The Waffen-SS was the armed branch of the SS (Schutzstaffel), which was a paramilitary organization of the Nazi Party created to protect Adolf Hitler. The Waffen-SS fought alongside the regular army in World War II on both the Russian Front and the Western Front. It grew from three regiments to a force of over 38 divisions, but was never formally part of the Wehrmacht. It was Adolf Hitler’s will that the Waffen-SS were to remain the armed wing of the Party.

The origins of the Waffen-SS go back to the selection of a group of 120 SS men in March 1933, by Josef "Sepp" Dietrich to form the Sonderkommando Berlin. Within months of its creation it was renamed SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. By November 1933, the Leibstandarte had grown to become an 800-men-strong regiment, and at a remembrance ceremony in Munich for the tenth anniversary of the failed Munich Putsch, this SS regiment swore allegiance to Hitler. The Leibstandarte showed their loyalty to their Führer on June 30, 1934, during the political purge known as the Night of the Long Knives when the leaders of the SA were executed by squads from the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler.

In September 1934, Adolf Hitler authorized the formation of the military wing of the Schutzstaffel; the SS-Verfügungstruppe or SS-VT, which would be a force of special service troops under Hitler’s command to fight revolutionary movements against Hitler’s government. By 1939, the size of the SS-VT expanded to four regiments (Standarten), since it was useful to have combat units outside the control of the German Army. These soldiers were carefully selected, as the requirements to join this new force were very strict.

The role of the SS-VT was eventually expanded. Heinrich Himmler wanted to have a military force that rivaled that of the German Army, and equipped these troops with the most modern weapons and vehicles. The training was tougher than that of the Wehrmacht’s, since Waffen-SS training involved the use of live ammunition. Hitler declared, on August 17, 1938, that the SS-VT (Waffen-SS) would have a role in domestic as well as foreign affairs, which transformed this growing armed force into the rival that the army had feared. When the Germans annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia, there were Waffen-SS troops along side German Army’s units. Before the invasion of Poland, the Waffen-SS was given extensive military training in the tactics of warfare as it was organized into units similar to those of the Army.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, there were four SS armed regiments: Leibstandarte, Deutschland, Germania and the new regiment from Austria Der Führer. Events during the Invasion of Poland raised doubts over the combat effectiveness of the SS-VT. Their willingness to fight was never in any doubt, but  sometimes they were almost too eager to fight and became reckless, unnecessarily risking their lives. The military branch of the SS (the SS-Verfügungstruppe) was known, by 1939, as the Bewaffnete SS, and later Waffen-SS. The unit SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler became the SS Division of the same name, while the unit SS-Deutschland and SS-Der Führer became the Verfüngungs Division; with this addition of the Langemarck unit, they were renamed the SS Das Reich Division. Units of the Totenkopf were reorganized into the SS Totenkopf Division. These were the Waffen-SS’s first three divisions, and would ferociously fight fierce battles throughout World War II.

As the war raged on, the Waffen-SS began to recruit outside of Germany. In 1940, the Standarte Nordland and Standarte Westland were formed for these foreign recruits within the SS military structure. Later, these two units were combined with the Standarte Germanic to comprise the Wiking Division. Based on this practice of forming units from foreign recruits, the Waffen-SS organized native "Legions" in occupied countries. Eventually, these units were enlarged into brigades and divisions. Units containing a high percentage of "racial" Germans and "Germanic" volunteers were designated as "Freiwilligen" within their names, such as the 11th SS-Freiwilligen Panzergrenadier Division "Nordland".

Josef "Sepp" Dietrich (1892–1966) was a German Waffen-SS general, an commander of the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, and one of the closest men to Adolf Hitler. For his wartime services, he was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords, and Diamonds and obtained several others military decorations as well.

Sepp Dietrich was born in Hawangen, Bavaria, Germany, on May 28, 1892, to Pelagius Dietrich and his wife Kreszentia. When he was young, Dietrich worked as a butcher and hotel servant, but he joined the army in 1911 and served for two years. At the outbreak of the Great War, he volunteered again, serving with the artillery, as a paymaster sergeant and later in the first German tank troops.

After the war, in May, 1919, Dietrich joined the Freikorps and fought against the Bavarian Soviet Republic until the regime was ousted and Bavaria was incorporated to the Weimar Republic. Thereafter, he became unemployed, a man without prospects, migrating from place to place looking for jobs. In the early twenties, Dietrich worked as a waiter, policeman, foreman, farm laborer, gas station attendant and customs officer. In 1928, he joined the Nazi Party (NSDAP) and became commander of Hitler’s Schutzstaffel (SS) bodyguard. He accompanied Hitler on his tours around Germany and was nicknamed "Chauffeureska" by Hitler. Later Hitler arranged other jobs for him and let him live in the chancellery.

