Hitler 39;s Officers Names

[Emerenciana Mcgreal]

Between1925 and 1945, the German Schutzstaffel (SS) grew from eight members to over a quarter of a million Waffen-SS and over a million Allgemeine-SS members. Other members included the SS-Totenkopfverbnde (SS-TV), which ran the Nazi concentration and extermination camps. The following list of SS personnel gives the names of notable persons who are counted among the organization's most famous, influential or notorious members. Women were not allowed to join the SS[citation needed] but were allowed into the SS-Gefolge and many served within the concentration camps.

Prior to 1934 the SS were nominally under the command of the Sturmabteilung[1] and so it could be said that both Adolf Hitler as Oberster SA-Fhrer and Ernst Rhm as Stabschef SA outranked the most senior SS position of Reichsfhrer-SS. Following the Night of the Long Knives Hitler "raised the SS, hitherto subordinate to the SA, to the rank of an independent organisation".[2] Hitler also was considered SS Member No. 1, Emil Maurice (considered the founder of the SS) was member No. 2, although leadership was assumed by Julius Schreck who was member No. 5. Himmler was SS member No. 168. Based on the seniority system of SS membership number, this made Hitler senior in the SS to all other members even if not by rank.

After the Night of the Long Knives, when the SS became independent from the SA, Hitler was listed on SS officer rolls as member No. 1 and considered supreme commander of the entire SS (Oberster Fhrer der Schutzstaffel: Literally, "Supreme Leader of the SS") by virtue of his position as the Fhrer of Germany. There is no photographic record of Hitler ever wearing an actual SS uniform nor was there a special SS insignia for Hitler above that worn by Himmler.

Following is the list of persons holding the title positions as well as actual highest ranks of the Schutzstaffel (SS) since the earliest inception of the armed SS units in Nazi Germany. The ranks include distinctive insignia designs worn on the collar at one points by all officers.

Dormant bank accounts, transfers of gold, and unclaimed insurance policies, all taken by the Nazis and hidden primarily in Swiss bank accounts during World War II, are now the subject of economic and financial research. Museums and galleries are researching the provenance of paintings, decorative arts, and sculpture in their collections in order to confirm that none of the pieces were looted during World War II. Although the Nazis were known for their thorough recordkeeping, a significant amount of artwork still is missing and unaccounted for. The Allied armies salvaged many of these German records, but do these records clearly tell the story of an art piece? And what is the story of the Allied attempts to find the owners of more than two million looted art pieces and bring German art dealers and Nazi collaborators to justice?

In recent years, renewed interest in Holocaust-era assets has prompted heirs, art historians, and curators to ask these questions concerning art provenance and claims research. Until recently, very few researchers were interested in economic and financial aspects of the Nazi regime and the war; even fewer in Holocaust-related assets.1 Now, provenance research of looted art has become an important activity for auction houses, art dealers, and art museums.2

To address the dual concerns of researchers' demand for records that document the locating and restituting of confiscated art and the preservation problems associated with overuse of fragile World War II records, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) created the Holocaust Records Project (HRP). The project has the task of identifying, preserving, describing, and microfilming more than twenty million pages of records created by the Allies in occupied Europe regarding Nazi looted art and the restitution of national treasures. These materials include documents generated by various U.S. government civilian agencies, U.S. military branches, and the Office of Military Government, U.S. Zone (OMGUS).

The HRP emerged from a meeting in the summer of 2001 between NARA and art historians and curators to identify NARA's key and relevant holdings concerning art provenance and restitution claims research. These records tell the story of Allied programs created in mid-1943 to protect art from being damaged or stolen by the Allied military forces, to prevent art from being used as a financial asset by the Axis powers, to keep Nazi looted art from being sent to a safe haven (somewhere outside of Germany, in the neutral countries or Latin America), and to aid Allied restitution efforts.

The HRP is microfilming documents in more than fifteen different records groups, including Records of the Office of Strategic Services (RG 226), General Records in the Department of State (RG 59), Records of the Office of Alien Property (Foreign Funds) (RG 131), and the "Ardelia Hall Collection" in Records of U.S. Occupation Headquarters, World War II (RG 260). The project's progress can be monitored on NARA's art provenance web page at www.archives.gov/research/holocaust/.

