SS [SCHUTZSTAFFEL]

Originally a volunteer bodyguard of Nazi thugs organized in 1925 to protect party leader Adolf Hitler on his travels around Germany, the Schutzstaffel (“Protection Force”) began its rise to the summit of the Nazi system in 1929 when a series of political struggles within the party left Heinrich Himmler, a colorless young man with the manners of a college professor, in charge of the small organization. Widely dismissed within the Nazi movement as a nonentity, Himmler was a serious student of the occult and deeply committed to Ariosophy, the racist occult theory that had spawned National Socialism itself. Shortly after his promotion, he went to Hitler with a proposal to expand the SS into a volunteer elite within the Nazi movement, a Deutsche Mannerorden or Order of German Manhood that would ultimately reshape Germany in a Nazi mold. The Führer’s approval enabled Himmler to build the organization step by step into the most powerful force in Nazi Germany. See Hitler, Adolf; National Socialism.

Himmler borrowed freely from Ariosophical sources in reinventing the SS. The SS racial purity guidelines came from the Ordo Novi Templi (ONT), an Austrian secret society with which Hitler had connections during his Vienna years, while the dagger-and-swastika emblem of the Thule Society – the organization that had originally sponsored the Nazi party – turned into the swastika armband and ceremonial dagger worn by every SS member. Ariosophical runic lore provided the new SS emblem, a double lightning-bolt S rune, which represented victory. See Ordo Novi Templi (ONT); Thule Society.

The organization of the SS, as well as its symbolism, copied secret society methods in detail; even orthodox historians have referred to the SS as “Nazi Freemasonry.” The vast majority of SS members were volunteers who worked at other jobs and attended SS meetings once or twice a week, where they took in lectures on Nazi racial and political theory and practiced military drill. Candidates for membership were vetted for character, discipline, racial purity, and political reliability; once a member, even stricter standards came into force. Members who showed promise were promoted to officer ranks. As the Nazi party became the most powerful force in German politics, the SS expanded alongside it, and Himmler’s small paid staff expanded into one of the largest bureaucracies in the Nazi system.

Hitler’s election as Germany’s Chancellor in January 1933 and the passage of the Enabling Act giving him dictatorial powers a few months later set the stage for a massive expansion of SS power. Shortly after the passage of the Enabling Act, Hitler granted police powers to the SS, and authorized Himmler to create a new branch of his Black Order, the Waffen-SS (Armed SS), as a security and military force loyal to Hitler and the Nazi party alone. In the months that followed, the SS took a leading role in rounding up 27,000 “enemies of the state” for internment in the first concentration camps, which were guarded by special Waffen-SS units. In 1934, faced with potential revolt in the SA – the private army of “brownshirt” street thugs formed by the Nazis in their first years – Hitler turned to the SS for help, and regular SS and Waffen-SS detachments alike took part in the notorious “Night of the Long Knives” in which the SA’s leaders were massacred on Hitler’s orders.

By the late 1930s Himmler was the second most powerful figure in the Nazi hierarchy, and the SS was a state within a state, with immense power over every aspect of German life. The Gestapo, Nazi Germany’s brutal secret police, was a branch of the SS, and the Waffen-SS formed Hitler’s bodyguard, managed the new network of concentration camps, and counted Germany’s best armored divisions among its membership. German intellectual and cultural life came increasingly under SS control too, as SS membership turned into a career requirement for university professors, authors, and artists, while an SS industrial empire took over a steadily growing fraction of the German economy.

Himmler’s occult interests had not been forgotten in the course of SS expansion. The SS headquarters staff contained three departments dedicated to research into occult, pagan, and Ariosophical subjects. The most important of these was the Ahnenerbe Forschungs- und Lehrgemeinschaft (Ancestral Heritage Research and Education Society), called Ahnenerbe for short, which employed well over 100 historians and researchers, including occult luminaries such as Julius Evola. The innermost dimensions of SS occultism took place at the Wewelsburg, a medieval castle in Westphalia converted under Himmler’s personal supervision into an SS ceremonial center. All records of SS Wewelsburg activities, along with the castle itself, were destroyed on Himmler’s orders in the last days of the Third Reich, but it is known that he and 12 handpicked senior SS officers met there several times a year; it has been suggested plausibly that this linked into the organized magical core of the Third Reich that so many contemporary occultists sensed. See Evola, Julius.

After the collapse of the Nazi regime and the suicide or execution of most of the Nazi leaders, the SS went to ground. Many of its members were rounded up by the Allies, who defined the SS as a criminal organization; others fled to Spain, Latin America, or the Arab world. How much of the Black Order’s traditions and inner teachings survived in exile is unknown.

SOURCE:

The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies : the ultimate a-z of ancient mysteries, lost civilizations and forgotten wisdom written by John Michael Greer – © John Michael Greer 2006

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