In October 1939 the SS RuSHA ( Rass- und Siedlungshauptamt, central office for race and resettlement) began deporting about 1 million Poles, replacing them with German-speakers from the Baltic states and eastern Europe. In May 1940, after Himmler had sent Hitler a memorandum calling for the deportation of the Jews, the enslavement of the Slav peoples, and the resettlement of Germans in eastern Europe, he was appointed Reichskommissar für die Festigung Deutschen Volkstums (state commissioner for the strengthening of German “peoplehood”, or RKF) and in January 1941 the SS took powers to execute “enemies of the state” without trial. At some point between March and July 1941 Hitler launched the “final solution of the Jewish question in Europe”, now known as the Holocaust, the genocide of about 6 million people designated as Jewish under the Nazis' Nuremberg Laws of 1935.
Between June 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and December SS Einsatzgruppen (task forces) murdered about 300,000 Soviet Jews, while other SS units, including recruits from Ukraine and the Baltic states, murdered about 200,000 and the army at least 19,000. by 1943 the SS had murdered another 400,000 or more Jews in Soviet territory. After the Wannsee Conference, organized by Adolf Eichmann in January 1942, Wirth established the extermination camps at Chelmno (Kulmhof), Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Maidanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau, in which at least 3 million Jews were murdered. Thousands of Slavs, leftwing activists, homosexuals, and Gypsies were also murdered by the SS and other Nazi units.
The SS also continued to extend its control over key sectors of the German economy and society. In April 1942 the SS WHVA (Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt, central office for economy and administration), created in 1940, took control of the Waffen-SS, the concentration camps, the 165 labour camps in which about 600,000 prisoners worked for the SS firm Ostindustrie GmbH, and, through secret arrangements, numerous companies producing building materials, weapons, textiles, leather goods, and foodstuffs. In June 1942, after Heydrich was assassinated by the Czech Resistance, Ernst Kaltenbrunner became head of the RSHA. The peak of SS power was reached in August 1943, when Himmler was appointed Minister of the Interior. During 1944, as the 40 divisions of the Waffen-SS, composed of 910,000 troops, shared in the defeats of the German Army, the Nazi leaders worked against one another to try to secure the succession. Hitler, informed of Himmler's attempts to negotiate with the Allies, abolished the SS and expelled Himmler from the party shortly before his suicide on April 30, 1945.
Who are the SS?
Heinrich Himmler,
Heinrich Himmler
Heinrich Himmler was a Nazi party official and the infamous head of all German police forces. As such he carried out a ruthless programme for the extermination of the Jews.
1900-1945
Himmler was notorious as the head of the Nazi police forces. He joined the party in 1925, and during the period 1926 to 1930 he was the director of propaganda in the Nazi party. In 1929 Hitler appointed him head of The SS (Schutzstaffel or Black Shirts) the elite military force of the Nazis and later in 1934 won over the control of the Gestapo who were a secret police force. Being head of the Police forces from 1936 to 1945 he carried out the ruthless Holocaust programme which was a disgusting crime that meant to exterminate the Jewish people and also was in charge of suppressing Nazi opposition. In 1943 Hitler announced him the Interior minister and in 1944 he became director of home-front operations and Chief of Germany’s armed forces within Germany’s borders. In April 1945 he was captured by the British Army and was to stand trial as a major War criminal, but committed suicide shortly after arrest.
Reinhard Heydrich, (Tristan Eugen)
1904-1942
German Nazi politician and deputy chief of the SS (Schutzstaffel, “protective force”), born in Halle. At 14, he joined the anti-Weimar “freicorps”, a group of thugs and street-fighters. Between 1922 and 1931 he served as a first lieutenant in the Navy, joining the Nazi party after being cashiered. When Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, Heydrich was appointed chief of police in Munich, with control over the camp at Dachau. By 1934 he was head of the SS in Berlin, and shortly afterwards was appointed second-in-command of that organization, (which included the Gestapo), under Himmler. His responsibility was to keep the occupied countries subdued, which he did with such ruthlessness that in 1941 he was made deputy-protector of Bohemia and Moravia. Within five weeks he had executed 300 Czechs. Similar actions in Norway, Holland, and France earned him the nickname of “The Butcher”. On May 27, 1942, as he drove along the Prague-Berlin highway, Czech resistance fighters shot and bombed his car: he died later that day in a Prague hospital. In revenge, the Germans razed the village of Lidice to the ground, and massacred its inhabitants.
Adolf Eichmann,
1906-1962
Hulton Deutsch
Adolf Eichmann
Adolf Eichmann was convicted by an Israeli court as the Nazi official who was responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews in death camps during World War II.
Nazi official responsible for the murder of millions of Jews during World War II. Eichmann joined the Nazi secret police in 1934, and when the Germans annexed Austria in 1938, he was given the job of deporting Jews from that country, in accordance with Nazi anti-Semitic policy. During World War II he was in charge of “the final solution of the Jewish problem”, in the course of which Jews from all over German-occupied Europe were sent to death camps to be exterminated. After the war Eichmann disappeared, but in 1960 Israeli agents located him in Argentina, abducted him, and took him to Israel. Tried in Jerusalem and convicted of crimes against humanity, he was hanged two years later.
