Word: schutzstaffel
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...stood for Schutzstaffel, meaning protective echelon, or, as commonly translated, elite guard. The organization grew out of a small group of thugs recruited in 1923 to protect Hitler, and was originally the security arm of the Nazi Party. When it came under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler in 1929, the SS began to expand; by the war's end almost 1 million men had passed through its ranks. The Waffen combat units were formed in the late 1930s. It was members of the Totenkopf ("Death Head") SS who served as guards and executioners at the concentration camps, wearing black caps...
Paroled on Dec. 19, 1924, Hitler spent the next five years reinvigorating the Nazi Party, exploiting Weimar democracy to bring down the Republic. The party's members were tireless, cajoling, exhorting, running for local offices, gathering about them a brutal elite guard called the Schutzstaffel, or SS. During this period an American journalist, Louis Lochner, watched the Nazi leader addressing students at Berlin University. "I came away from that meeting," he reported, "wondering how a man . . . who ranted and fumed and stamped could so impress young intellectuals. Of all people, I thought, they should have detected the palpable flaws...
...delivered "Secret Santa" gift apparently evoked images of the Nazi Schutzstaffel in the mind of Uri Almagor a Hebrew University professor of sociology and social anthropology living in Adams this fall...
...March 1945, this private conduit had admitted an astonishing emissary onto Swiss soil: Nazi General Karl Wolff, commander of the SS (Hitler's elite Schutzstaffel) in northern Italy. Like many of his fellow generals, Wolff had lost faith in a Führer whose paranoia refused to see that Germany was losing the war; like few of them, Wolff was prepared to do something about it. Meeting with Dulles in Zurich, he proposed to deliver every enemy soldier in northern Italy to the Allied cause...
...dreadful years, they butchered millions, making good their master's boast that men should "grow sick at the sight of [their] black coats." At Niirnberg, before the court of world opinion, they were forever condemned for crimes against humanity. Yet last week the SS (full name: Schutzstaffel) marched again, jack boots ringing on the cobblestones of the garrison town of Verden in lower Saxony...