Sepp Dietrich was assigned by Hitler to create an SS special unit which was called then the SonderKomando-Berlin, which later became the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, Dietrich was made Chief of the Führer’s Security. His SS guards provided a seven-man shooting party during the political purge known as the Night of the Long Knives, on June 30, 1934, when SA leader Ernst Röhm and his SA comrades were executed. On July 1, 1934, he was made SS Obergruppenführer, which is the equivalent to a full army general. General von Fritsch came to like Dietrich a great deal and personally instructed him in war strategy as the SS Leibstandarte developed into an elite combat unit.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Dietrich led the SS Leibstandarte in attacks in the Battle of France. Dietrich remained in command of the Leibstandarte throughout the campaigns in Greece and Yugoslavia. On the Eastern Front, Sepp Dietrich was commander of the 1.SS-Panzerkorps, attached to Army Group Center. Dietrich showed real skill as a leader saving his unit at least seven times with skilful tactical withdrawals during the retreat that the German Army made after Stalingrad. In 1943, he was sent to Italy to recover Benito Mussolini’s mistress Clara Petacci. Although Dietrich was faithful to Hitler, he also displayed some independence from the classic SS image. He did little to disguise his contempt for Himmler, head of the SS, as he personally protested to Hitler on two occasions about the shooting of Jews. In that regard, he was more senior army officer than senior SS leader.

In the Battle of Normandy, in June 1944, Dietrich was commander of the SS 1rst Panzer Division. It was during this campaign that he made it clear that he did not agree with Hitler’s strategy, for he wanted to make a tactical withdrawal to territory that he felt he was better able to defend. But he was not authorized to fall back. Nevertheless Dietrich fought tenaciously and was promoted to command the 6th SS-Panzer Army, which he led in the Battle of the Bulge. He had been assigned to that task because, due to the July 20 Plot, Hitler distrusted Wehrmacht officers.

At this point, Dietrich began to protest Hitler’s unwillingness to let officers act upon their own initiative. In April 1945, after the failure of Hitler’s planned Spring Awakening Offensive at Lake Balaton, spearheaded by Dietrich’s troops, a frustrated Hitler ordered Dietrich that the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler should give up their cuff titles, but Dietrich did not pass on the order. Dietrich commanded tank troops in Vienna but failed to prevent Soviet troops from taking the city. Accompanied by his wife, Dietrich surrendered on May 9, 1945 to Master-Sergeant Herbert Kraus of the U.S. 36th Infantry Division at Krems an der Donau north of St. Pölten in Austria.
 
After the war, Sepp Dietrich was put on trial for complicity in the Malmedy Massacre during the Battle of the Bulge. Although his direct involvement was never proved, Dietrich was sentenced to life in prison for offences against customs and ethics of war. Many senior German army officers came to his defence and the sentence was cut to 25 years. Dietrich was released in 1955 but was arrested again and charged with taking part in the murders during the Night of the Long Knives of 1934. For this, he was sentenced to 18 months prison. He was released in February 1958.

Dietrich died of a heart attack in Ludwigsburg at age 73, on April 21, 1966. Seven thousand of his wartime comrades came to his funeral. He was eulogized by former SS-Obergruppenführer and General der Waffen-SS Wilhelm Bittrich.

The Schutzstaffel, or SS, was a major Nazi paramilitary organization created within the Nazi Party during the Third Reich. The SS grew from a small paramilitary unit in the SA to a powerful independent force that served first as the Führer’s "Praetorian Guard," a force which fielded almost a million men, providing protection for the Nazi leaders and exerting strong political influence. The Schutzstaffel, under Heinrich Himmler‘s command, was also in charge of the concentration camps. The armed SS divisions were called the Waffen-SS, which fought during the war on both the Russian and Western Fronts alongside the German Army.

The SS was originally in 1923, as a company of the SA tasked with protecting senior leaders of the Nazi Party at rallies; this company was called the "Stabswache." The Stabswache was banned after the Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923. However, in 1925, the Stabswache was reorganized under the name of Schutzstaffel (SS) as a personal guard unit to protect Adolf Hitler. SS is the abreviation for the German words Schutz-Staffel, which means "Protection Squadron." Under the command of Heinrich Himmler, between 1929 and 1945, the SS broke away from the SA and grew from a small paramilitary formation to become the largest and most powerful organization in the Nazi Germany. The first commander of the SS was a journalist named Berchtold from the Nazi party newspaper "People’s Observer." Berchtold was then replaced by Erhard Heiden.

