Despite the questionable accuracy of these statements, which were produced to provide exemplary accounts of National Socialist commitment and were therefore shot through with propaganda clichés,55 all of these autobiographies indicate that although female Nazi activists fulfilled the subaltern roles the party allotted to them, they emotionally responded most strongly to those activities and experiences they shared with their male counterparts, such as being exposed to physical harm, beatings, and spitting. This assessment does not contradict the dominant historiographical view that Nazi street politics was first and foremost a male affair and that women were confined to auxiliary roles. Yet it does modify long-held beliefs about the alleged passivity of women in street politics, a belief that has been successfully challenged with regard to the Communist Party, but less so for the National Socialists.56 Female Nazi activists aspired to take part in all aspects of the political fight, yet in ways that suited their identities as women.57 ‘We experience the “SA spirit” in our partnerships and for ourselves,’ asserted Lore Snyckers, wife of the stormtrooper propagandist Hans Snyckers, in 1940.58 In some cases the close bonds between ‘SA mothers’, a Nazi term of endearment for those usually mature women who particularly in the early 1930s cared for the much younger boys of the SA, and their charges were supposed to last beyond death. In Magdeburg a cenotaph erected in honour of the city’s ‘Old Fighters’ expressed the expectation that Bertha Weinhöbel, an ‘SA mother’ who in 1931 celebrated her 60th birthday, would be laid to eternal rest next to her ‘boys’.59
Regardless of their political preferences, women in the Weimar Republic, particularly those from the middle classes, overwhelmingly shared the view that the ‘hypocrite bourgeois morality’ of the nineteenth century that had confined women to the domestic sphere was not a realistic option for their future lives – at least not when they were forced into such a role. This does not mean that there were no longer any women who regarded a ‘return’ to the role of guardian of the family and motherhood as attractive. This holds true in particular for members of the lower middle classes, who were most strongly exposed to the effects of downward social mobility in the late Weimar years, when class affiliation determined the conception of female and male roles more than any other factor. Yet, by the early 1930s, such a ‘return’ had only become acceptable to women if they perceived it as a consequence of their own choices. The significant rise in the number of female students that occurred beginning in the late 1930s is just one indicator that the popular conception of the Third Reich as a regime that forced women back into the home is incomplete. Such a picture underestimates the Eigensinn, or ‘self-will’, of young women as well as the ambivalent character of the Nazi regime regarding gender in general.60
Satisfying Emotional Needs
Naturally, the remarkably bold self-perception of SA leaders provoked scorn and aversion from political opponents as well as the intelligentsia. The Nazi campaign of terror against all those they perceived as dissidents, Franz Schweyer wrote dryly in 1925, caused widespread disgust – all the more as the ‘enforcer[s] of the new guidelines of public sentiments for the most part were of an age that seems a priori not to be called for such a task’.61 It should be noted, however, that an excessive belief in the capacities of male youth to alter fundamentally the society in which they were living was by no means limited to Nazi ideologists. The aforementioned Social Democrat, Hermann Schützinger, likewise in 1925 emphatically described German youth as a ‘new race’, ‘formed by the World War in iron blocks, aglow with the spirit of revolution and moulded into men by the touch of our new state’. The idealism and energies of these individuals, as ‘shock troops’ in the fight for the new state, should not be left to the extreme nationalists but channelled into a democratic renewal, Schützinger insisted. He imagined this renewal as occurring not through reform, but through revolution and war, a belief he expressed in slogans that were at times hard to distinguish from the Nazi rhetoric: ‘Let us get ready for the fight of the state!’62
The stormtroopers during the 1920s were initially just one of the many groups that participated in this ‘fight’. They benefited from the fundamental opposition of the early Nazi movement to the Weimar Republic, as they did not need to compromise for tactical reasons, unlike many of the other political youth organizations of the time.63 The internal reforms of Pfeffer von Salomon and later Röhm had created a tightly disciplined paramilitary organization that gained from the exploitation of grassroots mobilization. Historians – particularly those concerned with the relatively recent research into a proper ‘history of emotions’64 – have pointed to ‘emotion’, ‘charisma’, and ‘confidence’ as key terms for the analysis of mass politics. Such analytical perspectives are indeed helpful for better understanding the motives behind the second SA’s attraction to a considerable number of young German males in the interwar years, in particular when coupled with a path of research that since the 1970s began to analyse Fascism in general and National Socialism in particular as social movements.65 Such studies argue that it was not ideology but participation and excitement that accounted for the attraction of interwar Fascism.
