Rating: 
Summary: Propoganda
Review: Hohne's book is quite an achievement. The footnotes and bibliography alone are worth the price of the book. Hohne's biographical profile indicates that he is a journalist, but his balance and scholarship, as exemplified in this book, are indicative of an historian of great talent.Hohne provides the patient reader with a picture that helps to explain a very complex subject. Why did Himmler try to stop the death marches as the Nazi regime collapsed? Why did the Waffen SS shift from an almost demonic vehemence in the early part of the war, to an organization much more like the Wehermacht at the end? What did Himmler really think of the effectiveness of the policy of extermination in the east? The answers to these and dozens of other questions are laid out in a way that makes Himmler less of an enigma, and more of a pathetic dupe of his Fuhrer. The book is not always easy to read because a strict chronology would not work well for an organization as multifaceted as the SS. By organizing the book by area rather than by strict chronology, however, Hohne makes the reader shift gears fairly often, and although all is well resolved by the end, there are times when one wonders if something was missed. The effort is worth it.
Rating: 
Summary: An extraordinary history of the SS
Review: Hohne's book is quite an achievement. The footnotes and bibliography alone are worth the price of the book. Hohne's biographical profile indicates that he is a journalist, but his balance and scholarship, as exemplified in this book, are indicative of an historian of great talent. Hohne provides the patient reader with a picture that helps to explain a very complex subject. Why did Himmler try to stop the death marches as the Nazi regime collapsed? Why did the Waffen SS shift from an almost demonic vehemence in the early part of the war, to an organization much more like the Wehermacht at the end? What did Himmler really think of the effectiveness of the policy of extermination in the east? The answers to these and dozens of other questions are laid out in a way that makes Himmler less of an enigma, and more of a pathetic dupe of his Fuhrer. The book is not always easy to read because a strict chronology would not work well for an organization as multifaceted as the SS. By organizing the book by area rather than by strict chronology, however, Hohne makes the reader shift gears fairly often, and although all is well resolved by the end, there are times when one wonders if something was missed. The effort is worth it.
Rating:
Summary: A Touchstone Work
Review: If you want to know about why Nazism failed, this is the book. The SS was a criminal organization, but it was also uniquely German. The SS actually was everything we thought the KGB to be and everything the world thinks the CIA is. Hohne's tale is finely told and emninently readable. The structure, while it does jump around is brought together well for the conclusion. Hohne does not go into every detail, but his overview is thorough enough, either for the casual reader or the hardcore one. He provides us not with a intelligent and malevolent Heinrich Himmler, but an all too human one, not the madman people believe most Nazis to be, but as he was, a civil servant who believed in the fairy tales spun by his Fuhrer, a man who really did not come to grips with the power he actually had or as Hohne has titled one of his chapters:"The Impotence of Power". The SS could be most likened to a Crime Family gone wrong, pulling in too many different directions, and in some cases fighting itself. Hohne's book shatters the myth of SS perfection, they had no morality and humanity, and they didn't have a clue as it turns out. Even if you are not a history reader this book will entertain you and educate you, it is and always will be relevant to study, for business, for politics, for many other things.
Rating: 
Summary: BUREACRATIC CHAOS
Review: It is generally believed that the Third Reich was an effecient, orderly regime run by Hitler with the help of Himmler's SS, united in a desire to further the Nazi cause. Although I had begun to disabuse myself of this notion in recent years, Hohne's book demonstrated how utterly false the whole idea is. Nazi Germany is shown to be a hive of political activity, with different organizations battling each other and even themselves for power and influence. The SS itself was not united, and its members often disagreed with Hitler over policy. This book paints a picture of bureacratic chaos, where real power existed only when directly blessed by Hitler, and where various underlings would rush to the Fuhrer to report on rival's activities, much like children tattling to the teacher. In this book we see just how central the role of Hitler really was to Nazi Germany. Many of the most evil and crazy policies of the Reich lasted only because of his orders. They would likely have been reversed or modified under any other Nazi leadership. Although I learned a lot from this book, it was not nearly as enjoyable or interesting as other books on the subject, like Shirer's classic. I found myself wishing everyone would just shut up and go away, and stop the squabling. The world had to wait until 1945 for that.
