Militant Masculinity
Although from 1926 onward the highest leadership positions in the NSDAP’s army were given to former military officers – that is, veterans of the First World War and one-time professional soldiers of the German Army – the SA proved most attractive to young men who were too young to have fought in the war.10 This age bracket, often referred to as the ‘war youth generation’, was made up of young men born between 1900 and 1910. The term was originally popularized by the right-wing intellectual Ernst Günter Gründel in his 1932 book Die Sendung der jungen Generation (The Mission of the Young Generation) but was later converted from a political combat term into a category of historical analysis, although the problematic nature of this transfer and the gender bias it contains are rarely acknowledged.11 The men of this age group had been exposed to the ubiquitous and often ferocious German war propaganda as pupils and were deeply influenced by stories of German heroism and sacrifice on the battlefield.12 Only some of them later became activists of the SA. Yet, given the multitude of paramilitary and right-wing youth groups in Weimar Germany, it is safe to say that a considerable segment of male adolescents at the time regarded the diverse Freikorps units and nationalist leagues of the 1920s as a welcome opportunity to ‘live their violent fantasies of a romanticized warrior existence’ or simply to fulfil their duty to fight for the national cause.13 Many of these young hotheads believed that they were being called to take up where their fathers had left off in 1918, when they were allegedly ‘stabbed in the back’ by disloyal Germans on the home front and subsequently disarmed by the Allied forces. Determined to prevent further national humiliation or, even worse, a Communist takeover of power, these young nationalists formed ‘subcultures of ultra-militant masculinities’14 and fuelled the drive of the SA up to 1934.
The case of Munich is once again instructive: as demonstrated in chapter 2, the political instability of Bavaria during the years 1919–20 combined with severe economic problems created a situation in which nationalists as well as Bavarian particularists turned their anger and shame at the military defeat and the subsequent national ‘humiliation’ against perceived internal enemies. Deep-seated resentments against ‘Bolsheviks’, Prussians, Bavarian Social Democrats, and Jews formed the background against which the violent activism of young men could be interpreted as defence of the fatherland. This view was established as early as 1919, when the new Reichswehr in Bavaria declared Munich’s students indispensable to the task of upholding public order. So-called Studentenkompanien, military units formed of students that existed in Munich, Würzburg, and Erlangen, were regarded as being particularly loyal to the ideas and values of the lost empire. In the summer of 1919 such student battalions comprised approximately 50,000 men nationwide.15 In the eyes of the military, these youths were still free of the alleged ‘corrupting influence’ of civilian morality and yet had been disenchanted by the horrors and the suffering of real combat experiences. Their idealism could thus easily be turned against an internal enemy. This strategy seemed all the more promising after an assembly of Munich students greeted the news of the assassination of the Bavarian premier Kurt Eisner on 21 February 1919 with cheers of joy, demonstrating that even political murder was not perceived as downright illegitimate.16
Paramilitary activism was a key element of student life in Munich during the first years of the Republic, as it was in other major cities of central Europe, most notably in the Hungarian capital of Budapest.17 But even in the politically more stable Third Republic of France, the camelots du roi, the radical youth organization of the para-Fascist Action Française, recruited heavily among students in Paris’s Latin Quarter during the 1920s.18 The extreme nationalist propaganda of the First World War continued to reverberate among central European youths long after the armistice. Many of them perceived life, on an individual as well as a collective basis, to consist of a constant state of fighting. It posed risks, but it also contained the possibility of personal elevation and – eventually – fulfilment. In Germany public institutions supported this particular form of post-war youthful idealism. In Munich the University Directorate in May 1919 officially declared that service to one’s country was the first and most noble duty of every student. The studies proper ranked only second in importance. The opening of the summer term in 1919 was postponed out of respect for the military obligations of a considerable part of the student body. After consultations with the Reichswehr, the University Directorate agreed that classes would only be taught between Monday and Thursday morning, so that students could devote the following three and a half days to military training and exercises.19 Even those male students who had not received military training during the war years now acquired an intimate knowledge of the mental world of the military and learned basic fighting skills.
