Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris

by Ian Kershaw

  As long as the terror was levelled in the main at Communists, Socialists and Jews, it was in any case not likely to be widely unpopular, and could be played down as ‘excesses’ of the ‘national uprising’. But already by the summer, the number of incidents mounted in which overbearing and loutish behaviour by SA men caused widespread public offence even in pro-Nazi circles. By this time, complaints were pouring in from industry, commerce and local government offices about disturbances and intolerable actions by stormtroopers. The Foreign Office added its own protest at incidents where foreign diplomats had been insulted or even manhandled. The SA was threatening to become completely uncontrollable. Steps had to be taken.7 Reich President Hindenburg, exercised about the upheavals in the Protestant Church, himself requested Hitler to restore order.8

  The need for Hitler to act became especially urgent after Röhm, in a programmatic article in the Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte (National Socialist Monthly) in June 1933, had openly stated the SA’s aim of continuing the ‘German Revolution’ in the teeth of attempts by conservatives, reactionaries, and opportunist fellow-travellers to undermine and tame it. ‘The SA and SS will not allow the German Revolution to fall asleep or be betrayed half-way there by the non-fighters,’ he railed. ‘Whether they like it or not,’ the article ended, ‘we will carry on our struggle. If they finally grasp what it is about, with them! If they are not willing, without them! And if it has to be: against them!’9

  Röhm was clearly signalling to the new rulers of Germany that for him the revolution was only just starting; and that he would demand a leading role for himself and the mighty organization he headed – by now some 4½ million strong.10

  Forced now for the first time to choose between the demands of the party’s paramilitary wing and the ‘big battalions’ pressing for order, Hitler summoned the Reich Governors to a meeting in the Reich Chancellery on 6 July. ‘The revolution is not a permanent condition,’ he announced; ‘it must not turn into a lasting situation. It is necessary to divert the river of revolution that has broken free into the secure bed of evolution.’11 Other Nazi leaders – Frick, Göring, Goebbels and Heß – took up the message in the weeks that followed.12 There was an unmistakable change of course.

  Röhm’s ambitions were, however, undaunted. They amounted to little less than the creation of an ‘SA state’, with extensive powers in the police, in military matters, and in the civil administration. Little of this had been realized by the end of 1933. Göring had removed the SA from the role of auxiliary police in Prussia in the summer. By October, the SA had also been excluded from any control over concentration camps.13 The army leadership had the sharpest of antennae towards Röhm’s proclaimed intention of building up a huge people’s militia alongside the Reichswehr. And the SA ‘Special Commissioners’ (Sonderbeauftragte) attached to government offices in the Länder, especially in Bavaria and Prussia, were indeed substantial irritation factors, but had advisory, not controlling, functions. Even so, there was enough for the growing number of powerful enemies of the SA to worry about. When, in December 1933, Röhm was given cabinet status as Reich Minister without Portfolio, it was mainly as a consolation for the major offices and powers which had not come his way. However, his own hints that this might be a step to an ‘SA Ministry’ and, possibly, in the end to his scarcely concealed hope of taking over the Defence Ministry, were hardly guaranteed to calm the nerves of the Reichswehr leadership.14 Immediate steps were put in place to curtail cooperation with the SA and exclude it from influence in military matters.15

  It was not just a matter of Röhm’s own power ambitions. Within the gigantic army of Brownshirts, expectations of the wondrous shangri-la to follow the day when National Socialism took power had been hugely disappointed. Though they had poured out their bile on their political enemies, the offices, financial rewards, and power they had naïvely believed would flow their way remained elusive. Certainly, the top leaders of the SA fully exploited the new financial benefits which came the way of an organization now able to rely on extensive state funding.16 There was no shortage of high living at this level. The ostentatious splendour of Röhm’s own new villa in Munich’s Prinzregentenplatz, complete with mahogany chairs from the château of Fontainebleau and sixteenth-century Florentine wall-mirrors, was only one indication of this.17 But little filtered through to the base. Here, unemployment was higher than average. The reputation for poor work-discipline deterred many employers from taking on SA men, even now the National Socialists were in government.18 The resentments against ‘bourgeois’ authorities or party opportunists seen to block chances of obtaining the posts or material benefits thought of right to be theirs were profound among the ‘Old fighters’ in the SA. Talk of a ‘second revolution’, however little it was grounded in any clear programme of social change, was, therefore, bound to find strong resonance among rank-and-file stormtroopers.

