In pursuit of a criminal idea of race, the SS was to become a perfect, almost mystical bunch of Nordic thugs, not only identified by type and shape of head but also bound into a carefully chosen past. With absolutely no irony at all there were posters in wartime Norway which showed a Viking standing most approvingly behind an SS man, freelance freebooters and a foreign state police oddly united against Nazism’s mirror, Bolshevism.38
