The Berghof, mountain retreat of Adolf Hitler.
Here, senior party members and their families relax, away from the frantic
activity of the capital.
Yet, even in the peaceful setting of the Bavarian Alps, amongst the tranquil scenes
of domestic life, there is an unsettling presence.
The racial elite of the new order.
The SS.
How can we arrest racial decay?
Asks Adolf Hitler.
Shall we form a select company of the truly initiated?
An order, the brotherhood of Templars around the holy grail of pure blood.
By 1934, almost ten years after its creation, the SS is in the process of
becoming Hitler's brotherhood of Templars.
The hand-picked, disciplined and fiercely loyal bodyguard of the Fuhrer is being
transformed into an Aryan elite.
A mystical order, dedicated to the creation of an empire.
In the strange and terrifying doctrines of National Socialism, the Aryan is the race
of the future.
Providence has decreed that the Aryans will subjugate all other peoples.
In the vanguard of the Nazi mission will be the black club ranks of the SS.
This carefully selected elite is intended to be the stock from which will come a new
and superior breed of human.
The Superman.
A cast of men born to rule.
It is Heinrich Himmler who will forge Hitler's guard into a racial aristocracy.
Under Himmler's leadership, the SS will become a state within a state.
Obsessed with secrecy and bound by solemn ritual, the SS will become a force of
unprecedented power and authority.
The origins of this, the most sinister of all Nazi creations, do not lie in the
personal visions of Heinrich Himmler or his Fuhrer.
The roots of the SS go deeper even than National Socialism itself.
By 1900, the cities of Germany and Austria have changed beyond all recognition.
Millions have abandoned the poverty of peasant life, the slave in the mills and
foundries of the Industrial Revolution.
As their populations swell with the influx of labor, elegant centers of commercial
and aristocratic life become teeming industrial slums.
It is in the cities that the values of the old order are challenged.
Calls for democracy and socialism threaten the traditional power of the ruling
elites.
Established religious beliefs are undermined by science and a rising tide of
materialism.
To many, the new world seems fractured and chaotic.
Amongst the aristocratic and educated classes in the first decade of the 20th
century, the overriding mood is one of nostalgia.
There is a powerful yearning for a vanished past, a past believed to have
been more harmonious, orderly and spiritual.
All over industrialized Europe, new movements arise, devoted to the search
for simplicity.
In Germany, the movement calls itself Lebensreform, Life Reform.
It is pledged to the restoration of a more natural way of living.
Tens of thousands of German youth join the Wandervogel, the birds of passage.
Its members share a mystical love of the German countryside and revere German
folklore and ritual.
While science and medicine are rejected as products of the industrial revolution,
vegetarianism, herbal healing, nudism, communal living and meditation
become fashionable pursuits.
In every major city, cults devoted to spiritualism, astrology, magic and the
occult flourish among the disciples of Life Reform.
Of all the doctrines favored by the movement, none will be more influential
than those preached by the Russian adventurist and telepath, Madame Helena
Blavatsky.
In 1888, Madame Blavatsky claimed to have traveled to Tibet and there to have been
initiated into the secrets of spiritual masters she calls the Hidden Elect.
In the doctrines of occultists, the Hidden Elect or the Great White
Brotherhood are believed to be humans who by initiation and self-denial have risen
to become adepts.
They have gained powers and knowledge beyond those of ordinary mortals.
In Britain, Alistair Crowley, a magician of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn,
claimed in 1909 to have crossed the abyss and to have returned as an adept.
Madame Blavatsky did not claim to be an adept in her own right, but she did claim
constant telepathic communication with her Hidden Masters.
They had revealed to her, their chosen one, the occult history of the human race.
According to Madame Blavatsky, each round of the cosmic cycle has
associated with it seven root races.
The first root race to evolve on Earth she calls the Astral Race.
It was a race of pure spirit, the highest form of existence.
The second race she calls the Hyperborean Race.
Its home was a now vanished continent in the Northern Ocean.
