I
will post information about the SS Organization, SS-Totenkopfverbände from Wikipedia and other
links.
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Totenkopf (Death's
head) collar insignia, worn by the 13th Guard Company
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SS-TV officers
standing in front of prisoners at KZ Gusen in October 1941.
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Agency
overview
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Formed
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June 1934
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Dissolved
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8 May 1945
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Type
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Paramilitary Organisation
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Jurisdiction
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Nazi Germany
Occupied Europe |
Headquarters
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Oranienburg, near Berlin
52°45′16″N 13°14′13″E |
Employees
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22,033 (SS-TV 1939 and
SS Division Totenkopf c.1942) |
Minister
responsible
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Heinrich Himmler1934-1945, Reichsführer-SS
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Agency
executives
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SS-Obergruppenführer Theodor
Eicke (1934-1940), Commander, SS-TV
SS-Gruppenführer Richard Glücks (1940-1945), Commander, SS-TV |
Parent
agency
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Schutzstaffel
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SS-Totenkopfverbände (SS-TV), rendered in English
as "Death's-Head Units," was the SS
organization responsible for administering the Nazi
concentration camps for the Third Reich. While the Totenkopf (Death's Head/skull) was the
universal cap badge of the SS, the SS-TV also wore the insignia on the right
collar to distinguish itself from other SS units.
The
SS-TV was an independent unit within the SS with its
own ranks and command structure. It ran the camps throughout
Germany, such as Dachau, Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald; in Nazi-occupied Europe, there was Auschwitz
in German occupied Poland and Mauthausen
in Austria as well as numerous other concentration and death camps.
The death camps' primary function was genocide and included Treblinka,
Bełżec
and Sobibór.
It was responsible for facilitating what was called the Final Solution,
known since as Shoah or the Holocaust, in collaboration with the Reich
Main Security Office and the SS
Economic and Administrative Main Office or WVHA.
At
the outbreak of World War II one
of the first combat units of the Waffen-SS, the SS Division Totenkopf,
was formed from SS-TV personnel. It soon developed a reputation for ferocity
and fanaticism, participating in several war crimes such as the Le Paradis massacre
in 1940 during the Fall of France
and the killings of Soviet civilians in Operation Barbarossa.
Formation
On
26 June 1933, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler appointed SS-Oberführer
Theodor Eicke the Kommandant of the first Nazi concentration camp at Dachau.
Eicke requested a permanent unit that would be subordinate only to him and
Himmler granted the request; the SS-Wachverband (Guard Unit) was formed.
Promoted on 30 January 1934 to SS-Brigadeführer (equivalent to Major-general
in the army), Eicke as commander of Dachau began new reforms. He reorganized
the SS camp, establishing new guarding provisions,
which included blind obedience to orders, and tightening disciplinary and punishment regulations for
detainees, which were adopted by all concentration camps of the Third Reich on 1 January 1934. Following
the Night of the
Long Knives (30 June to 2 July 1934), Eicke, who had played a role
in the affair, was again promoted to the rank of SS-Gruppenführer and
officially appointed Inspector
of Concentration Camps and Commander of SS guard formations.
Personnel
from Dachau then went on to work at Sachsenhausen
and Oranienburg, where Eicke established his
central office. In 1935 Dachau became the training center for the concentration
camps service. Many of the early recruits came from the ranks of the SA and Allgemeine SS. Senior roles were filled
by personnel from the German police service.
On 29 March 1936, concentration camp guards and administration units were
officially designated as the SS-Totenkopfverbände (SS-TV).
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Protective
Custody Camp Dachau -- Inspection by the Nazi party and Himmler
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Development
In
1935, as the concentration camp system within Germany expanded, groups of camps
were organized into Wachsturmbanne (battalions) under the office of the
Inspector of Concentration Camps who answered directly to the SS headquarters
office and Heinrich Himmler. When the SS-Totenkopfverbände was formally
established in March 1936, the group was organized into six Wachtruppen
situated at each of Germany's major concentration camps. In 1937, the Wachsturmbanne
were in turn organized into three main SS-Totenkopfstandarten
(regiments).
