Overview of the SS, headed by Heinrich Himmler.
From 1929 until its dissolution in 1945, the SS was headed by Heinrich Himmler, who built up the SS from fewer than 300 members to more than 50,000 by the time the Nazis came to power in 1933. Himmler, a racist fanatic, screened applicants for their supposed physical perfection and racial purity but recruited members from all ranks of German society. With their sleek black uniforms and special insignia (lightninglike runic S’s, death’s head badges, and silver daggers), the men of the SS felt superior to the brawling brown-shirted Storm Troopers of the SA, to which initially they were nominally subordinate.
The Swahili teacher killed in a Nazi concentration camp
Black people were among the victims of the Nazis. The documented case of Mahjub bin Adam Mohamed also offers insight into Germany s colonial past.
While doing research at Germany s Federal Archives, Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst came across a document that shows there was a Swahili teacher named Mohammed Husen who was taken to the Nazis Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg, north of Berlin. I was really surprised by that document, because despite my studies as an Africanist historian, I did not know anything about the experiences of Africans during the Nazi era. Even when I researched the topic in academic works, I did not find any studies about it, says Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst, a professor of African Studies at the University of Cologne.