“Griesinger’s story offers a chilling reminder of how ordinary people, not monsters, made the Nazi regime and its heinous crimes.”

By Daniel Lee

PORTRAYALS IN popular culture of the infamous Schutzstaffel or SS generally paint a picture of sadistic and fanatical psychopaths who were ideologically committed to Nazism and obsessed with cruelty and violence. Consider Standartenführer Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds), Untersturmführer Amon Göth (Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List) or even Sturmbannführer Max Aldorfer (Dirk Bogarde in The Night Porter). Most popular histories of the SS have done little to alter this picture.

While such depictions are certainly supported by mountains of historical evidence, how much do we actually know about the rank-and-file individuals who made up the SS? Despite the enduring cinematic and literary interest in the Third Reich, most of us today can only name a handful of Nazis, and those are almost always high-ranking officials who formed part of Hitler’s inner circle.

While historians have studied in some depth the men at the top of the SS, such as those with the Reich Security Main Office and the Race and Settlement Main Office, we still know far too little about how low-level members navigated their day-to-day lives. No book has ever been written by a historian on a low-ranking, regular SS officer who was not a direct killer; such Nazis have seemingly vanished from the historical record.

As a historian of the Second World War, the opportunity to explore the life of an ordinary SS officer presented itself in the most unlikely and extraordinary of ways.

In 2011, an Amsterdam upholsterer by the name of Jana found a bundle of swastika-covered documents inside the cushion of an armchair he was repairing. The papers belonged to one Robert Griesinger, a lawyer from Stuttgart who was a minor SS official working for the Reich in Nazi-Occupied Prague.

The armchair’s Czech owner had purchased the item while a student in Prague in the 1960s. As I happened to know to the upholsterer’s daughter, I was asked to investigate the mystery of these hidden papers. I immediately set out to uncover more about this SS official, who, as it turned out, had never been mentioned in any books on the occupation of Prague, or even anywhere online. The results of the search became my new book The SS Officer’s Armchair.

My quest to learn more about Griesinger was to last five years. It would lead me to German provincial towns where the man had studied and worked and to archives and libraries across Europe and America. When the trail of evidence ran cold, I cast my net even wider. I eventually tracked down his two surviving daughters who were eager for details that might help them build up a picture of a father whose actions in the Third Reich had been shrouded in the shame and silence of post-war Germany. I even read his mother’s diary.

Piecing together the details of Griesinger’s career helped me shed light on where low-level SS members came from – personally and professionally – before they donned the infamous uniform. Their backgrounds are surprisingly varied. Griesinger’s was, in some respects, atypical. His file at the SS archives in Berlin revealed that he was not as German as I had thought; his father, born in New Orleans, was from a family that had once owned slaves in Louisiana. In other ways, however, Griesinger’s origins were much more typical of an SS member. He grew up in a conservative military family where antisemitism ran deep. In fact, the Griesingers blamed Jews for starting the Great War.

Born in 1906, Robert Griesinger formed part of a so-called ‘war-youth’ or ‘Weimar-youth’ generation. Like Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich and many thousands of other German men born between 1900 and 1910, he had been too young to fight in the war, but witnessed first-hand the collapse of the values and certainties of his parents’ world following the Armistice. His was a generation shaped by the devastating experience of war, national humiliation and the disorder that plagued the early years of the new post-war republic.

While Griesinger could not have realized it at the time, he was permanently scarred by the turmoil plaguing Germany in 1918 and 1919. The First World War and its aftermath formed a powerful backdrop to Griesinger’s life at Tübingen, one of Germany’s most distinguished universities and a hotbed of nationalist and reactionary sentiment.

As a student during Weimar Republic’s ‘Golden Years’ of relative stability and prosperity, Griesinger was not initially drawn to the nascent Nazi Party, which was still a fringe movement. Instead, he had his pick of established nationalist, anti-Weimar, right-wing parties from which to choose.

