Abstract
The beginnings of the SS were modest. It made its first public appearance in April 1925 (providing Hitler with ‘protection squads’) and struggled in the three following years to recruit more than a few hundred members. However, even at this early point in its existence, its first leader, Josef Berchtold, placed emphasis on its commitment to the National Socialist cause. In 1926, he declared that ‘there are no “ifs” and “buts” in the SS, only Party discipline’. When the ‘fiercely ambitious’ Heinrich Himmler became leader of the SS in 1929, he intensified this sense of discipline and added to it a clearer sense of purpose. His aim was to make the SS ‘the principal protector of the German racial community’. In the following decade and a half, Himmler and those around him turned the SS into one of the most prominent organizations in Nazi Germany. In his The SS: A New History, Adrian Weale traces this process of development.
Weale rightly devotes detailed attention to the activities of the SS during the Second World War (e.g. its contributions to the invasions of Poland and Yugoslavia and its involvement in Operation Barbarossa). Likewise, he closely examines the personalities (most obviously Himmler and Heydrich) who played a prominent part in earning the SS its unenviable reputation. The picture of Himmler and Heydrich that Weale presents is vivid. Each of them emerges, in common with Hitler, as a ‘moral entrepreneur’ (to use a term from R.A. Posner, The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 7–8 and 80–4). For they, like Hitler, sought to fashion a new order of values quite at odds with the egalitarianism that found expression in the Weimar constitution and European liberal-democratic culture more generally.
As well as throwing light on Himmler’s moral entrepreneurship, Weale offers an illuminating account of his background. The future national leader of the SS enjoyed a ‘comfortable … middle class upbringing’ in Munich. He was academically assiduous and ‘never shook off the pedantry that he inherited from his father’ (a teacher). However, Himmler (like many Germans of his age) found the idea of military service intoxicating. Having been too young to serve in the Great War, he pursued this interest by joining a small Free Corps unit in 1919. Four years later he became a Nazi and ‘adopted militant anti-Semitism … because that was the creed of the movement’. Previously, Himmler had uncritically embraced the ‘conservative nationalism’ (inflected with mild anti-Semitism) of the Munich bourgeoisie. In this alteration of view, we see the beginnings of the moral entrepreneurship that would, in the years ahead, become more obvious. Having become the SS’s leader, Himmler seized on a throwaway line by Hitler (‘SS-man your honour is called loyalty’) and worked it up into his organization’s motto: ‘My honour is called loyalty’. Five years later Himmler ensured that the SS played an effective part in the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ (during which Hitler countered – in an act of ‘pure political savagery’ – the threat posed to his plans by Ernst Röhm and the Brownshirts). In ways such as these Himmler’s ‘upwardly mobile’ organization was able to assume a central place in the life of the Third Reich.
Just as Weale gives us grounds for regarding Himmler as a moral entrepreneur, so too he identifies Heydrich as a kindred spirit. Having offered an account of Heydrich’s life before he joined the SS (a naval honour court dismissed him from the navy on grounds of sexual ‘impropriety’), he charts his rise in the SS. In 1931 Himmler appointed Heydrich as his chief of intelligence. Weale argues that Heydrich, being an ‘opportunist’, ‘was quick to see the advantages that his position gave him within a movement that, to some extent, defined itself by its enemies’. Heydrich’s opportunism became obvious when, in 1934, he became the Gestapo’s operational chief. He brought to this task ‘the SS’s ideological framework’ and identified as one of his central concerns the protection of the German racial community from ‘Jewry’. Heydrich gave concrete content to this ideology by ensuring that the Gestapo expended great effort on the investigation of ‘race defilement’ (the criminal offence of sexual intercourse between a Jew and an Aryan). Moreover, he pressed the National Socialist agenda further by focusing not just on the letter of the law but also on its spirit. This led him to ensure that the Gestapo investigated cases of ‘friendship with Jews’ on the ground that they were suggestive of opposition to the regime. Here we see Heydrich-the-moral-entrepreneur staking out concrete positions under the ‘moral canopy’ put in place – with no great commitment to precision – by Hitler. (On the ‘canopy’ under which those around Hitler worked, see M. Roseman, The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution, rev. edn, London: Penguin, 2003, p. 92.)