The third race was the Lemurians.
Blavatsky is clear about the reason for the fall of the Lemurian race.
It had interbred with animals.
The fourth race in the history revealed to Madame Blavatsky is the race of Atlantis.
The Atlanteans had possessed psychic powers and had constructed giant cities
using an energy source of mysterious origins.
The Atlanteans were destroyed in a great flood.
The fifth root race Madame Blavatsky sees as the race of hope.
The race that had once founded the culture of ancient Greece and soon would return
man to the pinnacle of spirituality.
That race she named the Aryan.
By 1914 Blavatsky's mystical doctrine of the destiny of Aryan man has spread
throughout Germany and Austria.
The opening days of the Great War.
There is little sense of impending cataclysm.
All over Europe news of war is greeted with unqualified enthusiasm.
In all the warring nations the emotions of militant nationalism are given free reign.
In the ranks of the Austrian and German armies there is a widespread belief that
the aspirations of a generation may be satisfied at last.
The unification of German speaking peoples and the creation of a Germanic empire.
To the frontline soldiers of the imperial armies the teachings of the Austrian
clairvoyant Guido von List are an inspiration.
List believes that in the Germans more than in any other people runs the blood of
the mythical race called by Madame Blavatsky the Aryans.
To List the Great War is proof that the modern world with its materialism and its
democracy is destroying itself.
But out of war and destruction will come the victory of the German cause and the
beginning of an Aryan millennium.
List revives the prayer of the 16th century philosopher and heretic Giordano
Bruno.
Oh Jove, let the Germans realize their own strength and they shall not be men but
gods.
Like Alistair Crowley and Madame Blavatsky, List's psychic researches have
led him to believe in the existence of a hidden elect.
His visions of the ancient German tribes have revealed to him an elite class of
priest rulers.
List calls it the Armannenschaft.
The role of the Armannenschaft was to preserve the occult knowledge of the
German's Aryan ancestors.
List claims that the imposition of Christianity on the Teutonic tribes and
the persecution of the followers of the old religion forced the Armannenschaft to
continue its traditions in secret.
Their lore had lived on in the rituals and symbols of a network of secret societies.
The store of occult knowledge had been preserved down the centuries by
Freemasons, Rosicrucians and chivalrous orders such as the Knights Templar.
So great is List's influence among German and German-Austrian nationalists that many
army officers have joined the secret occultist organization inspired by his
teachings.
The German Order, founded in May 1912, has lodges in ten German cities.
The government of the Order is by a secret twelve-man council of initiates,
calling itself the Armannest Assembly.
The future Aryan Empire will, according to List, be governed by a similar council of
initiates, a new Armannenschaft.
In the design of the future SS, List's Armannest Assembly will not be
forgotten.
List's prediction that the Great War would see the victory of Imperial Germany over
its democratic and degenerate enemies will not be fulfilled.
By 1918, the German economy is in ruins and the Kaiser's armies are crumbling.
To the men at the front, the failure of the Imperial war machine is inexplicable.
In 1918, Germany had won several major battles.
The Russian enemy had already collapsed.
Theories of a conspiracy abound.
Many believe that Germany has been betrayed from within.
The blame is placed squarely on the shoulders of the traditional targets of
the German nationalist movements, capitalists, democrats and Jews.
To the followers of Guido von List, all that is valuable seems irretrievably
lost.
A government of unknown politicians has accepted the humiliating terms of the
Versailles Treaty.
Worst of all, the Kaiser and the German princes have abdicated.
Germany has become a democratic republic.
The abdication of the Kaiser is a stunning blow to the occultists of the German
order.
Guido von List had taught that the aristocracy of Germany had been founded in
ancient times by the Armenianschaft itself.
In the aristocracy was to be found the purest of Aryan blood, and with it the
strongest remaining traces of the Aryan psychic powers.
In the aftermath of the Great War, faced with the twin threat of democracy
and socialism, traditionalists eagerly embrace List's mystical belief in the
German nobility.
