Army of Evil: A History of the SS (6 page)

However, soon the organisation had to look beyond Hitler’s existing inner circle for its recruits, and personnel records give an indication of the type of person who was favoured. A typical example was Robert Bednarek,
²⁴
who joined the SS on 20 May 1925 and was given membership number 467. Born in 1899 in Gleiwitz, Silesia, Bednarek completed just one year of secondary school and then served as an infantryman from May 1917 to August 1919. He was never promoted to NCO rank. After demobilisation, he joined a local Free Corps—the
Jägerschar von Heydebreck
—with whom he served for two years before moving into a succession of low-paid, unskilled jobs. Like many Germans, he had received no professional training before or after his military service, so he turned his hand to whatever work he could find: he was a bus conductor when he joined the SS. It is difficult to tell what motivated him to join the organisation, but political zealotry seems unlikely, as he did not join the party for another year. Most likely he was simply led into it by a former army or Free Corps comrade, but he probably shared the opinions of thousands of other right-wing paramilitaries: their politics were shaped by an ignorant resentment of the German state in the post-war era; and, on a personal level, they missed the discipline and the certainties of military life. Although one of its longest-serving members, Bednarek—who eventually became an SS officer—was expelled from the organisation in 1939 because of persistent drunkenness.

In later years, SS leaders liked to cite the Raiding Squad Adolf Hitler as its precursor, and certainly some of its earliest members had previously been in that group, but in reality the SS was something new. The Raiding Squad, like the SA, was a combat group, designed to be in the vanguard in a National Socialist revolution. The SS’s full title indicates that it was conceived for a totally different purpose.

Hitler had his first serious breach with Röhm in April 1925. By then, it was clear that Röhm did not want to reorganise the SA on Hitler’s terms, while Hitler would not support the continuation of Röhm’s alliance of right-wing militias as an independent organisation. In a conversation between the two men on the 16th, Hitler made his feelings clear to Röhm,
²⁵
and the next day Röhm resigned as leader of both the alliance and the SA. Soon afterwards, he got a job as a military adviser to the government of Bolivia and left Germany. Although the SA remained intact under new leadership, Schreck seized the opportunity to bolster his new, rival organisation.

Hitler wanted the SS to abandon the pseudo-military structure of the SA. Instead, he proposed that each local party group should form a squad of about ten men, drawn from its most reliable elements, to protect the local leadership and their meetings, and reinforce the party leaders’ escort whenever they visited. This was formalised in a circular issued by Schreck on 21 September 1925 to all “
Gau
*
leaderships and independent local groups,”
²⁶
which outlined the guidelines under which leaders of the squads, labelled
Schutzstaffeln
, were to operate. The key was controllability: “the protection squads were not to become muddled up with the SA”; names of proposed leaders were to be approved by the central leadership of the squads; and membership application forms and membership cards were available only from the central leadership. Subscriptions were set at one mark per month (soon reduced to fifty pfennigs), which were to be forwarded promptly to the central leadership. Uniform items—initially a brown, SA-type shirt, a black kepi with a skull-and-crossbones badge and an imperial cockade, and a black necktie—were to be obtained from the SS’s headquarters in Munich.

There was not an overwhelming rush to join the new squads, but this is hardly surprising, as so many other paramilitary and combat
groups were already associated with the NSDAP. It seems that local party members simply did not understand the need for the protection squads. Koehl points out that, by the time of Schreck’s circular, the Hamburg NSDAP was using teenagers from the nationalist
Blücherbund
group; Berlin was employing members of Röhm’s alliance; Cuxhaven was using the
Stahlhelm
nationalist war veterans’ group; while the Ruhr had created its own SA under a former Free Corps commander, Franz Pfeffer von Salomon.
²⁷
All of these were ill-disciplined mobs of bouncers and brawlers from the ranks of the SA, Free Corps and other trouble-making groups, who might very well attract the attention of regional and national authorities. That was specifically what Hitler and his immediate circle wanted to avoid—hence the need to put their personal security in the hands of a tight-knit, well-led, disciplined new organisation.

The SS was officially founded—or at least proclaimed as an organisation of the NSDAP—on 9 November 1925, the second anniversary of the
Putsch
. But there was certainly some form of SS administration several months before this date. Schreck’s file lists him as joining on 1 November,
²⁸
but, as we have seen, Bednarek’s dates his enrolment to May (and presumably 466 men had joined before him). More remarkably, Ulrich Graf supposedly signed up on “1.1.25.”
²⁹
This early membership—some months before the SS was even mooted—is doubtless the result of some sort of creative backdating, but it should not disguise the fact that Schreck wasted no time in implementing Hitler’s orders, and that local groups had begun to organise their protection squads long before his formal directives were issued.