  Ernst Röhm had, then, no difficulty in expanding his popularity among SA men through his continued dark threats in early 1934 about further revolution which would accomplish what the ‘national uprising’ had failed to bring about. He remained publicly loyal to Hitler. Privately, he was highly critical of Hitler’s policy towards the Reichswehr and his dependency on Blomberg and Reichenau. And he did nothing to deter the growth of a personality cult elevating his leadership of the SA.19 At the Reich Party Rally of Victory in 1933, he had been the most prominent party leader after Hitler, clearly featuring as the Führer’s right-hand man.20 By early 1934, Hitler had been largely forced from the pages of the SA’s newspaper, SA-Mann, by the expanding Röhm-cult.21

  At least in public, the loyalty was reciprocated.22 Hitler wavered, as he would continue to do during the first months of 1934, between Röhm’s SA and the Reichswehr. He could not bring himself to discipline, let alone dismiss, Röhm. The political damage and loss of face and popularity involved made such a move risky. But the realities of power compelled him to side with the Reichswehr leadership.23 This became fully clear only at the end of February. Before then, however much he had assuaged the Reichswehr leadership, he had never explicitly renounced the SA’s claims in military matters.24 But even thereafter, Hitler hesitated to take the action that this political choice demanded.25 The consequence was that the crisis would gather throughout the spring and early summer.

  By 2 February 1934, at a meeting of his Gauleiter, Hitler was again criticizing the SA in all but name. Only ‘fools’ (Narren) thought the revolution was not over; there were those in the Movement who only understood ‘revolution’ as meaning ‘a permanent condition of chaos’.26

  The previous day, Röhm had sent Blomberg a memorandum on relations between the army and the SA. What he appeared to be demanding – no copy of the actual memorandum has survived – was no less than the concession of national defence as the domain of the SA, and a reduction of the function of the armed forces to the provision of trained men for the SA.27 So crass were the demands that it seems highly likely that Blomberg deliberately falsified or misconstrued them when addressing a meeting of army District Commanders on 2 February in Berlin. They were predictably horrified.28 Now Hitler had to decide, stated Blomberg.29 The army lobbied him. In a conscious attempt to win his support against the SA, Blomberg, without any pressure from the Nazi leadership, introduced the NSDAP’s emblem into the army and accepted the ‘Aryan Paragraph’ for the officer corps, leading to the prompt dismissal of some seventy members of the armed forces.30 Röhm, too, sought to win his support. But, faced with having to choose between the Reichswehr, with Hindenburg’s backing, or his party army, Hitler could now only decide one way.

  By 27 February the army leaders had worked out their ‘guidelines for cooperation with the SA’, which formed the basis for Hitler’s speech the next day and had, therefore, certainly been agreed with him.31 At the meeting in the Reichswehr Ministry on 28 February, attended by Reichswehr, SA, and SS leaders, Hitler rejected outright Röhm’s plans for an SA-militia. The SA was to confine its activities to politi
cal, not military, matters.32 Hitler indicated how he saw matters developing. The NSDAP had cleared away unemployment, he is reported as having stated, but within about eight years an economic blow-out (Durchschlag) was bound to take place unless living-space was created for the surplus population. It was typical Hitlerian rhetoric. Unemployment had fallen sharply but by this time had by no means been eliminated. And severe economic constraints were already making themselves acutely felt. But, as he invariably did, Hitler painted for his audience a black-and-white scenario: that of following his diagnosis – attainment of ‘living-space’ – or facing the consequences of certain economic collapse. He drew the military consequences. ‘Short decisive blows against the West then against the East could therefore become necessary.’ But a militia, such as Röhm was suggesting, was not suitable even for minimal national defence. He was determined to build up a well-trained ‘people’s army’ (Volksheer) in the Reichswehr, equipped with the most modern weapons, which must be prepared for all eventualities on defence within five years and suitable for attack after eight years, ‘In domestic politics, one had to be loyal, but in foreign policy one could break one’s word,’ he declared. He demanded of the SA that they obey his orders. For the transitional period before the planned Wehrmacht was set up, he approved Blomberg’s suggestion to deploy the SA for tasks of border protection and pre-military training. But ‘the Wehrmacht must be the sole bearer of weapons of the nation’.33

