Regardless of such pressures, the Sturm cigarettes were popular in many parts of Germany in 1932. As regional SA leaders reported unanimously, SA men increasingly smoked the cigarette that ‘in terms of quality, could compete with its rivals’ and eagerly collected the vouchers and collector cards included in the packs. Every month the SA units received their share of the profits, which served, for example, to build regional SA leadership schools, pay for medical supplies, or benefit the SA stormtrooper units and their men directly.120 Several reports from the time indicate that these commissions financed local SA activities to an ‘important degree’, and that for some units they were the only reliable source of income.121 The Sturm Company was also popular among the National Socialists because it predominantly employed SA leaders as travelling salesmen, who in some cases could make a living from this activity.122 In East Prussia all thirteen SA-Standartenführer were ‘made mobile’ in such a way in 1932.123 The business model was so successful that it was quickly copied: the Kameradschaft Zigaretten-Speditionsgesellschaft mbH, literally the ‘Comradeship Cigarette and Transportation Company’, located in the city of Gera in Thuringia, soon also claimed to employ National Socialist party members exclusively and informed its distributors that its brands were to be marketed as ‘other Nazi cigarettes’.124 The SS and the National Socialist Factory Cell Organization (NSBO) allegedly supported this company.125
The only choice officially sanctioned by the SA, however, was among the different brands offered by the Sturm Company: the well-to-do stormtrooper could buy the relatively expensive ‘Neue Front’ (literally ‘New Front’) cigarettes for 6 pfennig each, or for 5 pfennig the cigarettes sold under the names of ‘Sturm’ or ‘Stephansdom’, the last named after Vienna’s St Stephen’s Cathedral. Most SA men, however, preferred the cheaper brands in the ‘consumer price range’ (Konsumpreisklasse): ‘Alarm’ and ‘Balilla’ for 4 pfennig, or ‘Trommler’ (literally ‘drummer’) for 3.5 pfennig. The latter brand was by far the most successful: in 1932, Trommler sales made up more than 80 per cent of the company’s volume of sales, and in the following year 95 per cent.126 These figures aptly parallel trends produced by the economic and social crisis in Germany.
Physical violence against competing companies and their distributors was another means employed by the Sturm Company. Dressler speculated that by agitating against his rivals, he would be able to drive down advertisement costs, which usually accounted for a large share of the cigarette industry’s budget.127 When the Nazis came to power in 1933, stormtroopers under the leadership of Alphons Michalke, an SA man and commercial director of the Sturm Company who in 1933 would become president of the Chamber of Commerce in Dresden,128 organized boycotts against the Dresden-based Bulgaria Compagny, another cigarette producer. This competitor was targeted as a ‘Jew firm’ because of its allegedly Jewish owner. On 31 March 1933 the SA blocked the entrances to the Bulgaria premises and carried out an illegal search of the house of Harry Carl Schnur, the director of the company. Schnur, however, had been warned beforehand by Philipp F. Reemstma, the head of Germany’s biggest cigarette corporation, located in Hamburg.129 Schnur was in fact Reemtsma’s employee, as the latter had bought the Bulgaria Company from Salomon Krentner, a Jew, in 1928. This deal, however, had not been made public. Even if this particular boycott was therefore not intended to strike Reemtsma, other SA ‘actions’ clearly were. Stormtroopers repeatedly attacked cigarette dealers who sold Reemtsma products, smashed their shop windows, and even physically attacked those who worked there, giving the term ‘Kampfzeit of the cigarette market’ an even more literal meaning.