Our primary goal is to aid archival research in looted cultural property records and to create specialized inventories and finding aids. Our finding aids allow researchers to narrow their search for archival records and also help to preserve the records by minimizing the amount of handling to which they are subjected. Two additional project goals are the posting of inventories and indexes on NARA's art provenance web page.

The first set of records to be microfilmed are the records of the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas ("The Roberts Commission");3 the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) inventory card files; the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFA&A) files; the Cultural Property Claims Applications; and the records of the four temporary collecting points under U.S. Army command: Marburg, Offenbach, Wiesbaden, and Munich.4 The army occupation forces in Germany, Italy, and Austria created massive quantities of records in the process of the recovery, administration, and restitution of looted art and cultural property and treasures. The paperwork involving property claim applications made to OMGUS from individuals and institutions was routed through the collecting point to the object's country of origin. For example, if an object had been taken out of Poland by the Nazis, moved to France, and shipped to Munich, then the claim was made to the Allies by the Polish government. Each European government was to determine ownership of artworks taken from its own country. Also in these records are U.S. Army interrogations and field reports on looted art, including information on the discovery and recovery of looted art, and captured German and French documents containing packing lists and bills of sale. One section of OMGUS records relating to the location and restitution of looted art alone amounts to several million pages.

The HRP's first completed project was the preservation microfilming of selected records of the Art Looting Investigation Unit (ALIU),5 an investigative program formed in November 1944 under the auspices of the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas ("The Roberts Commission") and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). These detailed interrogations, also known as the ALIU reports, describe Nazi looting; locations of looted art; German and Nazi attempts to sell looted art; the transport of art into and around the Reich; descriptions and dimensions of specific pieces, with many pieces listing the selling and purchasing prices; names of purchasing agents and auction houses; names and activities of Swiss, French, German, and other European art dealers; and art collections of Nazi leaders.6

ALIU officers interrogated more than two thousand individuals involved in art looting, including such key German and Nazi figures as Heinrich Hoffman, Hitler's chief photographer and art adviser; Ernst Buchner, director of the Bavarian State Paintings Museum; Karl Haberstock, a Berlin art dealer who purchased and sold artworks for Hitler; and Walter Hofer, Hermann Gring's art agent. After gathering intelligence information from their interrogations, ALIU members wrote thirteen Detailed Interrogation Reports (DIRs), then condensed these DIRs to create three Consolidated Interrogation Reports (CIRs).

The CIRs describe in detail the activities of the ERR, the official Nazi office charged with confiscating prominent art collections in France (CIR No. 1, "Activity of the Einsatzstab Rosenberg in France"); the origins of Hermann Gring's art collection (CIR No. 2, "The Goering Collection"); and art collected for Adolf Hitler's planned museum in Linz, Austria (CIR No. 4, "Linz: Hitler's Museum and Library"). CIR No. 3, which was to be written by Jan Vlug, Royal Netherlands Army, regarding German methods of acquisitions, was still pending in 1946 and never completed. These CIRs, used as evidence at the Nuremberg Trials of Hermann Gring and Alfred Rosenberg, also trace Germany's economic and financial growth and decline and the movement of assets within the Reich. The ALIU Final Report for the Roberts Commission was published in 1946.7

Soon after their rise to power in 1933, the Nazis purged so-called "degenerate art" from German public institutions. Artworks deemed degenerate by the Nazis included modern French and German artists in the areas of cubism, expressionism, and impressionism. Approximately sixteen thousand pieces were removed, and by 1938 the Nazi Party declared that all German art museums were purified. State-sponsored exhibitions of this art followed the Nazi purges, clarifying to Germans which types of modern art were now unacceptable in the new German Reich. Soon after, an auction of 126 degenerate artworks took place in 1939 at the Fischer Gallerie in Lucerne, Switzerland, in order to increase revenues for the party. The auctioned paintings by modern masters, many previously purged from German public institutions, included works by van Gogh and Matisse.

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