Army of Evil: A History of the SS (11 page)

The SS’s unwavering loyalty during the Stennes faction’s revolt cemented its
de facto
independent role as the party’s police force, even though Hitler had reaffirmed its subordination to the SA as recently as January 1931. In a letter to Daluege, Hitler wrote: “
SS-Mann, Deine Ehre heisst Treue
” (“SS-man, your honour is called loyalty”). Daluege then had the message printed on thank-you cards that were circulated among the Berlin SS on Hitler’s behalf.
¹⁹
The phrase evidently resonated with Himmler, too. He slightly altered it to “
Meine Ehre heisst
Treue
” (“My honour is called loyalty”) and then adopted it as the organisation’s motto. It was subsequently stamped on the SS’s metal belt buckles and various other regalia.

But there were far more important consequences of Stennes’ revolt than the coining of a pithy maxim. The SS had been given the opportunity to consolidate its unique role within the NSDAP, and this would enable Himmler to extend his organisation’s reach throughout the movement and position it for future power struggles within National Socialism. Less welcome for Himmler was Daluege’s continuing meteoric rise. As head of the Berlin SS, he had an independent power base and was now effectively number two in the organisation, even though he had joined less than a year before. Henceforth, Himmler would view Daluege as, at best, a potential rival and, at worst, an enemy.
²⁰

D
ESPITE HIS WORRIES
about his subordinate, Himmler was determined to press ahead with distancing the SS from the SA and building up its power. He decided that one of the best ways to achieve this was by giving the organisation its own distinct ideological framework, which would help to establish it as the elite of the National Socialist movement. To assist him in this endeavour, he turned to an old friend from his days in the Artamanen Society, Richard Walther Darré.

Darré was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1895, the son of a prosperous German businessman. He was educated at private schools in Argentina, Germany and, briefly, Britain, where he attended King’s College School, Wimbledon. He entered the German Colonial School at Witzenhausen in 1914, but completed only one term before volunteering for military service. After a relatively successful war, in which he was commissioned as a reserve officer, he returned to civilian life to study agriculture, specialising in animal breeding.
²¹

During the 1920s, as he continued to study, work in agriculture and participate in the Artamanen Society, he developed a theory that would later prove to be ideal for what Himmler had in mind for the SS.
In effect, he argued that peoples and races are always led by aristocracies, and that “It is an undisputed empirical fact of history that the growth and success of a nation is directly related to the health, both physical and moral, of its nobility.”
²²
He then went on to say that the old German nobility had been corrupted by the decline in “Germanic consciousness,” which was the direct result of the rise of “liberalism” since the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. This liberalism had led to “race defilement, materialism, greed and a disregard for the welfare of society.” Aristocratic selfishness and disinterest in the “collective” had thus led to an overall decline in the
Volk
. To Darré, the solution was simple: Germany needed a new aristocracy. He even suggested where its members could be found: among the Nordic peasant farmers, “the true repository of the Germanic spirit and race.” The peasantry comprised the wellspring of the German nation and had “always formed the only reliable basis for [the German] people from the point of view of the blood.” As a result, the state had a duty to protect and expand this sector of society by promoting settlement schemes and providing incentives to raise the birthrate and curtail the rural drift to urban areas. All of the great empires, in Darré’s view, had been created by men of Nordic blood, but had subsequently decayed because they had succumbed to humanistic ideologies: Freemasonry and Christianity, for example. They had also allowed their blood to become “diluted and impure.” He particularly bemoaned the ongoing process in Eastern Europe, where Germanic blood was becoming increasingly intermingled with “inferior” Jewish and Slavic blood.

All of this provided Himmler with the perfect ideological niche into which he could insert his organisation. It also allowed him to put the SS at the forefront of a mission that was a central plank of National Socialism: the reinvigoration and defence of the Germanic race. To achieve this aim, the SS would have to become both a military and a racial elite.

Bizarre (and indeed repugnant) as Darré’s theories now appear, they were far from radical at the time. Many German nationalists, as
well as innumerable supposedly “progressive” thinkers in other countries, held similar opinions. In large part, this was due to the widespread acceptance of the pseudo-science of eugenics throughout the Western world.
²³
Eugenics fitted the National Socialist worldview perfectly. Although it did not promote the hatred and persecution of other races, many of its proponents were happy to accept a racial ranking system with Germanic, Nordic and Aryan peoples at the top, and Mediterraneans, Slavs, Asians, Jews, Africans and so on much lower down. National Socialist supporters usually believed that such a ranking was virtually self-evident. To their minds, human evolution could be characterised scientifically as the struggle for mastery between various races, and the Germanic race had emerged on top.

Himmler’s SS was wedded to mainstream eugenic thinking within Germany, so many people would have viewed its ideology as “science,” rather than blind prejudice. Furthermore, he could point to his academic background in agronomy to buttress his own credibility on the subject. His plan was to make the SS selective and exclusive on the basis of racial background and characteristics, and ultimately the biological foundation of a renewed German nation. He had little difficulty in gaining support for this project within the National Socialist movement as a whole, as well as in the SS, and this basic idea underpinned many of his subsequent actions.

