FREE THE SS: A NEW HISTORY PDF Adrian Weale | 496 pages | 02 Feb 2012 | Little, Brown Book Group | 9780349117522 | English | London, United Kingdom The SS - Definition & Facts - HISTORY This website uses cookies to help us give you the best experience when you visit our website. By continuing to use this website, you consent to our use of these cookies. We still know far too little about the SS. Since then, there have been detailed scholarly studies of aspects The SS: A New History the organisation's history, but nobody has pulled The SS: A New History this work together into a fully satisfactory synthesis, and much research still needs to be done. Some of what we do know is competently recounted in this readable new book by Adrian Weale, a freelance writer and former officer in the British army who remains active in the reserve and recently, as he tells us in his preface, did a six-month tour of duty in Iraq. The SS was formed as a bodyguard troop for Adolf Hitler in the s, but it was not until it was taken over by the young Heinrich Himmler early infollowing the dismissal of a lacklustre predecessor, The SS: A New History it began to become the vehicle for more far-reaching ambitions. From the moment he fell under Hitler's spell until almost the very end of the Third Reich, Himmler born in was unconditionally loyal to the Nazi leader. Well-educated, from a solidly middle-class background his father was tutor to the Bavarian royal familyhard-working and extremely ambitious, Himmler quickly turned the SS into the ideological vanguard of Nazism. In Himmler's vision, the SS - soon made into an autonomous organisation, reorganised in a military-style The SS: A New History and equipped with smart new black uniforms to distinguish it from the chaotic mass movement of the Brownshirts - was to be a racial as well as an ideological elite. Weale The SS: A New History Himmler's directive of 31 December which stated that his aim was "to create a hereditarily The SS: A New History clan of a strictly Nordic German sort"; SS men had to prove their physical fitness and racial purity and were not allowed to marry without providing evidence of their suitability. It was clear enough that Himmler's boast that no man with even a single dental filling was going to be allowed to join the organisation was never going to be fulfilled in practice, and, as Weale points out, other physical requirements were soon relaxed as the SS expanded in numbers, especially during the war. However, even racial purity was diluted from the very beginning. Out ofThe SS: A New History men who applied for a marriage certificate between andonly 7, fulfilled all the racial and physical requirements; The SS: A New History, fewer than a thousand applications were turned down. Weale also fails to pay sufficient attention to the wilder side of Himmler's ideology, which went far beyond the core beliefs of Nazism. The pseudo-Germanic religious cult that he introduced into the SS, with sun-worship and the mystical invocation of Wotan and Thor at SS wedding ceremonies, for example, was ridiculed by Hitler, who devoted a speech in to emphasising the supposedly secular, scientific basis of Nazism "we do not have cult sites, but sports arenas". When the Brownshirts threatened to revolt against Hitler in JuneHimmler saw his chance. After proving its loyalty by serving as the instrument of Hitler's brutal curbing of the Brownshirts in the "Night of the Long Knives", the SS began to expand rapidly, taking over the police including the Gestapo in and, when war came, building up a military wing, the Waffen-SS, in which, eventually, more thanmen served. Yet he fails to convey the extent to which the ideological fanaticism of the Waffen-SS drove its units into repeated acts of useless self-sacrifice. Its men were often criticised by more cautious regular army officers, some of whom, however, as Himmler complained, were only too ready to give them the most dangerous positions in battle in order to preserve their own troops and undermine the strength of this threatening rival. More than a third of all Waffen-SS men were killed in battle, a considerably higher death rate than that of the professional military forces. Weale devotes far too much space to the foreign legions recruited by the SS, especially the insignificant "British Free Corps", while neglecting the growth of the SS in other fields of activity. A good deal has been written recently about the burgeoning economic empire of the SS during the war, for instance. Not only did it supply forced labour from the camps it ran, making money The SS: A New History the hundreds of thousands of prisoners it supplied to major manufacturing firms, it also owned and ran housing corporations, cement works, textile factories, munitions producers and much more besides. In pursuit of his crusade against alcoholism in the SS, Himmler even acquired the Apollinaris mineral water company after it had been expropriated from its British owners. Yet some have pointed out that this motley collection of haphazardly acquired businesses was too incoherent to pose a serious threat to the existing management of the Nazi economy. This is yet The SS: A New History area that requires further investigation. As a military historian, Weale focuses too much on the Waffen-SS to the detriment of other branches of the organisation, and even here, he breaks no new ground. Pressing questions remain unanswered: we know far too little, for example, about the social composition of the Waffen-SS, about its training and indoctrination, and about its internal dynamics. Weale is apparently unable to read German, and so misses out on a great deal of recently published research on the SS; on the other hand, he has made good use of documents in the National Archives at Kew, including interrogation records of former SS officers The SS: A New History files on British volunteers for the SS, the subject of a previous book by the same author. He gives a good summary of some of the central aspects of the organisation's history, and his book is remarkably free from error I spotted only one obvious mistake, the misdating of the introduction of conscription to instead of But it tells us no more about the SS than we already knew; in some respects, indeed, a good deal less. In the end, the question he poses at the beginning of the book still needs a convincing answer. This article first appeared in the 23 August issue of the New Statesman, Pakistan. Sign up. You are browsing in private mode. Schutzstaffel - Wikipedia Super Sportor SSis the signature performance option package offered by Chevrolet on a limited number of its vehicles. All SS models The SS: A New History with distinctive "SS" markings on their exterior. The SS package was first made available for the Impala. The package included Super Sport trim for both the interior and exterior, chassis reinforcements, stronger springs and shocks, power brakes, spinner wheel covers, and narrow-band whitewall tires. The car's dashboard received a Corvette style passenger hand bar and a steering column mounted rpm tachometer. Chevrolet builtImpalas that year and had the SS package, of which received the cid and received the cid. Both historically and today, the Super Sport package has The SS: A New History included high-performance tires, heavy-duty suspension, and increased power, along with a variety of other performance and appearance upgrades. Unlike the contemporary The SS: A New History, it was built as a hardtopwithout fixed 2 or The SS: A New History or frames around the door glass. InChevrolet released a concept car they named the SS. Though never intended for production, the vehicle was used as a show car and to hint at what was ahead for Chevrolet sports car design. It is usually easy to visually differentiate an SS from a "plain-Jane" model. However, it is more difficult to tell the difference between a genuine SS and a The SS: A New History, a non-SS vehicle that has been altered to look like an SS. Because of the number of SS clones in the marketplace, potential buyers are advised to do their research and contact their local car clubs for help to ensure that the vehicle is a true SS by running the VIN codes and casting numbers on the engine this also includes the vehicle's build sheet especially if the SS package was a factory option. Other non-SS vehicles altered to appear like them only use trim panels rather than aftermarket mechanical parts. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other uses, see Super sport disambiguation. Main article: Chevrolet SS concept car. Archived from the original on Retrieved Categories : Chevrolet Muscle cars Official motorsports and performance division of automakers. Hidden categories: CS1 maint: archived copy as title. Namespaces Article Talk. Views Read Edit View history. Help Learn to edit Community portal Recent changes Upload file. Download as PDF Printable version. The SS: a New History InHeinrich Himmler joined the unit, which had by then been reformed and given its final name. Under his direction — it grew from a small paramilitary formation during the Weimar Republic to one of the most powerful organizations in Nazi Germany. They were tasked with the detection of actual or potential enemies of the Nazi state, the neutralization of any opposition, policing the German people for their commitment to Nazi ideologyand providing domestic and foreign intelligence.