However, such violence quickly backfired. Reemtsma, regardless of his personal liberal-conservative sympathies, was not willing to let the Brownshirts ruin his business.130 The fact that the Nazis had initiated proceedings against him because of alleged corruption furthermore demanded immediate action, although tensions lessened somehow after Reemtsma was granted a personal meeting with Hitler in 1932.131 Between August 1933 and January 1934, Reemtsma repeatedly discussed his and his company’s problems with Hermann Göring, who had been appointed Reich Minister for Aviation and, as Minister President of Prussia, was in an ideal situation to exercise power over the SA. Göring’s ‘goodwill’ was available, albeit at a price: Reemtsma had to donate the very high amount of 3 million reichsmark to the state, officially for the preservation of German forests and their wildlife, as well as for the state theatres. In return, Göring made sure that the criminal investigations against Reemtsma, the anti-Reemtsma publicity in the Nazi press, and the SA boycotts stopped.132
A final agreement with the SA, however, was not reached before its leaders were executed in the summer of 1934. Röhm’s successor, Viktor Lutze, struck a deal with Reemtsma that resembled the agreement with Göring: in exchange for protection, Reemtsma would pay an annual fee into the accounts of the SA, as well as a one-time ‘temporary allowance’ of 150,000 reichsmark. The latter was intended to cover the anticipated losses of the Sturm Company.133 According to other sources, the Reemtsma’s ‘storm obolus’, a one-time allowance, amounted to as much as 250,000 reichsmark. Even so, the money was well invested. After the OSAF’s order that stormtroopers buy only Sturm cigarettes was lifted in the summer of 1934, Dressler’s company quickly experienced financial problems and finally declared bankruptcy in 1935. In the following years Reemtsma continued to be the undisputed king of the cigarette industry in Nazi Germany. However, even after the end of the Dressler venture, references to National Socialism remained a common element of the cigarette industry, as demonstrated by brand names such as Braunhemden (Brownshirts) and Arbeitsdienst (Labour Service, probably referring to the National Socialist Reichsarbeitsdienst, the Reich Labour Service).134
Modern Crusaders
It might strike readers today as counterintuitive, but many early stormtroopers regarded their commitment to the Nazi cause as completely in line with their religious beliefs. Some of them even perceived themselves as Christian crusaders fighting against the ‘godless’ and pagan ‘Jew Republic’. Protestant National Socialists in particular advanced such views. From their perspective the Weimar Republic had abolished the formerly close bonds between throne and altar. According to the influential pro-Prussian school of historiography, this alliance had been one of the main pillars of Germany’s rise to become a world power in the nineteenth century, and consequently a revitalization of this bond was expected to lead to a national renewal. Not only did representatives of the Protestant Churches and National Socialist activists share a deep-seated contempt for democracy, but many of them also regarded a rapprochement between their two groups as promising – at least as long as the Nazi Party claimed to be interested in cooperation based on mutual respect. The upcoming ‘Third Reich’, such clergymen hoped, would be a powerful Christian empire, with the stormtroopers serving as the propagators of these ideals.135
A characteristic albeit extreme example of such beliefs was the case of Pastor Max Michalik from Altmark in the Stuhm district, which in the 1930s was part of the German province of East Prussia. According to the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, not only was this pastor the deputy party leader in the region, but he also ‘engaged in every possible way’ with the NSDAP. He is said to have regularly participated in SA evenings at the local inn, dressed in his brown shirt. He also commissioned an unemployed stormtrooper as a door-to-door salesman distributing propaganda books written by a fellow Nazi minister. Michalik offered accommodation to travelling Nazi speakers and took injured militants in as guests, transferring his parsonage into an SA recreational home. In 1930 the Altmark Brownshirts and their pastor celebrated the Holy Night under a Christmas tree decorated with swastika flags, singing National Socialist fighting songs.136 Michalik himself considered his activism as little more than a drop in the bucket. In his eyes the region he was living in was dominated by a working alliance between German and Polish Catholics who would in every way possible prevent Protestants from exercising influence.
