Who's who? The party, SA, SS, Gestapo and youth organisations

When you read about National Socialism, you come across abbreviations: NSDAP, SA, SS, HJ, BDM, DAF, KdF. This is no coincidence. Alongside the state, the Nazis built a second apparatus – the party and its branches – as well as organisations for almost every area of life: for young people, workers, women, teachers, doctors and farmers. In “Who governs? Forms of state, democracy and dictatorship”, you learnt that this is exactly what characterises a totalitarian dictatorship: no one is supposed to remain outside its control.

To understand the Nazi state, you need to be able to tell these organisations apart. We will use the same set of questions for each organisation to help you:

1. What does the abbreviation stand for?
2. When was the organisation founded?
3. What was its role?
4. How could its members be recognised? (Uniform, colour, badge – we describe these in words.)
5. What part did it play in the terror?

Further down, you will find an overview with eight profiles, followed by four matching exercises to practise. Start with the party – all the others stem from it.

NSDAP stands for Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers' Party). It emerged in 1920 from the small DAP (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or German Workers' Party) in München, which Hitler had joined in 1919; he became its chairman in 1921. After his failed attempt to overthrow the government in München in November 1923, the party was briefly banned; Hitler refounded it in 1925. You already know about its rise during the Great Depression from “Weimarer Republik, Weltwirtschaftskrise und der Aufstieg des Nationalsozialismus”.

From 14 July 1933, the NSDAP was the only legal party. This changed its role: it was no longer one party among many, but the core of the state. Mayors, district administrators, headteachers, judges – anyone who wanted to advance their career generally needed a party membership card and wore the round party badge on their lapel. Membership rose from around 850 000 at the start of 1933 to around 8.5 million by 1945. More than a million people joined in the spring of 1933 alone – so many that long-standing party members mockingly called them ‘Märzgefallene’ (‘March casualties’): after the Reichstag election in March, they were suddenly ‘convinced’. In May 1933, the party even stopped accepting new members.

Like the state, the party was organised from the top down: Reichsleitung – Gauleiter – Kreisleiter – Ortsgruppenleiter – Blockleiter (national leadership – regional leaders – district leaders – local group leaders – block leaders). Each Blockleiter was responsible for 40 to 60 households: he distributed propaganda and collected donations – and reported who did not salute the flag, who listened to foreign radio stations or who spoke in a way considered ‘hostile to the state’. You have seen the organisational chart in “From democracy to dictatorship: 1933/34”.

Remember: The NSDAP was no longer a party in the democratic sense – there were no free elections, no opponents, and its reach extended into every home.

SA – Sturmabteilung (Storm Detachment)

The SA was formed in 1921 as the party's gang of thugs: it was supposed to ‘protect’ meetings (Saalschutz, or meeting security) and intimidate opponents. Its members wore brown uniform shirts, hence the name ‘Brownshirts’. Before 1933, the SA fought Communists and Social Democrats in the streets; after 30 January 1933, it was unleashed on opponents as an ‘auxiliary police force’, arresting and torturing people and setting up improvised camps. By 1934, it had several million members. It then became too powerful for the regime: after its leaders were murdered in June/July 1934 (the so-called ‘Röhm-Putsch’ – more on this in “From democracy to dictatorship: 1933/34”), the SA lost its power. It continued to exist – it took part again in the November pogroms of 1938 (violence against Jews organised by the regime throughout the Reich) – but power now lay with the SS.

SS – Schutzstaffel (Protection Squadron)

The SS began in 1925 as a small bodyguard unit for Hitler. From 1929, it was led by Heinrich Himmler, who turned the bodyguard unit into a state within a state. Its members were supposed to be an ‘elite’. Anyone seeking admission had to prove ‘Aryan ancestry’ – ‘Aryan’ is Nazi terminology: the Nazis claimed that there was a superior ‘race’ of ‘Aryans’, to which Germans belonged. This has no scientific basis, as you will see in more detail in the next module in this series. SS men usually wore black uniforms (the Waffen-SS wore field grey during the war) and a skull badge on their caps. After 1934, the SS expanded in every direction:

• It took control of the police: in 1936, Himmler became ‘Chief of the German Police’; the Gestapo (see below) was part of his domain.
• Its Totenkopfverbände (‘Death's Head Units’) guarded and ran the concentration camps.
• Its Waffen-SS was a separate fighting force alongside the Wehrmacht.
• From June 1941, its Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units drawn from the SS and police), together with Wehrmacht units and local helpers, murdered around 1.5 to 2 million people, mainly Jews, behind the front lines in Eastern Europe.
• It ran the extermination camps.

The SS was therefore the main organisation responsible for terror and genocide. A later module in this series explains exactly what the Einsatzgruppen and extermination camps were and how persecution led to them; here, the focus is only on the role of the SS within the Nazi apparatus. The International Military Tribunal in Nürnberg declared it a criminal organisation in 1946.

Remember: SA = the thugs of the early years; stripped of power after 1934 (power passed to the SS), but involved in violence again during the November pogroms of 1938. SS = the ‘elite’ that organised the police, camps and mass murder.

