advertising themselves as the inheritors, not opponents, of Christian traditions. On February 28, 1933, Hitler issued a “Decree for the Protection of People and State,” which suspended all basic civil liberties. A few days later, as Munich’s Chief of Police, Himmler established Germany’s first Concentration Camp. It’s purpose was to provide “Protective Custody” for political prisoners. This first camp, was constructed by converting an old ammunition factory northeast of Munich near a place called Dachau. That’s where Himmler created the first band of guards called Totenkopf Verbande (TV-SS) or Death’s Head SS. These were trained and indoctrinated to guard people taken into protective custody, not as prisoners, because there was no independent judicial review of the happenings inside the incarceration sites. The incarcerated were stateless, with no human rights to underpin any expectation of being treated with human dignity. Their statelessness was indefinite. The SS exploited for profit the forced labor of these individuals for as long as they could physically survive. A continuous flow of human beings into protective custody was assured by the SD and the Gestapo working together under Heydrich, in his position working for Himmler. Targeted individuals, groups and even entire races were gathered, processed, used and murdered. Rudolph Hess, who later commanded the concentration camp at Auschwitz, found the Death’s Head SS so hate-filled by indoctrination against anyone incarcerated that it “is inconceivable to those outside.”
In 1933 Hitler still wanted to better control the SA Brown Shirts led by Ernst Rohm. Hitler and Rohm were long-time personal acquaintances, each with his own ideas about how to fashion Germany’s future. Rohm, for example, significantly differed by wanting to continue a revolution that would rid Germany of Hitler’s wealthy supporters. Hitler decided to eliminate this festering problem and called for a quiet meeting in the Bavarian Alps. He convinced Rohm and others that in quiet retreat-like surroundings they could have a relaxing heart-to-heart talk. To put all the Brown Shirt leaders more at ease, Hitler suggested they let their paramilitaries and street-fighters return to their homes for a rest. Then, for three nights beginning June 30, 1934, happened a seminal event called The Night Of The Long Knives. By that time the SS, including the Death’s Head SS at Dachau, the Gestapo SS, the SD, and the Allgemeine or General SS, had more than 200,000 in their ranks. Himmler dispatched units of these men across Germany to visit and murder SA Brown Shirt leaders, and various other political opponents. Hitler admitted 77 were killed. Others’ estimates range as high as 1,000. The crime spree confused Germans, so in a July 13, 1934, address to the German Reichtag Hitler gave an explanation which most of the German legislators chose to accept:
“Deputies, Men of the German Reichtag!” Hitler detailed what he called a plot by Captain Rohm, aided by a foreign diplomat whom he did not identify, to usurp the government. Hitler asserted, that in the best interest of the nation, he had ordered a blood purge to save Germany from turmoil. “Only a ferocious and bloody repression could nip the revolt in the bud.” He admitted that he had himself led the attack in Munich, while Goring with his “steel fist” did the same in Berlin. “If someone asks me why we did not use regular courts I would reply: at the moment I was responsible for the German nation; consequently, it was I alone who, during those twenty-four hours, was the Supreme Court of Justice of the German People.” After the audience did considerable standing and saluting, shouting and cheering, he resumed. “I ordered the leaders of the guilty shot. I also ordered the abscesses caused by our internal and external poisons cauterized until the living flesh was burned. I also ordered that any rebel attempting to resist arrest should be killed immediately. The nation must know that its existence cannot be menaced with impunity by anyone, and that anyone who lifts his hand against the State shall die of it.” He acknowledged, “the cost of the purge has been high.” That’s when he probably lied that 77 were killed, including, he said while laughing, “three SS men for mistreating prisoners.” With applause thundering throughout the house, he closed by saying, “I am ready before history to take the responsibility for the twenty-four hours of the bitterest decision of my life, during which fate has again taught me to cling with every thought to the dearest thing we posses, the German people and the German Reich.” With no one left alive with enough public stature and personal courage to oppose the murders, Hitler, with his SS firmly under Himmler, became the Law.
