Behind the ceremonial marching stood one of the most sinister institutions ever created. The SS began as a small bodyguard for Hitler, but under Heinrich Himmler — the mild-looking former chicken farmer who took it over in 1929 — it grew into a state within the state. It came to control the German police and the Gestapo, ran the concentration and death camps, fielded its own army in the Waffen-SS, and drove the regime's racial programme, including the machinery of the Holocaust. No organisation did more to make Nazi Germany the terror it was. An officer like this one, marching with drawn sword beside Hitler and Himmler at a review, was a cog in that apparatus — one of the black-uniformed men through whom Himmler's power reached into every corner of German life.

The figure is an SS officer in black dress uniform, sword drawn, caught mid-stride as if escorting the leadership past a reviewing stand — the copy places him marching beside Hitler and Himmler themselves. He belongs with the collection's other senior SS figure, the SS-Brigadeführer, the Hitler he attends, and the ranks of the Leibstandarte he helped inspect. In a parade diorama the escorting officers frame the scene — the disciplined black cordon that always surrounded the men at the centre of the regime.

Model: LAH220 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 1 piece set