The SS in three verbs outside, above, undoing the law

The SS can be told in three verbs. It began outside the law, became an organization above the law, and ended as one that undid the law. Put it that compactly and the part usually left out shows: each step needed permission from people who still had the power to refuse. The sequence looks inevitable now. It was not. It was ratified three times.

Beginning outside the law is, by itself, unremarkable. Gangs, militias and revolutionary cells all work outside the legal order without threatening its foundations. The early SS was a party bodyguard unit, its violence something the movement’s leaders could disavow while profiting from it. The relationship was parasitic and, to the state, manageable. The transaction buried in this stage is the one that matters: legitimate institutions treating extralegal violence as a tool rather than a threat, so long as it served their nearer interests.

The move from outside the law to above it is the moment the parasite becomes the host. Above means superiority, a claim that the organization’s purposes outrank the legal order and so are not answerable to it. Under Himmler the SS won exactly that. It ran its own courts, its own businesses, its own intelligence service, and claimed a racial mission that mere legality could not hold; historians call it a state within the state, and Eugen Kogon titled his study of it simply Der SS-Staat (The SS State). This is not lawlessness. It is a rival claim to legitimacy, and it is more dangerous than crime because it gives obedience a moral vocabulary. Men rarely commit atrocities believing they are breaking rules. They commit them believing they serve a higher order.

Undoing the law goes past even this. It neither violates law nor rises above it; it dissolves the idea that any legal order could bind power. By the middle of the war the SS had done this within its domain. In the camps and the occupied East no law applied, no appeal existed, and nothing stood between the organization’s will and its execution.

The pattern is not peculiar to the SS or to fascism. Tolerated illegality, then claimed superiority, then the end of legal order: it recurs wherever checks are treated as obstacles instead of foundations. No organization undoes a law it has not first been allowed to stand outside, and none rises above the law without the consent of those still nominally administering it. Each verb marks a point where someone could have intervened and did not. Read them in order and you hear three doors close. Each one had someone standing beside it.

Sources

• Eugen Kogon, Der SS-Staat (Verlag Karl Alber, 1946), in English as The Theory and Practice of Hell (1950)