Falling prices for agricultural products were one of the most severe problems faced in many rural parts of the country, especially when they coincided with increases in taxes. As a consequence, Germany saw new waves of Landflucht, or ‘rural flight’, and a more radicalized peasantry, particularly among the young. In rural Brandenburg young peasants – notably those without the prospect of taking over their parents’ farm – constituted in many places the absolute majority of their respective Stürme.155 In Schleswig-Holstein the rise in discontent led to the development of a significant protest movement by 1928, the so-called Landvolkbewegung. Although this movement was not officially bound to a particular programme or party, the National Socialists successfully exploited the high level of popular discontent it tapped into, taking up the peasants’ revolutionary slogans and presenting themselves as the alternative needed. The violent protests of the peasants’ revolts as well as their widespread anti-capitalist and antisemitic sentiments provided fertile ground for the agitation of both Communists and Nazis, and the latter soon exploited the uprisings in many rural regions throughout northern Germany. By contrast, the Nazis’ excessive nationalism appealed less to the established farmers, who were first and foremost concerned with their rather narrow Lebenswelt and its practical problems rather than abstract notions of fatherland and international politics.156 Yet, with the economic situation deteriorating, they likewise became more susceptible to Nazi slogans and in particular to their highly symbolic actions. For example, in Western Pomerania in 1930, stormtroopers headed by the young and charismatic lawyer Wilhelm Karpenstein intervened at a compulsory auction of a county estate and gave the first bidder a stick, thus presenting themselves as defenders of the traditional local order against an alleged cold-blooded materialism.157
The central figure for the growth of the SA in Schleswig-Holstein was the agricultural labourer and later shop owner Heinrich Schoene, who joined the NSDAP in August 1925. Initially the local party, SA, and HJ leader for the Nazi Ortsgruppe in Lockstedter Lager, Schoene was appointed leader of the SA-Gruppe Nordmark in June 1929.158 A few weeks prior to this appointment, he had summarized his experiences as a Nazi agitator as follows: ‘The German peasant on his free soil is much more susceptible to National Socialism than the Marxist-infested townsman.’159 The early Nazis’ agitation concentrated initially on those areas of western Schleswig-Holstein where the Landvolk movement was particularly strong. In May 1929, for example, Schoene ordered his stormtroopers to carry out propaganda Stürme on bicycles during the Pentecost holidays, focusing on areas where the NSDAP was still in its infancy.160 By the time the Landvolk movement began to decline, in the early 1930s, the NSDAP had established itself as the leading rural party in the region, replacing the previously strong conservative parties as well as splinter parties like the Christlich-Nationale Bauern und Landvolkpartei, the ‘Christian National Peasants and Landvolk Party’, an offshoot of the German National People’s Party (DNVP).161 Here, as well as in several other Protestant-dominated rural areas of Germany such as East Prussia, Western Pomerania, or the predominantly agrarian parts of Württemberg or Northern Hesse, the NSDAP developed into a milieu party proper, with a position similar to the pre-eminence of the Centre Party in most Catholic provinces.162
The Landvolk movement in Schleswig-Holstein had already radicalized the peasants to such an extent that they had engaged in civil disobedience, attacked courthouses, and even fired off bombs. Against this background, the methods of stormtrooper violence did not need special justification. Elsewhere, however, the situation differed markedly. A less antagonistic style of propaganda than was used in the big cities, one that positively emphasized the benefits the future Third Reich would have for the peasantry, often proved beneficial to the NSDAP.163 In most parts of the countryside, life in the SA was dominated not by frequent physical clashes with competing paramilitary organizations, but by a constant campaign of penetration of the rural milieu, with its associations, loyalties, and habits.164 In order to establish themselves, despite their limited personal and financial means, the Nazis tried to win over those powerbrokers who traditionally set the agenda in rural Germany – the primary-school teacher, the pastor, the big farmer, and, in the provinces east of the Elbe, the local aristocrat – and use them as ‘milieu openers’.165 Consequently, the SA in these regions recruited less from the lower classes than among young farmers and artisans who were well-respected and well-integrated members of their communities.166 The party presented itself as a ‘conservative peasants’ and middle-class party’167 that stood for traditional German values but that was – due to the circumstances of the troubled Weimar years – required to take a tougher stance than the organizations that had hitherto dominated the rural regions.