But by now, a new concept of aristocracy is in the process of development.
Side by side with the teachings of List, it will become the cornerstone of Nazi
ideology and the future SS.
Since the mid-19th century, the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin
had challenged religious beliefs held sacred for centuries.
But by the end of the Great War, many physicians, scientists and
politicians have come to see in Darwinism a formula for social and political action.
Belief in the equality of man is seen as simply unscientific.
The new slogan is, the survival of the fittest.
In Darwin's The Descent of Man, published in 1871, he speculates on the
effect of modern medicine on the future course of human evolution.
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our best to check the process of
elimination.
Thus, the weak members of civilized society propagate their kind.
This, argues Darwin, must be highly injurious to the race of man.
Excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow
his worst animals to breed.
In Britain, the family planning movement, led by the scientist Marie Stopes,
is preoccupied with the supposed threat to the health of the race posed by
uncontrolled breeding.
Marie Stopes' work on birth control, Wise Parenthood, first published in 1918,
is dedicated to all those who wish to see our race grow in strength and beauty.
Stopes is concerned with the tendency, revealed by the national census,
for the lower classes to produce more children than the upper classes.
The numbers of our population, she states, increasingly tend to be made
up from the less thrifty and the less conscientious.
In America, the compulsory sterilization of the mentally handicapped, of
alcoholics, and of persistent criminals, has been legal in certain states since
1907.
Marie Stopes advocates similar policies for Britain, including the sterilization
of male children with an epileptic or mentally handicapped parent, uncle or
aunt.
The family planning movement is part of a broader movement aimed at directing and
accelerating the evolution of the human race by selective breeding.
This new science calls itself eugenics.
By 1918, eugenics has become so influential that the British Medical
Journal publishes an article in which a noted physician can write, There is no
equality in nature among children nor among adults.
And if there is to be a much needed improvement in the race, we must breed
from the physically, morally and intellectually fit.
From Britain, eugenics spreads to Germany, acquiring the new name, racial hygiene.
University departments and institutes are founded devoted to the new science.
By the 1920s, eugenics has won widespread support amongst the German medical
establishment.
It has also had a profound effect on the doctrines of the German occultists.
In 1919, Guido von List, a prophet of the Aryan millennium, dies in Berlin at the
age of 70.
His place as Germany's leading mystic and Aryan visionary has been taken by Jörg
Luntz.
Luntz, an ex-Cistercian monk and respected biblical scholar, will have a profound
impact on the development of Nazi ideology and on the structure and ritual of the
future SS.
Luntz has blended the Aryan occultism of Guido von List and the principles of the
science of eugenics.
He calls his new doctrine, Theozoology.
Theozoology is an occult religion of race.
Inspired by Madame Blavatsky's mystical history of racial evolution, Luntz claims
that the decline of the Aryans occurred because they had committed bestiality with
a subhuman species.
The result was the creation of many mixed races, races whose very existence
threatens the rightful dominance of the Aryans.
Like List, Luntz believed that the early Aryans possessed the power of telepathy.
Interbreeding with racial inferiors had led to the loss of their paranormal
abilities.
Why do you seek a hell in the next world?
Luntz asks.
Is not the hell in which we live and which burns inside us sufficiently dreadful?
To Luntz, the hell which burns inside is the impure blood in the veins of even the
purest of Aryans.
The teachings of Jörg Luntz are propagated throughout Germany and Austria by his own
journal, Ostara, founded in 1905.
Luntz claims that over 100,000 copies of Ostara a year are sold.
He even claims that amongst his eminent subscribers is the British general
Kitchener.
In the pages of Ostara, and in a series of widely read essays, Luntz develops a
terrifying prescription for the purification of the race.
He proposes polygamy to increase the birth rate of the racially purest.
Eugenic convents are to be established, in which chosen women, he calls brood
mothers, will produce children for pure-blooded Aryan males.
