So it looks like a --no-ff is not what I wanted. It stuffed all of the develop branch git history into master which it did NOT want :/ Am I using it wrong?

Features are merged into develop, develop is used as a staging branch. I want to keep full develop history. CI tests are run against develop. Once CI tests pass on develop I want to merge changes only (no history) into master. CI is triggered to publish against master, this is a release. Master is merged back into develop to avoid merge conflicts. All feature branches checkout develop not master.