In areas where local news was transmitted from mouth to mouth rather than through newspapers, a strong visual and physical presence on the ground was vital for any party or organization to succeed in winning followers. As historian Wolfram Pyta has convincingly demonstrated, in the small communities of rural Germany the Nazi promises of implementing a ‘people’s community’ mattered less than practical support or prospective personal gains. One way the party provided such support was to hire out groups of stormtroopers from the nearby cities as seasonal workers, usually paid in kind or with very small sums. Not surprisingly, farmers who were pleased with such mutually beneficial activism were more likely to react favourably to demands for food and other forms of party support (Plate 4). Their willingness to help impoverished Nazi militants was, however, severely put to the test as cases of SA leaders selling food they had received for free became more and more frequent. Farmers busy in their fields also wondered about the excursions of uniformed SA units on workdays, reflecting the widespread belief that active politics should be confined to weekends and not interfere in everyday community life.168 Finally, in 1932, when unemployment figures for the Reich peaked, entire stormtrooper units swept over the countryside like a murder of crows, begging and stealing in such aggressive ways that even regional Nazi party leaders referred to their behaviour as ‘landsknecht manners’.169
Because SA membership in many places was initially not strong, its activities in small communities were often confined to particular days and events. On these occasions it used cars, lorries, motorbikes, and bicycles to transport stormtroopers from one place to another, thus creating the impression that the regional SA units were much stronger than was actually the case (Plate 5). Two new organizations greatly aided this propaganda. Since the late 1920s, the SA had formed subsections that pooled militants who possessed motorcycles and private cars. Beginning on 1 April 1930, these subsections were referred to as the Motor-SA. Their main task was to transport SA leaders to party and election meetings, but their members were also called to assist in the training of stormtroopers to drive a car or ride a motorbike, thus allowing them to later pass the official driving tests without paying for expensive driving-school lessons. Besides the Motor-SA, there also existed the Nationalsozialistisches Automobil-Korps (NSAK), which in April 1931 was renamed the Nationalsozialistisches Kraftfahr-korps (NSKK), a reservoir of motorized party sympathizers who were willing to take on occasional jobs for the ‘movement’. Formal membership in the NSDAP and its sub-organizations was not required for membership in this group. Rather, as the Nazi propaganda rejoiced, it was the ‘SA spirit’ that ‘bound together men and motor to a vital unity and transformed the motor vehicle into a weapon for the political fight’.170 The Motor-SA grew rapidly, in line with the general SA, expanding from 100 Sturm units in October 1931 to 680 in August 1932, with the latter comprising 26,105 individuals. Similarly, membership in the NSKK mushroomed to 10,000 men in December 1931, after only 300 at the end of the previous year. Both organizations not only fulfilled important logistical tasks for the party but also contributed decisively to the ‘modern’ image of the NSDAP in the early 1930s; furthermore, they allowed middle-class sympathizers to serve the SA without taking part in long marches or param
ilitary exercises.171
Between 1930 and 1932 the Nazi Party’s voter support multiplied, particularly in villages and rural communities with a predominantly Protestant population.172 As usually everyone knew everyone else’s political preferences in such places, the growing number of ballots cast for the NSDAP should be seen less as a mass phenomenon driven by individuals than as a process of ‘entire communities converting their loyalty’.173 It was the result of a combined effort, one enhanced by the visual, yet infrequent, presence of SA and Motor-SA units touring the countryside who engaged in demonstrations that played on traditional feelings of national honour and relied on the influence of local leaders. It needs to be understood, however, that the Nazis’ intense electoral campaigns were not only directed outward, aiming to win over voters and impress or scare opponents. They were also directed inward, and in two ways. First, the intensified activities that characterized the pre-election weeks provided a range of efforts to which the individual SA man could personally contribute and thus prove himself a ‘political fighter’. Second, these campaigns also served as a means to control and discipline the rapidly growing number of stormtroopers who – as we have seen – were recruited in the early 1930s not only from those parts of the population committed to völkisch nationalism, but also from many German men suffering from economic hardship but lacking any firm political commitment.174
The regulations on so-called ‘propaganda storms’ for the April 1932 election campaign in Upper Silesia, drafted under the command of the notorious SA group leader Edmund Heines, provide a good example of this two-edged strategy. The guidelines requested the formation of five units, each ninety men strong and equipped with bicycles and a marching band. Between 3 and 10 April 1932, the week prior to the elections, each of these propaganda units was ordered to travel between thirty and forty kilometres a day, visiting at least six villages. In every village they would stop, distribute propaganda leaflets, and give a little concert in which traditional patriotic songs were given preference over Nazi fighting songs. In between these songs a local Nazi functionary would deliver a short speech.