The Schutzstaffel was made up of loyal troops and played a key role during the political purge of the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, when Ernst Röhm and other leaders of the SA were executed. All SS personnel were selected on the principles of racial purity and unconditional loyalty to the Nazi Party. In the early days of the SS, officer candidates had to prove German ancestry to 1750.

Heinrich Himmler (1900– 1945) was a very imporntant political figure in Nazi Germany and chief of the Schutzstaffel, or SS. Not only did he oversee all police and security forces, which included the Gestapo, but also supervised the concentration camps where the Jews and other minorities were eliminated during the Third Reich period.

Heinrich Himmler was born in Munich, Germany, on October 7, 1900, to Joseph Gebhard Himmler, a strict schoolteacher and principal of the prestigious Wittelsbacher Gymnasium. His mother was Anna Maria Himmler, who was a devout Roman Catholic and an attentive mother. Heinrich had two brothers, Gebhard and Ernst Himmler. In 1910, Himmler attended Gymnasium in Landshut, where he studied classic literature. He struggled in athletics, but he did well in his schoolwork. He played chess and collected stamps.

Although there was no trace of the sort of dramatic maltreatment, such as beatings, that might acount for what he was to become as an adult, there were portentous shadows. Young Heinrich was forced gently but relentlessly into a narrow mold by a pedantic father who supervised every detail of the boy’s education and every moment of his time. His father, who had once served as tutor to Prince Heinrich of the Bavarian royal family, even made lists of his son’s classmates, analyzing their family connections and giving instructions on which boys to befriend and which to ignore.

At the outbreak of the Great War, Himmler enthusiastically followed the events of the escalating conflict with a schoolboy’s fervor, but until 1917 he was too young to participate in anything other than relief work and home guard training. In January 1918, the young Himmler finally reported for training as an officer candidate in the 11th Bavarian Infantry Regiment. To Himmler’s everlasting frustration, the war ended just as he finished his training.

Crestfallen, Heinrich Himmler returned home to find that, almost overnight, everything had changed. The family’s patron, Prince Heinrich, had been killed in action. The monarchy itself was a casualty. Prostrated by the lost war, threatened with communist revolution, Germany had become a democratic republic under the Weimar Constitution. In 1919, Himmler enrolled in a technical college in Munich as an agricultural student, graduating with a degree in agriculture in 1922.

In 1923, Himmler joined the Nazi Party, quickly developing a reputation for thoroughness and efficiency. He participated in the coup attempt in Munich, known as the Beer Hall Putsch, in November 1923, as a standard bearer, walking at the side of Ernst Röhm before the march was broken up. From 1925 to 1930, he was the chief of propaganda for the Nazis in Bavaria, Swabia and the Palatinate. In 1928, Himmler married Margarete Siegroth (née Boden), a nurse seven years his senior, and with whom he had his only child, Gudrun. They bought a small farm and worked unsuccessfully as chicken farmers.

In 1929, Hitler assigned Himmler the task of building up a unit composed of faithful and fit men that were to be Hitler’s personal bodyguard; the Schutzstaffel, or SS. By 1929, this unit numbered 200 men. From 1929 to January 1933, the violence and chaos on the streets most associated with Weimar Germany came from the SA. The SS was rarely involved in this, as its task was only to protect Hitler.

In 1930, Himmler was elected to the German Parliament (the Reichstag) as Nazi deputy for Weser-Ems. But he devoted most of his time to expanding the SS so that by 1933, it had grown to 52,000 men. Himmler also made sure that the SS remained free from interference by Röhm and the SA. Himmler created the Security Service, appointing Reinhard Heydrich as its chief.

Himmler was a keen astrologist and cosmologist as he was convinced that Germany’s future rested in the stars. He considered the SS the Twentieth Century’s Teutonic Knights, as many SS ceremonies were held at night in castles lit only by flaming torches. He saw the SS as being a new type of people – soldiers, administrators, academics and leaders all rolled into one. In the mind of Himmler, the SS were to be the new aristocracy of Germany.

Obsessed with racial purity in Germany, Himmler encouraged Aryan breeding programmes. When the Second World War broke out, Himmler was able to pursue another racial goal, which was the elimination of Jews. After Poland had been defeated, Himmler was given total control of the annexed parts of the country. In the first year of the war more than 300,000 Jews had been forced out to be replaced with German settlers. By June 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Himmler controlled the police and the political administration of the occupied territories, and the concentration camps, which were run by the SS. In 1943, Hitler appointed Himmler minister of the interior. During this period he supervised the "Final Solution," which was a plan to kill all the Jews in Europe.

