Schutzstaffel (SS)
친위대 (SS)
The paramilitary organisation of Hitler and the Nazi Party that became the foremost agency of security, surveillance and state terror in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe. Made up of the General SS and the Waffen-SS, it ran the concentration and extermination camps and carried out the Holocaust.
In depth
It began as a small guard for party meetings and took its final name in 1925. It grew rapidly after Heinrich Himmler became Reichsführer in 1929, and after purging the SA leadership in the Night of the Long Knives of 1934 it became independent of the SA. When Himmler also became Chief of German Police in 1936, the Gestapo and the criminal police came under SS command, and in 1939 the Reich Security Main Office joined the SD and the Security Police. The Death’s Head units ran the concentration camps, while the Einsatzgruppen and the SS and police leaders carried out mass murder in the occupied territories. During the war the Waffen-SS, which also took foreign volunteers, grew into an army of hundreds of thousands. The Nuremberg tribunal declared the SS a criminal organisation.