However, most of the regulations for this rural propaganda campaign dealt with matters of internal discipline. Prior to their deployment, each propaganda Sturm was to be schooled for four days ‘under the strictest control’ of the SA-Standartenführer Hanns Günther von Obernitz, who in 1933 became police president of Nuremberg-Fürth.175 After the units were deployed every Sturm was to be reviewed at least once a day by von Obernitz and other SA-Standartenführer who were touring the country by car. Night quarters were to be established exclusively on the estates of Silesian noblemen who were sympathetic to the Nazis but these quarters were to be anything but luxurious: eight to ten men were expected to sleep on mulched floors in farmhouses and barns.176 Overnight stops in local inns were explicitly prohibited, as was the consumption of alcohol. A curfew had already been set for 9 p.m., to ‘prevent the vagabonding of SA men with or without female company’. The regional SA leadership even prohibited the singing of ‘provocative songs’.177
It seems unlikely that the actual behaviour of the propaganda Stürme would have followed such strict guidelines. However, the Prussian authorities were quick to ban these propaganda cycling tours, and when the Nazis started them nevertheless, the authorities stopped them immediately. In the following days at least 110 SA men from the propaganda Stürme were sentenced to fines and short prison terms following accelerated legal procedures.178 Despite the actual failure of this Nazi propaganda effort, the plans as such make plain that the SA leadership subjected its rank and file to strict subordination and discipline. Concerns about the aesthetics and, in particular, the sounds made by the travelling SA men were prioritized over considerations around actual political discourse. As ordered by Pfeffer von Salomon and later Röhm, the young men were expected to impress the public by their discipline and determination, acting as Wiedergänger of a glorious past and at the same time as the embodiment of national regeneration, but they were urged to remain at a distance from the local population. The stormtroopers’ wives and children were prohibited from joining their husbands and fathers on marches, so that any form of intimacy or possible conflict over the men’s loyalties was restricted.179 They were to be ‘party soldiers’ whose own biographies and views would become irrelevant once they dressed in the brown shirt. This worldview is mirrored in the highly conventional character of the Nazi autobiographies that have survived in the Abel collection at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California. As embodiments of the Nazi vision, as walking and cycling Nazi advertisement pillars, the rank-and-file stormtroopers had to put aside their individuality.180
In other words, marching Nazi militants were now first and foremost a ‘mass ornament’, identified by the sociologist and journalist Siegfried Kracauer as the primary characteristic of modern life in the capitalist societies of the interwar years. This trend was indeed common in interwar central Europe, as it was precisely the ‘masses as such – fluid, mobile, and mutable’ that ‘were the very media in which all central political questions were posed’.181 For Kracauer, these ‘mass ornaments’ were ultimately empty forms of the cult of rationality and as such testified to the extent to which the capitalist way of doing business had penetrated the realms of human interaction more generally. However, he claimed that human emancipation from this tight framework was possible, not by shaping one’s body to the detriment of individual expression, like his example of the Tiller girls, an internationally popular troupe of female revue dancers famous for their machine-like precision in moving their bodies simultaneously, but by the intellectual endeavour of realizing the correlation between such attempts at standardization and the demands of capitalism.182
Kracauer’s original analysis did not include a discussion of the forms of political mass ornaments. Nevertheless, the similarities between his descriptions of the Tiller girls and the sight of Nazi stormtroopers parading in the German streets are obvious. The boots of the activists marching in step corresponded no less to the ‘hands in the factory’ than did the legs of the Tiller girls, at least from an aesthetic perspective. The ‘sexless bodies’ in uniform, to paraphrase Kracauer again, thus gained importance only inasmuch as they could form a mass ornament, becoming interchangeable and reduced in, if not devoid of, individuality.183 Some fifty years later, Klaus Theweleit’s interpretations of the Fascist psyche came to a somewhat different conclusion. For him, the bodies of the marching SA men with their stern faces were not ‘sexless’ but rather were embodiments of a particular type of masculinity. Their Körperpanzer, or ‘body armour’, corresponded to violent male fantasies of domination, fighting, and the pleasure of sexual assault, Theweleit claimed.184 Regardless of such differences, both authors suggest that Nazi body politics was based on the repression of both natural instincts and middle-class ideas of intimacy.185
