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The Rule of the Black Order a Typology of the SS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
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When on January 30, 1933, the leader of the National Socialist Party had become German Chancellor, he assumed this position as representative of a united national movement. On the outer edge of this ‘popular movement’, bloated by opportunists of all kinds, was the army of the civil war, the Brownshirts. Having been distracted for some time by the hunting down of enemies of the State, they were now awaiting the final decision: the introduction of a ‘German Socialism’.
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- Copyright © 1953 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
1 Adolf Hitler, September 7, 1943, Party Rally Nuremberg: ‘It is not the State that gives orders to us, but we who give orders to the State.'
2 Fritz Maier Hartmann, Dokumente des Deutschen Reiches (Munich: Franz Eher Nachf., 1939) II, 159-60.
3 Hermann Rauschning, Die Revolution des Nihilismus, Kulisse und Wirklichkeit im Dritten Reich. Revised edition, Zürich: Europa Verlag, 1938. English trans. The Revolution of Nihilism: Warning to the West. New York: Alliance Book Corporation, Longmans, Green, and Co., 1939.
4 The central piece of this militancy against the' internal enemy' was Himmler's infamous secret address held before oflicers of the Wehrmacht which Der Neue Vorwaerts, Karlsbad, was able to print on September 26, 1937, on four narrowly printed pages. It was a sort of simplified S S programme and in its way it anticipated all the atrocities of the later years. ‘In a future war there will not only be a front of the army on land, of the navy on the sea, of the air force in the air—but there will be a fourth theatre of war: an inner front in the midst of Germany.' The army which was to fight the civil war was thus consciously mobilised even before the Wehrmacht. ‘When this takes place the execution of it will be without any mercy. There is no other alternative.' A shortened English version of this speech was published in 193 8 in New York under the title: ‘Once in 2,000 Years. Secret Speech Delivered by Heinrich Himmler, Chief of German Secret Police (GeStaPo) to the German Army General Staff.' Published by American Committee for Anti-Nazi Literature.
5 op. cit., p. 90.
6 Forrest Davis, ‘The Secret History of a Surrender', The Saturday Evening Post (New York, 22 and 29 September, 1945), pp. 9-II, 107, 108, III; 17, 105-106.
7 Cf. ‘Who Killed Hitler? The complete Story of how Death Came to Der Fuehrer and Eva Braun, Together with the First Intelligence Report on the Mystery of Adolf Hitler's Death —as Developed by Private Intelligence-from Never Before Published Facts and Documents', at variance with the official British and Russian Intelligence Reports, edited by Herbert Moore and James W. Barrett, Foreword by W. F. Heimlich, Former Chief Intelligence Officer for the U.S. Army in Berlin (New York: The Books Press, 1947). This book has not proven its case and may be safely ignored. The contention of this publication is that Heinrich Himmler had Hitler assassinated. The evidence is insufficient throughout. The authentic sources for the question of Hitler's death are still Gerhard Boldt, Die Letzten Tage, edited by Ernst A. Hepp (Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag, 1947), and above all Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler (New York: the MacMillan Co., 1947), with supplementary remarks ‘Wer weiss von Hitlers Tod', by the same author in Der Monat, Berlin, III, 26, pp. 126-38. Neither of these reports knows of any such thing as the assassination of Hitler by Himmler.
8 It seems that Himmler has taken rather seriously his own words in this case. In his speech on the Reichsbauerntag (Farmers' Rally) at Goslar, November 12, 1935, he said about the SS: ‘Many things—so we teach the SS man—can be forgiven in this world; but one thing never: unfaithfulness' (reprinted in Dokumente der deutschen Politik. Edited by Reg. Rat Paul Meier und Benneckenstein, Präsident der Deutschen Hochschule für Politik (Berlin: Junker and Duennhaupt, 1937), III, 33-49. See p. 45).
9 R. Heydrich, Wandlungen unseres Kampfes, München: Eher Nachf., 1935.
10 Milton Shulman, Defeat in the West (New York: A. P. Dutton and Co., 1948), pp. 316 et seq.
11 Alfred Rosenberg, Gestaltung der Idee, Blut und Ehre, II (München, 1936).
12 Himmler conceived of the German order as of'a knighthood of highest racial distinction of German blood, selected in the test of battle from the noblest families'. This German Order ‘was to set itself above the nations and contaminations of blood which could not compare racially to our nation.' (Speech on the Farmers' Rally, op. cit., p. 41.)
13 Eugen Kogon formulates this in the introduction to the revised edition of Der SS-Staat, edited by the Verlag der Frankfurter Hefte (Berlin: Verlag des Druckhauses Tempelhof, 1947), p. 5: ‘The SS State was actually planned and the concentration camps were its horrible pattern.'
14 Das Schwarze Korps, Nov. 26, 1942, about the Junker-schools of the S S-in-arms: ‘Those who enter through the immense doors of these schools for soldiers and leaders in which one learns to take and to give death will always be held by this image.'
