Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts
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Second, then, this comprehensive view, which encompasses the SA’s history in the Weimar Republic and in the Third Reich, enables us to see the SA more clearly than has hitherto been possible in a comparative and transnational context.100 Not only the early years of the SA’s existence have to be seen against the background of the White Terror in large parts of post-First World War central Europe and Mussolini’s successful takeover of power in Italy in 1922. Beyond this, the increasingly transnational dimension of the SA in the 1930s – including the appearance of the so-called ‘Austrian Legion’, a branch of the SA that consisted of Austrian Nazis who had taken shelter in the Reich prior to the Anschluss of 1938,101 and the geographical extension of the SA from the late 1930s onward into the territories annexed to the Nazi Empire – must also be acknowledged. By 1942, SA units existed not only in the territory of the former Czechoslovakian state, but also in Alsace, Slovenia, the Warthegau and the General Government in occupied Poland. The history of the SA in these regions is virtually unknown and allows us to gain important insights into the problems of ‘Germanization’, defined as the transformation of individuals from these regions into ‘proper’ Germans – as deemed by the Nazis’ cultural and racial standards. My analysis thus also adds to an excellent body of studies that have focused on the SS, the Foreign Office, and the several agencies concerned with German settlement questions.102 With regard to the ‘SA diplomats’, the German envoys from the highest ranks of the SA who were appointed to posts in southeastern European vassal states in the early 1940s, this book demonstrates that SA generals even had influence over Germany’s foreign policy. They were experts in violence who were directly concerned with the implementation of the Holocaust.
Third, although the level of physical violence in which the SA was involved was certainly high, particularly in the excessive year of 1933, it does not stand out on an international scale – at least in comparison to the different cases of extreme mass violence in the twentieth century.103 The SA is, however, a particularly useful example in scrutinizing what made and what makes the use of violence so attractive to young men in particular environments and times. Not only is violence a fact of human life, but its exercise also comes with considerable advantages and is thus often employed in a manner that is ‘purposively rational’.104 In the face of a capitalist modernity that not only produces economic winners and losers but also largely prevents the individual from experiencing feelings of excitement and belonging, the use of violence can provide key benefits, as the German philosopher and literary scholar Jan Philipp Reemtsma has recently argued.105 It is a kind of exit strategy, in that middle-class considerations based on careful planning and subordination to an allegedly universally binding morality are replaced by feelings of liberation (to destroy), individual empowerment, and momentous gains, both material and spiritual. Violence therefore allows for a specific form of pleasure that is particularly attractive at times when alternatives become, or seem to become, less likely to materialize in the foreseeable future.106 Consequently, political thinkers like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels who did not believe in the reform of capitalism embraced revolutionary violence as the ‘midwife of history’ and as a legitimate ‘tool’ for new social movements in their attempts to destroy ossified political forms.107 One can generalize from this point: if the temporary empowerment of individuals through violence can be justified as a way of serving higher ends – such as by rendering service to a nation or by doing God’s will (or, ideally, both) – the actors of such barely restrained but self-legitimized violence will also profit from a relatively stable alternative group identity that is not necessarily weaker than the more established moral order they are fighting.108
Two Sides of Violence
As this book will demonstrate, the stormtroopers’ use of violence was in many ways such a purposively rational and self-empowering choice. However, the possession of dangerous weapons that not only scare opponents but also serve to elevate their users into an identity constructed in sharp contrast to the mainstream society and its values, and an elaborate and highly skilful system of propaganda that encourages the violent individual to perceive himself or herself as a modern crusader for the nation and God, empowered to legitimately fight unbelievers, or even on behalf of mankind – all this was not exclusive to SA men of the 1920s and 1930s. Obviously, this is a history book on a particular organization and its members within the framework of a distinct period, and as such it cannot be considered a long-term study that systematically compares forms and regimes of violence until the present day. Yet, despite this reservation, the history of the SA is in many respects paradigmatic of the way politics, media coverage, violence, and grassroots activism were interwoven in the twentieth century.