By
1936, Eicke had also begun to establish military formations of concentration
camp personnel which eventually became the Totenkopf Division and other units of the Waffen-SS.
In the early days of the military camp service formation, the group's exact
chain of command was contested since Eicke as Führer der Totenkopfverbände
exercised personal control of the group but also, being a military SS
formation, authority over the armed units was claimed by the SS-Verfügungstruppe
(who would get it in August 1940). But at this time Eicke and Himmler
envisioned the armed SS-TV not as combat soldiers, but as troops for carrying
out what were euphemistically described as "police and security
operations" behind the front lines. Thus Eicke's men were trained by a
cadre of camp personnel without outside intervention; the first major training
exercise in 1935 resulted in the clearing of the entire Dachau camp for several
weeks while the Totenkopf military formation was organized.
By
April 1938, the SS-TV had four regiments of three storm battalions with three
infantry companies, one machine gun company and medical, communication and
transportation units. On 17 August 1938 Hitler decreed, at Himmler's request,
the SS-TV to be the reserve for the SS-Verfügungstruppe; this would over
the course of the war lead to a constant flux of men between the Waffen-SS and
the concentration camps. Himmler's intention was simply to expand his private
army by using the SS-TV (as well as the police, which he also controlled) as a
manpower pool. Himmler sought and obtained a further decree, issued on 18 May
1939, which authorized the expansion of the SS-TV to 50,000 men, and directed
the army to provide it with military equipment, something the army had resisted.
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Natural born killers
(as described by Taigman), the German SS-men Paul Bredow, Willi Mentz, Max
Möller, and Josef Hirtreiter who served at Treblinka extermination camp during
the Operation Reinhard in occupied Poland, four Nazi German war criminals and
Holocaust perpetrators posing for a group photo at the Treblinka zoo.
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By
the outbreak of war on 1 September 1939, Eicke's SS-TV field forces numbered
four infantry regiments and a cavalry regiment, plus two battalions
clandestinely placed in independent Danzig.
Their role in the invasion of Poland was not military; unlike the Leibstandarte
and the SS-VT they were not under Army High Command (OKH)
control, but Himmler's. "Their military capabilities were employed instead
in terrorizing the civilian population through acts that included hunting down
straggling Polish soldiers, confiscating agricultural produce and livestock,
and torturing and murdering large numbers of Polish political leaders,
aristocrats, businessmen, priests, intellectuals, and Jews." The behavior
of these Standarten in Poland elicited disgust and protests from
officers of the army, including 8th Army commander Johannes Blaskowitz
who wrote a lengthy memorandum to von Brauchitsch detailing SS-TV atrocities;
to no avail.
In
the wake of the Polish conquest the three senior Totenkopf-Standarten
were combined with the SS Heimwehr Danzig
and some support units transferred from the Army to create the Totenkopf-Division,
with Eicke in command. From fall 1939 to spring 1940 a massive recruitment
effort raised no fewer than twelve new TK-Standarten (four times the
size of the SS-VT) in anticipation of the coming attack on France. By now,
Eicke's ambition had aroused Himmler's suspicion, and Hausser's and Dietrich's resentment, especially his
designation of TK-Standarten as reserves for his Totenkopf-Division
alone, and his appropriation of Verfügungstruppe military supplies which
were stored at Eicke's concentration camps. After the TK-Division, and
Eicke personally, performed poorly during Fall Gelb Himmler resolved to curb his
subordinate. Cynically using as justification several well-publicized
atrocities committed by the Division in France, on 15 August 1940 he dissolved
Eicke's Inspectorate of SS-Totenkopfstandarten and transferred the Totenkopf-Division,
the independent TK-Standarten, and their reserve and replacement system
to the newly formed Waffen-SS high command. In February 1941 the Totenkopf
designation was removed from the names of all units other than the TK-Division
and the camp Totenkopfwachsturmbanne, and their personnel exchanged the
Death's-Head collar insignia for the Waffen-SS Sig-runes. The camp system
expanded greatly after the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, when large numbers of
Soviet soldiers were captured. Some were transferred to the camps, where their
inhumane treatment became normal.