Among German voters, he complained, the conservative DNVP and the Catholic Centre Party would dominate, whereas the Nazis even in 1932 would remain a splinter party.137
Only a minority of Protestant clergymen joined in such radical political activism for the NSDAP, but it is important to observe that most pastors, and particularly those from the influential ‘national Protestant’ wing of their churches, did not perceive SA violence as either unpatriotic or ungodly.138 The stormtroopers’ violence was at best seen as a practical, but not a fundamental, problem. Whereas Protestant church leaders regularly dismissed individual acts of rowdiness and political fanaticism committed in the frenzy of emotion, they tended to justify the strategically employed Nazi violence as a legitimate means of self-defence against the supposedly ever-intensifying Bolshevist threat. At a time when some believers perceived the political situation to be nothing less than a ‘new religious war’, the temporary ban on the SA in the spring of 1932 was tellingly compared to the persecution of Christians in late antiquity. Even Protestant youth groups were now called upon to take up the sword and at times even met for military sports in Reichswehr training areas, assembling under slogans such as ‘Christianity means fire, holy drive [heiliger Drang], battle!’139
Consequently, many pastors were willing to tolerate the presence of uniformed stormtroopers during Sunday service or on the occasion of funerals, or they even deliberately invited them – in contrast to the majority of their Catholic counterparts.140 Heinrich Rendtorff, the regional bishop of Mecklenburg, stated that ‘today, many members of the Protestant Church devote their hearts and souls to the National Socialist movement’. He warned the Nazis not to elevate Volk and race to false gods, but praised their ideal of confraternity (Brudergedanken) and acknowledged their general will to promote a ‘positive Christianity’, as laid down in point 24 of the NSDAP’s 1920 platform. Although the bishop did not express agreement with all aspects of National Socialism, he thought it paramount to respect their ‘great effort’ (großes Wollen), which he hoped would lead the people along a Christian path.141 In the same year Theophil Wurm, the regional bishop of Württemberg, spoke of the obvious duty of a German Christian to at least morally support the ‘German fight for freedom’ – a deliberate use of Nazi vocabulary that contemporaries could not have failed to understand.142
Similar to Rendtorff and Wurm, a considerable portion of the Protestant clergy in the early 1930s saw the rise of the NSDAP as a chance for their churches to again come closer to the people, particularly in the big cities.143 Kurt Hutten, a young theologian who worked as the executive director of the Evangelischer Volksbund Württemberg in 1932, compared National Socialism to a ‘ploughed field waiting for the seed of the Gospel to be sowed’.144 In the same year Pastor Gerhard Meyer from Lübeck, a member of the NSADP and its SA since 1929, called the stormtroopers modern martyrs who would follow in the footsteps of Jesus.145 And the well-known Magdeburg Cathedral preacher Ernst Martin, who between 1924 and 1928 served as a Reichstag deputy for the DNVP, in October 1932 officiated at an exclusive church service for the local SA in the city’s imposing cathedral, a Protestant lieu de mémoire ever since the sack of Magdeburg in 1631. According to the Nazis, this church service was symbolically of higher value to the ‘movement’ than a speech delivered by Hitler in the city’s civic hall.146 Such events characteristically illustrate the erosion of civic values. Although Martin had held annual church services for the Stahlhelmers throughout the 1920s, in the 1930s the SA, for him as well as for many other believers, took the place of the former as the primary group defending the nation against the sins of materialist culture and the threat of Bolshevism. It did not come as a surprise that, in March 1933, Martin joined the NSDAP and became a strong supporter of the German Christians, the pro-Nazi wing of the Protestant churches. However, as early as 1934, he publicly objected to attacks on synagogues and Jewish shops and soon lost faith in the NSDAP’s willingness to make Christian values and the fear of God central elements of the Third Reich.147
Martin’s colleague, the popular Lutheran pastor Franz Tügel from Hamburg, embraced the Nazis more enthusiastically and for a longer time, calling them in 1932 a ‘genuine popular movement of divine providence’ (schicksalsmäßig heraufgeführte Volksbewegung) that was shaped by a ‘willingness to sacrifice, by manly discipline and by trust in imminent victory’ (Opferbereitschaft, Manneszucht und Siegesfreudigkeit).148 Tügel became the Hamburg SA’s ‘foremost spiritual advisor’ and, after the Nazi takeover of power, even dressed in the brown shirt himself. He publicly rationalized the stormtroopers’ street violence as a legitimate and necessary defence of the nation and of the Christian faith.149
In neighbouring Schleswig-Holstein, however, the administration of the Evangelical-Lutheran State Church was more sceptical toward the Nazi movement. In late 1931 it published detailed guidelines about the ‘political activities of pastors’, prohibiting them from holding special services in churches for political parties and groups, from consecrating such groups’ flags and banners, from actively participating in political rallies, and from publicly wearing badges of a political party.150 That the Church in ever more German regions felt it necessary to publish such guidelines indicates that pastors engaged in such activities frequently.151 All over Germany political leanings and the practice of religion increasingly became difficult to separate.
