The SS: Alibi of a Nation, 1922-45. This item is unavailable.The SS: Alibi of a Nation, 1922-45

Based almost entirely on original German documents, including the captured files of the SS leadership, this book gives a final account of the Nazi Praetorian Guard. With steadily mounting tension, the story moves from the origins of the SS before 1923 to its supremacy, twenty years later, as the most appealing instrument of political and military terror known to history. The author sees the SS not as an historical accident, but as a tyrannical expression of bureaucracy in politics. It is with the administration and internal rivalries of the Nazi state that the book is mainly concerned: how the whole system worked out in peace, and above all in war. The author brought the objective eye of the historian to bear on this emotive subject and produced a book that is not only factual and absorbing but also a valid and vital contribution to the study of the Second World War. This is a classic work on the history of the SS.