At the beginning of World War II there were only three regiments of Waffen, or Weapon, SS. By the Battle of the Bulge there were thirty-eight divisions. Of these, seven were German SS Panzer Divisions. If a stake needed to be driven through the heart of the police state called Nazi Germany, the point of that stake must have to penetrate through the battle-hardened shell of Hitler’s SS Panzer units. These self-described tightly regimented political soldiers, beholden only to Hitler, considered themelves racially superior and above the law.

The evolution of the SS instructs our generation about how inflating the importance of close-minded, ignorant and arrogant men and women, found in small numbers in every society, becomes a tyrant’s base of power for controlling that entire society. Parliamentary procedures and important documents like the U.S. Constitution carefully try to protect the rights of individuals, while always guarding against control by a minority. In post-World War I Germany, such frameworks for legal protection, never foolproof, were overwhelmed by Hitler and his collaborators. Eventually a tiny minority called the Schutzstaffel (SS), or “protection squadrons,” grew into a second German armed force, operating parallel to but independent of the Wehrmacht.

In the early years around 1923, Hitler and his close associates convinced this small but steadily growing wall of “hall protectors” to believe they were racially pure, when in fact they were nothing more than a fanatically loyal private police force. Eventually Hitler used them as the backbone of the police state that dominated Germany. His early collaborator, Heinrich Himmler, led the SS, organizing and maintaining a secret sub-branch called the Gestapo. Gradually, as the Gestapo used arrest, torture and killing, to terrorize and subdue opposition to Hitler, Germans experienced complete loss of their civil rights, including protection against midnight surprise searches, arrest, and disappearance without a trace. Isolation in the face of this quiet but deadly bullying caused the broader population of Germans to pay lip service to Hitler’s regime, to willingly wear the required badges, and to not object to the substantial national sacrifices required for the sake of onerous militarization. As the SS grew stronger, its opposition weakened because Hitler had found a way to make the German people keep their mouths shut.

Eventually Himmler and selected members of the SS became entrusted with Hitler’s even more secret “final solution,’ a massive operation to exterminate “unwanted” human beings, including Europe’s Jews, Communists, liberal political opponents, homosexuals, and Gypsies. While the Allgemeine SS, or General SS, enforced Hitler’s broad policy of racial supremacy in Germany, the highly secret “Totenkopfverbande SS,” or Deaths Head SS, operated the concentration and extermination camps, created to gather and murder close to six million Jews and millions of other profiled, dehumanized and targeted minorities and political prisoners. While doing this, the SS in all its virulent forms viewed themselves as a sort of racially pure Knights of the Round Table. They knew themelves as essential in Hitler’s conspiracy to hold power.

In 1934 the SS became essential in Hitler’s trajectory to absolute power, after the angry former corporal had already made himself dictator. Members of the SS found it easy to be loyal to their Fuhrer, rather than to any constitution established for the protection of their fellow Germans’ rights and lives, or to international law designed to protect fellow Europeans. In June of that year, during The Night of the Long Knives, Hitler and Himmler brought the SS out of comparative obscurity to murder between 207 and 1,000 of the leadership of the brown-shirted “Sturmabteilung.” or SA Storm-Troopers, consisting of millions of military veterans and adventurers then thought to be the most important paramilitary arm of the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’, or Nazi, Party. As it turned out, Hitler never trusted the SA. He knew that many of them saw themselves differently, more as a surrogate army for Germany. By the summer of 1934, only a quarter of the SA’s four and a half million storm troopers were even members of the Nazi Party. SA leaders were content to disrupt normal government operations after achieving important positions with the government. They intended to eventually gain control of the German Army even with Hitler as dictator. With the SA threatening his power, Hitler decided to purge the brown shirts while also eliminating other opponents and rivals. In a few days, beginning the night of June 30, 1934, he began the effective process of striking absolute fear into the hearts of any countryman opposing him.

Six months after publicly thanking the SA Leaders for “imperishable services” to the Nazis and Germany, Hitler struck. While saying the brown shirts were planning a coup, he had them seized in a South Bavarian resort hotel. That’s where he had isolated senior SA leaders from their followers, with the expectation they would be discussing the SA’s overall role in Germany’s future. The leading brown shirts and others across Germany were simultaneously seized and killed in nearby barracks or prisons or murdered on the spot. The entire SA was disarmed. Though hard to believe that such a rampage might be ignored by a civil society, leaders of the army, the court system and the Catholic Church as well as the balance of German citizenry accepted Hitler’s claim that he had acted as at the supreme Judge of the German nation against a National-Bolshevik uprising. Later inquiry proved that the SA leadership had no intention of a coup, but it was too late. Hitler’s will had become the supreme German Law.

The real beneficiaries of this turn of events were the SS, then placed directly under Hitler. Two years later Himmler, the man who built the SS, was also given command of all the police capability in Germany even though Hitler had promised the Heer, or Army, that its members would be the only bearers of arms in and for Germany. By the Battle of the Bulge, the SS, especially the SS Panzers, had become a far more dangerous rival to the Wehrmacht, which included the combined army, navy and Air Force, than anyone could possibly have imagined. A bloody lesson emerged. Eventually all bullies must be confronted, and this really had to happen once and for all in the Ardennes Forest on December 16, 1944.

The ultimate confrontation started at 5:30 am on that day in the deep snow, darkened copses, tiny intersections, narrow gorges and streets and solid stone and brick houses and barns of the vast battlefield we traveled from Montana to survey. In that morning’s early darkness, four tired or inexperienced America army divisions, all of them too thinly spread, were suddenly and viciously attacked by three German armies, twenty German divisions, four of them SS Panzer. To both of us the setting for such a historic confrontation seemed like West Virginia around Harpers Ferry or northern Idaho around Kellogg. Here in terrain that could easily pass for North American, American soldiers did not cut and run as Hitler expected of the people he disdained as “mongrels.” They stayed, they died, and they put a stake through the heart of a contemptuous bully.

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