by Ian Kershaw
The beginnings of the SA, as we have noted, reach back to the start of 1920, when the DAP set out to stage bigger meetings in the Munich beerhalls and, as was the practice in other parties, needed a squad of bouncers – a ‘hall protection’ (Saalschutz) to deal with any disturbances.11 This was turned in November 1920 into the party’s ‘Gym and Sport Section’ (Turn-und Sportabteilung). Following Hitler’s ‘seizure of power’ within the party in July 1921, it was reshaped and given a pivotal role, responsible according to the new party statutes for the ‘bodily training of the male youth in the movement’.12 Hitler regarded its quasi-military structure as valuable in establishing his claim to leadership throughout the movement. However, the S A (Sturmabteilung, ‘Storm Section’) – as it became known from October 1921 onwards13 – was not, as has been claimed, ‘his personal creation’, solely a product of his will, or designed as an instrument of his personal power.14 The key figures in transforming the party’s hall protection squad into a paramilitary organization were Ernst Röhm and, initially, Captain Ehrhardt.
Röhm was, more even than Hitler, typical of the ‘front generation’. As a junior officer, he shared the dangers, anxieties, and privations of the troops in the trenches – shared, too, the prejudice and mounting anger levelled at those in staff headquarters behind the lines, at the military bureaucracy, at ‘incapable’ politicians, and at those seen as shirkers, idlers and profiteers at home. Against these highly negative images, he heroicized the ‘front community’, the solidarity of the men in the trenches, leadership resting on deeds rather than status, and the blind obedience that this demanded. What he wanted was a new ‘warrior’ élite whose actions and achievements had proved their right to rule. Though a monarchist, there was for Röhm to be no return to pre-war bourgeois society. His ideal was the community of fighting men. As for so many who joined the Freikorps and their successor paramilitary organizations, this ideal combined male fantasy with the cult of violence.15 Like so many, Röhm had gone to war in 1914 in wild enthusiasm, suffered serious facial injury within weeks when shell fragments tore away part of his nose, permanently disfiguring him, had returned to lead his company, but had been forced out of service at the front after being again badly injured at Verdun. His subsequent duties in the Bavarian War Ministry, and as the supply officer of a division, sharpened his political antennae and gave him experience in organizational matters. The trauma of defeat and revolution drove him into counter-revolutionary activity – including service in the Freikorps Epp during its participation in the crushing of the Räterepublik. After brief membership of the DNVP, he joined the tiny DAP soon after Hitler, in autumn 1919, and, as he himself claimed, was probably responsible for others from the Reichswehr entering the party.16 Röhm’s interest continued, however, to be dictated by military and paramilitary, rather than party, politics. He showed no exclusive interest in the NSDAP before the SA became a significant element in paramilitary politics.
But Röhm’s value to the party in engineering its paramilitary connections is hard to overrate. His access both to leading figures on the paramilitary scene and, especially, to weaponry was crucial. His position in control of weapon supplies for the Brigade Epp (the successor to the Freikorps unit, now integrated into the Reichswehr) gave him responsibility for providing the Einwohnerwehr with weapons. The semi-secrecy involved in concealing the extent of weaponry from Allied control – not difficult since there was no occupying army to carry out inspections – also gave Röhm a great deal of scope to build up a large stockpile of mainly small arms in 1920–21. After the dissolution of the Einwohnerwehr, and the official confiscation of weaponry, various paramilitary organizations entrusted him with their weapon supplies. Presiding over such an arsenal, deciding when and if weapons should be handed out, the ‘machine-gun king’ (Maschinengewehrkönig), as he became known, was thus in a pivotal position with regard to the demands of all paramilitary organizations. And, through the protection he gained from Epp, Kahr, and the Munich political police, he enjoyed influence beyond his rank on the politics of the nationalist Right.17