The
Totenkopf Division still had close ties to the camp service and its
members continued to wear the Death's-Head as their unit insignia. They were
known for brutal tactics, a result of the original doctrine of "no
pity" which Eicke had instilled in his camp personnel as far back as 1934,
together with the fact that the original Totenkopfstandarte had
"trained" themselves. The Division's ineffectiveness in France, as
well as its war crimes, can in part be explained by its personnel who were more
thugs than soldiers. However, over the course of the savage fighting in the
East (during which the Division was twice effectively destroyed and recreated),
the Totenkopf became one of the crack combat units of the German
military. Very few of the men who were part of the 1939 Standarten in
Poland were still in the Division by 1945.
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SS-TV Unterscharführer (Blockführer)
at Sachsenhausen
in 1936
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Camp organization
In
1941, the concentration camps themselves were part of a massive system both in
Germany and the occupied territories. By this time, special death camps had
also come into operation while an extensive labor camp system was providing
forced labor to the SS. As a result, the entire concentration camp system was
placed under the authority of the SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt
(WVHA) with the Inspector of Concentration Camps now a subordinate to the Chief
of the WVHA. The camps themselves were then administratively separated into
three main divisions of Labor Camps, Concentration Camps,
and Death Camps.
As
a final measure, in 1942 all camp personnel were folded into the Waffen-SS to
allow for easier rotation of wounded Waffen-SS personnel into camp positions
and for camp personnel to be easily transferred into combat units should the
need arise. This last measure was frequently used for SS personnel who were
deemed "too soft" for duty in a concentration camp or for those who
showed compassion to prisoners or refused to obey illegal orders such as the
gassing of prisoners or the shooting of women and children. This policy of
quick transfer into a combat unit was a large incentive for SS personnel to
participate in atrocities, as the alternative could be front line service on
the Eastern
Front. On the reverse, the SS procedures for camp personnel who
refused to engage in war crimes proved that there were never any cases where SS
soldiers were under threat of death unless they carried out atrocities (a
common defense claim of captured SS personnel at the end of the war). At the
trial of Treblinka camp personnel, it was in fact
proven that there had never been a single case in the SS where someone was
killed for refusing to carry out an illegal order and that such persons were
simply transferred into combat with the Waffen-SS.
Within
the camps themselves, there existed a hierarchy of camp titles and positions
which were unique only to the camp service. Each camp was commanded by a Kommandant, sometimes referred to as Lagerkommandant,
who was assisted by a camp adjutant and command staff. The prison barracks
within the camp were supervised by a Rapportführer who was responsible
for daily roll call and the camp daily schedule. The individual prisoner
barracks were overseen by junior SS-NCOs called Blockführer who, in turn
had one to two squads of SS soldiers responsible for overseeing the prisoners.
Within extermination camps, the Blockführer was in charge of the Sonderkommando and was also the person
who would physically gas victims in the camp gas chambers.
The
camp perimeter and watch towers were overseen by a separate formation called
the Guard Battalion, or the Wachbattalion. The guard battalion commander
was responsible for providing watch bills to man guard towers and oversaw
security patrols outside the camp. The battalion was organized on typical
military lines with companies, platoons, and squads. The battalion commander
was subordinate directly to the camp commander.
Concentration
camps also had supply and medical personnel, attached to the headquarters
office under the camp commander, as well as a security office with Gestapo and
Sicherheitsdienst
(SD) personnel attached temporarily to the camp. These security personnel,
while answering to the camp commander, were also under direct command of Sicherheitspolizei
(SiPo) and RSHA commanders independent of the camps.
