ALEXANDER KIMEL - HOLOCAUST UNDERSTANDING & PREVENTION

THE SS ORGANIZATION

The Final Solution would not have been possible without the existence of the S.S. Organization, an organization of fanatic followers, raised and trained in blind obedience and loyalty to death. "The S.S. organization was built on the principles of the order of Jesuits. The service status and spiritual exercises prescribes by Ignatius Loyola formed a pattern which Himmler assiduously tried to copy. Absolute obedience was the supreme rule; each and every order had to be accepted without question."

Himmler was impressed by the organization of the Jesuits Order, created by Spanish officer-Ignatius Loyola. The Jesuits, swore the allegiance to the Pope, and function like a private army, obedient and fanatically loyal to the Pope. Himmler a superior organizer, created a similar elite organization built on Nazi ideology: racial superiority, anti-Semitism and blind obedience. Every year on Hitler's birthday S.S. cadets swore the allegiance to Hitler, in a romantic candlelight ceremony.

" I swear to thee, Adolf Hitler as Fuhrer and Chancellor of the German Reich, loyalty, bravery and obedience unto death, so help me God."

To join the S.S. was to adapt a way of life; it was part aristocracy, part religious order, an army, a family, a gang. The officers of the S.S. formed a corps of true " believers" who were effective leaders because of, in addition to conviction about their own superiority to other men, they felt a common racial bond with their troops and were imbued with medieval sense of noblesse oblige toward them. Furthermore, since most of these officers had virtually surrender their sense of personal identity to Hitler and the S.S., they were rarely troubled by any personal doubts which can diver them form putting total energy into their work.

11 million of people were killed, and there were ten of thousands of willing and unwilling executioners. Who were the executioners? Were they normal or sadists and psychopath? The answer is that they were normal people . The S.S. did not conduct any special tests for the selection of the executioners. After the war only a handful of perpetrators were brought to justice, the remainder resumed a normal life, raised families and became respected members of the society. Even the most infamous killers like Ivan the Terrible, Mengele resumed a normal life.

There is an interesting reaction from the children of infamous fathers like Demianuk. When they are arrested, the children swear by their father's innocence. Sure they knew their fathers under different conditions, they were born after their brutal careers were over. The Germans created an environment so saturated with violence, that like in atomic chain reaction did the eruption of contagious violence brainwash the bystanders and changing them into perpetrators.

kimel@systec.com