The Great War (to become know to later generations as World War I) never ended. 
 
Hostilities stopped, and a truce was signed.  But it never officially ended.
 
It never ended because the Germans agreed to come to the truce table believing that they had not been defeated.  And today’s historians look on the First World War, the two decade truce period, and the Second World War as one event with three phases: WW I;truce;WW II.
 
The Weimar Republic in Germany emerged from the ashes of the Great War.  It was saddled from the beginning with crushing war reparations imposed by the “victorious Allies” in the Treaty of Versailles.  This treaty,a disaster on two counts, enforced an armistice that created instabilities that ensured another conflict.
 
First, the burden of paying off the war reparations doomed the fledgling democracy from the very beginning.  The only way that the Weimar Republic could pay off its obligations under the treaty was to run the printing presses 24-7.  And it did.  And it paid the debt in record time.  But it bankrupted the German economy in the process. 
 
There are abundant horror stories of inflation that ruined the middle class.  One anecdote has it that it took a wheelbarrow full of Riech Marks to buy a loaf of bread.  Another claims that people would pay for their meals in a restaurant before they ate because the price would have increased by the end of the meal.   
 
Second, the insult to German pride by the terms imposed upon them at Versailles fueled anger and reflected back on the Republic.  This was a major rant for orators like Hitler toward the end of the 1920’s as they sought to bring the democratic government down.  Hitler himself, a decorated corpral, felt strongly that the leadership had betrayed the soldiers and lost the war for Germany.
 
Germany suffered during the fat years of the roaring twenties.  Many Germans did not participate in the heady excesses of that decade.  Then along came the Great Depression, and it was down hill from there.  The smoldering fire of the Great Depression only played into the hands of Hitler as he strove relentlessly and successfully to usurp power.
 
Iron handed control in the pursuit of absolute power was the Nazi modis operandi from the very beginning, and there were two principle organizations that were the tools in hand.  One would survive to the end of the Second World War; the other would be sacrificed to consolidate power.
 
The German Nazi party evolved two main enforcement organizations:
o        the SA (Sturm Abteilung, literally Storm Troops)
o        the SS (Schutzstaffel, literally Elite Echelon)

The SA, the strong-arm wing of the party, fought the street fights with the Communist and socialists gangs, and bullied opponents and victims for Hitler.  It was a well organized Mega street gang that was later used to violently oppose the Weimar Republic.

The SS was Hitler’s Praetorian Guard, his personal bodyguard that swore absolute loyalty to him above all else.  It evolved into the Nazi party’s internal security apparatus as well as an elite political-military arm of the party.

The SA consisted largely of unemployed lower-middle-class workers, ex soldiers and workers. 

The SS consisted largely of middle-class intellectuals, professionals and businessmen.

The SA was not particularly dogmatic.  While it espoused the Nazi dogma, its membership was “recruited” and was not particularly political.  Nor was it cultivated to be superior in anything but brute strength.  It was more about being led and throwing its weight around.  It was more about rowdy rebellion than ideology.

The SS on the other hand had a higher calling and destiny.  It was sworn to worshipful duty and loyalty to the supreme leader, der Fuehrer.  Its members were “selected” for their Super Racial Characteristics.  The idea that they were superior, supermen and women, was inculcated into them continuously and relentlessly.  It instilled in them an expectant arrogance.  They were above the law and rules that members of the SA and indeed the rest of humanity had to be cognizant of.  They answered only to Hitler, and in return for their loyalty they were given a blank check to be “Gods” within the boundaries of the Third Reich.

The SS ultimately liquidated the SA, which was considered to be a growing threat to Hitler because of its increasing autonomy under Hitler's old comrade Ernst Röhm.  This was a questionable assumption, because it is rumored that Röhm thought that his captors were trying to overthrow Hitler, and he died with his arm in the air assuming the Nazi salute hieling Hitler. 

He seemed to be doggedly loyal to Hitler, and it seems that Hitler had great reservations about murdering Röhm – right up to the firing squad following his agonized political betrayal of his old friend.  Röhm and the rest of the SA leadership were murdered and the SA disbanded, with its members either absorbed into the SS or conscripted into the army.

The larger SA was instrumental in the Nazis’ rise to power, but once Hitler became the Chancellor in 1933, it became a liability as the party strove for the trappings of legitimacy.  It was also perceived (a questionable perception at best) to be a potential threat to Hitler’s iron clad control. 

When Hitler consolidated control of the German state, the SA had outlived its usefulness.  The Gestapo, the national secret police, now under Hemann Goering, took over from the SA as a more professional tool for controlling the German civilian population and eliminating any opposition that might be be active therein.  Although it was subservient to the Nazi Party, and the SS, it pre-dated Hitler by at least half a century as a fixture of the German government.

By contrast, the SS became even more useful as its role as party security enforcer expanded beyond the party to the whole of the German Riech, including conquered territories as they came under Nazi conrtrol.  The SS ensured that the Fuehrer’s will be done throughout the new Third Reich. 
  
The Nazi party instituted a new order on the German state where:
o        Fear was promulgated constantly.
o        Loyalty was valued over competence.
o        Government business was done in secret.
o        The power structure was riddled with cronyism.
o        Dissent was not permitted and was punished severely.
o        The party claimed a higher moral purpose to justify its actions.
o        Hitler cloaked his actions in messianic revelations (fulfilling a higher destiny)
o        The ends justified the means (e.g., torture, concentration camps, aggressive war)
o        The party and the industrial-military complex were mutually supportive and profitable.

Sound a little familiar?