Heinrich Himmler

In January 1929 Hitler appointed a chicken farmer, Heinrich Himmler, as head of the SS with the brief to build it up as a force to rival the SA. Even though the SS was nominally part of Röhm's force, Himmler was totally loyal to Hitler and threw himself into expanding his new fiefdom. Over the next four years he expanded the SS to some 52,000 men, which not only included bodyguards but also a covert secret intelligence organization called the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service, or SD). Loyalty to Hitler was at the core of the SS ethos. The expanded SS organization was essentially a shadow internal security apparatus that would help the Nazis gain and keep power in Germany.

The rise of the Nazis

Events across the Atlantic soon intervened to change the fortunes of Hitler and his Nazi Party. The Wall Street stock market crash of October and November 1929 rapidly sent ripples of economic crisis around the world. Germany's fragile recovery was stopped in its tracks. Millions were soon unemployed, and the value of Germany's currency went through the floor (there were 1.6 million unemployed in October 1929; by February 1932 this figure had increased to 6.12 million). The Great Depression gave Hitler the chance he was looking for, and again he portrayed himself as Germany's new messiah. From having only 12 seats in the Reichstag, the German parliament, in 1928, the Nazis managed to win 107 seats and six million votes in the 1930 election.

Over the next three years, as Germany's economic crisis worsened, the Nazi Party's vote increased, as did the votes going to the communists. Squeezed from left and right, the centre parties found themselves unable to form governments without the support of either of the political extremes. Governments lasted only a few months, preventing the implementation of the necessary measures to restore the economy. Germany's democracy was locked into a spiral of economic and political decline.

Hitler becomes chancellor

By the middle of 1932, the Nazis were the largest party in the Reichstag. Even though they did not have a majority of seats to allow them to form a government, they held the balance of power and Hitler was now a key power broker. For six months Germany was in political turmoil as the ageing President Paul von Hindenburg tried to form a government that excluded Hitler, despised by the former field marshal because of his lowly Austrian birth.

In January 1933, Hindenburg bowed to the inevitable and appointed Hitler as Germany's chancellor, as leader of a coalition with other right-wing parties representing big business interests. Over the next year, Hitler moved systematically to consolidate his grip on power and eventually appointed himself Germany's Führer (Leader) with unlimited dictatorial powers. The SS played a key role in this move to dictatorship.

Once in control of the levers of political power, Hitler moved to put his loyal lieutenants into key positions of influence. Himmler was made police chief in Munich. The SS was also authorized to act as an official police unit, alongside established state police forces. Crucially, money from the Interior Ministry budget was diverted to pay for it. Now many of the part-time SS men could become full-time employees of the German state. SS units around the country were established on a permanent basis with battalions, or political readiness squads, being set up in every major city for so-called "heavy police tasks". These were, in effect, paramilitary squads which owed their loyalty directly to Hitler, even though they remained nominally under Röhm's control. The SA organization by the end of 1933 had mushroomed to three million men, and Hitler was looking for ways to bring it under his control.

prev | next