The SS men, the brutal elite of the Nazi Party, swore eternal allegiance to Hitler and, with unrelatenting violence, imposed the Fuhrer's will upon Germany and all the countries which came under his yoke. So terrible were its misdeeds that the SS was declared a criminal organization in the Nuremberg Trials. 

The SS was founded in 1925 to serve as Hitler's personal bodyguard. From 1929 it was headed by Heinrich Himmler, who built its numbers up from under 300 to well over a million by 1945 as the SS grew to be the backbone of Nazi Germany, taking over almost every function of the state. SS members were chosen not only to be the living embodiment of Hitler's notion of 'Aryan supremacy,' but also to cement undying loyalty to the Fuhrer at every level of German society. Handpicked to run the concentration camps and to spearhead the Holocaust, they spread death and destruction everywhere they went—their crimes can never be erased from human memory.