While the racially impure and the physically or mentally unfit are to be
sterilized, other races, deemed inferior, are to be deported to Madagascar or used
as slave labor.
In the future Nazi state, all of Luntz's proposals will be given the most serious
consideration.
Some will be put into practice.
A massive compulsory sterilization campaign will be directed at those judged
physically, mentally or racially inferior.
The deportation of German Jews to Madagascar will be discussed in the upper
echelons of the party.
The SS will plan for the official introduction of polygamy and will found
its own SS breeding program.
To Jörg Luntz, the legends of the Knights of the Holy Grail are more than the
products of the medieval imagination.
Luntz believed that they were the Knights Templar, founded in the 12th century and
famed for their part in the Christian Crusades.
Luntz believed that the Crusades were an attempt to hold back the inferior races of
the East.
The Holy Grail was an electrical force, representing the psychic powers of the
pure-blooded Aryans.
The search for the Grail was the search for racial purity.
In 1907, Luntz formed an occult society dedicated to a new crusade.
He called it the Order of the New Templars.
In the castle of Burg Wurfenstein in Upper Austria, Luntz founded the Order's first
headquarters.
Other Order priories soon followed.
The occult rituals of the New Templars are based on Luntz's monastic experience.
And his own specially composed psalms, prayers and readings.
A constant theme is an appeal to the Aryan Christ, Frey Uzzur, for salvation from
racial impurity and for the extermination of inferior races.
The aims of the Order are explicit.
To harmonize science, art and ethics into an occult religion, devoted to the
purification of the Aryan race in all countries of the world.
In anticipation of the practices of the SS, prospective members and their
marriages are racially vetted.
For Luntz, the New Templars are the beginning of a new order.
No longer will parliaments determine the fate of the people, Luntz proclaims.
In their place will rule wise priest kings and leaders of chivalrous and spiritual
secret orders.
In reality, it will not be the occultists of the New Templars who will create the
Aryan aristocracy of the future.
The mystical doctrines preached by Luntz will be put into practice by others.
Above all, by a man who since the age of 20 has been an avid collector of Astara.
In the closing months of 1918, Corporal Adolf Hitler, holder of the Iron
Cross First Class, will come to the attention of his superior officers.
A near mutiny at the demobilization camp at which Hitler is stationed is brought
under control by his powerful oratory.
In September 1919, Hitler, now a civilian, is called upon once more by the army
command.
This time to spy on an insignificant nationalist group calling itself the
German Workers' Party.
Within months, Hitler has joined the party and has begun to speak at meetings.
By January 1920, he has been elected head of propaganda and has drawn up a new party
constitution.
The army intelligence captain who had first recruited Hitler as a spy has been
retired.
His replacement as Hitler's army sponsor is the 32 year old Captain Ernst Röhm.
Röhm is held in high regard as a courageous frontline officer and an
outstanding organizer.
The Bavarian army command has given Röhm the task of circumventing the arms
restrictions imposed by Hitler.
He is to establish secret arms dumps and organize the many nationalist paramilitary
groups in Bavaria into an unofficial army reserve.
One such group of irregulars is the powerful force commanded by ex-naval
captain Hermann Erhardt.
The Erhardt Brigade has played a major role in combating socialist revolution in
Bavaria.
It is Ernst Röhm who brings together Erhardt and Adolf Hitler.
Public meetings of the early Nazi party are defended by stewards known as the
Athletics and Sports Detachment.
In the summer of 1921, Ernst Röhm arranges that officers of the Erhardt Brigade
should become the commanders of a new party defense force, the SA Storm
Detachment.
To Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party, the function of the SA is to protect party
speakers and make an impressive show of force when the occasion demands.
But the SA has another role.
It is an unofficial part of the German army.
It is trained by army officers, numbered in army mobilization plans and
controlled by Röhm and Erhardt.
Hitler is well aware that the allegiance of the SA does not lie with him or with
the party.
He knows that as party leader he needs a force upon which he can rely utterly.
The Shock Troop Hitler is the prototype for the SS.
