So Im trying to understand how the SS was structured. I know it was basically an army made to fight for Hitler and nazism specifically instead of for Germany like the regular Wehrmacht
>Waffen SS-elite proto special forces who would fight in the front lines of battle with the help and equipment of the Heer
>Orpo-regular German police force
>SS-TV-in charge of running and maintaining the concentration camps
>Gestapo-secret police who would sniff out political criminals
>SD-intelligence and spy shit. basically the nazi CIA
And then Himmler is in charge of running all of this. Is that it?
Pretty much.
Basically the dedicated nazis. Only allowed to join if you were a pure or very close to pure aryan. If I remember correctly hitter said he was going to cede a small state to himmler for the ss in the same why the Teutonic order had their own state
>Waffen SS
>"""""""elite""""""""
Shitty meme. They were basically the political thugs of the SA given hand-me-down equipment from the Heer. Their best use was charging blindly at the enemy and getting themselves cut down.
>>928621
>if you were a pure or very close to pure aryan
How strict was this? I think you only needed to have a certain height and stuff.
>>928632
Not as strict as Jewish influenced media makes it out. But you had to be white nonetheless
>>928631
while that is true for early war waffen ss, in late war it was several outfits of the waffen ss that received premium equipment and were of the elite category
>>928603
>>Waffen SS-elite proto special forces who would fight in the front lines of battle with the help and equipment of the Heer
the waffen ss were not special forces, they were regular combat units
>>928632
Height, physical fitness, and you had to prove you had only Germany ancestors going back some hundreds of years. I think it was to 1700. As the war started to turn against Germany the "pure Aryan" requirements were increasingly ignored and by the end it was pretty mongrel.
Only the Leibstandarte, the Das Reich and the Totenkopf divisions of the Waffen SS can be considered truly elite
>>928621
>>928632
At the start, you had to be pure German, or at least, no traces of mudblood. The nazis were really strict in "racial hygiene" but if you had a great great grandfather who was a jew, they would let you slide by, but you were exempt from joining the SS. You also had to be at least 6 feet tall. But towards the end, they were accepting anyone willing to fight really, and then started folding in members of the hitler youth into it as well.
And yeah, the idea was to basically make a new Teutonic order. And Himmler definitely infused his love and interest in the occult and german paganism into it.
>>928651
You mean "elite" in that they had the prestigious job of gunning down women and children?
>>928668
Those were the Einsatzgruppen, special units attached to the Eastern front armies that carried the task of killing jews in occupied land. i'm talking about the conventional fighting units of the SS (which also commited tons of warcrimes)
>>928621
Depended. Foreigners could join the SS by swearing allegiance to the Nazi party.
Actual Germans had more selective joining requirements but all that went out the window when Germany started losing.
Although the SS was supposed to be pure volunteers it eventually became filled up with conscripts.
>>928668
thats the Einsatzgrouppen, which was part of the SD, not the waffen-SS
and while the waffen-ss did massacre people, they also actually fought against allied soldiers
the Einsatzgrouppen was made specifically to round up undesirables in their newly acquired eastern european territories and murder them. And also experiment with finding the quickest ways to kill as many people as possible. This was all before the Final Solution was actually devised.
>>928647
1800 actually. The height restriction was only for the Leibstandare afaik. For that unit it also made sense as it was the original guard unit.
>>928668
That's a doctored image.
The actual image is the family caught in a crossfire between the Germans and Soviets.
Why would the Germans photograph their own war crimes?
>>928718
a pole took that image
>>928668
Does anyone have the full, noncropped image showing the whole scene?
>>928668
That soldier is clearly Russian, and none of those three guns are angled correctly to hit any of those people.
What requisites did you need to match to join the SS?
>Height?
>IQ?
>Ancestry?
>>928942
At first you needed to prove White ancestery back to 1750, eventually it added on foreign legion brigades that would accept Syrians, Indians, Arabians, Turks, and the like.
>>928603
Orpo=regular german police force
Gestapo=basically the nazi FBI within greater deuschland
SD-CIA
>>929136
imagine going through some of the most brutal battles, seeing your friends die, living in some dirt hole for months at a time, being worried about being bombed all the time and then thinking "at least it cant get any worse" and then you are ordered to liberate what appears to be some POW camp and seeing how the enemy completely brutalized some civilians without remorse, so you just say "fuck it" and line them up to just machine gun them
>>928995
>Herr Himmler I'm Gestapo