As a result, SD and Gestapo personnel within the concentration camps were seen
as "outsiders" by the full-time camp personnel and frequently looked
down upon with distrust by the regular SS-TV members.
In
addition to the regular SS personnel assigned to the Concentration Camp, there
also existed a prisoner system of trustees known as Kapos
who performed a wide variety of duties from administration to overseeing other
groups of prisoners. The Sonderkommando were special groups of Jewish
prisoner who assisted in the extermination camps with the disposal of bodies
and other tasks. The duty of actually gassing prisoners was, however, always
carried out by the SS.
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Sonderkommando men
working at the Crematorium at Dachau
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| Theodor Eicke |
Operations
Eicke
in his role as the commander of the SS-TV, continued to reorganize the camp
system by dismantling smaller camps. By August 1937 only Dachau, Sachsenhausen,
Buchenwald and Ravensbrück remained in Germany. In 1938
Eicke oversaw the building of new camps in Austria following the Anschluss, such as Mauthausen.
Eicke's
reorganization and the introduction of forced labor made the camps one of the
SS's most powerful tools, but it earned him the enmity of RSHA chief, Reinhard Heydrich, who wanted to take over control of Dachau. Himmler wanted to
keep a separation of power so Eicke remained in command of the SS-TV and camp
operations. This kept control of the camps out of the hands of the Gestapo or
the SD.
In
September 1939, Eicke became the commander of the SS Totenkopf Division. In
1940, the Concentration
Camps Inspectorate became part of the Amt D
of the Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt under SS-Obergruppenführer
Oswald Pohl. Eicke was replaced by his Head of Staff, SS-Gruppenführer Richard Glücks
who continued to manage the camp administration until the end of the war.
In
1942 Glücks was increasingly involved in the administration of the Endlösung, supplying personnel to
assist in Aktion Reinhardt (although the death camps
of Belzec,
Treblinka and Sobibor
were administered by SS-und
Polizei-führer Odilo Globocnik of the General Government).
In July 1942, Glücks met Himmler to discuss medical experiments on
concentration camp inmates. All extermination orders were issued from Glücks'
office to SS-TV commands throughout Nazi Germany and occupied Europe. He
specifically authorized the purchase of Zyklon B for use at Auschwitz.
But
as the tide of war changed in Europe, conditions became increasingly harsh for
surviving camp inmates. In 1945 SS-TV units began to receive orders to conceal
as much of the evidence of The Holocaust
as possible. Camps were destroyed, sick prisoners were shot and others were
marched on death marches
away from the advancing Allies.
The SS-TV were also instrumental in the execution of hundreds of political
prisoners to prevent their liberation.
By
April 1945 many SS-TV had left their posts. Due to their notoriety, some
removed their death head insignia to hide their identities. Camp duties
were increasingly turned over to so-called "Auxiliary-SS", soldiers
and civilians conscripted as camp guards so that the Totenkopf men could
escape. However, many were caught by Allied war crime investigators and tried
at Nuremberg
between 1946 and 1949.
SS KZ personnel
From
its inception, Eicke fostered an attitude of "inflexible harshness"
in the SS-TV. This core belief continued to influence guards in all
concentration camps even after Eicke had taken over command of the SS Totenkopf
Division. Recruits were taught to hate their enemies through tough training
regimes and Nazi indoctrination.
SS-TV
personnel lost any compassion for camp inmates. Within camps, guards created an
atmosphere of controlled, disciplined cruelty that subjugated prisoners. This
brutal ethos influenced some of the SS-TV's most infamous members including Rudolf Höß,
Franz Ziereis, Karl Otto Koch, Max Kögel and Amon Goeth.
In
the last days of World War II, a special group called the
"Auxiliary-SS" (SS-Mannschaft) was formed as a last-ditch
effort to keep concentration camps running and allow regular SS personnel to
escape. Auxiliary-SS members were not considered regular SS personnel, but were
conscripted members from other branches of the German military, the Nazi Party,
and the Volkssturm.