By 1939 the General SS alone had expanded to 240,000 members and was being used for staffing many of the headquarters and support functions for the other complex SS organizations. By 1943 the Gestapo fielded 45,000 men, each wearing a serial numbered warrant medallion giving its bearer unlimited arrest authority. These were aided by 60,000 agents and 100,000 informers. By 1945 the infamous Einsatz Gruppen SS or Action Squads, comprised of personnel from the other SS organizations, were following close behind military combat units during their invasions of other countries. Often aided by local auxiliaries, Action Squads rounded up targeted civilians and murdered them on the spot. Reputable sources suggest that between 15.8 million and 18.7 million non-combat human beings were killed by these sorts of SS unit’s. There was another SS organization taking shape for killing combatants.
Called the Waffen or Armed SS, these military units grew to a million men, but never more than 10 percent of the Wehrmacht’s total strength. The Wehrmacht was the German Army, Navy and Air Force. There were two big differences between volunteers for the Waffen-SS and volunteers for the Wehrmacht. Waffen-SS physical requirements were higher and they included proof of Aryan bloodlines, but Waffen-SS educational requirements were much lower. This made Waffen-SS troops more amenable to indoctrination. Their ideological training left them believing they had destinies as missionaries of a new Aryan Order, which would eventually rule the world. They were trained to obey, regardless of sacrifice required, and convinced the Nazi ideology would reign supreme. Each Waffen-SS soldier swore his personal oath of allegiance to Hitler. Every member was prepared to carry out every order, whether issued by Hitler or by an immediate superior.² Each had impressive determination and courage and disdain for death. Of the Waffen-SS divisions at the end of WWII, ten were armored divisions. Seven of these were SS-Panzer, meaning they were tank heavy, and three were SS-Panzer Grenadier, meaning they were infantry heavy.
The Waffen-SS began growing in 1939 with Germany’s invasion of Poland. They started with no more than a few battalion and regimental-sized units scattered through the Wehrmacht. They proved courageous in battle. A year later, on May 10, 1940, two German Army Groups started their 46-day conquest of Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. Army Group B made a feint into neutral Belgium to draw the British Expeditionary Force and the best-equipped French army units into Belgium for a meeting engagement. This allowed Army Group A, comprised of 45 1/2 divisions, including 7 Panzer divisions, of which by then two were SS-Panzer divisions, to attack out of the Ardennes Forest. They took the same surprise route that later forced The Bulge in American lines, precipitating the savage, no holds barred, Battle of The Bulge. Both times through the Ardennes a huge German surprise force struck around the north end of France¹s stationary Maginot Line fortifications. After crossing the Meuse River into open tank country, Army Group B blasted like lightning to the English Channel, cutting through the rear of the northwards committed Allied forces. At Dunkirk a nearly miraculous evacuation saved 335,000 British Soldiers. Within a few more weeks Hitler finished defeating, or browbeating into allying with him, the whole of non-Russian Europe. Nazis, using the greatest and most successful armed force in History, were extending protective custody. Going east into Russia to gain living space for the Aryan master race, they intended to murder 34 million people with Slavic ancestors. Slavs were already the people on the land, but were among the human beings Nazis considered as an inferior race.
During the 1939-40 time period most Americans paid little heed, or were still trying to make sense out of what they were seeing on the newsreels in movie houses. Straight out of Montana’s Western District, Congressman Jacob Thorkelson was making a national name for himself with his anti-semitic rhetoric and attention-grabbing entries into The Congressional Record. Dr. Thorkelson was a Norwegian Sea Captain, who arrived around Butte after becoming a mail order Medical Doctor. Though he ran as a Republican, he got elected because Democrat Senator Burton K. Wheeler was clashing with President Franklin Roosevelt over several major issues, including possible U.S military involvement in Europe. Wheeler was not happy with some public utterances by the previous incumbent from Western Montana, Congressman Jerry O’Connell. At this time the U.S. had one combat-ready division, 471 aircraft, and 200 tanks.
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