Book excerpt: Focusing on the Leibstandarte's members as soldiers, this account contributes significantly to military history of the World War II period. The Leibstandarte originated in March 1933 as an elite staff guard for Hitler's chancellery, when Hitler personally gave the order for its formation to his long­time associate and bodyguard, Sepp Die­trich. The guard soon proved loyalty to Hitler by eliminating the Führer's real and imagined enemies in the "blood purge" of 1934. As an elite military unit, which it became during the war, it fought in the last major offensive against the Western Allies in December 1944-Janu­ary 1945, as a kind of tangible represen­tation of Hitler on the battlefield. Based largely on captured German SS and army records Weingartner's account thus forms a unique and valuable record of the party-military organization, the SS in microcosm.