November 1923.
Adolf Hitler is jailed for his part in an attempt to overthrow the government of
Bavaria.
The Nazi party and the SA are banned.
Hitler's Shock Troop bodyguard is scattered.
During his imprisonment, Hitler writes his political testament, Mein Kampf,
and ponders the future of the party and of the SA.
It is clear that eventually he must revive the SA.
But he must also reform and strengthen his own personal guard.
Hitler's requirements for his new force are clear.
I told myself then that I needed a bodyguard, even a very restricted one,
but made up of men ready to march against their own brothers.
On December 20, 1924, Hitler is released from prison.
He has served only nine months of a five-year sentence, but his trial and
imprisonment have made him a national figure.
Two months after his release, Hitler formally reconstitutes the Nazi party and
reforms the SA under a new commander.
Rome and Hitler have argued and parted company.
In April 1925, Hitler orders his chauffeur and ex-bodyguard Julius Schreck to form a
new force for the defense of the Führer and the protection of party headquarters.
It is the Schutzstaffel Protection Squad, the SS.
To set themselves apart from the SA, the SS wear black caps bearing a silver
death's head insignia.
To the intense irritation of the SA, the SS is soon behaving as an elite.
SS entry requirements are far stricter than those of the SA.
SS discipline is more severe.
The SS attend all party meetings but never speak.
Already, its unofficial motto is, the aristocracy keeps its mouth shut.
On July 4, 1926, Hitler confirms the SS as his elite organization.
At the second party rally at Weimar, he gives the SS guardianship of the
party's most sacred relic.
The flag drenched in the blood of party fighters killed in the coup of 1923.
As custodians of the blood banner, the SS are entrusted with the Nazi symbol
of martyrdom in the struggle for Aryan supremacy.
The transformation of the SS from the elite guard of the Führer into the
mystical order it will eventually become will be the work of one man.
He is Heinrich Himmler, the most enigmatic of all Nazi leaders.
Himmler is a devoted follower of the Aryan occultism of Guido von List and Hubert
Lutz.
He too dreams of a Germanic empire ruled by a mystical order of the Aryan elite.
He is determined that this elite should be drawn from the ranks of the SS.
The superman, the new breed of Germanic ruler is to be created from the stock
which he will select.
Himmler is appointed head of the SS in January 1929.
For almost a year, he and his wife have been smallholders and poultry farmers.
Since early youth, Himmler has been an eager convert to the teachings of the
movement for life reform.
The land, he believes, is the origin of all that is good.
Cities are the source of all that is unhealthy, corrupt and immoral.
The yeoman on his own acre, writes Himmler, is the background of the German
people's strength and character.
Himmler has long been associated with the Ottoman League, a nationalist and
anti-Slavic movement of city youth committed to life on the land and the
expansion of German farming to the east.
The oath of the Ottoman League is sworn by blood and soil.
In the Ottoman League, Himmler has met the man who will transform the oath by blood
and soil into a central doctrine of the SS.
To Wouter Darre, an ex-official in the Prussian Ministry of Agriculture,
the relationship between German blood and German soil is a source of mystical power.
Questions of agriculture are not questions of economics, but of race and destiny.
In 1930, Himmler's fantasies of an Aryan future are the least of Hitler's concerns.
The unity of the party and Hitler's own future as its leader are under threat.
With the economic depression at its height, Germany's unemployed flood into
the ranks of the SA.
The stormtroopers now number 100,000 men.
To the radicals of the SA, National Socialism promises the destruction of the
traditional German ruling classes.
In the eyes of the stormtroopers, the industrialists, army officers and
aristocrats, who are the Nazi party's most influential supporters, are no more than
contemptible parasites.
In protest at the political alliances which Hitler has formed, many SA
commanders withdraw their men from the party's service.
Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, warns Hitler that a split within the SA
and within the party is imminent.
Hitler's solution is to recall the only man he believes capable of reuniting the
SA, Ernst Röhm.