The universities thus proved fertile ground for the formation of the first National Socialist Sturmabteilungen in Munich between 1920 and 1923. For some of its earliest members, the activism of the first SA units was merely a prolongation of their paramilitary student experience of 1919. With the slow ‘normalization’ of social interactions in Germany and the absorption by the Bavarian home guard movement of important parts of the former paramilitary groups, such a militarized lifestyle soon survived only among the most extreme political parties like the DAP, soon to become the NSDAP.20 Of course, students remained a minority in the early SA, but they formed an important part of the SA membership whose influence exceeded their statistical proportion. An early SA register intercepted by the police included 144 names for which a professional affiliation was listed. Of these, eleven were registered as ‘students’ (born between 1897 and 1905) and several others as ‘pupils’.21 In Franconia it was Gustav Steinbeck, a twenty-four-year-old student and former petty officer (Fähnrich zur See), who led the first local SA units.22 The eleventh Hundertschaft of the Munich SA, until 1923 led by Rudolf Hess, who later was to become Hitler’s deputy, is said to have been entirely composed of students.23
However, a closer look urges caution in drawing conclusions from such examples. At least in the case of the intercepted list, ‘student’ seems to have been a self-imposed title that was more closely related to an individual’s social and educational background than his actual occupation.24 Interrogated by the authorities in Baden in September 1921, just weeks after being appointed head of the SA, the ‘law student’ Klintzsch explained that after his resignation from active navy duty, ostensibly on 2 June 1921, he had spent the holidays on the East Frisian island of Borkum prior to beginning his studies. Situated in the extreme northwest of the German Reich, the island since the nineteenth century had taken pride in its reputation as an antisemitic beach resort25 – a fact Klintzsch knew well. What he did not tell the authorities, however, was that he, as a naval lieutenant, had previously attempted to prevent the raising of the revolutionary red flag over the officers’ mess on the very same island in November 1918, and that it was for this reason that he had not been accepted into the navy of the new Reichswehr later. In early 1919 he instead had returned to the Joachimsthalsches Gymnasium, a prestigious Protestant gymnasium in the city of Templin, north of Berlin. There, Klintzsch attended the so-called ‘warrior’s class’, which prepared former soldiers for the Notabitur, a school-leaving examination that could be completed in a less formal and strict way. Klintzsch continued his pattern of reactionary agitation in the school and was one of the driving forces for the organization of an unofficial ‘Kaiser’s birthday party’ that was celebrated there on 26 January 1919.26
According to his testimony from September 1921, Klintzsch had moved to Munich some months earlier with the aim of studying law and public policy (Staatswissenschaften). However, the new semester did not start until October. Over the summer months Klintzsch attended meetings of the NSDAP, an activity that he presented as a kind of alternative course of study: ‘The ideas championed there mesmerized me to an extent that I have virtually limited my studies to the learning of the matters covered there. I very muc
h devoted myself to questions dealing with the Jews and the Freemasons.’27 Klintzsch enrolled at Munich’s Technical University only for the winter term of 1921/1922 and for the summer term of 1922; he left without graduating.28 His main activity in these years was working as a full-time instructor of the NSDAP’s youth and as a paramilitary conspirator.