Rating:
Summary: BUREACRATIC CHAOS
Review: It is generally believed that the Third Reich was an effecient, orderly regime run by Hitler with the help of Himmler's SS, united in a desire to further the Nazi cause. Although I had begun to disabuse myself of this notion in recent years, Hohne's book demonstrated how utterly false the whole idea is. Nazi Germany is shown to be a hive of political activity, with different organizations battling each other and even themselves for power and influence. The SS itself was not united, and its members often disagreed with Hitler over policy. This book paints a picture of bureacratic chaos, where real power existed only when directly blessed by Hitler, and where various underlings would rush to the Fuhrer to report on rival's activities, much like children tattling to the teacher. In this book we see just how central the role of Hitler really was to Nazi Germany. Many of the most evil and crazy policies of the Reich lasted only because of his orders. They would likely have been reversed or modified under any other Nazi leadership. Although I learned a lot from this book, it was not nearly as enjoyable or interesting as other books on the subject, like Shirer's classic. I found myself wishing everyone would just shut up and go away, and stop the squabling. The world had to wait until 1945 for that.
Rating:
Summary: leaves me wanting more
Review: It reads like The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It is a little more obscure and even boring at times. The info on Ernst Roehm and the SD, I thought was very interesting. This book reads faster than The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and Albert Speer's Inside the Third Reich. I felt like with the other two Order of the Death's Head gives a nice picture of Nazi Germany. Because of the depressing subject manner in the eyes of most humans. I would suggest all three works with plenty of time to get the bad taste out of one's mouth between reading them. I also would argue that a focus on power is the best way to look at these people. There are plenty of racists, but few of them created and reached positions of power in a society. Thank you and good luck to you.
Rating:
Summary: The author makes a good case against an evil regime
Review: The central theme of Hoehne's thesis is that the SS, and Nazi Germany in general, was not quite the efficient all-for-one tight-knit apparatus everyone thinks it was. There was structure, however the structure of the state apparatus was mostly set up by Hitler to keep his subordinates too busy fighting amongst themselves, to threaten Hitler's position. (Contrast this to Stalin's method, which was to simply kill off all potential rivals.) The subordinate departments; the SS, SA, SD, Gestapo were quite independent of one another, and often were at odds with one another due to overlap in jurisdiction.
There is a wealth of information in this book. A lot of things in here will surprise you; for example there is the case of Ernst Roehm, the leader of the SA, who went to court over a stolen suitcase. The thief was a male prostitute who testified in court that he left Roehm (without his suitcase) because Roehm wanted to "engage in a form of intercourse which he found abhorrent." And Roehm wasn't the only Nazi homosexual. (A "distilled" account of Nazi homosexuality can be found in the books "Pink Swastika" by Lively and "Germany's National Vice" by Igra.)
While not as comprehensive as Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" "Order of the Death's Head," like Shirer's book, gives the reader a good picture of what times were like then, and it is certainly sufficient to read this book if you want to understand some basic things about Nazi Germany.
Rating:
Summary: The Truth Revealed
Review: The ultimate killing machine, streamlined, unopposed, the SS of Nazi Germany. At least, this is the story presented to us by the writers in Hollywood. Heinze Hohne seeks to rectify the grossly inaccurate picture presented on the silver screen with his fascinating in-depth analysis of the rise, fall, and structure (or lack thereof) of a deadly agency and its maniacal leader Heinrich Himmler. A masterpiece of modern analysis, this book rightfully owns its classic status.
Rating:
Summary: The Truth Revealed
Review: The ultimate killing machine, streamlined, unopposed, the SS of Nazi Germany. At least, this is the story presented to us by the writers in Hollywood. Heinze Hohne seeks to rectify the grossly inaccurate picture presented on the silver screen with his fascinating in-depth analysis of the rise, fall, and structure (or lack thereof) of a deadly agency and its maniacal leader Heinrich Himmler. A masterpiece of modern analysis, this book rightfully owns its classic status.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent overview
Review: This recounts the history of one of the most evil organizations ever created. Founded in 1925 as a bodyguard for Hitler, the SS ultimately became a security, military and bureaucratic behemoth whose influence pervaded the entire Nazi empire. Contrary to both contemporary propaganda and subsequent popular belief, however, neither the SS nor the Nazi regime were monolithic organizations devoted to exercising their leaders' directives. Indeed, a suggestive metaphor for the Nazi state would be that of a cancerous tumour, in which a collection of aggressively growing and constantly mutating cells maintains just enough cohesion to carry out its expansionist aims. The government consisted of a variety of departments whose ill-defined and overlapping responsibilities resulted in a permanent state of fractious feudalism. This arrangement suited Hitler perfectly. By pitting his subordinates against each other he maintained his position as the supreme and final authority.
