Weren’t all SS members also Nazi party members?
They did draft people to fight in the SS.
Doubtful. One thing people forget is that Himmler had ambitions beyond just Germany - he saw the SS as an international organization. Germany was considered the heartland of the Aryan race but the SS recruited members from all over Europe. There were over 300,000 non-Germans in the SS and I don’t think the Nazi Party was interested in accepting them for membership.
I had thought the SS was supposed to be some elite group, thus probably not interested in lowering their standards to any Hans Schmoe off the street.
They started out with very stringent standards,yes, but with the attrition of war (and the SS units suffered higher attritions than Heer units due to being elite forces being pushed into whatever scrap seemed worst), by the end of the war they were drafting virtually anyone with a heartbeat to maintain unit numbers (not combat efficency of course).
To be absolutely clear I intend not the slightest mote of sympathy for this murderous organization in using the word misunderstood, but the SS is highly misunderstood in this regard. The elite SS formations were kept to high standards of ‘racial purity’ as understood by Nazi ideology; but by the end of the war they were a minority of the SS. By the end of the war the size of the Waffen SS had ballooned to about 1,000,000. In an effort to expand the size of his personal army, Himmler was able to have the SS take control of most foreign troops serving in the German military. Wiki has a list here of Waffen SS divisions raised during the war and the origin of the troops. There were also a number of non-divisional sized SS formations raised during the war formed of foreign troops. Note that no less than 3 SS divisions were formed from Russian troops, and the Slavic race was considered untermenschen (subhuman) by Nazi ideology. The infamous Dirlewanger Brigade, later raised to divisional strength consisted of:
Thanks for the info, gang. Ignorance on this topic beaten to a pulp. 