Sue, I have to 544 this b/c your use of Schutz Staffel (Nazi Protection Squad) is all wrong. I can understand your comparison of today's NSA with the SS but the Nazi org. was not primary German Intel. during WW2. They started as political soldiers that displaced the treasonous SA, were loyal to Hitler, and then branched out into many other entities which included: the SD, SS Technical Branch, the Deaths Head concentration camp guards, the Black Sun religious cult, the Race and Relocation agency, the WiW enemy armaments inspectors, and the second German Army- the Waffen SS. Although they gathered some intel on the Reds and that was used by the OSS that morphed into the CIA (torture methods and special assaination equipment also accepted)... that has nothing to do with the current NSA activity. You could have wrote this about Snowden with title "I'm a Whistle-blower and I'm OK." Sorry Sue :(

Think how much easier future genealogists' work will be. Instead of just a couple dates and maybe a photo of your great grandparents, you will be able to have a day by day account of their entire lives. Hitler purged the SA leadership because their scandalous behavior made them anathema to the old line Prussian generals and the industrialists. Ernst Röhm had ambitions of merging the SA into the Reichswehr and commanding the combined force. He could have posed a threat to Hitler. Rohm should have stayed in Bolivia.

The Purge occured b/c Rohm's SA had grown to 30,000 in the 1920s and were rebelling against the Nazi Party by 1930. They wanted to replace the Reichswehr entirely. Hitler had the SS founded in 1925 and they remained loyal and by 1932 had grown to 32,000. But the SA by '32 was 400,000 strong (4:1 against the German Military)- a real armed threat to Hitler and Germany. Hitler, elected in 1933, wanted to assure the Army that the SA was taken care of permanently. Rohm then made the fateful mistake of actually saying that the SA should be the new Army of the Nazi Party- which was treason. In June 1934 the SA stood at 3 million men! Hitler and Himmler used the SS Leibstandarte and Dachau Totenkopfverbande to kill Rohm and the SA senior staff as well as 1000 others. Hitler then disbanded them and had the German Army swear an oath of allegience to Hitler. In the mid-30s the SS was slowly being turned into the Waffen SS covertly with funding coming from policing. This augmentation to the German Police fooled the Army into thinking the SS was harmless as SS-VT which then accompanied the Army into Austria in 1938 to make arrests, loot art and treasure, and persecute Jews. Three Regiments by May 1940 then became full-strength Waffen SS Divisions and the German Army got pissed...