Gallo, David <br/><br/>
The policy of ideological training within the SS (1933-1945). A study of the transmission of Nazi normativity 

 -  2015.<br/>							 
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<br/><br/> The following article traces the history of the policy of “ideological training” (weltanschauliche Schulung or weltanschauliche Erziehung) developed between 1933 and 1945 by the SS (Schutzstaffel), the organization that considered itself the elite of Nazism. Its radicalism and its scope make the SS’s efforts in the field of political indoctrination a paradigmatic example of the Nazi regime’s attempts at transmitting its new system of values to its rank and file. An empirical case study of such a policy can thus allow the historian to shed new light on the problem of Nazi normativity and help bring a new perspective to the understanding of the mentalities of the men who committed themselves to the cause of the “Third Reich” and fought and murdered in its name—two issues that are central to the recent historiography of national socialism. This article combines four complementary methodological approaches: an institutional history of the network of organizations tasked with elaborating and implementing the SS’s training program, at the center of which stood the SS-Schulungsamt (educational office), which oversaw the work of an “educational organization” (Schulungsapparat) of more than a thousand instructors, present at all levels; a prosopographical profile of the specific group of Nazi perpetrators who operated at various levels of the “educational organization”; an analysis of the ideological discourses and teaching methods elaborated by these institutions; and an evaluation of the way the SS’s own brand of education impacted the hundreds of thousands of men who served in its civil, military or police branches. The first two parts of the article analyze the two main chronological phases of the history of the “educational organization” and its changing priorities, as the program of ideological training, which initially aimed at forging the civil elite of the Nazi regime through a process of long-term reeducation (1933-1939), increasingly transformed into an instrument of morale-boosting for the SS’s fighting troops (1939-1945). The third and last part of the article tries to assess the results of ideological training and the extend to which Nazi norms penetrated the SS’s various units. It reaches the conclusion that, although ideological penetration should not be underestimated, it varied greatly and remained generally far below the utopian expectations of SS ideologists.