For other early SA leaders who matriculated at various universities, the seriousness of their studies can likewise be questioned. Dietrich von Jagow, who stepped in for Klintzsch as provisional head of the SA in the autumn of 1921, moved to Tübingen in late January 1922. Soon afterward he registered as a guest lecturer at Eberhard Karls University. By February 1922 von Jagow had also become a trainee at the city’s long-standing Osiander bookshop, which was now in the hands of two ex-marine officers who had likewise been former members of the Ehrhardt Brigade.29 Yet von Jagow’s main activities were political, not bibliophilic. Hitler had sent him to Tübingen as SA Chief of Staff for Württemberg (Inspekteur der SA für Württemberg) in order to help develop and at the same time monitor the nascent stormtrooper units in this region. In April 1923 the Nazis in Tübingen operated under the cover name ‘Wanderverein Schönbuch’, which suggested an apolitical hiking club.30
The traditional university town of Tübingen proved to be a favourable place for the growth of the Nazi movement in Württemberg. The Social Democrat Hermann Schützinger, an ex-soldier promoted to head of the police in Saxony and later a leading member of the Reichsbanner, remarked as early as 1926 that in Tübingen ‘stubborn small-town professors’ were training the sons of the German middle classes in völkisch nationalism. The windows of the local bookshops displayed the memoirs of Ludendorff and Hitler’s Mein Kampf ‘next to all kinds of antisemitic Germanic kitsch spat out by the metropolis’, Schützinger complained.31 It is indicative of the ascendant nationalist mentalities in Tübingen that as early as 1925 university students clashed with the Reichsbanner when the latter attempted to protect a meeting with the lecturer Emil Julius Gumbel, a well-known statistician studying Weimar’s political violence and a pacifist.32 A local cell of the National Socialist Student League was set up at Eberhard Karls University as early as 1926; a genuine SA student Sturm followed there in 1929.33
A considerable number of the NSDAP and SA leaders who belonged to the ‘war youth generation’ during the 1920s oscillated between party work and lecture halls.34 They not only contributed to the political radicalization of the student body in ever more German universities but also transferred the traditional student claim to leadership to their SA units, which comprised a broad spectrum of the German male population. Juvenile middle-class SA leaders such as Klintzsch as well as those with aristocratic backgrounds like von Jagow regarded themselves as forerunners of the people’s community to come. They considered themselves a true elite, who did not believe in parliamentary rule but in the leadership of the ‘most able men originating from the midst of the people’, and they claimed that they already enjoyed the support of the (still silent) majority of the populace.35 These beliefs legitimized their perceived role as educators of male German youth, whom they sought to keep away from ‘taverns, card games, drinking alcohol, the dangers of the street and the immorality of the new, un-German literature and art’.36 Although such programmatic statements contrasted sharply with the social realities of many SA Stürme, the SA ideology built on the positions of the pre-1914 youth movement. Both stressed ‘purity’ as a prerequisite for human and social progress, but pursued radically different goals: the German youth movement, in line with the ideal of the German Bildungsbürgertum, thought progress could be achieved by allowing young men and women to grow into physically and physiologically ‘healthy’ individuals.37 By contrast, the stormtroopers regarded such things first and foremost as prerequisites for the successful remilitarization of male German youth. The physical training of young men in boxing and jiu-jitsu; their schooling in military discipline, fighting techniques, and the handling of weapons; and the Nazis’ efforts to deepen their ‘feelings of love’ for Heimat and the German nature all served one central purpose: instilling revanchist ideas into the minds and hearts of a new generation of Germans.38 The Nazis hoped that one day in the not too distant future, a new generation under the leadership of the SA would take the national destiny into its own hands and ‘fight back’ against internal and external enemies, above all the ‘Marxists’ and the Jews, the French and the British.39
Both this self-proclaimed war youth generation and the pre-1914 youth movement furthermore shared the belief that the dislocations of modern capitalism had to be overcome by a new ‘spirit’, a new ‘idealism’. This idea, which was common among the radical right, resonated even with young Social Democrats.40 Around 1930 it became a cross-party belief among politicized youth that the time of political liberalism and parliamentary rule as pillars of democracy was over. ‘An epoch came to an end, and we have to liquidate it mentally as well,’ exclaimed emphatically the young SPD Reichstag deputy Carl[o] Mierendorff in 1932.41 Real democracy, a democracy that represented the true will of the people and not antagonistic class interests, was to be achieved by different means. The solution that Mierendorff and like-minded politicians and political writers proposed was a kind of ‘authoritarian democracy’ that received its legitimacy not from formal procedures but from the imagined organic bond between ‘genuine political leaders’ and their followers.42 ‘Today, nobody and certainly not the young are willing to climb the barricades for the parliamentary system,’ argued Mierendorff’s fellow party member August Rathmann, stressing somewhat paradoxically that democracy could only be saved ‘by a different system of representation and government’.43