The SA internal educational material from 1929 supports this view: the stormtrooper, such materials claimed, was requested to live on a level above that inhabited by men who only sought sensual pleasure from women. Instead, he was called to respect and ‘honour’ German women and girls, their parents, and even the Churches. Individual attraction between the sexes was ultimately subordinated to formal criteria: ‘No SA man is allowed to socialize with a girl who wears un-German clothes’, one regulation noted, most likely referring to the urban chic of the 1920s ‘new woman’, who wore trousers and close-fitting dresses.186 Such formal guidelines on interpersonal relations, of course, describe an ideal and not a social reality. They testify, however, to the SA leadership’s attempt to control all spheres of the lives of the rank and file, including their sex lives. Observations made by foreign observers like the journalist Ferdinand Tuohy, who travelled to the nascent Third Reich in 1933, indeed suggest that there was an element of restraint in the relations between stormtroopers and women, at least in public: ‘There seemed but one element missing, the feminine. Only one uniformed Nazi did I see with his girl and h
e looked betrothed many times over, judging by the stiff angle of his proffered arm. This movement is a very male one, please note, and pure to austerity at that.’187
The tightly disciplined SA troop in formation, seemingly unaffected by or at least sufficiently isolated from female temptations along the way, was an ideal ‘mass ornament’ in the sense outlined above, but it would be premature to end the analysis here. As Kracauer noticed, sardonically ridiculing the popular life-reform movement more generally and rhythmic gymnastics in particular, many of his contemporaries were attempting to free themselves from the demands of modern life, giving up rationality in favour of a regained unity between nature and soul.188 Individual stormtroopers likewise did not regard themselves as a mere decoration of Fascist politics. They certainly took pleasure and pride in the formations they jointly created in their marches and parades, but they did not see them as reducing human agency. From their perspective, it was Fascist mass mobilization that allowed the individual to participate in the collective national will. Only because of and through the nation, they believed, could modern individuality stand up against the demands of capitalist modernity, a modernity that stormtroopers came to associate with economic exploitation and social marginalization. Fascist aesthetics therefore not only attempted to take advantage of the new kinds of mass formation, but also claimed to provide a solution for the individual in an increasingly anonymous and competitive society. At a time when individuality was widely perceived to be at risk, National Socialism promised to reconcile the evanescent modern self with the allegedly ‘eternal’ nation that represented the human achievements of the past embodied in folk traditions and racial origin, as well as to provide a link from that past into a bright future. This was ultimately a romantic ideology that appealed to those who shared the perception of living in an interim period, but it was neither anti-modern nor technophobic. It was Goebbels who most clearly expressed this amalgam of romantic longing and belief in technological progress and social engineering, proclaiming in early 1939: ‘We live in an age that is both organic and steel-like, that has not lost its depth of feeling. On the contrary, it has discovered a new romanticism in the results of modern inventions and technology.’189 As late as 1943 he held onto this idea and publicly assured his listeners that even the war years were a time of particular romanticism – a romanticism in the face of deprivation, harder and crueller than in previous periods, but one that ‘remains romantic. The steely romanticism of our time manifests itself in actions and deeds in service to a great national goal, in a feeling of duty raised to the level of an unbreachable principle. We are all more or less romantics in a new German mood.’190
Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts Page 14