(a) Criminal activities of SS guards and camp personnel. The first requirement of the camps was for guard and administrative personnel. Part-time volunteer members of the Allgemeine SS were originally utilized as guards. But part-time volunteers could not adequately serve the need of the extensive and long-range program that was planned. Hence, beginning in 1933 full-time professional guard units (the SS Totenkopf Verbaende) were organized. Their very name (“Death Head Units”) and their distinguishing insignia, the skull and cross bones, appropriately marked the type of activity in which they engaged.
During the war, members of the Allgemeine SS resumed the function of guarding the camps which they had undertaken when the camps were created. This was provided for in the Hitler order of 17 August 1938 (647-PS) directing the substitution of Allgemeine SS members for the Death Head Units in the event of mobilization. That substitution took place. In reviewing the events of the period between 1938 and 1940, significant for the SS, the National Socialist Yearbook of 1940 congratulated the Allgemeine SS on the performance of its new mission:
“However, not only the garrisoned parts of the SS were employed. Also the General SS were brought forth for special missions. Thousands of younger and older SS comrades were employed for the strengthening of the police and for the guarding of concentration camps and have faithfully fulfilled their duty throughout the weeks.” (2164-PS)
It is unnecessary to repeat the evidence of wholesale brutalities, tortures, and murders committed by SS guards. These were not sporadic crimes committed by irresponsible individuals. They were a part of a definite and calculated policy, which necessarily resulted from SS philosophy, and which was carried out from the initial creation of the camps.
Himmler bluntly explained to the Wehrmacht in 1937 the prevailing view of the SS as to the inmates of concentration camps:
“It would be extremely instructive for everyone, some members of the Wehrmacht were already able to do so, to inspect such a concentration camp. Once they have seen it, they are convinced of the fact that no one had been sent there unjustly; that it is the offal of criminals and freaks. No better demonstration of the laws of inheritance and race, as set forth by Doctor Guett, exists than such a concentration camp. There you can find people with hydrocephalus, people who are cross-eyed, deformed, half-Jewish, and a number of racially inferior products. All that is assembled there. Of course, we distinguish between those inmates who are only there for a few months for the purpose of education, and those who are to stay for a very long time. On the whole, education consists of discipline, never of any kind of instruction on an ideological basis, for the prisoners have, for the most part, slave-like souls; and only very few people of real character can be found there.” (1992-A-PS)
Even these “slave-like souls,” however, might be redeemed by SS hygienic measures. For, as Himmler continued:
“The discipline thus means order. The order begins with these people living in clean barracks. Such a thing can really only be accomplished by us Germans, hardly another nation would be as humane as we are. The laundry is frequently changed. The people are taught to wash themselves twice daily, and the use of a toothbrush with which most of them have been unfamiliar.” (1992-A-PS)
Despite this callous jest to the Wehrmacht, all pretense was swept away in Himmler’s speech to his own Gruppenfuehrers at Posen:
“I don’t believe the Communists could attempt any action, for their leading elements, like most criminals, are in our concentration camps. And here I must say this—that we shall be able to see after the war what a blessing it was for Germany that, in spite of all the silly talk about humanitarianism, we imprisoned all this criminal substratum of the German people in concentration camps: I’ll answer for that.” (1919-PS).