This study will examine the development of the Hitler's SS Death's Head (Totenkopf) Division, as described in Soldiers of Destruction, by Charles W. Sydnor, Jr. The study will consider the reasons for the growth of the SSTK and what such development tells us about the nature of National Socialism. The greatest enemy of the Nazis, at least in Europe, was Russia, and it was inevitable that the SSTK, as one of the essential ingredients in National Socialism, would find its ultimate purpose in the war on the eastern front with Stalin. As the war moved toward that final confrontation with Russia, the importance of the SSTK inevitably grew, leading to the development and expansion of the elite, powerful and ruthless Division.
Sydnor makes clear that he believes the SSTK were an essential part of the rise of National Socialism under Hitler and that the Division represented the spirit of Nazism. He writes, for example, that there is an increasing interest in the SSTK "because, institutionally, and for most of the history of the Third Reich, the SS Death's Head Division occupied a strategic intersection amid the moving traffic of Hitlerian criminality" (xii).
The theme of the book is that the SSTK was not only the spirit of Hitler's Nazi policy, but also its very backbone. In his conclusion, Sydnor writes of "'the executive instrument of the Fuhrer's will'---the wartime SS, the single most important institution of the Hitlerian age" (350). The book, then, is a record of the origins and development of such an essential arm of Nazi philosophy and policy before and during the Second World War.
The SSTK was in essence created by Theodor Eicke, the creator as well of the concentration camp system before the war. The SSTK emerged from the SSTV. The SSTK itself originated in October 1939 and lasted until May 1945. The most important point made by Sydnor in the opening chapter on the prewar origins of the SSTK is that the Division was the ...