SS (Schutzstaffel)

Full Description

The Schutzstaffel (Protection Squadron) began as Hitler’s personal bodyguard and became the most powerful organisation in the Nazi state. Under Heinrich Himmler, the SS controlled the concentration camp system, ran the Gestapo, commanded the Waffen-SS military units, and administered the occupied eastern territories. The SS embodied the racial state in its most extreme form — it was the institution primarily responsible for the systematic murder of Jews and other groups during the Holocaust.

Critical Perspective

The SS was not a rogue agency acting outside the state — it *was* the state in its most radical form. Historian Christopher Browning’s work on the perpetrators of the Holocaust shows that SS members were not uniquely sadistic but largely ordinary men who had been systematically brutalised by an ideological culture that defined mass murder as duty.