In 1925, the year Griesinger started university, the Nazis founded the SS as guard detachments (Schutzstaffel) consisting of several ten-man bodyguard units to protect Hitler and other party leaders from political opponents. When Himmler was appointed Reichsführer–SS in 1929, the organization had only 250 men. Under his leadership, it expanded rapidly. Cast as the racial elite of Nazi society, men from the middle and upper classes flocked to the SS, whose selection process and rigorous discipline provided a stark contrast to the street rabble and revolutionary intentions of the Nazi’s brown-shirted Sturmabteilung or SA.

By June 1932, SS membership had expanded to 41,000 men. As a young legal official seeking to establish a career in Germany’s new and dynamic political landscape, Griesinger was not yet a Nazi, even at the beginning of 1933 when the party won power. Yet, within a year he had joined a host of Nazi organizations, including the SS, as a channel for career advancement. Griesinger enlisted at the very moment when the new regime was calling out for well-educated recruits capable of assuming complex administrative functions. A full 28 per cent of these new members had doctorates.

It’s crucial to state that Griesinger, like 90 per cent of all SS members, served in the non-military Allgemeine SS (the General SS) that was tasked with ensuring the security of the Nazi party, its leaders, and the rest of the German volk. Most popular histories of the SS have generally focused attention on the Waffen or “armed” SS. Consequently, many incorrectly conflate the regular Allgemeine SS with the more fanatical military branches.

Members of the Allgemeine SS were also distinct from the SS-Totenkopfverbände or “death’s-head units” (concentration camp and extermination camp guards) and the Einsatzgruppen (mobile SS killing units), with which the organization’s most brutal methods of terror are commonly associated.

Unlike concentration-camp guards, ordinary members of the Allgemeine SS had full-time jobs elsewhere and did not wear the uniform every day to work; Griesinger and the men of his Sturm had to pay for theirs. Griesinger only donned the notorious tunic while attending SS gatherings, which usually took place one or two evenings a week and lasted for up to two hours. Reports and timetables of meetings show those present took part in a wide range of events: sports games against another local SS Sturm, marching sessions, singing lessons, first aid training or listening to presentations by local SS officials. To cultivate a sense of belonging and to foster greater understanding their new community, SS authorities encouraged members’ wives to attend “family nights” (Sippenabend).

For Griesinger and for most men of his background, taking part in Allgemeine SS meetings and activities was only a part-time pursuit. Thousands of businessmen, teachers, doctors and lawyers who carried out their SS duties when called upon were able to step out of their roles as Nazis, at least temporarily, to focus on more pressing tasks in their lives.

Unravelling Griesinger’s past reveals the SS to have been a much more multifaceted organization than is commonly recognized. Griesinger was able to move in and out of SS participation as it suited him, needing only to take part in the minimum number of SS activities necessary to retain his membership. During the 1930s, he received only a handful of promotions. Griesinger was not tempted to relinquish his status as a civil servant and dedicate his life to the SS. It’s more likely that he recognized that the prestige of belonging to such an elite organization brought him exciting potential for career advancement within the civil service.

Charting the life of one low-ranking member exposes the SS as a highly complicated organism of the Nazi state, which cannot be reduced simply to a homogenous group. Returning texture and agency to one such perpetrator affords Griesinger the opportunity to stand in for the thousands of anonymous ordinary Nazis whose widespread culpability wreaked havoc on so many lives and whose biographies have, until now, never seen the light of day. Griesinger’s story offers a chilling reminder of how ordinary people, not monsters, made the Nazi regime and its heinous crimes. He, and countless others like him, effortlessly switched from warm, kind and gentle husbands, fathers and co-workers to accomplices of a ruthlessly murderous and cold-blooded regime. The ambition, drive and antisemitism of the SS made up only a single strand of Griesinger’s life. As I show in my book, his service at the Stuttgart Gestapo in the 1930s, his proximity to the murder of Jews and Communists in Ukraine in summer 1941 by members of his Wehrmacht unit and, later, his drafting of forced labour in Nazi-Occupied Prague, rendered him an active participant in Nazi terror.

DANIEL LEE is the author of The SS Officer’s Armchair. A senior lecturer in modern history at Queen Mary, University of London, he is a specialist in the history of Jews in France and North Africa during the Second World War. He completed his doctorate at the University of Oxford, and is also the author of Pétain’s Jewish Children. As a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinker, Lee is a regular broadcaster on radio. He lives in north London.