The twenty-four-year-old Richard F. Behrendt in 1932 was one of the first academics to advocate such views. After receiving his PhD from the University of Basel the year before, Behrendt returned to Berlin, where he had grown up and was now able to witness the last convulsions of Weimar democracy at close quarters.66 The result was an original book on the forms and causes of the era’s political activism, analysed from a sociological and psychological point of view.67 Influenced by thinkers as diverse as Robert Michels, Hermann Schmalenbach, and Sigmund Freud, Behrendt forcefully argued that the crisis of the modern (German) state was a result of the inability of its institutions to satisfy the emotional needs of its people. As a consequence, he claimed, the political realm had grown, and would continue to grow, in importance. In Freudian terms, politics would even come to serve as an ‘object of fixation’, Behrendt argued. Only engagement in politics would allow the otherwise transcendentally homeless individual to prevent the development of ‘acute neurosis’.68 Collective (political) action could absorb the individual’s ‘free-floating libido’ and thus satisfy him or her. As long as modern society did not allow the individual to establish bonds with a whole, or an imagined whole, particular groups defined and held together by collective activities would engage in mutually antagonistic struggles.69
Permitting such groups to carry out aggressive behaviour would allow for the ‘emotional fulfilment’ of their members, regardless of the ideology employed by their activists, Behrendt argued.70 He regarded the latter as hardly more than a strategic political justification or, on the individual level, as an ex post facto rationalization. The ideal framework to organize bonding through collective violence would be the Bund, or ‘league’, commanded by a charismatic leader. Such a Bund, however, could necessarily exist for only a limited amount of time: it would always be a transitional form between (intimate) community and (anonymous) society.71 For this reason, members of a Bund, who would inevitably perceive themselves as members of an ‘avant garde’ or ‘elite’, would set themselves apart from the existing social and political order, glorifying the establishment of a future order. They would necessarily long for conflicts, as personal success and fulfilment could only be achieved through action. However, Behrendt claimed that it would not be necessary for the political ‘deed’ to be translated into political ‘success’, as measured by traditional standards. In his view the political violence in Weimar Germany – the brawls and riots in the streets, taverns, and halls – was ultimately an end in itself. It was the field of politics that permitted the expression of the strongest emotions, similar to the ‘sport frenzy’ sparked by mass sporting events of the time. According to Behrendt, the military forces in the interwar years approached politics in a manner similar to hooligans who exploited the emotions of popular sporting competitions for their own personal ends: to test their physical
strength as a means of excitement, empowerment, and ultimately self-elevation.72
It is instructive to analyse the activities of the Nazi stormtroopers in such a way, as long as one remains aware that this perspective sheds light on some, but not all, forms of SA sociability. Largely missing from Behrendt’s book is, for example, any reflection on how these forms of ‘political’ activism influenced and helped shape the political organizations of the time. The most important advantage of his methodological approach is that it relieves scholars from having to explain how the crude Nazi ideology around 1930 became highly attractive for hundreds of thousands of German men virtually overnight. Even the vigilant liberal Jewish weekly CV-Zeitung noted that the spectacular Nazi gains in the September 1930 elections should not be interpreted as widespread support for the party’s antisemitic creed, but as a sign of the ‘deepest despair’ of millions of voters.73 Long-time National Socialist leaders certainly embraced the fundamental aspects of Nazi ideology, including its fervent antisemitism, but for many in the SA’s rank and file the role the ‘movement’ played in allowing for the formation of ‘emotional communities’ was more important. Such communities enabled the expression of emotions such as despair and hate and encouraged the use of violence.74 As the economic situation worsened, this form of community building became increasingly important for ‘ordinary’ German men and women, as already analysed in the previous chapter.
Behrendt’s book appeared in print in late 1932, only weeks before the Nazis came to power. It has been completely forgotten today. More recent studies that adopt a similar model of explanation stress that the SA during the late 1920s and early 1930s was transformed into a social movement proper; it thus serves as a paradigmatic example of this kind of grassroots activism. However, such categorization is problematic. The influential sociologist Joachim Raschke in the 1980s defined a ‘social movement’ as ‘a mobilizing collective actor which, based on high symbolic integration and only low role specification, pursues the goal of fundamental social change [. . .] by applying flexible forms of organization and action’.75 It is obvious that the SA, at least until 1934, meets the majority of these criteria. First, as an organization particularly between 1929 and 1934 it was very successful in mobilizing mass support for the Nazi movement. Second, notwithstanding constant internal restructuring and leadership changes as well as short periods of illegality, it operated continuously. Finally, the SA was clearly an organization that promoted fundamental societal change. The SA’s main goal was not only to destroy the democratic order of the Weimar Republic and to replace it with an authoritarian form of government that would supposedly cope better with the internal and external problems of Germany, but also to instigate social change that would lead to the development of a true, socially inclusive ‘people’s community’ which would blur existing class differences.
