One Hundred Thousand SA and SS men at Party Day, Nurnberg 1933.
Numbering about 10,000 at the end of 1929, the SS only assumed rapidly growing importance with the appointment of Heinrich Himmler as the new Reichsfiihrer-SS (6 January 1929). Servile, but exceptionally industrious and eager, Himmler, who had been particularly devoted to the volkisch agrarian ideology of the race, blood and soil theory, methodically went about transforming the bodyguard’s old code of honor to a specifically SS order and elitist ideal and issued strict conditions of enlistment and service for the SS. The more rapidly the SA became a brown mass army with a marked proletarian strain after the flood of new members from 1929-30, the more the ‘black’ SS filled the role of the Party elite, which now attracted former officers, failed academics or the nobility.