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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.
SA-Standarten operated in every major German city and were split into even smaller units, known as Sturmbanne and Stürme. The command nexus for the entire SA was the Oberste SA-Führung, located in Stuttgart. The SA supreme command had many sub-offices to handle supply, finance and recruiting. The SA also had several military training units.
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]
On 30 June 1934 the SS and Gestapo acted in coordinated mass arrests that continued for two days. The SS took one of its most decisive steps in eliminating its competition for command of security within Germany and established itself firmly in the Nazi hierarchy, making the SS and its intelligence organ, the SD, responsible only to the Führer.
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" Nazi ...
In early January 1938, SS-Sturmbannführer (SS-Major) Hans Helm was appointed as a police attaché to the German diplomatic mission in Belgrade. Helm was a protege of the senior Gestapo official, Heinrich Müller , and his appointment to the position was encouraged by Jovanović and Aćimović, whom he had met when they visited Berlin.
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 ]
The ranks of the Allgemeine SS and the Waffen-SS were based upon those of the SA and used the same titles. However, there was a distinctly separate hierarchical subdivision of the larger Waffen-SS from its general-SS counterpart and an SS member could in fact hold two separate SS ranks.