Within the late Weimar Republic, the popular battle cry ‘Make Way, You Old Men!’ thus gained a new, strongly political connotation. The Nazis ‘exacerbated the existing generational tensions’ that had been prevalent in Germany since the turn of the century, modifying them to their own ends. They effectively transformed political longings for youthful revolt that were initially ideologically diverse first into a vehicle for party propaganda and then, beginning in 1933, into alleged signs of youth support for the Third Reich.44 A comprehensive booklet on the organization and values of the SA from late 1929 even claimed that it would be the SA leaders’ task to provide their men with a higher sense of life, based on the ideas of National Socialism.45 All those who subscribed to these ideas in practice were called to perceive themselves as members of a new German elite united by conviction and belonging, not by social homogeneity. Consequently, the SA leadership from its early days in Munich demanded that its stormtroopers ‘regard each other as brothers and true comrades, irrespective of one’s social status, profession, wealth or poverty’.46
Female Nazi Activism
To what extent such brotherly love should embrace women was very much a matter of debate among the stormtroopers. Andrew Wackerfuss has recently emphasized that women ‘played a large but overlooked role in the SA’, keeping the men ‘dressed and fed’ and comforting them when sick. Yet he also notes that women could only earn a ‘limited place’ within the movement, as they were prevented from experiencing ‘combat’ and thus could not request treatment equal to that received by their male counterparts.47 Although women were not formally excluded from the SA until the late 1920s, it was clearly an institution made by men and for men. The duties of the ‘SA woman’, defined in paragraph 6 of the statute of the NSDAP’s Sturmabteilung, which came into effect on 17 September 1926 and was slightly modified on 31 May 1927, limited female Nazi activists to practical aspects of support for the stormtroopers and to the maintenance of their social welfare more generally. Helping impoverished party members, catering to the needs of travelling fellow Nazis, and handing out presents at Christmas were listed as exemplary duties, next to the making of flags, shirts, hats, and party badges.48 In contrast to the nationalist Stahlhelm which in 1931 categorically stated that ‘our women shall not actively devote themselves to politics’,49 the Natio
nal Socialists simply declared traditional forms of female tasks to be political. The NSDAP was aware that it had to reach out to women in order to maximize its support among the population, but its intellectual founders did not in the early days have a clue as to what proper female National Socialist activism might look like (Plate 3).50
The popular appeal to women of these ‘female’ tasks was limited, not only in comparison to the more active demands placed on their male counterparts, but also when contrasted with the party’s otherwise immoderate rhetoric. As some of the fervent National Socialist women’s autobiographies collected in 1934 by the sociologist Theodore Abel indicate, their writers actually shared similar values with their male counterparts and took pride in fulfilling tasks that resembled theirs.51 Nazi women did not object to what the party officially requested from them and willingly contributed to the ‘movement’ by engaging in welfare activities and providing logistical support to their male comrades, but it was their execution of ‘manly’ activities that they described with the strongest emotional zeal. A certain Hilde Boehm-Stoltz from Berlin, for example, described herself as a ‘fighter for the true and pure soul of the race’ (Kämpfer um die echte artreine Rassenseele). No longer did she have any spare time, Boehm-Stoltz claimed, yet she felt more than rewarded to be included among the ranks of the ‘soldiers’ of National Socialism, a political movement that, according to her, was ‘totally based on idealism’.52 The widowed Hertha von Reuß likewise emphasized the moments of happiness she experienced when she was ‘fighting’ as a member of early Nazi groups in the Bavarian provinces in the early 1920s. Writing some years later, she noted that she had grown lonely because of a ‘lack of understanding’ from her ‘politically right-wing family members’. Having moved to Berlin, von Reuß remembered with fondness her nights out in such illustrious Nazi hangouts as ‘Ameise’ (Ant), ‘Wespe’ (Wasp), and ‘Bärenhöhle’ (Bear’s Den). There, she had prepared and distributed propaganda leaflets to spread the Nazi gospel face to face.53 Finally, the much younger Marlene Heder, a girl from the village of Kleinenglis in Northern Hesse who came into contact with the Nazi movement in 1929 at the age of fifteen, described in similar terms the moments of ‘danger’ that had resulted from her Nazi activities. Despite lasting incomprehension from friends and family, she claimed to have not only remained faithful to the Nazi cause, but to have even attended a dangerous ‘red meeting’ in the city of Kassel (a meeting that was in fact organized by the Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft, the ‘German Society for Peace’!). As a well-known Nazi supporter, Heder boasted that she was ‘never safe’ in her village, a victim of nightly persecutions by opponents following her on bicycles. She also claimed that she had been at risk of being hit by logs of wood thrown at her from the neighbours’ windows.54
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