It was in all probability Röhm who arranged the agreement reached between Hitler and Ehrhardt in August 1921 which brought former members of Ehrhardt’s naval brigade, seasoned campaigners in paramilitary activity, most of them just returned from the action in Upper Silesia, into the party’s ‘Sport Section’. This was placed under the leadership of the Ehrhardt veteran Leutnant Klintzsch (later suspected of having a hand in 1922 in the murder of Walter Rathenau – the Reich Foreign Minister, of Jewish background and, as main author of the ‘fulfilment policy’ towards the Versailles Treaty, a detested figure on the extreme Right),18 who was given the task of building up a fighting unit and provided by Ehrhardt with the funding to do this. During the first months, this was mainly a matter of sport (especially boxing), marching, exercises, and occasional sharpshooter practice. The members – there were around 300 by November 1921, all under the age of twenty-four and mainly from Munich’s lower-middle class – combined this paramilitary training with political activism. They took the ‘friend–foe’ mentality of the front into what they saw as practically a civil war at home, preparing for violent combat with the political enemy, evoking the spirit of aggressive camaraderie and blind commitment to the leader.19 From the beginning, the dual role of paramilitary organization (initially linked to Ehrhardt) and party shock troops under Hitler’s leadership contained the seeds of the tension that was to accompany the SA down to 1934.20 The interest of Röhm and Ehrhardt lay on the paramilitary side.21 Hitler tried to integrate the SA fully into the party, though organizationally it retained considerable independence before 1924.22 The build-up of the S A was steady, not spectacular, before the second half of 1922. It was after that date, in conditions of rapidly mounting crisis in Bavaria and in the Reich, that the SA’s numbers swelled, making it a force to be reckoned with on the nationalist Right.23
II
Hitler, meanwhile, now undisputed leader of his party, carried on his ceaseless agitation much as before, able to exploit the continued tension between Bavaria and the Reich. The murder of Reich Finance Minister Matthias Erzberger on 26 August 1921 – an indication of the near-anarchism that still prevailed in Germany – and Kahr’s refusal to accept the validity for Bavaria of the state of emergency declared by Reich President Friedrich Ebert, kept things on the boil.24 Material discontent played its own part. Prices were already rising sharply as the currency depreciated. Foodstuffs were almost eight times more expensive in 1921 as they had been at the end of the war. By the next year they would be over 130 times dearer. And that was before the currency lost all its value in the hyperinflation of 1923.25
Hitler’s provocation of his political enemies and of the authorities to gain publicity was stepped up. In mid-September he led the planned violent disruption by his followers of a meeting in the Löwenbräukeller, to be addressed by one of his arch-enemies at the time, the separatist leader of the Bayernbund, Otto Ballerstedt. Hitler’s arrival in the packed hall was the signal for his supporters, many of them young thugs from the ‘Sport Section’ who had taken up seats around the platform early in the evening, to storm the podium, screaming ‘Hitler’ continually in chorus, and prevent Ballerstedt from speaking. Someone had the idea of switching off the lights to prevent a brawl. But this only made the disturbance worse. When the lights went on again, Ballerstedt and another member of his party were physically attacked and injured before the police could arrive.26 Even then, it seems, the police had to ask Hitler’s help in calling his men to order. He was by this time happy enough to do so. The aim had been met. ‘Ballerstedt won’t speak any more today,’ he declared.27
The matter did not, however, end there. Ballerstedt pressed charges against Hitler, who was sentenced in January 1922 to three months’ imprisonment for breach of the peace – two months suspended against future good behaviour (though conveniently forgotten about when the good behaviour did not materialize). Even his powerful friends could not
prevent him serving the other month of his sentence. Between 24 June and 27 July 1922 he took up residence in Stadelheim prison in Munich.28
Apart from this short interlude, Hitler did not let up with his agitation. Brushes with the police were commonplace. The police noted some thirty bans on publications, placards, and other Nazi publicity in 1921.29 Even while awaiting trial in the Ballerstedt case, Hitler was warned by the police – in connection with Nazi disruption of an SPD meeting on 16 October and subsequent disturbances – that he could expect his expulsion from Bavaria if things carried on in the same way.30 It was not to be the last time that expulsion was posed as a vain threat. Hitler simply commented that he could not be held responsible for the disturbances and promised to do what he could to prevent any in future.31 Within little over a week, on 4 November 1921, he was the centre of further riotous scenes, this time at a meeting he himself was addressing in the Hofbräuhaus. As a full-scale brawl broke out, Hitler continued speaking amid a hail of beermugs that his opponents – socialists, but perhaps also including some veteran beerhall brawlers, spoiling for a fight – had been quietly storing beneath their tables as ammunition. He later idealized the scene in Mein Kampf as the ‘baptism of fire’ of his SA men, greatly outnumbered but triumphant over their socialist enemies.32 For Hitler, these violent clashes with his opponents were the lifeblood of his movement. They were above all good for publicity.
