17 March 1933, Berlin, Germany.

A new guard unit is formed in the capital of the  Third Reich.

At first it is small and presented as a bodyguard for the new German chancellor, Adolf  Hitler, loyal only to him and placed close to the centre of power.

Uniforms, parades, and propaganda  give it the image of a chosen formation.

Yet behind this image stands something more dangerous.

The unit is built not to defend Germany in a normal military sense, but to protect Hitler and  serve Nazi ideology.

In the years that follow, it grows from a personal guard into a major military  formation and fights on nearly every important front of the war.

Wherever it goes, it leaves  behind massacres, murdered prisoners, and terror against civilians.

This unit will be known in  the future as the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler.

The roots of the Leibstandarte reached back to  Hitler’s earlier bodyguard groups of the 1920s.

After the Nazi seizure of power in January  1933, Hitler wanted a guard he could trust completely and soon a new SS formation was  created.

In the following months it changed names several times and in September 1933  it became the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, then numbering approximately 120 men.

It was  commanded by Sepp Dietrich and stationed in Berlin-Lichterfelde.

On 9 November 1933 its men  swore a personal oath to Hitler – their loyalty was directed not to the state or to the law, but  to Hitler himself.

The unit also became a model for the expansion of other armed SS formations.

The SS, the organization responsible for enforcing Nazi racial policy and running concentration  and extermination camps, used the Leibstandarte as a symbol of discipline and loyalty.

When the Second World War began on 1 September 1939, the Leibstandarte, by then expanded into  a motorised regiment, took part in the German attack on Poland.

The unit was involved in several  battles against Polish cavalry brigades attempting to hit the flanks of the German advance.

The  campaign in Poland was short, but the crimes of the unit began almost immediately – for example in  the night of 18 September 1939 men serving under officer Hermann Müller-John hunted down Jewish  civilians and shot 50 of them.

The massacre was so brutal that even the Wehrmacht, the regular German  army, arrested Müller-John and wanted to bring him before a military court.

But Sepp Dietrich,  commander of the unit at that time, intervened, and in the end Hitler himself secured the release  of Müller-John.

This early case showed a pattern that would continue through the war – members of  the Leibstandarte could murder civilians and still expect protection from the higher floor of the  Nazi system.

These were not the only crimes done by the unit in Poland – they became notorious  among others for burning villages, and even killing Polish civilians with machine guns.

In 1940 the unit fought in the campaign in Western Europe.

There it became linked with one  of the best-known crimes against Allied soldiers during the western campaign.

On 28 May 1940  near Wormhout in northern France, the British and French soldiers who had been cut off and run  out of ammunition surrendered to German troops, but instead of being treated as prisoners of  war, many were forced into a barn.

Some of the Allied soldiers were already shot or wounded,  and many of them had been beaten before they arrived at the barn.

Once they were inside, hand  grenades were thrown into the crowded building.

Some of those who survived the blasts were  taken out of the barn in groups and executed, while others were shot inside the barn.

Between  eighty and one hundred prisoners of war were murdered.

A few survived only by hiding among the  dead or escaping despite severe wounds.

Soon after the fall of France, the unit was reorganised and  ready for the next Nazi attack.

That came in 1941, when the unit fought in the Balkans and took  part also in the invasion of the Soviet Union.

During this period, the unit fought on the Eastern  Front in some of the most brutal conditions of the entire war.

There the conflict was shaped  by ideology, starvation, mass shootings, and the constant destruction of any boundary  between combatant and civilian.

Like other units of the Waffen-SS, which was the military branch  of the SS, the Leibstandarte was hardened by this experience.

To further expand and reinforce the  unit, which had been on the front lines for a year, they were transferred to northern France  in July 1942.

Here, the unit was expanded into a Panzergrenadier Division and from 15 July 1942  the unit was designated as the SS Panzergrenadier Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler.

In the  spring of 1943, the formation was sent back to the Eastern Front, where it participated in the  battles near the Ukrainian city of Kharkov, which was recaptured by the SS Division Leibstandarte on  15 March 1943.

During the fighting around Kharkov, a smaller unit of the division under the command  of Joachim Peiper gained a nickname “Blowtorch Battalion.

” Ukrainian sources, including surviving  witness Ivan Kiselev, who was 14 at the time of the massacre, described the killings in the  villages of Yefremovka and Semyonovka on 17 February 1943 where soldiers under Peiper’s  command killed 872 men, women and children and some 240 of these were burned alive in the  church of Yefremovka.

The division also took part in the fighting during the operation Citadel  on the Eastern Front in the summer of 1943, including the legendary Battle of Prokhorovka,  where the division lost hundreds of men.

After the ending of this operation, the division left  the eastern front once again.

