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[4] Many in the SA itself — including the leadership — held a contrary, and more glorious, view of the SA's role. To them, the SA was a nascent military organization: the basis for a future citizen army on the Napoleonic model, an army which would, ideally, absorb the Reichswehr and displace its "outmoded" Prussian concepts with "modern ...
The violence and destruction was carried out by members of the Sturmabteilung (SA), Schutzstaffel (SS), Gestapo, as well as German civilians. [1] [2] German and Nazi officials, along with standard civilians, watched as Jewish property in Leipzig turned to ash. The pogrom affected Jewish men, women, and children in Leipzig and other parts of ...
[6] [7] The two police branches were commonly known as the Orpo and SiPo (Kripo and Gestapo combined), respectively. [5] The idea was to fully identify and integrate the party agency (SD) with the state agency (SiPo). [8] Most of the SiPo members were encouraged or volunteered to become members of the SS and many held a rank in both organisations.
During World War II, the Nazi German Einsatzkommandos were a sub-group of the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads) – up to 3,000 men total – usually composed of 500–1,000 functionaries of the SS and Gestapo, whose mission was to exterminate Jews, Polish intellectuals, Romani, and communists in the captured territories often far behind the advancing German front.
The Einsatzgruppen were formed under the direction of SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich and operated by the Schutzstaffel (SS) before and during World War II. [4] The Einsatzgruppen had their origins in the ad hoc Einsatzkommando formed by Heydrich to secure government buildings and documents following the Anschluss in Austria in March 1938. [5]
The Einsatzgruppen were SS mobile death squads, operating behind the front line in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe.From 1941 to 1945, they murdered around 2 million people; 1.3 million Jews, up to 250,000 Romani, and around 500,000 so-called "partisans", people with disabilities, political commissars, Slavs, homosexuals and others.
The vast majority of Gestapo officers came from the police forces of the Weimar Republic; members of the SS, the SA, and the Nazi Party also joined the Gestapo but were less numerous. [104] By March 1937, the Gestapo employed an estimated 6,500 people in fifty-four regional offices across the Reich. [ 105 ]
Hitler's Bandit Hunters: The SS and the Nazi Occupation of Europe. Potomac Books. ISBN 978-1-59797-021-1. Browder, George C (1996). Hitler's Enforcers: The Gestapo and the SS Security Service in the Nazi Revolution. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19820-297-4. Dams, Carsten; Stolle, Michael (2014).