Free The Himmler's SS by Robert Ferguson Page B

suddenly found themselves bound to obey Himmler in terms of the SS discipline code.
    The medium which united all these facets of the SS organisation, and kept them in touch with each other, was the SS-Presse. A magazine entitled Die Schutzstaffel was published as early as December 1926, but it was short-lived and it was not until 1935 that the Reichsführung-SS began to publish a weekly newspaper called Das Schwarze Korps or ‘The Black Corps’. Set up on Heydrich’s initiative and directed by SS-Standartenführer Gunter d’Alquen, descendant of a Huguenot family, it was printed by the NSDAP publishing house of Eher Verlag, Munich, and had its editorial offices at 88 Zimmerstrasse, Berlin. By 1939, circulation had reached 500,000 copies. Das Schwarze Korps was a sharply written paper, very neo-pagan, and specialised in the exposure of those the Reichsführung-SS considered social miscreants whom the courts could not reach. It was the only organ of the German press which was not censored and, although rigorously orthodox at the ideological level, was also the only newspaper that gave any indication of having a critical or nonconformist spirit. From its very first issue, the originality of Das Schwarze Korps was emphasised by its aggressiveness to the rest of Goebbels’ press. It took sides against leaders of the NSDAP, attacked ministers of state such as Alfred Rosenberg, who had been short-sighted enough to shun Himmler’s offers of honorary SS rank, and denounced inadequacies in the administration. Private enterprise and initiative were favoured by the paper because they aided progress, particularly in wartime. After 1939, the publicising of SS and police military heroes became an increasingly important feature, especially when d’Alquen was made commander of the SS War Correspondents’ Regiment and Kurt Eggers took over the paper. As the war progressed and the need grew for all sections of the régime to be seen to act as one, the old criticisms of the excesses of the party leaders disappeared. By 1944, Das Schwarze Korps and its sister paper for Patron Members, the FM-Zeitschrift , had degenerated from lively and controversial publications to propaganda sheets expounding the exploits of Waffen-SS soldiers on the battlefront. In this way, the path of the SS-Presse paralleled that of the entire SS organisation.
    SS D UTIES AND C ONDITIONS OF S ERVICE
    The first and foremost duty of the entire SS organisation was the protection of Adolf Hitler; at least that was the official line. In 1931, after Hitler had lost the presidential election to von Hindenburg, Himmler described the SS as ‘Des Führers ureigenste, erlesene Garde’, the Führer’s most personal, selected guards. However, while it is true to say that the earliest Stosstrupp and SS men in the 1920s were indeed directly employed only as Hitler’s bodyguards and then as ‘Rednerschutz’ to protect other leading Nazi orators, the vast majority of the Allgemeine-SS in the 1930s and 1940s never even came into the close proximity of members of the political hierarchy, far less that of the Führer himself, whose protection after 1933 was the responsibility of the Leibstandarte-SS ‘Adolf Hitler’ alone. Nevertheless, even in later years the primary SS duty of guarding Hitler was still stressed, the Organisationsbuch der NSDAP declaring in 1937: ‘It is the fundamental and most noble task of the SS to be concerned with the safety of the Führer’.

    SS men guarding Hitler during a speech at Elbing, 5 November 1933. Only the man in the centre sports collar patches: the others are still probationary members.
    After the advent of the Leibstandarte, whose members worked full-time to a rota system and accompanied Hitler on his journeys throughout the Reich, the part-time SS men who had originally been recruited on a local basis to protect Hitler during his trips around Germany found that aspect