Hitler was still dissatisfied with the coverage – even of a negative kind – he received in the press.33 Nevertheless, the actions of the NSDAP and its leader ensured that they remained in the public eye. Nor could the party any longer be ignored in the Bavarian Landtag. Following Kahr’s resignation as Minister President in September 1921 – the consequence of his intransigence in the conflict with the Reich – the unpopularity and weaker stance towards Berlin of his successor, Hugo Graf Lerchenfeld-Koefering, an arch-conservative, from a non-party Catholic, aristocratic, and diplomatic background, provided an easy target for undiminished Nazi agitation throughout the first half of 1922.34 This was no time for young Germans to spend studying philosophy and sitting behind a desk full of books, proclaimed Dietrich Eckart: it was a question now of ‘into the stormtroops who must rescue Germany’. Open attacks on opponents became the order of the day. Rubber truncheons and knuckle-dusters were the main weapons, but pistols and even, on occasion, home-made bombs and grenades were also used in the campaign of violence.35 Hitler kept up unabated his torrent of abuse directed at both the Reich and Bavarian governments. Reich President Ebert was booed, whistled at, insulted, and spat upon by Nazi demonstrators when he visited Munich in summer 1922.36 Hitler poured scorn on Minister President von Lerchenfeld – a man with the brain of a sheep, he ranted, totally out of touch with reality and the will of the people, who clamoured for genuine, born leaders.37 While his leading supporters hinted darkly at dire consequences if the Bavarian government expelled him from Germany, Hitler made propaganda capital out of the threat of expulsion by pointing to his war record, when he had fought as a German for his country while others had done no more than stay at home and preach politics.38
On 16 August 1922, Hitler spoke alongside other leaders of the nationalist associations at a huge protest rally of the Vereinigte Vaterländische Verbände Bayerns (United Patriotic Associations of Bavaria) on the Königsplatz in Munich. The rally, held under the slogan ‘For Germany – Against Berlin’, directed at ‘the approaching Jewish Bolshevism under the protection of the Republic’,39 was the first time that the SA had appeared in public as a paramilitary formation under its own banners. Its numbers – no more than 800 or so men about this time – were, however, dwarfed by the 30,000 armed men of Pittinger’s Bund Bayern und Reich, and by the large, well-armed formations of Bund Oberland and the Reichsflagge.40 Talk of a putsch against Lerchenfeld in favour of the restoration of Kahr was in the air. There were rumours that this would take place at a further mass protest rally against Lerchenfeld, planned for 25 August. Indeed there was a plot, involving Pittinger and Röhm, which became known to the police, but a ban on the rally and the prevention of the armed bands of the nationalist associations from other parts of Bavaria travelling to Munich left only a few thousand National Socialists assembled on the Karolinenplatz. Eventually, around 5,000 made their way to a meeting in the Kindlkeller, one of the big Munich beerhalls where Hitler occasionally held speeches. Feelings were running high. There were rumours that a putsch was about to happen. But nothing materialized. A thousand Communists assembled outside, and violence threatened. The police acted against the Communists, but did no more against the Nazis than appeal to Hitler to calm things down. Hitler told his men that it was the duty of every single one of them ‘to become an agitator in order to bring the mass of the people on to the street’ against the government.41 But at the request of the police he called them to order. They obeyed, quietly dispersing.42 Hitler was said to be furious at the way the day had fizzled out into such an anticlimax. Next time he would act – alone if necessary, he stated.43 The danger of a Hitler Putsch was not lost on the authorities. The Württemberg emissary in Munich reported to Stuttgart, following discussions in the Bavarian foreign ministry on 31 August: ‘The National Socialists especially were gaining enormous support and were capable of anything… The leader Hitler must be quite a fascinating personality. So it’s not impossible that they will try a putsch here before long, using the mounting inflation as an excuse.’44