The problematic element of the SA when measured against that definition is the criterion of ‘low role specificity’, or the existence of only vaguely defined roles within a social movement. In the SA, which was organized like the NSDAP according to the Führer principle, the different positions were anything but flexible. Obviously, some stormtroopers built considerable careers over short periods of time, whereas others dropped out after a few weeks. However, it was the SA as a hierarchical organization that defined the different roles available – with no discretion for the rank and file to modify these rules. Even mid-level SA leaders, who were supposed to act as exemplary role models for their men and certainly wielded authority within the SA when fulfilling this role, ultimately had very limited power to transform the SA’s hierarchy and organization. They had to lead and to obey at the same time, but they were explicitly not invited to engage in the process of shaping the SA as an organization. This is why Raschke struggled to decide whether the SA was a typical social movement or not. At times he described the SA as a ‘totalitarian movement’, which he regarded as a special kind of social movement in which the spontaneous activities of violent masses are embedded in a stable organizational framework.76
The historian Sven Reichardt later took up Raschke’s definition. He had no problem with defining the SA as a social movement and highlighted in particular four elements that social and Fascist movements share: first, a loosely formalized but still effective organizational structure; second, an intrinsic dynamic; third, a certain ‘closeness’ of the political community; and fourth, an aggressive stance toward the prevalent political system.77 Although Reichardt also informed his readers that not all parts of Raschke’s definition fit the case of the SA, he did not explicitly discuss this problem, nor did he provide a solution to it. Instead, he repeated Raschke’s claim that ‘social movements do not possess an ordinary membership structure nor do they provide institutional solutions in order to solve internal problems’, even though these two criteria did not fit the SA, as it had regular membership lists and arbitral jurisdiction.78 Certainly, the NSDAP and the higher SA command at times had difficulties in keeping their men in check, particularly in 1931 and 1932, but this does not allow us to disregard the decisive influence exerted by the OSAF, or ‘Supreme SA leader’, and the party headquarters in Munich.
It is at this point that a rereading of Behrendt’s 1932 book proves most beneficial, as he dealt extensively with the problem of leadership in social movements. Fusing his ideas with the findings of more recent sociological literature, I suggest defining the SA during the late Weimar years as a political organization that mobilized followers like a social movement but at the same time was hierarchically structured on a local and regional level as a Bund.79 The mass of these Bünde on a national level were tightly dovetailed into a top-down paramilitary command that ensured the party’s ultimate control but at the same time exploited the grassroots activism of the rank-and-file stormtrooper to its maximum degree.
The decisive figure ensuring the coherence of every Bund was its charismatic leader. Charisma as a concept has long been used to describe the influence and success of populist political leaders in the twentieth century, from Hitler and Mussolini on the right to Mao and Fidel Castro on the left.80 However, charisma, understood as a ‘purely emotional bond’ between a leader and his followers, is by no means restricted to such iconic political leaders but encompasses the phenomenon of social movements that Behrendt defines as ‘coalitions of charismatic communities’.81 Although we are accustomed to viewing charisma (and ‘charismatic rule’, to use the original term coined by Max Weber) in modern times as an effect of propaganda and its dissemination through mass media, it is first and foremost a phenomenon that is necessarily ‘rooted in the micro level of social interaction’.82 In its daily operations the SA was – as Behrendt assumed early on – an organization that recruited its followers not so much through abstract political programmes and particular military aesthetics, but through the charismatic relationships that formed between the regional and local SA leaders and the rank and file in the particular stormtrooper units.
The charismatic SA-Führer was one of the key personae in the National Socialist movement, in action as well as in theory. The role is described early and in some detail in a document entitled ‘Guidelines for the Formation of a Stormtrooper Unit’ from 16 May 1922. The appointment by a local party leader (Ortsgruppenvorsitzender) of a particular SA leader was to be exclusively based on the latter’s ‘prowess and his military skills’. Once appointed, however, even low-level SA leaders enjoyed considerable autonomy. They received general instructions and later also direct orders from the SA headquarters in Munich, but they were relatively free in putting these often quite technical rules into practical effect. Furthermore, according to the 1922 instructions, each SA leader was solely responsible for making sure that his men recognized his authority.83 In other words, the larger SA organization attempted to ensure that only those SA men who were able to claim charismatic authority were appointed as leaders. Several years later, in 1931, when the SA had grown into a mass organization with more than 100,000 men, Röh
m’s Order no. 2 defined the Sturmführer as the most important role within the SA and explicitly held him responsible for the fate of his SA comrades, who, according to the new regulations, would number between 70 and 200. The Sturm leader was to be acquainted with the lives of all men under his command, sharing their daily sorrows and providing help if needed.84 Needless to say, the social realities of this relationship were often different. In the small town of Frose in Anhalt in 1932, for example, a Sturmführer is reported to have attacked some of the men under his command with his fists and a knife in order to impose his will on them.85
Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts Page 17