The Himmler's SS (6 page)

During the autumn of 1934, Himmler quickly went about the business of once again reorganising his high command structure. The Reichsführung-SS was set up as the supreme authority, comprising two staffs, the Kommandostab RfSS, which was an executive administrative staff at Himmler's personal headquarters, and the Persönlicher Stab RfSS, a much larger and more loosely organised body consisting of a number of advisory officials including the heads of the main SS departments and certain other special offices. The fresh administrative burdens later imposed by the war made it necessary to create a much larger and more complex command structure than had sufficed during peacetime. By 1942, subject to Himmler's controlling authority and that of the Reichsführung-SS, the day-to-day work of directing, organising and administering the SS was carried out by the eight main departments, or Hauptämter, listed below, each of which is duly covered in turn.

In addition, there were a number of minor offices and departments not of Hauptamt status.

The functions of the various Hauptämter were continually adapted to meet new exigencies and by far the greater part of their work during the 1939–45 period concerned the numerically superior Waffen-SS and the execution of SS policy in the occupied territories. There were ultimately a good many overlapping and conflicting interests as regards their various duties and jurisdictions. By 1945, the Hauptamt system had become a vast and complex network of intertwining bureaucratic empires, each vying for supremacy over the others and for the attention of their Reichsführer. Having said that, there is no doubt that they always functioned effectively, even if not efficiently. The spirit of competition between them, which Himmler actively encouraged, ensured that everything dealt with by each department was recorded, checked and double checked to avoid error. If another Hauptamt had an interest, it too would record, check and double check. The result was the most detailed system of manual files ever compiled, not just on the SS organisation but on every aspect of life in the Third Reich. The SS Personalhauptamt alone housed 150 million individual documents, and the Reichssicherheitshauptamt even maintained secret and potentially incriminating dossiers on Hitler himself and on all the other Nazi leaders, mostly compiled during the 1920s by the security police of the Weimar Republic, whose files were duly inherited by the SS. This attention to detail and ability to come up with all sorts of information gave the impression of an all-seeing, all-knowing command structure which ensured that, right up until the capitulation, the Reichsführung-SS and the SS Hauptämter successfully managed to control and administer the vast SS organisation. That was not an insignificant achievement, considering that, at its peak, the SS operated across an area from the Channel Islands to the Black Sea and from the Arctic Circle to the Mediterranean, with a generally hostile population.

T
HE
SS H
AUPTÄMTER

As the core of the Reichsführung-SS, the Personal Staff of the Reichsführer-SS (Pers. Stab RfSS) had its main offices at 8 Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, Berlin. Its members were designated ‘i.P.St.' (on the Personal Staff) and were subordinated directly to Himmler. As more and more high-ranking people inside and outside the SS sought to gain Himmler's ear, the Personal Staff became the focus of influence in the SS command. It consisted of:

1.
The heads of the SS Hauptämter, who were ex-officio members

2.
SS officials in certain offices and departments integrated into the Pers. Stab

3.
SS officials appointed or attached to the staff for special advisory or honorary purposes

Besides being an advisory and co-ordinating body, the Pers. Stab was responsible for all business in which the Reichsführer-SS was concerned that did not come into the province of any of the other SS Hauptämter. In addition, it liaised with government and party offices and controlled various financial and business dealings on Himmler's behalf. The Chief of the Personal Staff was SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, who served as Himmler's adjutant from 1934. In 1943, ‘Wölfchen' was also appointed Supreme SS and Police Commander in Italy, in effect military governor of the country, but he always retained his post as Chief of the Personal Staff and, with it, all the powers and disciplinary prerogatives of a Hauptamtschef.

Much of the administrative work generated by the Pers. Stab was processed through the Kommandostab RfSS which operated during the war on a mobile basis under the title Feldkommandostelle RfSS, or Field Headquarters of the Reichsführer-SS. It was by then organised like a military HQ and accompanied Himmler on his numerous tours of the occupied territories. Together with attached SS units including a signals section, an escort battalion and a flak detachment, the Feldkommandostelle eventually numbered over 3,000 men. Its special train, ‘Sonderzug Heinrich', had fourteen carriages.

At various times, the following offices and departments were part of, or directly subordinated to, the Persönlicher Stab RfSS and they give a general idea of the extent of its interests and influence:

In addition, the following special posts are examples of the types subordinated directly to Himmler. Those officers mentioned held the posts in 1944:

In short then, all SS activities, and everything which affected the SS, came within the jurisdiction of the Hauptamt Persönlicher Stab RfSS.