As well as furnishing his readers with clear accounts of Himmler, Heydrich, and other prominent members of the SS (e.g. Adolf Eichmann), Weale dwells on the character and modus operandi of the SS. Having started life as a ‘protection squad’, the SS became in 1933 ‘a hybrid, part Party formation, part state agency’. Weale argues that, by this time, the SS had its own ‘specific’ ideology. Certainly, Himmler was determined to ensure that his organization would become a racial and military elite. To this end, he identified ‘selectivity’ (Auslese) as a founding principle of the SS. And alongside this principle he set five others: struggle, honour, loyalty, obedience, and the Führerprinzip (principle of leadership). But this was not a distinct ideology. Rather, it was an intensification of the practical impulses that ran through National Socialism. The prominent place that these principles occupied within the SS meant that Himmler was able successfully to embrace the military doctrine of Auftragstaktik. According to this doctrine, orders from superiors were broad directives that lower-ranking personnel might implement in a variety of ways. Thus Einsatzgruppen commanders adopted distinctive approaches to the ‘liquidation’ of Jews following the invasion of the Soviet Union – with some fomenting pogroms while others ordered their men to carry out the killings themselves.
When he turns to the military element in Himmler’s organization, the Waffen SS, Weale emphasizes its distinctiveness. It was ‘a primarily military force’ within a ‘primarily political organisation’. He adds that, while Himmler was ‘keen’ to establish effective fighting units, his central concern was that the SS should play a prominent role in ‘the rejuvenation of the German/Nordic race’. This led Field Marshal von Fritsch (when the Wehrmacht’s commander-in-chief) to conclude that Himmler had found in the Waffen SS an opportunity to ‘play soldiers’. While there is a lot in this dismissive assessment, Weale notes that some formations of the SS (e.g. the Reich and Totenkopf divisions) were ‘among the best the Germans had’. But against this he sets the fact that other elements in the organization were ‘abysmal’. This is true of, for example, the Kossovar-Albanian Division, which ‘barely functioned’ as a combat unit.
As well as chronicling the involvement of the SS in German military operations, Weale also examines in detail its participation in ‘special’ operations, including Operation Tannenberg, the elimination of the Polish ruling class (aristocrats, politicians, clerics, and the intelligentsia). On the Holocaust, he argues, among other things, that ‘the Wannsee Conference was probably not as significant as is often portrayed’. This was the conference at which Heydrich sought to ‘demonstrate his … authority and preeminence on policy relating to the Jewish Question’. Weale finds support for his view of the conference in the fact that it ‘did not involve substantive discussion about the practicalities … of the mass execution of the Jewish people’. While this is true, it nonetheless was the case that Heydrich (as Weale concedes) galvanized those who sat around the table with him in Wannsee. He drove home the point that they were under a duty to find ways in which to wipe out the Jews of Europe. In doing so, he exhibited the single-mindedness that Posner associates with the character of a moral entrepreneur.
While Weale lends strong support to this view of Heydrich, we should not draw the further conclusion that the SS was part of an apparatus of governance that was, in all respects, coherent. Consider Weale’s account of Reichskristallnacht – the anti-Jewish pogrom that took place on 9–10 November 1938. The orchestrators of this atrocity, Hitler and Goebbels, did not inform Heydrich that it would take place. When Heydrich learned of the pogrom, he deployed police and SS personnel to protect Jewish property and to arrest looters. With this and other such examples, Weale makes plain the improvised and, on occasion, ramshackle character of the Third Reich. But against this we must set the fierce sense of purpose that he detects in the SS.
In this sense of purpose, we find a basis on which to explain not just the activities of the SS but the often highly coordinated activities of a regime that was anything but a model of institutional design. The moral entrepreneurs on whom Weale dwells fostered this sense of purpose. But Weale, regrettably, does not pin down precisely the impulse that lay at the core of their moral agenda. If we had to name it, we might describe it as a form of ‘deontology’ – the view of morality according to which people should always seek to do that which is intrinsically right. The deontology of Himmler and Heydrich was demented. For it placed SS personnel under a duty to slaughter large numbers of human beings who were, on the Nazi view, inferior and unworthy of life.