The SS leadership was “directed to take over the ‘Hall Control’ for the [party anniversary meeting] on 25 February 1926,”
³⁰
but it is indicative of the somewhat ad hoc nature of the organisation at this time that it was also “absolutely essential that members of the appointed ‘hall protection’ receive a pass in order to ensure free entry.”
³¹
SS groups continued to organise sporadically in March, but there was little impetus until the return to Munich of the diminutive Josef
Berchtold, who had fled to Austria after the
Putsch
. In April, he took over from Schreck,
*
styling himself
Reichsführer der Schutzstaffeln
(National Leader of the Protection Squads), in contrast to his predecessor’s old title,
Führer der Oberleitung
(Leader of the Headquarters Staff). Berchtold soon installed Erhard Heiden as his deputy and issued a new set of rules—apparently drafted by Schreck—in order to establish the SS’s position vis-à-vis the SA. He specified that the “SS is neither a (para-)military organisation nor a group of hangers-on, but a small squad of men that our movement and our Führer can rely on. They must be people who can protect our meetings against troublemakers and professional stirrers. There are no ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ in the SS, only party discipline.”
³²
He also suggested that the strength of a standard SS squad should be one officer and ten men, but stressed that bigger party districts might need more. A subsequent instruction forbade “district SS leaders to give their men military training, to allow them to be members of other ‘combat organisations’ or to participate in military training with them.”
³³

Berchtold’s efforts were rewarded on 4 July 1926, when Hitler placed the “Blood Banner,” a swastika flag allegedly stained with the blood of the fallen National Socialist “martyr” Andreas Bauriedl during the
Putsch
, into the SS’s safekeeping as a kind of holy relic of the movement. However, the SS still had a rival: the SA. Following Röhm’s departure, this had been reorganised as a mass, uniformed formation that would be tolerated by the authorities. At the end of July, Franz Pfeffer von Salomon was named as its leader.
³⁴

Around this time, there was something of a rupture between the southern and northern factions of the NSDAP. The latter, led by Gregor Strasser, recognised Hitler’s overall leadership but were less enthusiastic about the Bavarian cliques that surrounded him. To some extent, the problem was ideological: Strasser was extremely anti-Semitic, but he focused on the “socialist” rather than the “nationalist” elements of the NSDAP’s programme. Hitler knew that he had to bring the northerners back onside, and the way to achieve this was to allow the revival of the SA, whose non-southern branches had been largely untainted by the
Putsch
. On 1 November, Franz Pfeffer von Salomon was named leader of the SA, and shortly thereafter—despite Berchtold’s best efforts—the SS was subordinated to the SA as a “special formation.”

Part of Pfeffer von Salomon’s task was to bring the SA back under political control. Many of the organisation’s units were still directly descended from—indeed, in some cases, were one and the same as—the lawless Free Corps. In the relatively peaceful Germany of 1926, these groups were unlikely to appeal to the kind of people who were being targeted as potential supporters by the NSDAP. Hitler wanted the re-formed SA simply to create the conditions in which the party’s propagandists could do their work, so Pfeffer von Salomon introduced drill, parades and other straightforward military techniques to instil some discipline into his units.

By contrast, members of the SS, when not acting as personal bodyguards, were typical political activists: they collected donations, canvassed potential supporters and sold the party newspaper, the
Völkische Beobachter
(
Folkish Observer
). An SS newsletter, published in December 1926, gives somewhat breathless accounts of these relatively mundane tasks. However, it also offers to sell SS members “knockout gas pistols” for a few marks each, under the legal warning that they should “only be used in case of ‘danger’; unprovoked or unwarned use may result in legal punishment. Knockout guns are not toys, but primarily handy defence weapons.”
³⁵

The subordination of the SS to the SA appears to have disenchanted Berchtold, and he handed over leadership to his colourless deputy, Heiden, in March 1927. But Heinz Höhne notes that Heiden also “found it difficult to compete with the growing size and influence of the SA; Pfeffer von Salomon, for instance, forbade the SS to form units in towns where the SA was still under strength.”
³⁶
Even so, Heiden continued to enforce a far stricter code upon his SS members than would have been tolerated in the SA. He demanded that his men should not get involved in party matters that did not concern them; insisted on strict discipline during party meetings; and—notwithstanding the sale of “knockout guns”—ordered commanders to search for and confiscate any illegal weapons prior to SS men going on duty. The intention was to create a self-conscious elite that would take pride in its difference from the SA and attract a better class of recruit. Höhne repeatedly refers to the SS as a kind of party “aristocracy,” even at this early stage in its development. This may seem slightly odd, given the radical working- and lower-middle-class nature of the organisation, but it gives an indication of how members of the SS regarded themselves. It was always intended to be a small, elite group with a pronounced
esprit de corps
.

Nevertheless, outside Munich, it struggled in the early years to maintain any organisational momentum. At Christmas 1925, it had claimed a membership of “about a thousand men,”
³⁷
but shortly thereafter this had declined to “about 200.”
³⁸
And there it languished for the next three years, throughout the reigns of Berchtold and Heiden. The latter was finally dismissed at the beginning of 1929, probably because of his lacklustre performance, although a rumour suggested that he had been exposed as a police spy. There would be no such doubts about his replacement.

*
In the last days of the war, Schaub, by then an
SS-Obergruppenführer
(general), was tasked with destroying Hitler’s personal papers in Berlin, in Munich and at the Obersalzburg.

*
Gaue
were the regional organisations of the National Socialist Party. These were headed by
Gauleiters
(regional leaders), who were among the most important and influential of National Socialist Party officials, acting, in effect, as local representatives for Hitler himself.

*
Schreck resumed his role as Hitler’s chauffeur and ceased to take an active part in the SS, although he was subsequently given the rank of
SS-Standartenführer
(colonel). He died on 15 May 1936 of meningitis. At his funeral, Heinrich Himmler gave a graveside eulogy which ended: “We have now taken our leave of you. But you live in our ranks still, as when you were actually there. And now I have an honour for you, dear Comrade Schreck, that your Führer has given you. When you founded the squad, you were a tiny group of ten men. From today the Führer has ordered that the 1st SS Regiment in Munich should bear the name ‘Julius Schreck.’ We will all strive to ensure that this regiment which carries this name—of a man who was a hero in our ranks—does so with honour!” (USNA: SSO100B)