Röhm will succeed in the task Hitler has set for him.
He will pay for success with his life.
As Röhm sets about the unification and expansion of the SA, Himmler takes a
different road.
His strategy is not one of rapid expansion.
Instead, he concentrates on careful and systematic selection.
In 1930, Himmler had won a valuable concession from Hitler.
The SS would be allowed to recruit from the ranks of the SA.
Himmler proceeds to put into practice his theories of breeding.
We went about it like a nursery gardener trying to reproduce a good old strain
which has been adulterated and debased.
I started with a minimum height requirement.
I knew that men of a certain height must somewhere possess the blood I desired.
On December 31, 1931, Himmler establishes the SS Race and Resettlement Bureau.
It is to be headed by his old friend, Walter Dary.
Dary is awarded the rank of Honorary SS General.
The task of the Race and Resettlement Bureau is to prepare for the future
colonization of the East by pure-blooded Germans.
It is also instructed to conduct research into racial ancestry, biological
selection, and the history of the areas.
Its staff of leading academics and medical men are ordered by Himmler to develop
stricter requirements for SS entry.
Bureau physicians assess the degree of racial purity of each applicant by
physical examination.
Only those considered pure or predominantly Nordic are acceptable.
The applicant's physique is also judged on a nine-point scale.
The examiners are instructed to take into account the attitude and bearing of the
candidate.
Himmler has decreed, in his attitude to discipline, the man should not behave like
an underling.
His gait, his hands, everything should correspond to the ideal which we have set
ourselves.
To Himmler, selection is only the first step in his plan to reclaim the Aryan
blood latent in the German people.
The second stage is the control of SS breeding.
The Race and Resettlement Bureau is charged with the task of racially vetting
SS marriages.
Prospective brides of SS men are required to prove the purity of their Aryan blood
back to the year 1750.
By 1933, the Bureau will be examining almost 2,000 SS marriage applications a
month.
It is the beginning of the largest and most terrifying eugenics experiment in
human history.
From 1935, the Race and Resettlement Bureau will be empowered to vet the
marriages of the entire civilian population of Germany.
Heinrich Himmler is so confident of success that he predicts that in 120
years, the entire German people should once more be pure-blooded Aryans.
Himmler knows that the realization of his Aryan vision depends above all on the SS
becoming the most powerful organization in the Nazi party and in the German state.
Already, Hitler has given the SS the role of carrying out police and intelligence
duties within the party.
Himmler is quick to seize the opportunity to expand his power.
In 1931, Himmler recruits a 33-year-old ex-naval officer, Reinhard Heydrich,
to found an SS security service.
The establishment of the SD will be the first stage in Himmler's creation of an SS
state within a state.
In 1932, two elections for the presidency of Germany deliver to Hitler 30% of the
national vote.
In the July parliamentary elections, Hitler campaigns in 50 cities in the space
of two weeks.
His efforts are amply rewarding.
The party wins over 13 million votes and 230 seats in the Reichstag.
Hitler demands the post of Chancellor.
Parliament refuses.
Yet another election on November the 6th sees the Nazi vote fall by 2 million.
The communists increase their vote by almost 1 million and win 100 seats.
With no party having an overall majority, the conservatives in parliament choose an
alliance with the Nazis.
Hitler's price for cooperation is the chancellorship.
This time, he is not refused.
In spite of his growing power within the party, Heinrich Himmler is not awarded a
ministerial post in the new government.
But the man Hitler calls, my loyal Heinrich, does not complain to his Führer.
Himmler's ambition extends far beyond the control of a mere government department.
During his youth, Himmler had spent three years as a student of agriculture.
In the college fencing fraternity to which Himmler belonged, Jörg Lanz's occultist
periodical, Ostara, was widely read.
Of all the prophecies made by Lanz, one would become Himmler's obsession.
On astrological grounds, Lanz foretold the invasion of Europe from the east.
Himmler comes to believe that it is the destiny of the SS to repel the coming
assault.
