The document discusses the SS-Totenkopfverbände (Death's Head Units) which maintained the Nazi concentration camps during World War II. They were known for their skull and crossbones symbol and harsh treatment of prisoners. Theodor Eicke organized the first camp at Dachau and instructed guards to show no humanity. Concentration camps held not just Jews but also Roma, Slavs, homosexuals and others. Camp commandants like Rudolf Höss at Auschwitz oversaw the mass murder of over a million Jews in gas chambers. After the war, Höss and other Nazis were tried for war crimes at the Nuremberg Trials where they testified about the brutality and mass killings that took

1. By Darren Miller
Written for William Davies Middle School
Mays Landing NJ

2. Death's Head
Units
• http://www.bloodyelbow.com/2010/12/27
/1898181/nazi-imagery-continues-to-haunt-
silver-star-ufc-and-mma
Soldiers of the SS-
Totenkopfverbaende (Death's Head),
their objective was maintaining the
concentration camps in Nazi
Germany during World War II.
They were named for the skull-and-
cross-bones symbol worn on the right
collar of their uniforms.
On 29 March 1936, concentration
camp guards and administration
units were officially designated as
the SS-Death Head Unit.
The SS-TK had a reputation of being
harsh masters, meting out tough
punishments on those who did not
show loyalty to the Nazi ideals.
The daily life of prisoners lay in the
brutal and merciless hands of the
camp commandants and these SS
Death's-Head Units.

3. Theodor Eicke
• http://galleria.thule-
italia.com/hoyer.html
In 1934 Heinrich Himmler ordered
Theodor Eicke, a fervent anti-
Semitic, to organize and manage the
first concentration camp which had
been established at Dachau,
Germany.
One of his recommendations was
that guards should be warned that
they would be punished if they
showed prisoners any signs of
humanity.
Eicke was appointed Inspector of
Concentration Camps and head of
Death's Head Units until the
outbreak of World War II.
Eicke laid down exact instructions
on corporal punishment, beatings,
solitary confinement and shooting of
offenders who were considered as
agitators, mutineers or disobedient
elements who refused to obey
instructions regarding working
details.

4. Concentration camps
In 1937, there were only four concentration camps in Germany; by
1944, there were approximately 30 main camps and hundreds of sub camps.
They were located throughout the Germany and German-occupied
Europe.
The initial goal of the concentration camp prisoners were to make
them forced laborers to produce construction materials, and eventually to do
the manual labor to build and maintain the Europe dominated Third
Reich(Germany).
Not just Jewish people were sent to the camps. This included:
Homosexuals, Habitual criminals, Gypsies, Pacifists, the disabled and
Communists amongst others.

5. Waffen SS
• http://spartacus.schoolnet.uk/GERwaffen.
htm
Most of the initial enlisted soldiers
were SS-Death Head soldiers (SS
concentration camp guards), and as
such is popularly referred to as the
"Death's Head Division". They
participated in several known war
crimes.
They eventually took over the camps.
The members had to be ready and
willing tools, prepared to carry out
tasks of any nature, however
distasteful.
The Waffen SS troops were taught a
distorted view of the past, one based
on racial struggle and
Lebensraum(living space). The past
provided a sense of continuity and
showed the recruit that the Jews and
Slavs had always been the enemies of
Germany.

6. Hierarchy of camp titles
Each camp was commanded by a Kommandant, sometimes referred
to as Lagerkommandant.
The prison barracks within the camp were supervised by a
Rapportführer who was responsible for daily roll call and the camp daily
schedule.
The individual prisoner barracks were overseen by junior SS-soldiers
called Blockführer who, in turn had one to two squads of SS soldiers
responsible for overseeing the prisoners.
The camp perimeter and watch towers were overseen by a separate
formation called the Guard Battalion, or the Wachbattalion.
Within extermination camps, the Blockführer was the person who
would physically gas victims in the camp gas chambers.

7. Russian
Prisoners
http://www.gendercide.org/case_sovie
t.html
The Concentration camps established specially
for the Russians were called Russenlager.
In the case of the Soviet POWs, most of the
camps were simply open areas fenced off with
barbed wire and watchtowers with no
housing. These meager conditions forced the
crowded prisoners to live in holes they had
dug for themselves, which were exposed to the
elements. Beatings and other abuse by the
guards were common, and prisoners were
malnourished, often consuming only a few
hundred calories per day.
A contraption was installed at the infirmary
disguised as a height measuring stand. A Nazi
guard pretending to be a doctor would ask the
Soviet POWs(prisoners of war) to stand at
the contraption for measurement and through
a hole in the stand another guard fired in the
back of the head instantly killing the prisoner.
Loud music was played in the next room
where other POWs waited, to mask the sound
of the gunshot.

