• in Nazi Germany, Christmas featured decorating Christmas trees with swastikas, Germanic "sun wheels" and SS-style Nordic sig runes?
• in 1953, former SS-Obergruppenführer Emil Mazuw received an eight year prison sentence for severely abusing political prisoners and Jews?
• during World War II, the SS-run Haidari concentration camp near Athens was so infamous that it became known as the "Bastille of Greece"?
• in one of his Posen speeches, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler said that the decision had to be made to make the Jews "disappear from the Earth"?
• in the aftermath of the Defence of the Polish Post in Danzig, in the Polish September Campaign of 1939, all the Polish civilians who had held out for 15 hours against the SS-led assault were executed?
• the SS-physician Alfred Trzebinski, who was involved in the homicide of 20 children at the former school Bullenhuser Damm, was executed by hanging in 1946?
• some members of the Nazi SS became eligible for their 25-year SS Long Service Awards well before their completion of 25 years of service?
• due to standing among corpses in his coat and rubber gloves while holding a syringe, SS-Oberscharführer Josef Klehr has been described as the ultimate caricature of the omnipotent Auschwitz doctor?
• despite jointly murdering at least 1,000 inmates at Auschwitz, former SS-Unterscharführer Oswald Kaduk earned the nickname "Papa Kaduk" among patients at the hospital he worked at after the war?
• SS-Untersturmführer Hans Stark admitted that during the mass gassing of prisoners at Auschwitz, he inserted the Zyklon B into the gas chamber himself when a medical orderly did not turn up?
• SS-Oberscharführer Ludwig Plagge, executed for his crimes at Auschwitz, was one of the first SS men to be deployed there?
• Holocaust deniers have contacted former SS-Rottenführer Oskar Gröning to convince him that the things he witnessed at Auschwitz were hallucinations on his part?
• Julius Schreck ended his SS career as Adolf Hitler's chauffeur, and that Hitler read the eulogy at his state funeral in 1936?
• Stalag fiction was a genre of Israeli pornography about concentration-camp imprisonment, brutalization by female SS guards, and the prisoners' revenge?
• as the SS struggled to keep up sorting the valuables plundered from prisoners at Auschwitz, Karl Möckel stated that fifteen to twenty suitcases of them were sent to the WVHA quarterly?
• Untersturmführer was the first commissioned officer rank of the German SS?
• chemist and science policy-maker Rudolf Mentzel, head of the German Research Foundation in the 1930s and later VP of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, was also an SS Brigadier?

Facts on topics related to Schutzstaffel

Nazi Party

• Hugo Jaeger's personal collection of photographs includes colour shots of Adolf Hitler on a cruise in 1939 and of the Nazi leader attending a Christmas party in 1941?
• Peter Adolf Thiessen, who received a Stalin Prize for his work on the Soviet atomic bomb project, had joined the Nazi Party as early as 1925?
• editor Willi Eichler's 1932 Urgent Call for Unity to thwart the Nazi Party's rise to power was signed by 33 leading German intellectuals including Albert Einstein, Erich Kästner and Käthe Kollwitz?
• industrialist Nazi Party member John Rabe saved more than 50,000 Chinese nationals from the Rape of Nanking?
• the German Communist Martin Hoop, who was arrested and murdered by the Nazi regime in 1933, was an undercover agent for the Communists?
• the Nazi leader Theodor Habicht was briefly involved with the communists after World War I before joining the Nazi Party in 1926?
• the Zionist leader Leo Motzkin organized the Jewish delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, 1919 and led agitations against the Nazi Party?
• the Distomo Archaeological Collection of Greece has an exhibition of photographs related to the Distomo massacre in 1944 by Nazi troops?

