Four men, alike as bricks — and that was exactly the intention. Heinrich Himmler set out to make the SS a racial "elite," the vanguard of the master race his ideology imagined, and he screened recruits accordingly. Candidates had to be physically flawless and able to document "Aryan" ancestry back generations — to 1800 for enlisted men, 1750 for officers — and the Leibstandarte, Hitler's showpiece guard, went further still, demanding a minimum height of nearly six feet and a near-identical build so that a rank of them looked machine-made. The result stands here: four interchangeable specimens, chosen not for who they were but for how well they fit a fantasy of purity. Behind the parade-ground perfection lay one of history's most murderous ideas — that some human beings were worth more than others.

The set gives four Leibstandarte guardsmen at parade rest in black dress uniform, white belts and gloves, rifles grounded before them — a block of the honour guard for lining a parade route or flanking a rostrum. It pairs with its companion set, the same men At Attention, and completes the ceremonial scene alongside the regiment's colour party and the goose-stepping SS Flagbearer. Ranked up in a display, four identical guards give a parade diorama the massed, mechanical uniformity the regime worked so hard to project.

Model: LAH-S05 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 4 piece set