Himmler found these ideas of a lost Aryan golden age immensely appealing. He had long soaked up tales of feudal lords and kings, soldiers and peasants, Teutonic knights and Roman emperors. Indeed, nearly a third of the books that he had read since his teenage years explored historical subjects. In the charismatic Hitler, he believed, he had at last found someone who shared his passion for the past.

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Hitler saw something appealing in Himmler as well: a deep, unwavering fervor and a blind obedience to his authority that he demanded of all members of his inner circle. Himmler, who had served the party well as a young election campaigner, also showed signs of organizational genius. So in January 1929, Hitler placed him at the head of the Schutzstaffel, or SS, an elite bodyguard formed four years earlier. The SS had, however, failed to live up to Hitler’s expectations, and he thought it was time for a major shake-up.

Himmler was hungry to succeed in his new post and began reorganizing the SS from top to bottom. He ended the chaotic group meetings where SS men merely lounged about, smoking and telling stories and boasting about the Communist heads they had smashed. With Himmler at the helm, members paraded in a brisk military drill before each meeting. They sang SS songs and listened attentively to the political speeches that consumed most of the meetings. By the end of 1931, the SS boasted 10,000 members, with stacks of new applications arriving daily.

Still Himmler was far from satisfied. In his own mind, he saw SS men as the new aristocracy of the Third Reich: human livestock that could be used to rebreed the old master race. In 1931 he instructed his senior staff to accept only young males who possessed traits of the Aryan—or, as the SS preferred to call it, the Nordic—race. To select these men, Himmler’s advisers developed a racial grading system and approached their work, as Himmler later noted, “like a nursery gardener trying to reproduce a good old strain which has been adulterated and debased; we started from the principles of plant selection and then proceeded quite unashamedly to weed out the men whom we did not think we could use for the build-up of the SS.”

The examiners required applicants to take a medical examination and submit both a detailed genealogy chart and a set of photographs of themselves. In the SS offices, examiners pored over these pictures, searching for supposed Nordic traits—long head, narrow face, flat forehead, narrow nose, angular chin, thin lips, tall slender body, blue eyes, fair hair. They rated the physiques of the applicants on a scale of one to nine, then graded them on a five-point scale from “pure Nordic” to “suspected non-European blood components.” They also scanned the men’s family medical histories, searching for congenital illness. Finally they decided. A green card meant “SS suited”; red marked rejection.

Those accepted into the SS were encouraged to think of themselves as a new genetic aristocracy. While most Germans of the day traveled on the country’s superb system of urban trains, for example, a fleet of drivers in private cars chauffeured SS officers around to their appointments. And Himmler made certain that his SS men looked trim and elegant. The German firm Hugo Boss supplied their uniforms. In contrast to the scruffy brown tunics and pants of another security force, the Sturmabteilung, or SA, Himmler’s men were decked out impressively in black with silver collar-flashes. On their hats, they wore a silver death’s head, an ominous touch that supposedly symbolized “duty until death.” Such sartorial splendor clearly served a dual purpose. It intimidated victims and was also meant to add to the men’s sex appeal, boosting the chances of “success with the girls,” as Himmler once candidly remarked to a potential recruit.

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