Schutzstaffel (known for acronym SS) is a German term that means "protection squadron", in Portuguese. It was a group founded in 1925, with the aim of protect Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party leaders.
That Nazi army originated from the paramilitary group Sturmabteilung (SA), which had acted semi-independently since 1923, with the aim of protecting Party members.
Adolf Hitler, in 1925, creates Schutzstaffel to replace Sturmabteilung, with the objective of controlling and guaranteeing the personal protection of him and all other Nazi leaders.
The members of the SS were made up of so-called “elite men”, individuals who met the standards of racial “purity” espoused by Nazi ideology. These soldiers swore total loyalty to the Third Reich, the official SS motto being: "Mein Ehre heißt Treue", which means "my honor is loyalty".
O Reichsführer (a leadership title) of the SS required its members to demonstrate their Aryan ancestry to 1750, for the purpose of creating an order of "pure-bred" fighters.
Until then, the SS was composed of few members (less than 300 soldiers). Only after 1929, when
Heinrich Himmler takes charge, that this Nazi army begins to become a powerful organization.Learn more about the meaning of Nazism.
During World War II, the SS reached over a million members, making it one of the most influential entities in the Third Reich.
The SS gained so much power during Himmler's leadership that, in 1933, the SS changed from being a paramilitary group to building its own army (called the Waffen SS), which differentiated itself and had full autonomy from the Wehrmacht, the traditional armed forces.
With the advance of Nazi influence, the SS also absorbed other entities, such as the gestapo (Nazi secret police), the Sicherheitspolizei (security police), Ordnungspolizei (civil police), and the Einsatzgruppen, a group created in 1939 and responsible for capturing and exterminating minority ethnic groups.
In fact, as of that year, the SS started to command all the Concentration Camps and the Extermination built in countries occupied during World War II, starting the terrible Holocaust.
To learn more, see the meaning of Holocaust.
With the end of the war and the defeat of the Nazi Party, most members of the SS and leader Heinrich Himmler were convicted at the Nuremberg Court for crimes against humanity.
See also: the meaning of Swastika, which was adopted as the official symbol of the Nazi Party.