Germanic SS

Germanic SS
The Germanic SS were foreign branches of the Allgemeine SS.

Headquarters of the Schalburg Corps in Copenhagen, Denmark, c.1943.
Agency overview
Formed September 1939
Dissolved 8 May 1945
Jurisdiction Germany Germany
Occupied Europe
Headquarters SS-Hauptamt, Prinz-Albrecht-Straße, Berlin
Employees ~35,000 c.1943
Minister responsible
Parent agency Schutzstaffel

The Germanic SS (German: Germanische SS) was the collective name given to Nordic SS groups which arose in occupied Europe between 1939 and 1945. The units were modeled on the Allgemeine SS in Nazi Germany. Such groups existed in Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Belgium, whose populations the Nazi ideogues considered to be especially "racially suitable". They typically served as local security police augmenting German units of the Gestapo, Sicherheitsdienst (SD), and other departments of the German Reich Main Security Office.

Origins

Before the war, both Denmark and Norway had fascist parties. The Danish National Socialist Workers' Party (Danmarks Nationalsocialistiske Arbejderparti; DNSAP) was founded in 1930, however, only held three seats in parliament by 1939.[1] By 1933, Vidkun Quisling was the leader of a Norwegian political party, Nasjonal Samling (NS, National Unity).[2] However, it was not effective as a political party until the pro-German government took over after Norway was conquered. At that point, its state police, abolished in 1937, was reestablished to assist the Gestapo in Norway. In the Netherlands, the Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging (National Socialist Movement; NSB) had greater success before the war. The party had four per cent of the vote in the 1937 national elections. After the occupation in 1940, all these groups worked in their respective countries in support of Nazi Germany and became recruiting grounds for the Waffen-SS.[3]

The Nazi idea behind co-opting additional Germanic people into the SS stems to a certain extent from the völkisch belief that the original Aryan-Germanic homeland rested in Scandinavia and that, in a racial-ideological sense, people from there or the neighbouring northern European regions were a human reservoir of Nordic/Germanic blood.[4] Conquest of Western Europe gave the Germans, and especially the SS, access to these "potential recruits" who were considered part of the wider "Germanic family".[1] Four of these conquered nations were ripe with Germanic peoples according to Nazi estimations (Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, and the Flemish-speaking Belgians). Himmler referred to people from these lands in terms of their Germanic suitability as, "blutsmässig unerhört wertvolle Kräfte" ("by blood exceptionally highly qualified people").[5] Accordingly, some of them were recruited into the SS and enjoyed the highest privileges as did foreign workers from these regions, to include unrestrained sexual contact with German women.[6] Eager to expand their reach, fanatical Nazis like Chief of the SS Main Office, Gottlob Berger considered the Germanic SS as foundational for a burgeoning German Empire.[7]

Himmler's vision for a Germanic SS started with grouping the Netherlands, Belgium and north-east France together into a western-Germanic state called Burgundia which would be policed by the SS as a security buffer for Germany. In 1940, the first manifestation of the Germanic SS appeared in Flanders as the Allgemeene SS Vlaanderen to be joined two-months later by the Dutch Nederlandsche SS and in May 1941 the Norwegian Norges SS was formed. The final nation to contribute to the Germanic SS was Denmark, whose Germansk Korpet (later called the Schalburg Corps) came into being in April 1943.[8] For the SS, they did not think of their compatriots in terms of national borders but in terms of Germanic racial makeup, known conceptually to them as Deutschtum, a greater idea which transcended traditional political boundaries.[9] While the SS leadership foresaw an imperialistic and semi-autonomous relationship for the Nordic/Germanic countries like Denmark, the Netherlands and Norway as co-bearers of a greater Germanic empire, Hitler refused to grant them the same degree of independence despite ongoing pressure from ranking members of the SS.[10]

Duties

The purpose of the Germanic SS was to enforce Nazi racial doctrine, especially anti-Semitic ideals. They typically served as local security police augmenting German units of the Gestapo, Sicherheitsdienst (SD), and other main departments of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA). Their principle responsibilities during wartime was to root-out partisans, subversive organizations and any group opposed to Nazi ideals. In other cases, these foreign units of the SS were employed by major German firms to distribute propaganda for the Nazi cause among their compatriots and to police and control workers.[11] More than this however, the inclusion of other Germanic peoples was part of the Nazi attempt to Germanize Europe in the collective, and for them, Germanization entailed the creation of an empire ruled by Germanic people at the expense of other races.[12]

One of the most notorious groups was in the Netherlands where the Germanic SS was employed to round-up Jews. Of the 140,000 Jews that had lived in the Netherlands prior to 1940, around 24,000 survived the war by hiding.[13] Despite their relatively small numbers, a total of 512 Jews from Oslo were hunted down by the Norwegian Police and the Germanske SS Norge (Norwegian General SS); once caught, they were deported to Auschwitz. More Jews were rounded-up elsewhere, but the total number of Norwegian Jews captured never reached a thousand throughout the course of the war.[14] Similar measures were planned by the SS against Danish Jews who totaled about 6,500 but most of them managed to go into hiding or escape to Sweden before the senior German representative in Denmark, SS-General Werner Best could marshal the SS forces at his disposal and complete his planned raids and deportations.[15][16]

Germanic SS organizations

Vidkun Quisling inspects the Germanske SS Norge on the Palace Square in Oslo

The following countries raised active Germanic SS detachments:

  • The Netherlands: Germaansche SS in Nederland (before 1942: Nederlandsche SS)
  • Flanders (Belgium): Germaansche SS in Vlaanderen (before 1942: Algemeene SS Vlaanderen) was one of the first collaborationist formations to become part of the Germanische SS and, in 1943, became associated with the radical DeVlag political party. Unofficially, Himmler wanted to use the organization to penetrate occupied Belgium, which was under the control of the Wehrmacht military government, not the party or the SS.[17] The SS-Vlaanderen was also used to staff the anti-Jewish units of the German security services with auxiliary staff.[18]
  • Norway: Germanske SS Norge (before 1942: Norges SS) was a paramilitary organization established in Norway in July 1942. GSSN was at the same time a Norwegian branch of Germanic-SS, and a sub organization of Quisling's Nasjonal Samling. Leader of the organization was Jonas Lie, and second-in-command was Sverre Riisnæs. The number of members reached a maximum of about 1,300 in 1944. A large part of the members were recruited from the police, and about fifty percent served in the occupied Soviet Union.[19][20]
  • Denmark: Schalburg Corps, the Danish Germanic-SS, was formed on February 2, 1943. On March 30 the corps was renamed Schalburg Corps. During the summer of 1943, Søren Kam was commander of the Schalburg Corps.[21]

An underground Nazi organization also existed in Switzerland, known as the Germanische SS Schweiz. It had very few members and was considered merely a splinter Nazi group by Swiss authorities.[22]

Post-war

After World War II, many Germanic SS members were tried by their respective countries for treason. Independent war crimes trials (outside the jurisdiction of the Nuremberg Trials) were conducted in several European countries, such as the Netherlands, Norway and Denmark.

References

Citations

  1. 1 2 Weale 2012, p. 265.
  2. ↑ Shirer 1990, pp. 676.
  3. ↑ Weale 2012, pp. 265–266.
  4. ↑ Puschner 2013, pp. 26–27.
  5. ↑ Frijtag Drabbe Künzel 2013, p. 93.
  6. ↑ Hilberg 1992, p. 209.
  7. ↑ Höhne 2001, p. 500.
  8. ↑ McNab 2013, p. 105.
  9. ↑ Mineau 2011, p. 45.
  10. ↑ Höhne 2001, pp. 500–501.
  11. ↑ McNab 2013, pp. 105–106.
  12. ↑ Frijtag Drabbe Künzel 2013, pp. 83–84.
  13. ↑ Bauer 1982, pp. 240–243.
  14. ↑ Weale 2012, p. 387.
  15. ↑ Bloxham 2009, pp. 241–243.
  16. ↑ Weale 2012, p. 387–388.
  17. ↑ Bosworth, R. J. B. (2009). The Oxford handbook of fascism. Oxford University Press. p. 483. ISBN 978-0-19-929131-1.
  18. ↑ Mikhman, Dan (1998). Belgium and the Holocaust: Jews, Belgians, Germans. Berghahn Books. p. 212. ISBN 978-965-308-068-3.
  19. ↑ Sørensen, Øystein (1995). "Germanske SS Norge (GSSN)". In Dahl; Hjeltnes; Nøkleby; Ringdal; Sørensen. Norsk krigsleksikon 1940–1945 (in Norwegian). Oslo: Cappelen. pp. 133&ndash, 134. ISBN 82-02-14138-9.
  20. ↑ Emberland, Terje; Kott, Matthew (2012). Himmlers Norge. Nordmenn i det storgermanske prosjekt (in Norwegian). Oslo: Aschehoug. pp. 341&ndash, 349. ISBN 978-82-03-29308-5.
  21. ↑ Høgh-Sørensen, Erik (2013). Drabet på Clemmensen og historien om Søren Kam [The murder of Clemmensen and the story of Søren Kam] (in Danish) (2. revised (after Dansk Dødspatrulje) ed.). People's Press. 223 pages. ISBN 978-87-7137-540-4.
  22. ↑ Fink 1985, pp. 72–75.

Bibliography

  • Bauer, Yehuda (1982). A History of the Holocaust. New York: Franklin Watts. ISBN 9780531056417.
  • Bloxham, Donald (2009). The Final Solution: A Genocide. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19955-034-0.
  • Fink, Jürg (1985). Die Schweiz aus der Sicht des Dritten Reiches 1933-1945 (in German). Zürich: Schulthess. ISBN 3-7255-2430-0.
  • Frijtag Drabbe Künzel, Geraldien von (2013). "Germanic Brothers: The Dutch and the Germanization of the Occupied East". In Anton Weiss-Wendt; Rory Yeomans, eds. Racial Science in Hitler's New Europe, 1938–1945. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 978-0-80324-605-8.
  • Hilberg, Raul (1992). Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945. New York: Harper Collins. ISBN 0-8419-0910-5.
  • Höhne, Heinz (2001). The Order of the Death’s Head: The Story of Hitler’s SS. New York: Penguin Press. ISBN 978-0-14139-012-3.
  • McNab, Chris (2013). Hitler's Elite: The SS 1939–45. Oxford and New York: Osprey. ISBN 978-1-78200-088-4.
  • Mineau, André (2011). SS Thinking and the Holocaust. New York: Editions Rodopi. ISBN 978- 9401207829.
  • Page-Taylor, Hugh (2002). "History of the Norwegian political SS". Historical Research Unit (H.R.U.), London. H.R.U. Retrieved 2012-02-29.
  • Puschner, Uwe (2013). "The Notions Völkisch and Nordic: A Conceptual Approximation". In Horst Junginger; Andreas Åkerlund, eds. Nordic Ideology between Religion and Scholarship. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang GmbH. ISBN 978-3-63164-487-4.
  • Shirer, William (1990). The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: MJF Books. ISBN 978-1-56731-163-1.
  • Weale, Adrian (2012). Army of Evil: A History of the SS. New York: Caliber Printing. ISBN 978-0-451-23791-0.
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