Gestapo is short for Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State Police). Hermann Göring founded it in April 1933 in Preussen as a political police force; from 1934, it was under Himmler's control and therefore that of the SS. Its task was to track down and eliminate political opponents – Communists, Social Democrats, critics within the churches, and later Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals and forced labourers.

Three things made the Gestapo so dangerous:

1. No judicial oversight. The Gestapo could place people in ‘Schutzhaft’ (‘protective custody’) – a euphemism, because this was about persecution, not protection: no charges, no judge, no time limit. People were often sent to a concentration camp by Gestapo order rather than by a court sentence. The suspension of fundamental rights under the Reichstag Fire Decree shaped everyday life: there was no longer any protection against arbitrary detention, no protection of the home from intrusion, and no privacy of correspondence.
2. Torture. Interrogations in Gestapo cellars were notorious; the regime euphemistically called such abuse ‘intensified interrogation’.
3. Denunciation. The Gestapo was much smaller than people believed: in 1937, it had only about 7 000 officers throughout the Reich. It nevertheless seemed to be everywhere and ‘all-knowing’, largely because of information supplied by the public – neighbours, colleagues, block leaders and sometimes members of the same family. Paid informants (‘V-Leute’) and information from interrogations also played a part. Historians have studied Gestapo files: a large proportion of cases began with a report (a denunciation) from someone close to the people targeted. Motives included fear and conviction, but also envy, disputes over a flat or revenge.

In 1939, the regime brought the Gestapo, the criminal police and the party's intelligence service, the SD (Sicherheitsdienst der SS, or SS Security Service), together in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) (Reich Security Main Office), headed by Reinhard Heydrich. The deportations of Jews were later also organised from there.

Remember: Terror did not work only from the top down. It worked because enough people took part – and because everyone knew that someone might be listening.

There were four organisations for children and young people, divided by age and sex:

The Hitlerjugend was founded in 1926; the Jungvolk, BDM and Jungmädelbund had joined it as sub-organisations by 1931. In 1931, Baldur von Schirach became leader of the entire Nazi youth movement. At the end of 1932, the Hitlerjugend had just over 100 000 members in total; by the end of 1933, it had more than two million. Most other youth associations had by then been banned or ‘incorporated’; only the Catholic youth movement, protected by a treaty between the regime and the Vatican, managed to survive for a few more years. The Gesetz über die Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth Law) of 1 December 1936 made it the state youth organisation. At the beginning of 1939, the four organisations together had around 8.7 million young members; in March 1939, membership became compulsory from the age of ten.

Remember: ‘Hitlerjugend’ has two meanings. In the narrow sense, HJ refers only to the group for boys aged 14 to 18, as in the table above. In the broad sense, it means the whole Nazi youth organisation with all four sections (HJ, DJ, BDM, JM), as in the ‘Gesetz über die Hitlerjugend’ of 1936 and compulsory membership from the age of ten. As you read, check which meaning is intended.

Pay attention to the spelling: the official abbreviation is BDM, with a capital D; you may occasionally see ‘BdM’, but this is not the official form. What the youth organisations intended for young people – camps, drill, educational aims and elite schools – and how young people adapted or resisted is the subject of a separate module in this series.

Adults, too, were supposed to have no life outside the regime's control. Three organisations covered work, leisure and the period after leaving school:

• DAF – Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German Labour Front). Founded in May 1933 under Robert Ley, after the trade unions had been destroyed (you know about this from “From democracy to dictatorship: 1933/34”). It did not represent workers' interests; it was a compulsory organisation: strikes were banned, the ‘Betriebsführer’ (‘workplace leader’) gave orders, and the ‘Gefolgschaft’ (‘followers’) obeyed. With around 25 million members, the DAF was the largest Nazi organisation.
• KdF – ‘Kraft durch Freude’ (‘Strength through Joy’). The DAF's leisure organisation (from November 1933): cheap theatre tickets, sports courses, hikes and cruises on its own KdF ships. Leisure thus became part of propaganda – and a reward for those who belonged.
• RAD – Reichsarbeitsdienst (Reich Labour Service). From 1935, young men had to do six months of compulsory labour (roads, drainage, later armaments); from 1939, this also applied to young women. The spade was its symbol; the RAD involved drill and preparation for military service.

• KZ – Konzentrationslager (concentration camp). Detention camps where people were held without a court sentence, initially for political opponents (Dachau, March 1933), later for everyone the regime excluded. Run by the SS-Totenkopfverbände. Important: a concentration camp is not the same as an extermination camp. In concentration camps, people were tortured and exploited, and died in huge numbers; from 1941/42, extermination camps in occupied Poland were used for deliberate mass killing. You will learn more in the module on the persecution of Jews.
• The ‘KdF-Wagen’. The leisure organisation promised every family a car of their own: hundreds of thousands saved up through savings stamps, but not a single saver received their car – from 1939, the factory built military vehicles. After the war, the model became the VW Käfer (Beetle).
• RSHA – Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office). From 1939, the headquarters of the Gestapo, criminal police and SD under Reinhard Heydrich – the nerve centre of terror and later of the deportations.
• NS / ‘Nazi’. NS is short for ‘nationalsozialistisch’ (National Socialist). ‘Nazi’ was originally a mocking nickname used by opponents (like ‘Sozi’ for Social Democrats) and became the word commonly used today.