Himmler and the SS illustrate the total power that Hitler had over Germany. How far do you agree with this viewpoint?
Traditionalist historians would agree with this interpretation of Hitler’s Germany, viewing it as a totalitarian state supported by terror and repression. Undoubtedly, one of the most powerful instruments of this policy was the SS, created in 1925 as Hitler’s personal bodyguard. This role expanded as the Schutzstaffel developed into a mass organisation under Heinrich Himmler’s careful leadership and grew to represent one of the most powerful and feared tools of the Nazi State with 240,000 members by 1939, allowing it to achieve dominance in the Third Reich.
Under Hitler’s authorisation, the SS became an auxiliary police force and was able to take suspects into ‘protective custody.’ This allowed the Nazi’s to target any opposition and by 1939, approximately 385,000 German’s had been convicted and imprisoned for political crimes without trial. This is one example which illustrates the power the Nazi’s imposed through their stringent policy of terror. Their persecution of non-conformists allowed Nazism to increase its hold over Germany with little opposition. It is this role which has led to historians describing the mass organisation of the SS as a virtual state within a state. As the American historian Sax describes, ‘The SS evolved from a police organisation operating within an administrative whole to become an independent organisation.’ While it could be argued that this demonstrates Hitler’s power over Germany in that Hitler was at the head of this mass organisation, revisionist historians such as Kershaw have used the SS as an example of the polycratic rather than the totalitarian nature of the regime. They argue that Hitler himself was not necessarily the exerciser of all power in Germany and that there were many different bodies which all made their own decisions. Using the SS as an example, Sax also says that they ‘made all decisions of any political importance ‘ and created policy ‘beyond the limits of legitimate state activity.’ Ultimately, he asserts that they were able to use the Volksgemeinschaft to justify any policy making. This could be used to illustrate the structuralist view that Hitler didn’t hold as much sole power over Germany as had previously been thought and that major decisions were influenced more by the structure of institutions and general trends and events in the course of German history than by Hitler himself.
