The SS - Alibi of a Nation 1922-1945

Arms and Armour Press, 1981

Based almost entirely on original German documents, including the captured files of the SS leadership, this book gives a final account of the Nazi Praetorian Guard. With steadily mounting tension, the story moves from the origins of the SS before 1923 to its supremacy, twenty years later, as the most appalling instrument of political and military terror known to history. The author sees the SS not as an historical accident, but as a tyrannical expression of bureaucracy in politics. It is with the administration and internal rivalries of the Nazi state that the book is mainly concerned: how the whole system worked out in peace, and above all, in war. The book includes a study of the field divisions of the SS, of the Gestapo and its peculiar limitations, and of the rival agencies of the German Military Intelligence. Also discussed is the organization of the concentration camps and death camps, and the greatest racial massacre in history...