This time, it was sent to northern Italy after the country left the  Axis alliance.

There it continued in its policy of mass murder and violence against civilians.

Between 15 and 23 September 1943, men of the division arrested Jewish civilians in a  series of operations around Lago Maggiore on the Swiss-Italian border.

Members of the division  arrested over 50 Jews and held them in a number of local hotels.

During the nights of 22 and 23  September, they were taken in small groups to a local forest where they were shot.

The bodies  were then placed in sacks filled with stones, rowed out in boats and sunk in the lake.

Other members of the division seized hundreds of Jewish refugees near the municipality of Borgo  San Dalmazzo, in the Italian region of Piemonte.

349 of them were imprisoned and later deported  through France to Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in German-occupied Poland where mass murder was being  carried out – only 9 of them survived the war.

The division also committed the massacre in  Boves, where 25 Italian civilians were killed, including the parish priest Don Bernardi  and local industrialist Alessandro Vassallo, who were burned alive and 350 houses were  destroyed by artillery fire of the Waffen-SS under the command of Joachim Peiper.

The massacre  and destruction were reprisals for one German soldier having been killed and two German officers  having been captured and held by Italian partisans in the vicinity of the town.

After obtaining  their release, Peiper ordered the destruction of the town, despite earlier promising not to do so.

By late 1943 the division returned to the Eastern Front and suffered heavy losses in Ukraine  during the winter of 1943 to 1944.

The division was nearly destroyed and had to be rebuilt in  Belgium.

After the unit was again operational, it was positioned north of the River Seine  to counter any possible landing in the area of the Pas de Calais.

After the Allies landed in  Normandy on 6 June 1944, the division was sent from this region to support the German attempt to  halt the Allied advance.

This proved unsuccessful, and the division, along with other units,  ended up in the so-called Falaise Pocket, from which some of its units managed to escape  only by abandoning all their armoured equipment.

The division sustained 5,000 casualties during the  Normandy campaign and during their retreat through French territory, they faced attacks from the  French Resistance.

The response of the Waffen-SS was often collective punishment.

In the Aisne  department in northern France on 31 August 1944, members of the Leibstandarte and the 12th  SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend surrounded the village of Tavaux-et-Pontséricourt, killed 20  civilians, including two children aged 6 and 11, and burned 86 houses.

On the same day, in the  nearby commune of Plomion, 14 men were reportedly beaten to death in the presence of women and  children.

Its most infamous crime in the west came during the Ardennes Offensive in December 1944,  Germany’s last major attack on the Western Front.

Within the division, Kampfgruppe Peiper, a battle  group led by Joachim Peiper, formed the spearhead.

On 17 December 1944, near Baugnez close to the  city of Malmedy in Belgium, American soldiers were captured and murdered.

The prisoners of war  who survived said that a group of approximately 120 American soldiers stood in a farmer’s field  when the Waffen-SS fired machine guns at them.

Panicked by the machine gun fire, some soldiers  fled, but German soldiers shot and killed most of them where they stood.

After machine-gunning  the group of soldiers, the Leibstandarte soldiers walked amongst the corpses, searching for wounded  survivors to kill them with a gunshot to the head.

Some of the fleeing American soldiers hid  in a café at the nearby crossroads.

The SS soldiers then set the café afire, and killed every  American soldier who escaped the burning building.

At least 82 American soldiers who were prisoners  of war were shot by members of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler during this massacre.

[akoze nie  je tam toho soldier/s trochu vela? Dpc – to zu   musim aj taketo veci kontorlovat v scriptoch?] After the failure of the Ardennes Offensive, the Leibstandarte was sent to Hungary in early  1945 for the fighting around Lake Balaton.

Germany was trying to protect its last important oil  supplies and hold together the collapsing front.

The division fought there and then retreated into  Austria as Soviet forces advanced.

By this stage, what had once been presented as Hitler’s  proud elite formation was once again only a battered remnant.

In April 1945 the  remains of the division surrendered near the city of Steyr in Upper Austria.

During the Second World War, many of the men of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler who were  involved in crimes did not live to see its end.

The division fought on almost every major  front, and its losses were extremely high, especially from 1943 onward.

Officers and  soldiers who had taken part in killings in Poland, France, the Soviet Union, and  Italy were killed in the thousands.

A smaller number of men connected to the crimes  of the Leibstandarte met violent ends after the war.

The most well-known case was Joachim Peiper,  the commander linked to the Malmedy massacre and other massacres done by the unit through Europe.

Although he had escaped execution after the war as his death sentence was reduced, his past followed  him.

In 1976, while living in France, his house was attacked and set on fire by a group calling  themselves “The Avengers”.

He died inside the burning building.

His death was widely seen as an  act of revenge connected to his wartime murders.