8. Heinrich
Himmler
• http://elginhistory12.wikispaces.com/
Heinrich+Himmler
As facilitator and overseer of the
concentration camps at the start of the war,
Himmler directed the killing of some six
million Jews and other victims.
Himmler established the SS Race and
Settlement Main Office, a racist and anti-
Semitic(hostility toward or discrimination
against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial
group) organization.
In the case of the Soviet POWs, he ordered
that most of the camps were simply open areas
fenced off with barbed wire and watchtowers
with no housing.
Under Himmler's leadership, the SS Death
Head Units were horrific towards the people
in the camps.
British forces captured Himmler in 1945.
After admitting his identity and the doctor
ordered to search him, he bit down on a
cyanide capsule hidden in his mouth. Similar
to Adolf Hitler, Heinrich committed suicide as
well.
In October 1939 he told the SS that women,
single or married, should, out of patriotic
duty, get themselves pregnant by soldiers who
were about to go to war.

9. The Holocaust
• http://www.ushmm.org/holocaust/
The Holocaust was the systematic,
bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and
murder of approximately six million Jews by
the Nazi regime and its collaborators.
"Holocaust" is a word of Greek origin meaning
"sacrifice by fire."
The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in
January 1933, believed that Germans were
racially superior and that the Jews, deemed
inferior, were an alien threat to the so-called
German racial community.
The Holocaust is best known for the
concentration camps that murdered many
Jews.
In 1933, the Jewish population of Europe
stood at over nine million. Most European
Jews lived in countries that Nazi Germany
would occupy or influence during World War
II. By the end of 1945, (Germanys defeat) the
Germans and their collaborators killed nearly
two out of every three European Jews as part
of the Final Solution, the Nazi policy to
murder the Jews of Europe.

10. Rudolf Höss
http://kandiisalwaysright.wordpress.com/2011/04
/20/halocaust-joseff-hoess/
The most notorious of all the SS- "Death's Head“
soldiers.
He was Kommandant of the newly-built
Auschwitz Concentration Camps in early 1940
until liberated by the Soviet Army on 27 January
1945.
He was known as counting corpses with the cool
dedication of a trained bookkeeper, he went home
each night to the loving embrace of his own
family. An affectionate husband who kissed his
wife morning and night, and tucked his children
into bed.
He watching millions of innocent human beings
dissolve in the gas chambers(used to murder his
victims), burning in the crematoriums, and their
teeth melting into gold bars, Höss wrote poetry
about the beauty of Auschwitz.
Höss stated during Post-War Nuremberg War
Crime trials: So when I set up the extermination
building at Auschwitz, I used Zyklon B, which
was a crystallized prussic acid which they
dropped into the death chamber from a small
opening. It took from 3-15 minutes to kill the
people in the death chamber, depending upon
climatic conditions. They knew when the people
were dead because their screaming stopped.

11. Nuremberg Trials
The best known of the war crimes trials held after World War II was the
trial of major German war criminals held in Nuremberg, Germany.
On November 29, 1945, the prosecution introduced an hour-long film
titled "The Nazi Concentration Camps." When the lights came up where all
assembled, they sat in silence.
Herman Göring the highest official of the Nazi state tried at Nuremberg,
testified openly and frankly about the persecution of German Jews from the rise of
the Nazi party to power in 1933 until the outbreak of war in 1939.
The commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoess, testified freely about the
gassing of more than a million Jews at the Auschwitz- killing center during the
war.
The judges of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg
sentenced Göring and Hoess to death by hanging.

12. Bibilography
Type of source First Reference
Shapiro Library SS Exemplified Nazi Ruthlessness: [FINAL HOME EDITION] Tulsa World [Tulsa, Okla] 02 Mar 1997:
G.5.
Shapiro Library Buchanan, William. Houston Chronicle (pre-1997 Fulltext) [Houston, Tex] 25 Apr 1985: 13. Shapiro
Library
Shapiro Library Six million died during Nazi genocide Express & Echo [Exeter (UK)] 28 Jan
Book 2008: 10. Soldiers of Destruction: The SS Death Heads Division from 1933-1945 jr, Syndor, Charles
Copyright 1977 by Princeton University Press
Internet http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/kramer.html
Internet http://www.germandaggers.info/Eicke.htm
Internet http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/himmler.html
Internet http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/focus/warcrimetrials/
Internet http://www.auschwitz.dk/hoess.htm
Internet hhtp://www.gendercide.org/case soviet.html
Internet http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/waffen-ss.htm