Schutz+Staffel+(SS)


 * SS (Schutz Staffel)**

The SS was formed in 1925 as Hitlers elite body guard. This group was known as the blackshirts due to their black uniforms. This group showed how powerful Hitler, and the Nazi cause was, when by 1933 there was 52,000 members (The Third Reich, 10). From 1929 untill 1945 (the end of the SS and the Nazi party) Heinrich Himmler was the leader of the bodygaurd group. Under Himmler, the SS grew from 300 to more than 50,000 members in 1933 when the Nazi party took power. Himmler, a racist fanatic, searched through aplications looking for people with "supposed physical perfection and racial purity" (Britannica). The blackshirts found themselves to be more powerful and surperior than the SA "Storm Troopers" who were formally the more powerful of the two. By 1939 the SS numbered 250,000 and became a huge, powerful group, divided into two sections: the Allgemeine-SS (General SS) and the Waffen-SS (Armed SS)(Britannica).

During WWII the SS commited countless murders of Jews, Gypsies, and all those Hitler looked down on. Following the Allied victory, "the SS was declared a criminal organization by the Allied Tribunal in Nürnberg in 1946."

[[image:http://media-2.web.britannica.com/eb-media/68/67968-004-3D6EE08D.jpg width="390" height="265" caption="Two Askaris (Ukrainian members of the SS) survey the bodies of Jews killed in the Warsaw Ghetto … [Credits : © National Archives/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]"]] "Thy Honour is Thy Loyalty” The motto of the SS

//Encyclopedia Brittanica//. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Oct. 2009. .