Such a broad focus requires methodological rigour, and thus some additional methodological explanations are needed here. The focus of my book is on violence and its personal, strategic, and cultural implications, but it also concerns the integrating power that an organization like the SA was able to wield. I will pay particular attention to processes of violent mobilization and disciplinary integration. With regard to the stormtroopers, both phenomena were inextricably linked. The Nazi movement not only used violence as a means to mobilize its supporters and to fight its enemies, but also used it to discipline the population at large and its activists in particular. Whereas the first use of violence dominated up to the years 1933–4, in later years of the Third Reich the second usage prevailed. Yet even then, processes of disciplinary integration through violence always contained elements of mobilization – and, vice versa, the earlier mobilization had at the same time disciplinary effects on the rank and file of the SA.109
The history of violence is a field of study that has expanded considerably over the last twenty years.110 The period 1914–45, at times described as a ‘European civil war’, has received particular attention from historians with an interest in the study of violence – not only because of the two world wars and their extremely high levels of destruction and death, but also because of the two opposing ideologies of Communism and Fascism that challenged democratic rule based on ideas of political liberalism.111 National Socialism, as the German variant of Fascism or, more precisely, of ‘authoritarian rightism’, has been firmly embedded in a broad field of transnational and comparative studies on authoritarian, Fascist, or extreme nationalist movements and regimes in interwar Europe that replace older notions of totalitarianism.112 The forms of political violence that these movements exercised have increasingly come under comparative and transnational scrutiny.113 In effect, the history of National Socialism, or at least its early phase, is now increasingly analysed as a variant of a European phenomenon and less prominently interpreted as the keystone of the Sonderweg, the special path of modern German history that can be compared negatively with the imagined progressive course of modern Western history that unfolded elsewhere, a framework adopted in particular by the influential Bielefeld School of social history.114 Nevertheless, to stress similarities does not mean to neglect differences. National Socialism became excessively violent with the establishment of the Third Reich and then again radicalized during the Second World War, when it implemented a programme of destruction and mass murder on an unprecedented scale, enslaving and killing millions of people whom the regime deemed ‘undesirable’, most notably the European Jewry.115
The present study follows this transnational historiographical trend without losing sight of the SA’s national specificity. It analyses the changing patterns of stormtrooper violence and its effects, from the organization’s early years as a genuine paramilitary Wehrverband to its heyday as a violent social movement, to the Nazi regime years when the SA was transformed into a mass organization with auxiliary police responsibilities but decreasing influence on the central government.116 For the sake of clarity, I sometimes refer to these different stages as the first (1920/1–1923), second (1925/6–1933/4), and third SA (1933/4–1945). In order to adequately cover these different p
eriods, with their changing forms of political activism, I rely on praxeological analyses of violent action, following the pioneering work of Sven Reichardt, who using the example of interwar Fascism has successfully demonstrated that praxeology as a method of studying social interaction allows for the reconciliation of structure and action, ideology and daily practices. By analysing the physical routines of the Nazi militants, their collectively shared worldviews, and their ‘subjective attribution’ of sense (to the acts they committed), it is possible to reconstruct the particular modes of Vergemeinschaftung in the SA.117 However, I will also re-evaluate Reichardt’s principal argument that in the SA, committing violence and feeling a sense of community were inextricably linked.118 This is all the more important as his analysis predominantly concentrated on the narrow period of time between the late 1920s and the early 1930s. I will ask to what extent Reichardt’s observations match the realities of the third SA and thereby attempt to clarify whether rupture or continuity prevailed in the history of the stormtroopers.
In scrutinizing the violence employed, I analyse the physical, psychological, cultural, and structural elements that such violence contains.119 Whereas the first two forms are rather self-explanatory – physical violence is a direct assault on someone else’s body, while psychological violence is a conscious attempt to compromise someone else’s well-being – cultural and structural forms of violence, as well as forms of symbolic violence, are much harder to define and even more difficult to assess in retrospect. Apart from possible harmful intentions on the interpersonal level, such violence is here (also) the result of larger social and political processes.120 The latter forms of violence thus blur the boundaries between the perpetrator and the victim, as they ultimately exert force on both of them. Responsibility is thus more difficult to attribute.
Regardless of such practical problems, two quick examples will make plain why a broad understanding of violence is needed for this study. First, a public SA march through a working-class neighbourhood around 1930 was meant by its participants and perceived by its political opponents as a violent provocation, even if no one was actually injured. Second, some years later, after the Nazi dictatorship was established, the sheer presence of a group of uniformed stormtroopers sufficed to scare potential dissidents and bystanders alike.121 This was more than an aesthetic occupation of the public space. Everyone knew how quickly even a seemingly peaceful SA cohort could resort to physical violence, and many likewise knew that to ask for help from the police or the judiciary was often useless, if not a direct invitation to trouble.122 The present study argues that this structural element of SA violence, its men’s Aktionsmacht, or ‘power of action’,123 remained in force throughout the Third Reich. Following Thomas Kühne, who has recently emphasized that in the Third Reich even seemingly harmless concepts as ‘comradeship’ contained a highly aggressive and ultimately genocidal tendency,124 the present study likewise not only covers the SA’s tangible violence, as documented in the press, court files, and memoirs, but also pays attention to the less spectacular forms of SA sociability and community and inquires into the extent to which they contributed to a social climate in which belonging and exclusion complemented each other and which ultimately made central Europe a Gewaltraum, a ‘territory of violence’ where forms of security that had structured human interaction in peacetime were no longer valid.125 Whereas actual outbursts of SA physical violence remained relatively limited after the Nazi takeover of power was completed in 1934 – although, for the reasons just mentioned, we can assume that violent incidents involving stormtroopers were in fact more frequent than court and police records of the Third Reich suggest – it was the permanent menace posed by the Brownshirts’ psychological and cultural violence in combination with other Nazi institutions that explains their lasting power and social impact.