As a first step, he introduced physical as well as political criteria into SS recruitment. Hitherto, potential SS members had only had to display absolute political loyalty, discipline and obedience, but now that often would not be enough. In a wartime speech, he described how he “went about it like a nursery gardener trying to reproduce a good old strain which has been adulterated and debased; we started from the principles of plant selection and then proceeded, quite unashamedly, to weed out the men whom we did not think we could use for the build up of the SS.”
²⁴
This, like many of Himmler’s later pronouncements on matters of principle, was not entirely true. There was no “weeding out” because the physical criteria were not—at that
time—applied to existing members (if they had been, Himmler would have lost about half his manpower overnight). And they were not even universally enforced among new members: Himmler was always prepared to turn a blind eye to allow politically or socially well-connected individuals to join the SS, no matter what they looked like.

Nevertheless, on the whole, he was serious about his project. In late 1931, he appointed Darré as leader of the SS
Rassenamt
(Race Office) and began to enact measures to turn their ideas into reality. The most important of these was the SS Marriage Law, promulgated by Himmler on 31 December 1931, which read:

In 1932, Darré recruited two friends, Dr. Schultz and Dr. Rechenbach (an anthropologist and an army veterinarian, respectively), into the Race Office. These two men introduced the concept of the “scientific” eugenic racial examiner, who was supposedly able to determine racial origin objectively—through measurement of body parts, eye colour, hair colour and so on. Over the next two years, when there was a massive increase in applications to join the SS, all potential recruits were vetted for these characteristics by racial desk officers—medically trained collaborators and “experts” who also acted as instructors in SS racial ideology. These officers worked to guidelines drawn up by Schultz that meant all candidates (and existing SS members’ proposed spouses) were placed in one of five groups: “pure Nordic”; “predominantly Nordic or Phalic”; harmonious bastard with slight “Alpine, Dinaric or Mediterranean characteristics”; bastards of predominantly East Baltic or Alpine origin; and bastards of extra-European origin. In theory, only those in the first three groups would be allowed to join the SS or marry one of its members.
²⁶

Auslese
(selectivity) thus became the overarching, founding principle of the SS’s ideological framework. As guardian of the National Socialist movement and wellspring for the reinvigoration of the Germanic people, it could proceed only on the basis of having the “correct” racial material. But Himmler added a further five key principles: struggle, honour, loyalty, obedience and
Führerprinzip
(the principle of leadership). The regeneration of the Germanic race would entail a struggle to eliminate “impurities,” but through that struggle each SS man would gain strength and endurance. In some respects, this
was a racist twist on the Marxist doctrine of class struggle. Himmler wrote:

Thus, the SS was explicitly involved in a racial war to cleanse the Germanic race of the Jewish “bacillus,” and obedience was vital to achieve this. Absolute obedience to the will of Hitler—the authoritative interpreter of National Socialism—would guarantee that the movement’s programme would be implemented. In that way the New Order—and consequently freedom for the Germanic people—would be realised.

Complementing struggle and obedience were honour and loyalty. This linked the SS to the romantic ideal of the old German chivalric orders:

The principle of leadership was intended to be a binding force. In
Mein Kampf
, Hitler had articulated it as his reason for rejecting democracy.
²⁹
As far as he was concerned, “The progress of culture and
humanity are not a product of the majority, but rest exclusively on the genius and energy of the personality.” In Hitler’s view, a leader should hold absolute power while bearing absolute responsibility to the people for his decisions and actions. Democracy, based on a principle of equality, meant that rule was inevitably given to “inferiors” who were more interested in maintaining power than in wielding it for the good of the people, which meant that leaders could not be held to account for their actions. It was also “unnatural,” because it eliminated the struggle for supremacy between unequals in which the strong would inevitably come to the fore. Consequently, “inferior” races had inhibited the supremacy of the Germanic people. Hitler believed that absolute authority was the right of a leader who had shown his worth by struggling to the top; it should not be granted (and potentially withdrawn) by the governed in democratic elections.

The SS leadership principle was a refinement of this, with a disciplined, meritocratic hierarchy being formed from the organisation’s racial and political elite. An SS man would thus be able to rise to the limit of his abilities within the hierarchy, but would still recognise his absolute subordination to those whose talents had raised them even higher. Ultimately, of course, they would always remain subordinate to Hitler—the
Führer
—himself.

For the most part, National Socialism’s “enemies” had already been identified by Hitler: Jews, Marxists, democrats, liberals, capitalists, the bourgeoisie, Freemasons, internationalists and homosexuals. The SS was quite explicit in adding the Roman Catholic Church to this list. But there were secret enemies too—ostensible National Socialists who were subverting the movement from within. The SS had to be prepared to strike them down. They had already done so in the case of Stennes and his supporters, but soon their attacks on the “enemy within” would become much more comprehensive.