institutional manifestation of the character of Eicke. In other words, in Sydnor's view, to know Eicke was to know the nature of the SSTK. In that context, Sydnor writes that Eicke was "a tough and vicious figure. Ever-suspicious, quarrelsome, cruel, humorless, and afflicted with a cancerous ambition." He was a "genuinely fanatic Nazi who had embraced the movement's political and racial liturgy with the zeal of the late convert, advancing rapidly and unshakeably into the power structure of the Third Reich" (23).
The original SSTV troops, out of which the SSTK came, were specially selected guards at the concentration camps. Eicke was able from the beginning to establish for the SSTV and then the SSTK an independence unparalleled among segments
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