Read Army of Evil: A History of the SS Online
Authors: Adrian Weale
Left
: Ulrich Graf, one of Hitler’s earliest bodyguards. (
Bundesarchiv)
Right
: Ernst Röhm, revolutionary, military radical and SA Chief of Staff. (
AP/Press Association Images)
Left
: Kurt Daluege, Berlin sanitation engineer turned police chief. (
Getty Images)
Right
: Prince Josias zu Waldeck-Pyrmont, one of Himmler’s earliest aristocratic recruits. (
Bundesarchiv)
Left
: Oswald Pohl, business and administrative chief of the SS. (
Bundesarchiv)
Right
: Reinhard Heydrich, disgraced naval officer turned security chief. (
Deutsche Press-Agentur/Press Association Images
)
March 1933, the Nazi terror begins. A Jewish lawyer is humiliated by SS auxiliary policemen on the streets of Munich. The placard reads:
Ich werde mich nie mehr bei der Polizei beschweren
(I will no longer burden the police). (
Bundesarchiv)
Spring 1933, a police officer swears in SS men as auxiliaries. (
Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz)
May 1933, detainees at work at the newly established Dachau concentration camp. (
Bundesarchiv)
May 1933, SS guards roll-call at Dachau. (
Bundesarchiv)
Himmler standing next to his ideological mentor, Richard Walter Darré, and the police president of Berlin, Graf Helldorf, January 1939. (
Bundesarchiv)
1939, the chiefs of the SS security apparatus: (
left to right
) Franz Josef Huber, Arthur Nebe, Himmler, Heydrich and Heinrich Müller. (
Getty Images)
Left
: Rudolf Diels, the Nazi fellow traveller who was first chief of the Gestapo. (
Bundesarchiv)