By the end of the 1930s, the SS organization had ballooned to some 200,000 men, of whom the vast majority were in its police, security and concentration camp guard units rather than in the SS-VT. During this period the SS became central to Hitler's "folk myth", with senior figures in the organization being portrayed as Nordic gods in Nazi propaganda. The racial purity of SS recruits was given great prominence, and Hitler tried to build on this as a way to indoctrinate the German people with his theories of racial superiority. The SS also had its own rank system that gave members prestige and power over ordinary mortals in the army, the Nazi Party and in civilian branches of government.

Expansion of the SS

The growth of the armed SS during the later years of the 1930s was one of slow evolution. Much of the ground work for the development of the armed SS was undertaken in great secrecy to allow the opposition of the army High Command to be by-passed or ignored. Hitler was still unwilling to stage an open confrontation with the army's generals, and preferred to dispose of problematic commanders in a series of "dirty tricks" operations to discredit individuals who opposed him. The early development of the armed SS were therefore characterized by a series of deals with the army High Command.

The expansion of the Totenkopfverbönde

In May 1935, joining the armed SS was classified as military service and it exempted the SS recruit from being conscripted into the army. At the same time, however, the army retained control of the flow of new manpower into the SS-VT, and during most of the 1930s that effectively limited it to a total of under 10,000 men. The army also retained control of military aspects of SS training, and had the right to inspect SS-VT units. To get round these restrictions, Himmler allowed the Totenkopfverbönde to mushroom into a force of some 25,000 men by 1939. He groomed the concentration camp guards to become almost a "ghost" reserve for the SS-VT, and stretched its role as a force for "special tasks of a police nature" to the limit. Because it had no formal military role, the army could not claim any right to interfere in its affairs. Totenkopfverbönde units were fully motorized, had heavy machine guns and other light weapons. Plans were drawn up so SS police reservists aged over 45 could be quickly mobilized to guard the concentration camps in order to release the Totenkopfverbönde motorized regiments for combat duties. While on paper Eicke's private army seemed a powerful and heavily armed force, in reality it did not undertake intense combat training and was nowhere near the quality of the mainstream armed units of the SS-VT. During the invasion of Poland and France, for example, its lack of military skills would become very apparent.

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