page_title: Schutzstaffel
section_title: Post-war activity and aftermath
hierarchical_section_title: Schutzstaffel / Post-war activity and aftermath
caption_attribution_description: Čeština: Den Lotyšské legie English: Latvian Legion Day
context_page_description: The Schutzstaffel was a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany, and later throughout German-occupied Europe during World War II. It began with a small guard unit known as the Saal-Schutz made up of NSDAP volunteers to provide security for party meetings in Munich. In 1925, Heinrich 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. From the time of the Nazi Party’s rise to power until the regime’s collapse in 1945, the SS was the foremost agency of security, surveillance, and terror within Germany and German-occupied Europe.
  The two main constituent groups were the Allgemeine SS and Waffen-SS. The Allgemeine SS was responsible for enforcing the racial policy of Nazi Germany and general policing, whereas the Waffen-SS consisted of combat units within Nazi Germany's military. A third component of the SS, the SS-Totenkopfverbände, ran the concentration camps and extermination camps.
context_section_description: Following Nazi Germany's collapse, the SS ceased to exist. Numerous members of the SS, many of them still committed Nazis, remained at large in Germany and across Europe. On 21 May 1945, the British captured Himmler, who was in disguise and using a false passport. At an internment camp near Lüneburg, he committed suicide by biting down on a cyanide capsule. Several other leading members of the SS fled, but some were quickly captured. Kaltenbrunner, chief of the RSHA and the highest-ranking surviving SS main department chief upon Himmler's suicide, was captured and arrested in the Bavarian Alps. He was among the 24 defendants put on trial at the International Military Tribunal in 1945–46.
  Some SS members were subject to summary execution, torture, and beatings at the hands of freed prisoners, displaced persons, or Allied soldiers. American soldiers of the 157th Regiment, who entered the concentration camp at Dachau in April 1945 and saw the human deprivation and cruelty committed by the SS, shot some of the remaining SS camp guards. On 15 April 1945, British troops entered Bergen-Belsen. They placed the SS guards on starvation rations, made them work without breaks, forced them to deal with the remaining corpses, and stabbed them with bayonets or struck them with their rifle butts if they slowed their pace. Some members of the US Army Counter Intelligence Corps delivered captured SS camp guards to displaced person camps, where they knew they would be subject to summary execution.
caption: Remembrance day of the Latvian legionnaires, 16 March 2008
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