The SS, for all its powers, was therefore still hemmed in by its rivals, of whom the most notable were the SA, the Party and the Wehrmacht. The rivalry with the SA was eventually settled in blood in the Roehm putsch of 1934, following which the SS gained primacy. But the rise of the SS would have been likely in any event by virtue of the Party's ascension to power. The SA had served its purpose: the regime no longer required an army of politicized street brawlers but rather a professional security apparatus.
The rivalries with the Party and the army were not so neatly resolved. Party administrators frustrated SS designs in the occupied regions - for example in Poland under Hans Frank - while Martin Bormann controlled access to the Fuehrer. The SS ambition to create its own statelet outside of Greater Germany was never realised. The Wehrmacht, meanwhile, maintained a long-standing opposition to the arming of Party organizations - both SA and SS alike - and initially inhibited the development of the Waffen SS. In the field of intelligence the SS organizations the Sicherheitsdienst and the Gestapo were frequently in conflict with each other and the military intelligence service, the Abwehr. This is apparently why the Stauffenberg circle, which almost succeeded in assassinating Hitler in 1944, escaped SS notice: its members were mostly in the military.
The Waffen SS eventually developed into a formidable fighting force. Based on storm trooper principles - which in fact had their origin in practices developed by front-line officers in the First World War - and which emphasized mobile, elite strike formations, and staffed by highly motivated and ideologically committed troops it was widely acknowledged as the best force on any side in the war. But its very success was self-limiting. Thrown into the harshest battles on the Eastern Front it took heavy casualties. At Rhzev in winter 1942, for instance, the SS regiment "Der Fuehrer" attacked and drove back a much larger Soviet force - reportedly in temperatures as low as minus 52 degrees Celsius. Of an original strength of 2,000, however, only 35 survived to claim the victory. The inability of the German population to provide enough manpower for a force which peaked at a strength of 900,000 led to the creation of what was in effect an SS foreign legion. While the earliest recruits came from sufficiently Nordic countries such as Holland and Norway, the numbers were eventually topped up by groups such as Soviet Muslims. Ultimately casualties, foreign recruitment and generally lowered levels of ideological fervour resulted in a dilution of Waffen SS strength.
The one area of supreme and unquestioned SS sovereignty was the world of the concentration camps. Minor impediments notwithstanding the SS was ultimately able to round up the large part of the Jewish population of the conquered territories. They were wiped out in the camps. Perhaps the most striking juxtaposition of Nazi petty legality and raw brutality is the bizarre story of the SS crackdown on improper behaviour by its own staff in the camps, in which hundreds of charges of corruption and even of "unlawful" killing of inmates were laid. Since these cases had to be properly documented, investigators were put in the absurd position of having to examine the precise circumstances of the isolated deaths of a handful of inmates in an environment where thousands were being killed "legitimately" every day. In the end, two hundred camp staff were themselves executed before the investigations were concluded.
Heinrich Himmler, the SS leader, was the stereotype of the Nazi functionary. A master bureaucrat, tenacious and obsessed with the minutiae of office politics, he was physically unprepossessing and far from the Aryan ideal. Nor did he approximate it any more closely in fighting spirit. He almost collapsed on one occasion when viewing the execution of Jewish prisoners. After a disastrous stint as a military commander in 1945 he feigned illness, reportedly cowering beneath the sheets when visited by General Guderian. As the inevitable outcome of the war became clear, he began to think increasingly about the prospects of surrender to the Western Allies. But such a plan would have entailed removing one major obstacle, namely Hitler, and this Himmler could not bring himself to do. In thrall to "the greatest brain of all times," Himmler - who clicked his heels when the Fuehrer spoke to him by telephone - was still dithering in early 1945. Finally, despite an admonition by finance minister von Krosigk that the Reichsfuehrer SS could not go running around in a false beard but must surrender openly, Himmler attempted to sneak through British lines in disguise. When detained he bit on a cyanide capsule, a coward to the (literally) bitter end.
The history of the SS is one of a fatal combination of arrogant brutality, overweening ideology and abysmal ignorance. Annihilated forever in 1945, it will continue to fascinate and appall readers for centuries to come.
This account is well-written and comprehensively researched, but somewhat difficult to follow because of its non-chronological approach. Given the vast scope of the topic, however, even such a sizeable volume as this can provide no more than an overview.
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