To concentrate the historical analysis on the perpetrators and the structural framework in which they were operating would still be incomplete, however. A book on the stormtroopers is ipso facto also about those who were on the receiving end of their violence. Although in what follows I explore the intentions, actions, and mindsets of the men in the SA, I also hope to do justice to all those who directly experienced SA violence between the early 1920s and 1945. To analyse historical violence is not to excuse it, but it inevitably leads to a kind of rapprochement – a fact I tried to keep in mind while researching and writing this book.126
The Line of Argumentation
The following eleven chapters are arranged according to both chronology and topic and are divided into four parts. The first part, encompassing chapters 1 to 3, provides an overview of the early SA, from its inception in Munich in 1920–1 to its transformation into a kind of controlled social movement ten years later. I thus analyse the organizational and political history of the SA in light of the increasingly antagonistic and hostile political culture of the Weimar Republic. Without the experience of the First World War and the culture of paramilitary leagues in the 1920s, the phenomenal rise of the SA by the late 1920s would not have been possible, but this environment alone is not sufficient to explain its ‘success story’ between 1926 and 1933. The book therefore takes up the task of integrating the SA’s institutional and political history into a study of everyday violence, of the palpable as well as the rhetorical kind. Both forms of violence were closely intertwined. My study scrutinizes more closely some of the (political) clashes that occurred in ever growing numbers starting in the late 1920s in order to demonstrate the mechanisms of a political strategy that was, to a large extent, built on the communicative aspects of violence and terror. I likewise re-evaluate the SA’s crucial importance for the Nazis’ growing success at the polls and – against this background – account for the growing dissatisfaction within the SA caused by the pretended ‘legalistic course’ of the NSDAP. Finally, this part of the book will explore the political motifs and the self-understanding of the oppositional groups within the SA, commonly identified with the brothers Gregor and Otto Strasser as well as Walther Stennes, the SA commander in Berlin until his expulsion in 1931. I will demonstrate that a closer look at the history of the SA does not attest to a straightforward ‘march to power’, as the party propaganda attempted to portray, but reveals an often complicated path of development, full of conflicts and internal quarrels.
The second part of this study, encompassing chapters 4 and 5, examines the SA’s crucial role at the beginning of the Third Reich. In the first two years of the regime, until the summer of 1934, the SA was the most important organization responsible for the incarceration and murder of political opponents. Although a considerable number of local and regional studies on SA terror have been written in the last thirty years, we still lack an expert overview that goes beyond the mere retelling of particular crimes and biographies to synthesize the forms and aims of the SA’s para-police violence.127 This book thus analyses in depth how SA violence was embedded in the political transformation of Germany from a democratic to a dictatorial state. Exemplary case studies show how the SA interacted with the Nazi Party leadership, the police, and the judiciary, illuminating larger trends. It will be demonstrated that the SA’s violence in this crucial period was hard to control and even threatened the same people who had contributed to the rise of a violent political culture in the preceding years. Furthermore, I explore in what ways the individual SA man ‘made sense’ of these violent acts (for himself and his peers), and how this meaning-making fits into the broader National Socialist understanding of the times. By taking a closer look at individual perspectives as well as the more systematic effects of SA violence, this book provides not only a fuller picture of the SA but also a better understanding of the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship. The second part concludes with a chapter on the murder of Röhm, several dozen high-ranking SA leaders, and other reputed enemies of National Socialism, in an event today known as the ‘Night of the Long Knives’, in early July 1934. I will re-evaluate the latest literature on these thoroughly examine
d events with a particular focus on their mid- and long-term effects.
The third part of the book, comprising chapters 6 to 9, analyses the extent to which the SA not only survived the murder of considerable parts of its leadership corps but also contributed to the militarization of society in the following years and engaged in preparations for the Second World War. Up to now, not much has been written about the SA in this period, with the exception of its antisemitic violence in Germany and, later, also in Austria. In order to paint a comprehensive picture of the stormtroopers’ relevance between 1934 and 1939, I will argue in chapter 6 that one should not only focus on such high-profile outbursts of violence but also take into account the structural aspects of the SA’s transformation into a mass organization that penetrated German society on several levels. Beginning in the mid-1930s, the Brownshirts were increasingly concerned with paramilitary tasks related to the annexation of Austria and the Memelland and the dismantling of Czechoslovakia. Chapter 7 will demonstrate that the SA leadership even made settlement plans for eastern Europe, a task that it was ultimately forced to hand over to the rival SS. During the war years, analysed in chapter 8, the SA suffered from the drafting of the majority of its members into the Wehrmacht. Some fighting units, however – in particular, the SA-Standarte Feldherrnhalle – were composed exclusively of SA men. The earlier National Socialist concept of the ‘political soldier’ appeared during this period in an updated form: he was fighting Bolshevism now not in the German streets but on the Russian plains. Chapter 9 will for the first time ever provide a thorough analysis of the tasks and actions of those high-ranking SA generals who were sent as German envoys into the countries of southeastern Europe. I will argue that their appointment not only was an attempt to further bring the German diplomatic service under party control but also was intended to entrust diplomatic preparations for the murder of local Jews in these states to men who had been proven loyal NSDAP activists and fanatical antisemites. Even if the SA was no longer one of the dominant Nazi organizations in Germany, these examples demonstrate that it remained highly relevant as a network of ‘committed’ Nazi activists who contributed to the war and the Holocaust.