  Röhm and Blomberg had to sign and shake hands on the ‘agreement’. Hitler departed. Champagne followed. But the atmosphere was anything but cordial.34 When the officers had left, Röhm was overheard to remark: ‘What the ridiculous corporal declared doesn’t apply to us. Hitler has no loyalty and has at least to be sent on leave. If not with, then we’ll manage the thing without Hitler.’ The person taking note of these treasonable remarks was SA-Obergruppenführer Viktor Lutze, who reported what had gone on to Hitler. ‘We’ll have to let the thing ripen’ was all he gleaned as reply.35 But the show of loyalty was noted. When he needed a new SA chief after the events of 30 June, Lutze was Hitler’s man.

  II

  From the beginning of 1934, Hitler seems to have recognized that he would be faced with no choice but to cut down to size his over-mighty subject, Chief of Staff Ernst Röhm. How to tackle Röhm was, however, unclear. Hitler deferred the problem. He simply awaited developments.36 The Reichswehr leadership, too, was biding its time, expecting a gradual escalation, but looking then to a final showdown.37 Relations between the army and the SA continued to fester. But Hitler did, it seems, order the monitoring of SA activities. According to the later account of Gestapo chief Rudolf Diels, it was in January 1934 that Hitler requested him and Göring to collect material on the excesses of the SA.38 From the end of February onwards, the Reichswehr leadership started assembling its own intelligence on SA activities, which was passed to Hitler.39 Once Himmler and Heydrich had taken over the Prussian Gestapo in April, the build-up of a dossier on the SA was evidently intensified. Röhm’s foreign contacts were noted, as well as those with figures at home known to be cool towards the regime, such as former Chancellor Schleicher.40

  By this time, Röhm had incited an ensemble of powerful enemies, who would eventually coagulate into an unholy alliance against the SA. Göring was so keen to be rid of the SA’s alternative power-base in Prussia – which he himself had done much to establish, starting when he made the SA auxiliary police in February 1933 – that he was even prepared by 20 April to concede control over the Prussian Gestapo to Heinrich Himmler, thus paving the way for the creation of a centralized police-state in the hands of the SS. Himmler himself, and even more so his cold and dangerous henchman Reinhard Heydrich, recognized that their ambitions to construct such an empire – the key edifice of power and control in the Third Reich – rested on the élite SS breaking with its superior body, the SA, and eliminating the power-base held by Röhm. In the party, the head of the organization, installed in April 1933 with the grand title of the Fuhrer’s Deputy (for party affairs), Rudolf Heß, and the increasingly powerful figure behind the scenes, Martin Bormann, were more than aware of the contempt in which the Political Organization was held by Röhm’s men and the threat of the SA actually replacing the party, or making it redundant.41 For the army, as already noted, Röhm’s aim to subordinate the Reichswehr to the interests of a people’s militia was anathema. Intensified military exercises, expansive parades, and, not least, reports of extensive weapon collections in the hands of the SA, did little to calm the nerves.42

  At the centre of this web of countervailing interests and intrigue, united only in the anxiety to be rid of the menace of the SA, Hitler’s sharp instinct for the realities of power by now must have made it plain that he had to break with Röhm. How radical the break would be was at this stage unclear. In February, and again in April, he indicated to Anthony Eden, at that time Lord Privy Seal in the British government, that he would be prepared to reduce the SA by two-thirds and place the rest under international supervision to ensure their demilitarization. He told Eden that his common sense and political instinct would never allow him to sanction the creation of a second army in the state – ‘never, never!’ he repeated.43 His remarks were a marker for the western powers both of an apparent accommodation in disarmament negotiations and of his gestating thoughts on the problem of the SA. There is no hint at this stage of a plot to kill Röhm, nor plans for a modern St Bartholomew’s Night Massacre. These would be largely improvised only at the last moment.44