15 Cf. Eugen Lennhoff, Die Freimaurer, Geschichte, Wesen und Geheimnis der koniglichen Kunst, Zurich: Phaidon-Verlag, 1932. Idem, Politische Geheimbünde, Zürich: Amathea Verlag, 1931. René Fülöp-Miller, Macht und Geheimnis der Jesuiten, Leipzig: Grethlein & Co., 1929.
16 Reinhold Schneider, Die Hohenzollern. Tragik und Königtum (Leipzig: Jakob Hegner, 1933). p. 16.
17 Friedrich Meyer-Abich, editor, Hermann Hassbargen, revised by, Die Masken fallen, Aus den Geheimpapieren des Dritten Reiches (Hamburg: Morawe & Schaeffelt, 1949), p. 99.
18 The infamous Dirlewanger S S Division for the greater part was made up of all kinds of criminals—just as the division 999 of the Army. Beside poachers there were those who were declared ‘unworthy of serving in the German Army', i.e., people who were serving a sentence given by the Army or S S, or who were deprived of their rank, or volunteers from concentration camps, many of them professional criminals.
19 Heinrich Orb, whose book 13 Jahre Machtrausch (Olten: Otto Walter, 1945, 2nd ed.) gives a careful and detailed presentation of the intricate relations of people and organisations in the S S apparatus—reaching out into the party, the police, the Wehrmacht, the industry, and whose burning hatred for National Socialism is beyond question, expressly testifies from personal knowledge that indeed there have been high S S leaders of this kind.
20 It is not possible to treat at this point the intricate and partly contradictory distribution of responsibility among the various central and specialised organisations. In Kogon's book there is a by no means complete list. An elaborate collection of documents is contained in the Uebersicht der Gliederungen verbrecherischer Nazi Organisationen ed. by the Länderrat of the U.S. Zone, and in its ‘ergänzender Begleittext'.
21 See the pamphlet Der Prozess gegen Mitglieder verbrecherischer Organisationen (Berlin: O M G U S). In vol. I, pp. 27 et seq. of the German edition of the proceedings of Nuremberg, in the verdict, XXI I, 750 et seq. there is a list of all the organisations declared' ‘criminal' with all their subdivisions.
22 Ernst von Schenck, Europa vor der -Deutschen Frage. Briefe eines Schweizers nach Deutschland, (Bern: A. Francke 1946), p. 36.
23 Some of that impulse—though certainly not in a rational form—which Thierry-Maulnier hints at in his essay ‘Die Epoche des Terrors', Merkur, Baden-Baden, III, 2 (1949), p. 115: ‘The terror is connected with revolution by a more irrational and more abso lute tie. Terror is not the tool of revolution, it is its ritual of purification or exorcism, its liturgical means, its holy mass and sacrament… One cannot unleash a revolution without unleashing violence and murder too, and one may unleash the latter ones on the condition only that one sets goals for them.' —This was true only for that short period in which the National Socialist revolution terrorised inimical political parties. When the policy of the Order, the terror of which was scientifically perfected, began to urge ‘final solutions' (viz., the Jewish problem) and insisted that a practical use should be made of their captives (viz., slave labour), there was no place left for the myth of self-purification.
24 Wolfgang Langhoff, Die Moorsoldaten, Zürich: Schweizer Spiegel, 1935.
25 Geheimvortrag of Heinrich Himmler, op. cit., Sept. 26, 1937.
26 Benedikt Kautsky, Teufel und Verdammte. Erfahrungen und Erkenntnisse aus sieben Jahren in deutschen Konzentrationslagern (Ziirich: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1946), p. 98.
27 Gerhart Hermann Mostar, ‘Portrait eines Weibsteufels, Die Dolchstosslegende der Ilse Koch', Aufbau (New York, January 5, 1951), pp. 3 et seq.
28 Thus, e.g., S S headquarters issued a manual for the S S called the Soldatenfreund containing the following statement of purpose: ‘The task of S S headquarters (S S-Hauptamt) is the creation of a rigidly unified Order. It is therefore responsible for the selection of those men whom it considers fit for the S S, and for the general supervision of the members of the S S and their families; it will further be responsible for the ideological and political training of the entire S S, the police forces, and the care of the regular troops (Truppenbetreuung).
29 The best insight into this world is afforded by Ernst von Salomon in his book Di Geächteten, Berlin: Rowohlt Verlag, 1931. Cf. also later works by the same author.
30 E. Almy Buller, Darkness Over Germany (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1944), p. 137. In this context it is interesting that the S S itself never pleaded for ‘terror' in public, but in distinction to other preachers of Volksgemeinschaft (‘solidarity of the people’), it pursued a national ideal in a youthfully militant manner. (Cf. the collection of articles from the Schwarzes Korps by Guenther d'Alquen, ‘Auf Hieb und Stich, Stimmen zur Zeit am Wege einer deutschen Zeitung', München: Zentral-Verlag der NSDAP, 1937.
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