The SS: A Warning from History

The most notorious but probably the least well-documented element of the Nazi regime, the SS grew from Adolf Hitler's bodyguard into an organisation which set and enforced the agenda of the Third Reich. Often referred to as 'a state within the state', the SS was the creation and personal fiefdom of Heinrich Himmler and its membership was drawn from all walks of life. Its tentacles extended into the army and police, the business world and, of course, the death camps.

Obsessed with crackpot theories about Germanic mythology, Himmler was disliked and feared by his colleagues and mocked yet indulged by Hitler and Goebbels. Himmler's lieutenant, the chillingly ambitious Reinhard Heydrich, later Reich Protector of Bohemia, gave the SS its organisational muscle and deadly efficiency. The Totenkopf (Death's Head) Brigade, set up to run the concentration camps and death camps, was also heavily implicated in the mass shooting of civilians in Russia and eastern Europe. The Waffen-SS were not 'soldiers like any others', but ruthless killing machines, whose battlefield crimes set them apart from the regular Wehrmacht.

As the war ended, surviving members of the SS set up escape routes to Latin America and the Middle East, often with assistance from members of the Vatican hierarchy. The evil spirit of the SS lives on in neo-Nazi circles, encouraged by people like Himmler's daughter Gudrun, who heads a society for ex-SS men called 'Silent Aid'.

With the help of photographs, many previously unpublished, and the words of former SS men, their friends, colleagues and victims, Guido Knopp evokes a generation whose fanaticism and violence shaped the identity of the Third Reich.