Such personnel wore a distinctive twin swastika collar patch and served as camp
guard and administrative personnel until the surrender of Germany.
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An SS-TV Scharführer
from KZ Mauthausen. His collar and
hat band patches show the Totenkopf insignia of a concentration camp guard.
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Combat formations
- 1st TK-Standarte Oberbayern. Formed 1937 at Dachau. During the Polish invasion conducted "security operations" behind the lines. Redesignated 1. SS-Totenkopf-Infanterie-Regiment and assigned to the Totenkopf Division 10/39.
- 2nd TK-Standarte Brandenburg. Formed 1937 at Oranienburg. During the Polish invasion conducted "security operations" behind the lines. Redesignated 2. SS-Totenkopf-Infanterie-Regiment and assigned to the Totenkopf Division 10/39.
- 3rd TK-Standarte Thüringen. Formed 1937 at Buchenwald. During the Polish invasion conducted "security operations" behind the lines. Redesignated 3. SS-Totenkopf-Infanterie-Regiment and assigned to the Totenkopf Division, with some men forming the cadre of the 10. TK-Standarte, 11/39.
- 4th TK-Standarte Ostmark. Formed 1938 at Vienna and Berlin. III Sturmbann Götze detached to form the core of SS Heimwehr Danzig 7/39. Garrison duty at Prague 10/39 and in the Netherlands 6/40. Designated 4. SS-Infanterie-Regiment 2/41, assigned to 2. SS-Infanterie-Brigade 5/41.
- SS-Wachsturmbann Eimann. Formed 1939 at Danzig. During the Polish invasion conducted "security operations" behind the lines. Dissolved 1940.
- TK-Reiter-Standarte. Formed 9/39 in Poland to conduct "security operations" behind the lines. Expanded and divided into 1. and 2. TK-Reiter-Standarten 5/40. Redesignated 1. and 2. SS-Kavallerie-Regimenter 2/41, combined into SS-Kavallerie-Brigade (later SS-Kavallerie-Division Florian Geyer) 9/41.
- 5th TK-Standarte Dietrich Eckart. Formed 1939 at Berlin and Oranienburg. Designated 5. SS-Infanterie-Regiment 2/41, assigned to 2. SS-Infanterie-Brigade 5/41.
- 6th TK-Standarte. Formed 1939 at Prague. Garrison duty in Norway 5/40. Designated 6. SS-Infanterie-Regiment 2/41, assigned to Kampfgruppe Nord (later 6. SS-Gebirgs-Division Nord) spring 41.
- 7th TK-Standarte. Formed 1939 at Brno. Garrison duty in Norway 5/40. Designated 7. SS-Infanterie-Regiment 2/41, assigned to Kampfgruppe Nord (later 6. SS-Gebirgs-Division Nord) spring 41.
- 8th TK-Standarte. Formed 1939 at Crakow. Designated 8. SS-Infanterie-Regiment 2/41, assigned to 1. SS-Infanterie-Brigade 4/41.
- 9th TK-Standarte. Formed 1939 at Danzig. Reorganized (with elements of St. 12) into Standarte "K" (Kirkenes, Norway) 8-11/40, redesignated 9. SS-Infanterie-Regiment 2/41, assigned to Kampfgruppe Nord spring 41. Incorporated into SS-Regiment Thule 8/42.
- 10th TK-Standarte. Formed 1939 at Buchenwald. Garrison duties in Poland 1940. Designated 10. SS-Infanterie-Regiment 2/41, assigned to 1. SS-Infanterie-Brigade 4/41.
- 11th TK-Standarte. Formed 1939 at Radom. Garrison duty in the Netherlands 5/40. Assigned to SS-Infanterie-Division (mot) Reich to replace the 2. SS-Infanterie-Regiment Germania 12/40 and redesignated 11. SS-Infanterie-Regiment.
- TK-Standarten 12-16 were raised in the winter of 1939-40, but disbanded the following summer, their personnel used to fill out other units.
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