  In the meantime, the problem of the SA was part of the first looming crisis of the regime’s existence, as spring turned into summer in 1934. Hitler himself was well aware of the situation. The position of the German economy – chronically lacking raw materials, with falling exports, soaring imports, and a haemorrhage of hard currency fast approaching disaster level – had become highly precarious. The foreign press predicted Hitler’s early downfall.45 It was a matter of ‘preventing a catastrophe’, Hitler told a meeting of Reich Governors and other party high-ups on 22 March 1934. He went on to criticize the constant interference in the economy by party and SA activists. Continued boycotting of department stores could easily lead to a bank crisis, signalling the death of hopes of economic recovery, was his sombre assessment, based on the information he had been given in no uncertain terms by his economic advisers.46

  At the level of the ordinary mass of the population, the excited and anticipatory mood of ‘national renewal’ that had swept the country during the breathless upheavals of 1933 had given way to widespread discontent and criticism as disillusionment and material disappointment took over. A nationwide propaganda campaign launched by Goebbels in May to combat the ‘moaners’ was a resounding failure. All across the country, there were reports of a deterioration in the mood of the people. Angered by the imposition of a maze of bureaucratic controls by the Reich Food Estate (Reichsnährstand) – the vast and unwieldy organization headed by agriculture minister Walther Darré and set up in September 1933 to direct every aspect of German farming – peasants vented their spleen on the corruption of a system in which only ‘big-shots’ profited. Industrial workers, cowed and intimidated, nevertheless revealed their feelings in elections for the newly established ‘Councils of Trust’ (Vertrauensräte) in April. The ‘Councils of Trust’ had been created in January 1934 in place of the former ‘Works Councils’ (Betriebsräte), purportedly to look after the interests of both employers and employees in the larger firms. Workers recognized them for the sham they were – largely vehicles for employer control. The results of the elections to the councils were so embarrassing to the regime that they were never published. The commercial middle class complained bitterly at poor economic prospects, currency and credit restrictions, raw material shortages, and the failure of the government to stimulate trade.47 Also, for the millions still unemployed, the reality of the Third Reich bore little resemblance to its propaganda. Hitler himself was still massively popular. But criticism of corrupt an
d high-handed party functionaries was extensive. Not least, the arrogant, overbearing, and bullying behaviour of the SA – acceptable even to Nazi sympathizers only when directed at Communists, Socialists, Jews, or other disliked minorities – was for many the most intolerable daily manifestation of Nazi rule.

  The wide-ranging public discontent amounted, of course, to nothing like rooted political opposition. As the exiled Social Democratic leadership acknowledged, much of it was little more than grumbling ‘whose dissatisfaction has purely economic causes’. For most of the middle classes and peasants, Nazism, whatever its faults, was preferable to Bolshevism, which Hitler had successfully depicted as the only alternative. ‘The anxiety about Bolshevism, about the chaos which in the opinion of the great mass in particular of the Mittelstand and the peasantry would follow on the fall of Hitler, is still the negative mass base of the regime,’ adjudged the SPD’s exiled analysts.48 The ‘dark side’ of the regime, which had revealed itself only too clearly in the opening phase of Nazi rule, was seen by many in this light. It was bad; but Bolshevism would have been worse. There was also a good deal of feeling that those who had suffered most – Communists, Socialists and Jews – had deserved it. And that – sharing President Hindenburg’s views – much of what had happened, if at times regrettable, was inevitable amid such political upheaval, but would settle down. Whatever his minions might do, many thought, Hitler meant the best for Germany. Amid the continuing idealism and avid enthusiasm of millions of Hitler loyalists, it was certainly the case that National Socialism had lost ground in terms of public support by the spring of 1934. But this in itself, attributable only in part to the behaviour of the SA, did not suggest danger for the regime.