The SS Hauptamt or SS-HA, the SS Central Office, was based at 7–11 Douglasstrasse, Berlin-Grünewald, and developed from the SS-Amt which, under SS-Gruppenführer Kurt Wittje, co-ordinated SS operations prior to 1935. It was the oldest of the SS main departments and its bare title of Hauptamt, without further qualification, indicated in itself the fundamental part it originally played in the administration of the SS. As late as 1940, under SS-Obergruppenführer August Heissmeyer, it maintained its supremacy. At that time there were still only three Hauptämter proper, the other two being the Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt and the Reichssicherheitshauptamt. With the exception therefore of the specialist functions carried out by these two departments, the SS-HA was responsible for all the varied tasks involved in the general administration of the whole SS.

The expansion of the SS as a result of wartime mobilisation, however, made the multiplicity of functions converging on the SS-HA too great a burden for one department, and in August 1940 a major reorganisation of the central administration of the SS took place. Two existing SS-HA branches, the Personalamt (Personnel Office) and the SS Gericht (Legal Department) were detached and themselves raised to Hauptamt status, becoming the SS Personalhauptamt and the Hauptamt SS Gericht. In addition, two further Hauptämter were created, namely the SS Führungshauptamt and the SS Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt, by taking certain responsibilities away from the SS-HA. Several other functions of the SS-HA were also transferred or absorbed elsewhere, an example being the supervision of SS radio communications and signals which was taken over by the Chief of Communications on the Persönlicher Stab RfSS. The result of this reorganisation was that the SS-HA lost eight of its thirteen offices. At one stroke it was completely deprived of the commanding position it had previously enjoyed. The main importance still attaching to the SS-HA under its new chief, SS-Obergruppenführer Gottlob-Christian Berger, was its responsibility for recruitment and the maintenance of records on non-commissioned personnel.

The subsequent recovery of the SS-HA during 1941–45 was almost entirely due to the continued expansion of the Waffen-SS and the extension of the area of Allgemeine-SS influence into occupied territories. From 1941, the Waffen-SS increasingly recruited both individual Germanic volunteers and complete Germanic units from western Europe and Scandinavia. At the same time, efforts were made in Flanders, Holland, Norway and Denmark to raise native Allgemeine-SS formations, the so-called Germanic-SS, to assist in policing these countries. The reflection of this was the creation at the end of 1941 of the Germanische Leitstelle, or Germanic Liaison Office, of the SS-HA, which looked after the welfare of all members of Germanic races who came within the orbit of the SS. These included foreign students at German universities, foreign workers in German factories, and non-German members of the Allgemeine-SS proper. This aspect of the work of the SS-HA steadily expanded during the war and brought with it a number of allied duties and functions, including the setting up of public exhibitions geared towards the promotion of German culture in western Europe. In addition to these primary concerns, the SS Hauptamt also kept a general watching brief over propaganda, publications, education, sport and physical training for the whole SS and police.

The SS Operational Headquarters or Führungshauptamt (SS-FHA), under SS-Obergruppenführer Hans Jüttner, was located at 188 Kaiserallee, Berlin-Wilmersdorf. It grew from the Operations Department of the SS Hauptamt, becoming a separate entity in August 1940, and developed into the biggest of all the SS Hauptämter, with a staff of 40,000 in 1944. The reason for its rapid growth was the expansion of the Waffen-SS, which imposed a colossal administrative burden on the SS command for which there had been no parallel before the war. However, while the greater operational needs of the Waffen-SS made the administration of that branch by far the most important function of the SS-FHA, the latter was never intended to be the headquarters solely of the Waffen-SS. It was, in fact, the Operational HQ of the Gesamt-SS, or whole SS, and included as one of its departments the Allgemeine-SS Headquarters (Kommandoamt der Allgemeinen-SS) under SS-Gruppenführer Leo Petri, which was responsible for the control and operational deployment of the Allgemeine-SS as well as its general administration, supplies, training and mobilisation. All SS units which were not under the tactical command of the Wehrmacht in the field were entirely subordinated to the SS-FHA for both operational and administrative purposes. It organised the payment of wages and the supply of equipment, arms, ammunition and vehicles, as well as the maintenance and repair of stocks. The SS-FHA personnel branch was responsible for appointments, transfers and promotions, although questions affecting officer personnel were handled in conjunction with the SS Personalhauptamt, of which the chief of the SS-FHA personnel branch, SS-Obergruppenführer Kurt Knoblauch, was an ex-officio member. In addition, the SS-FHA co-ordinated the training of all SS formations and controlled a large number of training units, schools and camps, while its medical branch supervised SS hospitals. A Movement Control Officer at the SS-FHA was responsible for all matters affecting the transport of the SS and police, including rail, shipping and air transport, and the SS-FHA Field Post Department controlled SS Field post offices and mail censorship. The SS-FHA also oversaw a host of other miscellaneous SS activities, including military geology, war archives and dentistry.