The Schutzstaffel of the NSDAP was the most violent terrorist organization of the Nazi regime. According to the will of Hitler and Himmler, it was meant to be the "racial" elite of National Socialism, chosen as the model for the eugenic "Nordification" of the German people. By 1939, the "Black Order" had around 200,000 members. About 90 percent of them belonged to the Allgemeine SS, from which the core of the concentration camp SS and many of the later SS war criminals emerged. Who were these men? How did they join the Schutzstaffel? What did they do in Himmler's "Order"? Bastian Hein answers these open questions and focuses on a central link between the Nazi regime's apparatus of power and German society.