Hitler’s most notable propaganda success in 1922 was his party’s participation in the so-called ‘German Day’ (Deutscher Tag) in Coburg on 14–15 October. Coburg, on the Thuringian border in the north of Upper Franconia and part of Bavaria for only two years, was virgin territory for the Nazis. Hitler had been invited to take part in the German Day with a small delegation by the organizational committee of the Schutz- und Trutzbund. He saw it as an opportunity not to be missed. He scraped together what funds the NSDAP had to hire a special train – in itself a novel propaganda stunt – to take 800 stormtroopers to Coburg. In Hitler’s compartment were the hard-core of his entourage – Amann, Esser, Eckart, Christian Weber, Graf and Rosenberg. On arrival on the Saturday afternoon, the Nazis were greeted at the station with shouts of ‘Heil’ by a sizeable gathering of nationalists and with a torrent of abuse from 200–300 socialist workers and trade unionists who had assembled at the same spot. The SA men were instructed by Hitler to ignore explicit police orders, banning a formation march with unfurled banners and musical accompaniment, and marched with hoisted swastika flags through the town. Workers lining the streets insulted them and spat at them. Nazis in turn leapt out of the ranks beating their tormentors with sticks and rubber truncheons. A furious battle with the socialists ensued. After ten minutes of mayhem, in which they had police support, the stormtroopers triumphantly claimed the streets of Coburg as theirs. The local authorities blamed the workers of Coburg for provoking the violence, but, with some contradiction, acknowledged that the other nationalists would have caused no problems and ‘that the German Day would have passed by completely peacefully if the Hitler people (Hitlerleute) had not come to Coburg’.45 For Hitler, the propaganda victory was what counted. The German Day in Coburg went down in the party’s annals. The NSDAP had made its mark in northern Bavaria.
It was Hitler’s second major success in Franconia within a few days. On 8 October, Julius Streicher, head of the sizeable Nuremberg branch of the Deutsche Werkgemeinschaft, had written to Hitler offering to take his sizeable following, together with his newspaper the Deutscher Volkswille, into the NSDAP.46 In the wake of the Coburg triumph, the transfer took place on 20 October. Streicher, a short, squat, shaven-headed bully, born in 1885 in the Augsburg area, for a time a primary schoolteacher as his father had been, and, like Hitler, a war veteran decorated with the Iron Cross, First Class, was utterly possessed by demonic images of Jews. Shortly after the war he had been one of the founding members of the Deutschsozialistische Partei (German-Socialist Party), as antisemitic as the NSDAP and,
as we noted in the previous chapter, with a similar programme. His newspaper Der Stürmer, established in 1923 and becoming notorious for its obscene caricatures of evil-looking Jews seducing pure German maidens and ritual-murder allegations, would – despite Hitler’s personal approving comments, and view that ‘the Jew’ was far worse than Streicher’s ‘idealized’ picture – for a while be banned even in the Third Reich.47 Streicher was eventually tried at Nuremberg, and hanged. Now, back in 1922, in a step of vital importance for the development of the NSDAP in Franconia, in the northern regions of Bavaria, he subordinated himself personally to Hitler.48 The arch-rival DSP was now fatally weakened in Franconia. The Nazi Party practically doubled its membership. From around 2,000 members about the beginning of 1921 and 6,000 a year later, the party was overnight some 20,000 strong.49 More than that: the Franconian countryside – piously Protestant, fervently nationalist, and stridently antisemitic – was to provide the NSDAP with a stronghold far greater than was offered by its home city of Munich in the Catholic south of Bavaria, and a symbolic capital in Nuremberg – later designated the ‘city of the Reich Party Rallies’. It was little wonder that Hitler was keen to express his gratitude to Streicher publicly in Mein Kampf.50