Word: ss
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...other concentration camps, it was originally designed as a "holding pen" for Jews who were to be exchanged for German prisoners of war. Established in 1943, near Hanover in northwestern Germany, Bergen-Belsen was built to contain 10,000 prisoners and was run, like all the camps, by the SS. In 1944 the commandant, SS Major Josef Kramer, later known as the Beast of Belsen, began accepting inmates from other camps who were too frail to continue their slave labor. The population of 15,000 Jews was swollen by thousands of new prisoners, most of them starved and diseased after...
...onslaught was waged in large measure by members of the Waffen (Weapons) SS, the combat branch of the Third Reich's elite guard. Forty-seven of those buried at Bitburg were members of the SS, which is clearly marked on many headstones. Most of those 47 SS casualties were between the ages of 17 and 20 when they died, though some were reportedly over...
...SS stood for Schutzstaffel, meaning protective echelon, or, as commonly translated, elite guard. The organization grew out of a small group of thugs recruited in 1923 to protect Hitler, and was originally the security arm of the Nazi Party. When it came under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler in 1929, the SS began to expand; by the war's end almost 1 million men had passed through its ranks. The Waffen combat units were formed in the late 1930s. It was members of the Totenkopf ("Death Head") SS who served as guards and executioners at the concentration camps, wearing black...
...SS, said Himmler, was "to find out, to fight and destroy all open and secret enemies of the Führer, the National Socialist movement and our racial resurrection." Two of the guard's most notorious members were Adolf Eichmann, who was later executed for directing the deportation of Jews to concentration camps, and Josef Mengele, the evil Auschwitz doctor who is still thought to be at large. Known for their viciousness and fanaticism, SS squads rounded up Jews and resisters in villages in Germany and throughout the rest of Europe and shot them on the spot...
...early 1944 an officer from the SS second division, some of whose members are buried at Kolmeshöhe, was shot by a French resistance sniper. In retaliation, soldiers from the division rounded up the inhabitants of Oradour-sur-Glane, a nearby village, and massacred all 642 of them, including 207 children. They then burned the town to the ground. During the Battle of the Bulge, a Waffen SS battle group from the first division gunned down 71 American prisoners of war captured at Malmédy, Belgium, 40 miles northwest of Bitburg. Afterward, boisterous SS men used the bodies for target...