Hi everyone! I’m a project assistant currently working on a museum exhibition about the history of Nazi Germany. I have (BA and MA) degrees in Modern History and Public History, and I would say my background knowledge on this topic is more-than-average. But I am no expert either. Especially not when it comes to the history and the beliefs of the SS, which is quite important for this exhibition.
So I was wondering: do any experts out there know of a good book to introduce me to the history of the SS? I am especially interested in books that discuss their belief system, racism, neo-pagan ideology, and the role which they saw for themselves as the vanguard of a ‘racially pure’ German Lebensraum.
A quick Google tells me that there are plenty of books about the SS, but as a non-expert I can’t tell whether they have any scholarly merit. A lot of them seem to basically be either (1) exploitation novels, (2) neo-nazi propaganda or (3) boyish military histories fetishising panzers and uniforms. I’m looking for an actually well-researched academic introduction to the history of the SS, and its role in the wider context of the Third Reich - including its war crimes and genocide. Books/articles can be both in English and German. Any advice is welcome, thank you all very much in advance!
*Edit: removed some unnecessary spacing
There are indeed a ton of books about the SS and most of them are neither very good nor very useful, I unfortunately have to say. The fundamental problem is that when talking about the SS, one is talking about a couple, very different things. Because of the role the SS had and the broad character of the organization as well as the merger between party and state, the SS encompasses the party organization of the name SS, the concentration camp system, the Gestapo and Security Police and the fighting units in form of the Waffen-SS, including a whole plethora of non-German troops. This is, to a certain degree, a rather fundamental problem when writing about the SS and among the reasons why there isn't such a thing like a recent standard work on the entire history of the organization (at least that I am aware of. Maybe you know more /u/kieslowskifan?)
That all said, there is a couple of works that might be interesting for you. Some of them, unfortunately, only exist in German but I will include them anyway:
Hans Buchheim, Martin Broszat, Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, Helmut Krausnick: Anatomie des SS-Staates. This is very old and already published in its 7th edition in 1999 but can still serve as a useful book despite some of it being very outdated.
Ronald Smelser, Enrico Syring (Hrsg.): Die SS. Elite unter dem Totenkopf. 30 Lebensläufe. Schöningh, Paderborn 2000. This is somewhat useful as it collects 30 different biographies in order to portray the different aspects of the SS.
Karin Orth: Die Konzentrationslager-SS. Sozialstrukturelle Analysen und biographische Studien. dtv, München 2004. This is a collective, almost sociological study of the concentration camp SS. Very recent, very good for that specific aspect and Karin Orth does outstanding work.
Peter Longerich: Himmler Longerich's Himmler biography is the best, recent such book and despite Longerich's tendencies to "psychologize" a bit much, it gives very good insight into the ideology of the SS.
Michael Wildt: An uncompromising Generation. This is a book about the ideology of the high-ranking officials in the Reich Security Main Office. Useful for understanding this specific aspect and the idea of the "fighting bureaucracy" Himmler propagated.
Nicholas Goodriche-Clark: The Occult Roots of Nazism: The Ariosophists of Austria and Germany, 1890-1935 This is, to my knowledge, the only comprehensive, serious work about the occult roots and practices in the SS that is not a pile of sensationalist garbage.
That's what I can think of off the top of my head and it should provide at least a starting point, I hope.
Just to get you started, there are some flair-approved recommendations in our Book List section on Germany in WW2!
Thank you very much everyone, you've really helped a lot! It's quite strange there's no real standard work on this topic, considering the huge amount of influence the SS had on Nazi Germany.