Adolf Hitler

• 20th-century medieval scholar Erika Cheetham interpreted Nostradamus' writings as prophecies of Napoleon, Hitler, and the establishment of modern Israel?
• Adolf Hitler lived in a public dormitory in Vienna from 1910 to 1913?
• Adolf Hitler never thought much of the Columbus Globe for State and Industry Leaders despite its iconic status in the U.S.?
• Adolf Hitler was a self-proclaimed vegetarian and had a large greenhouse built to keep him supplied with fresh fruits and vegetables throughout World War II?
• U.S. Ambassador Charles E. Bohlen received the secret protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which contained an understanding between Hitler and Stalin to split Central Europe, from German diplomat Hans von Herwarth?
• Heinz Guderian (pictured) and Adolf Hitler had heated arguments while planning for Operation Solstice, one of the major German offensive operations on the Eastern Front during WWII?
• Imperial Japanese Navy submarine Commander Takakazu Kinashi was awarded the Iron Cross by Adolf Hitler for his role in the sinking of the American aircraft carrier Wasp?
• neo-Nazi politician and member of the Bundestag Fritz Rössler, who resembled Adolf Hitler, had a habit of attending parliament drunk?
• Pope Pius XII's retention of Cesare Orsenigo (pictured left, with Hitler and von Ribbentrop) as Apostolic Nuncio to Germany is a "chief point of criticism" of his response to the Holocaust?
• David Bergelson was a Yiddish language writer, who believed that the future of Yiddish literature lay in the Soviet Union and that he moved there from Berlin when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, but was ultimately executed during Josef Stalin's anti-semitic campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans"?

Nazi Germany

• 3–5.5 million OST-Arbeiters, slave laborers from Eastern Europe, worked in Nazi Germany during WWII?
• ACLU director Aryeh Neier, a refugee from Nazi Germany, supported the Neo-Nazi National Socialist Party of America in its efforts to march in Skokie, Illinois, an area with many Holocaust survivors?
• French Roman Catholic archbishop Marcel Lefebvre's father René Lefebvre died in a Nazi concentration camp?
• French soprano Germaine Lubin was imprisoned for three years after World War II for her alleged support of Nazi Germany?
• Heinz Guderian (pictured) and Adolf Hitler had heated arguments while planning for Operation Solstice, one of the major German offensive operations on the Eastern Front during WWII?
• Karl Wahl, the leader of the Nazi Gau Schwaben, was the only Bavarian Gauleiter without a university degree?
• Lithuanians initially viewed Nazi Germany's invasion in June 1941 as a liberation from Soviet rule, but soon began to resist, forming the Supreme Committee for the Liberation of Lithuania?
• Max Manus referred to the release of Norwegian resistance member Kolbein Lauring from Grini concentration camp in 1943 as a "miraculous mistake" by the German authorities?
• German Luftwaffe fighter ace Walther Dahl shot down 128 enemy aircraft in the Second World War, including a USAAF B-17 that he rammed in 1944?
• Nazi German leaders, including Heinrich Himmler, briefly fell for Heinz Kurschildgen's claims to be able to make petrol from water?

Nazism

• Belgian senator Baron Jacques Brotchi survived World War II as a child when his Jewish family was hidden from the Nazis by a Belgian family in Comblain-au-Pont?
• Ukrainian Nazis have been blamed for the 1944 Huta Pieniacka massacre of Polish civilians?
• Ponary massacre lasted for 3 years as 100,000 Jews, Poles and Russians were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators near Vilnius?
• Olympic pair skating champions Andrée Brunet and Pierre Brunet refused to defend their title at the 1936 Winter Olympics because Nazi Germany was hosting the Games?
• during World War II, Pierre-Marie Cardinal Gerlier asked that religious orders take Jewish children into hiding to avoid Nazi death camps?
• in spite of hesitations due to the growing influence of Nazism in Germany, the International Federation of Trade Unions moved its headquarters to Berlin in 1931?
• publication of comics in Hungary largely stopped during World War II due to Nazi pressure?
• renowned Holocaust scholar Robert Jan van Pelt says that the first Holocaust deniers were the Nazis themselves?
• the King Jagiello Monument (pictured) in Central Park, New York, was forced to remain in the United States after the Nazi invasion of Poland made its return from the 1939 New York World's Fair impossible?
• the men's adventure genre of pulp magazine often featured damsels in distress menaced by Nazis?

Neo-Nazism

• neo-Nazi politician and member of the Bundestag Fritz Rössler, who resembled Adolf Hitler, had a habit of attending parliament drunk?
• Temple Beth Israel in Eugene, Oregon was attacked by neo-Nazi members of the Volksfront in 1994 and 2002?
• Mevlüde Genç, a Turk living in Germany who had lost five of her family members to Neo-Nazi violence in the Solingen arson attack of 1993, went on to advocate tolerance between Turks and Germans?
• in 2003, German authorities foiled a plot by a neo-Nazi group to set off a bomb at the Ohel Jakob synagogue cornerstone ceremony?
• in late 1992, the German Federal Ministry of the Interior banned the neo-Nazi groups German Alternative (DA), Nationalist Front (NF), German Comradeship Alliance (DKB), and the National Offensive (NO) all within a month?