After the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler, on July 20, 1944, Himmler’s position was strengthened still further. Nevertheless, as Germany’s defeat became imminent, Himmler made attempts to negotiate with the Allies. Hitler was furious and stripped Himmler of all his offices. Following Germany’s surrender, he tried to escape under a false identity but was captured by a British unit. On May 23, 1945, Heinrich Himmler committed suicide by taking a cyanide capsule in his cell while he was under custody.

Ernst Julius Röhm (1887 – 1934) was a German army officer and commander of the SA. In 1934, he was executed during the political purge known as the Night of the Long Knives. Ernst Röhm was born in Munich, Germany, on November 28, 1887. He joined the German Army in 1906. At the outbreak of World War I, he served in the 13th Regiment of Bavaria. He was wounded three times, reaching the rank of major.

After the war, in 1919, Röhm joined the Freikorps and served under Franz Epp in Munich. He actively participated in right-wing politics and in 1921 he recruited Adolf Hitler to spy on the German Worker’s Party. Realizing that this political party had no connections with the communists, but was rather a rightist political party, Ernst Röhm, like Hitler, also joined the German Worker’s Party, which evolved into the National Socialist German Workers Party, or "Nazi" party.

In November 1923, Ernst Röhm took part in the Beer Hall Putsch. After its failure, he was put on trial and sentenced to to one year and three months in prison, but was released on a promise of good behavior. In 1924, when Hitler was still in prison, Röhm helped to create the Frontbann, which was a legal alternative to the then-outlawed SA. In 1925, due to differences in their political approach with other members of the Nazi Party, Röhm emigrated to Bolivia, where he served as a military advisor to the Bolivian army. But in 1931, Adolf Hitler recalled Röhm to Germany and appointed him chief of the Sturm Abteilung (SA). In just over a year he expanded it from 70,000 to 170,000 members. By 1934 the SA had grown to 3,000,000 men.

In 1933, Hitler’s minister of war, General Werner von Blomberg, and Walther von Reichenau, chief liaison officer between the German Army and the Nazi Party, became deeply concerned about the growing power of the Sturm Abteilung (SA) and Ernst Röhm, who had been given a seat on the National Defence Council and started to demand more say over military matters. On 2nd October 1933, Röhm sent a letter to Reichenau that said: "I regard the Reichswehr (German Army) now only as a training school for the German people. The conduct of war, and therefore of mobilization as well, in the future is the task of the SA."

Werner von Blomberg and Walther von Reichenau, along with Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler, began to conspire against Röhm and the SA. Himmler asked Reinhard Heydrich to assemble a dossier on Röhm. Heydrich, after painstakingly thorough investigation, found evidence that suggested that Röhm had been paid 12 million marks by the French to orchestrate a military coup to overthrow and execute Hitler.

Hitler liked Röhm and initially refused to believe the dossier provided by Heydrich. Röhm had been one of his first supporters and, without his ability to obtain army funds in the early days of the movement, it is unlikely that the Nazis would have ever become established. But Röhm had different political view; he was left-oriented and despised not only the army Generals, but also the German businessmen, some of whom had financed Hitler’s political campaigns. Nevertheless, Adolf Hitler had his own reasons for wanting Röhm removed. Powerful supporters of Hitler had been complaining about Röhm for some time. Generals were afraid that the Sturm Abteilung (SA), a force of over 3 million men, would absorb the much smaller German Army into its ranks and Röhm would become its overall leader.

Industrialists, who had provided the funds for the Nazi victory, were unhappy with Röhm’s socialistic views on the economy and his claims that the real revolution had still to take place. Many people in the party also disapproved of the fact that Röhm and many other leaders of the SA were homosexuals. Adolf Hitler was also aware that Röhm and the SA had the power to remove him as leader. Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler played on this fear by constantly feeding him with new information on Röhm’s proposed coup. Their masterstroke was to claim that Gregor Strasser, whom Hitler hated, was part of the planned conspiracy against him. With this news Hitler ordered all the SA leaders to attend a meeting in the Hanselbauer Hotel in Wiesse.

In the early hours of June 30, 1934, Hitler, accompanied by a Schutzstaffel (SS) unit, arrived at Wiesse, where he personally arrested Ernst Röhm. During the next 24 hours 200 other senior SA officers were arrested on the way to Wiesse. Many were shot as soon as they were captured but Hitler decided to pardon Röhm because of his past services to the movement. Nevertheless, after much pressure from Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler, Hitler agreed that Röhm should be executed at once. At first Hitler insisted that Röhm should be allowed to commit suicide but, when he refused, Ernst Röhm was killed by two SS men.