The great battles he foresees will be a prelude to the final victory of the
Aryans.
Already, Himmler has identified the figure of German history who will become his idol
and his inspiration.
King Heinrich I, German king of the Saxons, had in the 10th century fought and
conquered the Slavic tribes of the east.
So great will Himmler's devotion to the king become that he will make an annual
pilgrimage to Heinrich's tomb.
He will believe himself the reincarnation of the king and the recipient of psychic
messages from the spirit of the dead ruler.
Himmler believes that his divine mission is to complete the work of King Heinrich.
He will create from the SS a knightly order which will rule the coming Aryan
Empire.
But, for a time at least, Himmler's visions of the future must take second
place to practical politics.
From 1933, Himmler's objective is to win control of Germany's many state police
forces.
A major obstacle to his ambition is Hermann Goering.
Goering is now minister president of Prussia and chief of the Prussian secret
police, the Gestapo.
Goering sees himself as prime candidate for the job of chief of a new unified
German police force.
In Goering's campaign to eliminate Prussian communists and all other
opponents of national socialism, he employs the SA as auxiliaries to the
police and the Gestapo.
The Berlin SA are the most brutal and the most feared stormtroop detachments in
Germany.
Their hatred of the middle classes almost equals their hatred of Jews and
communists.
But Goering is unconcerned.
It is not my business to do justice, he proclaims.
It is my business to annihilate and exterminate.
That is all.
In the capital and throughout Prussia, Goering unleashes a reign of terror in
which thousands are interred in SA concentration camps.
The situation is fast becoming a national scandal.
The party's supporters amongst the middle and upper classes are outraged.
Hitler is persuaded that command of a unified German police force cannot be
entrusted to Goering.
Himmler has won a major victory.
One by one, the state police forces will fall under his control.
In April 1934, Himmler wins the greatest prize of all.
He succeeds in forcing Goering to hand over control of the Gestapo.
Now, only one force stands between Himmler and the power he seeks.
Spring 1934.
Ernst Röhm, leader of the SA, conducts his own version of Hitler's flag consecration
ritual.
It is a sign to the 4 million strong SA of Röhm's power and independence.
Röhm's intention is to create from the SA a new National Socialist German army with
himself as its commander-in-chief.
The regular army commanders become increasingly anxious.
Under cover of inspecting a naval exercise, Hitler holds a secret meeting
with the army generals.
He gives them his assurance that in exchange for their support, the army will
continue to be Germany's only military force.
Hitler promises that Röhm will be dealt with.
The agent of his destruction is to be Himmler's SS.
Himmler and his deputy, Heydrich, contrive evidence that Röhm and the SA are
planning a coup against Hitler.
A list of the supposed conspirators is drawn up.
It includes not only the leadership of the SA, but all those who have opposed the
growing power of the SS.
The bloodbath that Himmler unleashes on June 30, 1934, will become known as the
Night of the Long Nights.
Up to 500 will be murdered by SS executions.
The murder of the SA leadership is greeted with relief by the German army.
On the death of President Hindenburg on the 2nd of August, 1934, and the
confirmation of Hitler as president of Germany, the army willingly changes its
oath of allegiance.
Loyalty is now sworn not to the German state or to the constitution, but to Adolf
Hitler himself.
The true victor of the Night of the Long Nights is not the German army,
it is the SS.
On July 20, 1934, a grateful Fuhrer decrees that the SS is to be an
independent organization within the party.
What is more, ignoring his pledge that the army is to be the Reich's only military
force, he gives permission for the SS to form its own military units.
In time, the Waffen, or armed SS, will number almost one million men.
By the summer of 1934, Himmler has won total independence for his SS elite.
His eugenics program is established.
He has begun the process of winning control of all German police and security
services.
With Hitler's blessing, he has created the nucleus of an SS army.
Heinrich Himmler is now free to put into effect the next phase of his plan for the
SS.
The creation of a mystical order of Teutonic Knights, an order which will
dominate the coming Aryan millennium.