This monumental book on the SS is one I believe many will not want to miss. For the uninitiated like me who thinks that the SS is but a single organisation of uniform people, this book will almost confuse you with the divisions and sub-divisions within the collective SS outfit. Riding along the history of the SS is the inescapable history of the Third Reich, this book therefore does more than one job.
The Introduction to the book was written like a literature review in a thesis with a good survey of the then available literature. The research questions were given at the start:
A book on the Third Reich will always evoke questions about how it came to be. How did a bunch of people who started off on the fringe, identified more with a group of hooligans than stately politicians came to gain total control over Germany and almost dominated Europe? The author did not explicitly answer these questions but gave clues for the readers to make their own conclusions. It was not that nobody was able to see the sinister side of the Hitler, but the law, which might have stopped him, failed to be exercised. The generals had their chances but would never take the fateful step when the time came (pg. 250) and eventually would have to relent to the Einsatzgruppen’s lawlessness, and then be themselves implicated after the war (pg. 298).
There are a few chapters that are particularly worth reading. Examples of these are the one on Heydrich (Chapter 8) and especially the one on the Final Solution (Chapter 14). The latter gives a raw depiction at the heart of the Nazi regime, one that is defined by violence. Many readers would have known about the camps and the number of people who died. But this chapter presents the torture in graphic details and most important of all, it tried to capture the warped and 'schizophrenic' nature of the SS. They are shown as 'ordinary' people who could go back to their families after killing hundreds in the camp - it's all in a day's work. What to me is the scariest is not that they didn't know what they did was morally wrong, not even that they tried to justify it based on their need to obey commands from the top, but their romance about the sacrifice they were making by doing something evil for the greater good, so that others would not have to do it. And I always believe that the interest in understanding the Nazis is precisely because we know that we might be like them.
More interestingly is how people deal with the issue of the SS after the war. The author hinted that the Germans were very quick to recognise the existence of the SS, not to glorify them, but rather to paint them in as bad a light as possible, thereby shifting their collective guilt to the SS, absolving themselves of blame (pg. 7).
What of the surviving members of the SS then? The reader is invited to find out for himself/herself in this book, one that is not easy to read, but is nevertheless an important source of almost all aspects of the SS.
(Find this book at Goodreads)
The Introduction to the book was written like a literature review in a thesis with a good survey of the then available literature. The research questions were given at the start:
- What is this organisation and how do they go about the tasks that defined their existence? ("But the outer world was never allowed to know anything of what went on inside the SS...) (pg 2).
- What turned the SS into this machinery that turned the ethnic cleansing doctrine into reality? ("...it did not explain the source of power which enabled the SS to turn the racial fantasies of the National-Socialist regime into dreadful fact.) (pg 4).
A book on the Third Reich will always evoke questions about how it came to be. How did a bunch of people who started off on the fringe, identified more with a group of hooligans than stately politicians came to gain total control over Germany and almost dominated Europe? The author did not explicitly answer these questions but gave clues for the readers to make their own conclusions. It was not that nobody was able to see the sinister side of the Hitler, but the law, which might have stopped him, failed to be exercised. The generals had their chances but would never take the fateful step when the time came (pg. 250) and eventually would have to relent to the Einsatzgruppen’s lawlessness, and then be themselves implicated after the war (pg. 298).
There are a few chapters that are particularly worth reading. Examples of these are the one on Heydrich (Chapter 8) and especially the one on the Final Solution (Chapter 14). The latter gives a raw depiction at the heart of the Nazi regime, one that is defined by violence. Many readers would have known about the camps and the number of people who died. But this chapter presents the torture in graphic details and most important of all, it tried to capture the warped and 'schizophrenic' nature of the SS. They are shown as 'ordinary' people who could go back to their families after killing hundreds in the camp - it's all in a day's work. What to me is the scariest is not that they didn't know what they did was morally wrong, not even that they tried to justify it based on their need to obey commands from the top, but their romance about the sacrifice they were making by doing something evil for the greater good, so that others would not have to do it. And I always believe that the interest in understanding the Nazis is precisely because we know that we might be like them.
More interestingly is how people deal with the issue of the SS after the war. The author hinted that the Germans were very quick to recognise the existence of the SS, not to glorify them, but rather to paint them in as bad a light as possible, thereby shifting their collective guilt to the SS, absolving themselves of blame (pg. 7).
What of the surviving members of the SS then? The reader is invited to find out for himself/herself in this book, one that is not easy to read, but is nevertheless an important source of almost all aspects of the SS.
(Find this book at Goodreads)
