Schutzstaffel has been listed as one of the History good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.
Article milestones Date Process Result April 2, 2005 Featured article candidate Not promoted April 14, 2016 Good article nominee Listed
Current status: Good article

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This page got 8 million hits yesterday. That is unprecedented traffic, and there is no related news story that I could find. What's happening here? Postman McDude (talk) 17:00, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

What the hell? That is insane. I haven't found anything in the news either. Carlstak (talk) 18:52, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe these hits are from bots? Lorfragra (talk) 19:34, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Postman McDude Feels like some botting's at play here. PL.My (talk) 21:19, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It's been coming up on different forums around conversation conversations about ICE's role in America politics. Johnsosd (talk) 23:31, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

There were a articles in the Signpost about recent heavy bot/AI pageviews of Wikipedia: see Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2025-04-09/Opinion, Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2025-04-09/Op-ed. — Diannaa 🍁 (talk) 02:30, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Aha. Thanks Diannaa for the links. Smallbones' op-ed is a must-read. I have definitely noticed that Wikipedia pages have been loading more slowly, especially within the last month or so. Now I know why. Musk deploying AI to create the internal wiring for a police state and ICE working with Palantir and its Artificial Intelligence Platform is a nightmare. Carlstak (talk) 16:20, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Whoever it is, it's super creepy that they would choose to use this particular article. — Diannaa 🍁 (talk) 19:41, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, absolutely so, and in character for the fascists, per the article: "...the SS was the foremost agency of security, mass surveillance, and state terrorism within Germany and German-occupied Europe." If the courts don't stop them, we should not be surprised to see non-immigrant US citizens who voice dissent or who are on Trump's enemies list to be declared "terrorists" and sent to concentration camps without due process. Carlstak (talk) 20:22, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Change "5.5 to 6 million Jews" to "6 million Jews".

Rationale: I don't have access to the book the sentence is citing (Evans 2008), but the current consensus among historians seems to be around 6 million (see The_Holocaust#Death_toll). Even if the book cited uses a "5.5 to 6 million" figure, the point of the cite is attribution of responsibility to the SS, not the death count, so I think it'd be reasonable to go with 6 million here. Yihkrys (talk) 22:57, 1 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Evans also says on the same page that since the opening of the Soviet archives "it has become clear that the probable total is around 6 million", so I have gone ahead and changed it. Thanks for the suggestion. — Diannaa 🍁 (talk) 00:07, 2 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

According to Franz Pfeffer von Salomon's biographer, the early membership figures of the SS look different. Mark Fraschka writes that under Berchtold, the SS grew quite rapidly to 1,000 members in 1926. At that time, there was no proper SA organization. However, when Pfeffer von Salomon became the Supreme SA Leader and the SS lost its independence, the number of SS members fell to 280 by 1929.
Source: Mark A. Fraschka: "Franz Pfeffer von Salomon. Hitlers vergessener Oberster SA-Führer". Wallstein Verlag., 2016. ISBN: 9783835319097. Page 357.

Also according to the historian Bastian Hein, Berchtold succeeded in increasing the membership to 1000 by July 1926. In 1927, after Pfeffer von Salomon had become the Supreme SA Leader, there were demands in several Gaue to even completely dissolve the SS as a superfluous parallel organization.
Source: Bastian Hein: Elite für Volk und Führer? Die Allgemeine SS und ihre Mitglieder 1925–1945, Oldenbourg, München 2012, ISBN 978-3-486-70936-0 (Habilitation, Universität Regensburg, 2011). Pages 42-43 ~2025-35984-24 (talk) 09:33, 24 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion:

• Himmler besichtigt die Gefangenenlager in Russland. Heinrich Himmler inspects a prisoner of war camp in Russia, circa... - NARA - 540164.jpg

Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 09:44, 31 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]