The relationship between the stormtroopers and the Catholic Church was more complicated, due to the traditional support of the clergy for the Centre Party and their mental and programmatic reservations about National Socialism. Yet the increasing popularity of the NSDAP among Catholic voters by 1929–30 posed a serious problem in the upper levels of the Catholic clergy. How could they keep their distance from such a popular movement without alienating a considerable part of the loyal and devout churchgoers attracted to it?152 In February 1931 the bishops attempted to clarify the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Nazis, publishing a statement that condemned ‘leading representatives of National Socialism’ for placing race over religion and formally prohibited the clergy from taking part in the Nazi movement, but they remained silent on the movement’s antisemitism and its open hostility toward the Weimar Republic.153 The most pressing question – whether or not a devout Catholic layman was allowed to participate in the NSDAP and its organizations – was left to the local priests to decide. In the years that followed, the majority of the Catholic clergy remained rather cold and distant toward the NSDAP. Nevertheless, party propaganda claiming that without the SA’s defence ‘church-murdering’ Bolshevism would have swamped Germany long ago did not fail to impress many devout Catholics.154 In addition, a small but active group of Catholic clergymen publicly voiced their support for the NSDAP in the late 1920s and early 1930s. They advocated for a ‘revival of Catholic support for the NSDAP’, building on the temporary rapprochement of the two that had occurred in the early 1920s.155
Public perception of the ‘Christian respectability’ of the Nazis was certainly helped by the presence of their uniformed stormtroopers at carefully selected Sunday services, a relatively frequent sight in Protestant parts of Germany starting in the late 1920s. In Catholic areas such practices became more common only in the early 1930s. On one highly symbolic occasion about 400 Brownshirts equipped with flags and banners attended high mass in the cathedral of Regensburg in May 1930, despite the uncertain relationship between the Catholic Church and the NSDAP.156 Three years later such spectacles had been transformed from the extraordinary to the everyday. After a uniformed Munich SA unit formed a guard of honour in a ‘ceremonious and well-attended’ mass on Friday, 28 April 1933 in the Frauenkirche, celebrated by Munich Archbishop Michael von Faulhaber, men dressed in SA uniform became a familiar if still somewhat peculiar sight at Catholic masses in Bavaria.157 Regulations outlined in the Pflichtenlehre des Sturm-Abteilungsmannes (SA-Katechismus), a small brochure of SA tenets modelled after Luther’s Small Catechism and edited by SA-Obergruppenführer Hans Georg Hofmann
in 1934, explicitly stated that the Nazi movement was pledged to protect the two Christian confessions of faith, Protestants and Catholics.158 A similar booklet, entitled Der kleine Katechismus Dr. Martin Luthers für den braunen Mann, edited by the Deutsche Evangelische Männerwerk in the same year, exclusively targeted Protestant stormtroopers. It claimed that ‘we need men who are prepared to fight for their faith’. This fight was to be inspired by the ‘greatest role model of a fighter and comrade’: Jesus, the exceptional man (but not Christ).159
Against this background it seems more than a coincidence that some of the earliest and most active SA leaders had close links to the churches: Hans Ulrich Klintzsch in Munich and Horst Wessel in Berlin, for example, were both sons of Protestant pastors. Their fathers had died by the time the sons became heavily involved in the early Nazi movement.160 After the Second World War, Klintzsch is said to have aspired to become a pastor himself. From 1949 to 1952 he worked as a catechist in Schorndorf near Stuttgart, introducing schoolchildren to the doctrines of the Protestant faith.161 Even the watchmaker Emil Maurice – usually portrayed as a simple and violence-prone footman to Hitler – kept ties with the pastor of his hometown in Schleswig-Holstein. In a personal letter from 1924, Maurice offered a justification of himself and the high level of Nazi violence to this pastor, apparently longing for the approval of a man of God.162 To understand men like Klintzsch, Maurice, and Wessel, it is necessary to grasp that they perceived the political struggle of the 1920s as an eschatological battle, and themselves as modern crusaders fighting for the nation, the German race, and – ultimately – God.163 Hitler supported such views early on. At the NSDAP’s Christmas party on 17 December 1922, held in a packed Bürgerbräukeller in Munich, he praised Jesus Christ – of all people – as an exemplary model for the National Socialists. Of modest birth, Jesus was a man of high ideals who despised worldly goods and fame, and it was precisely because of this that the Jews later crucified him, Hitler claimed.164 Implicitly, he modelled his own autobiography according to his version of the Jesus story – with himself as the new ‘idealist’ and his followers as the disciples, threatened by the Jews and by the foreign occupying powers, who assumed the role of the new Romans. The police agent present at this Nazi gathering did not mention this flagrant case of blasphemy in his report but noted enthusiastically that the occasion was, ‘in a word, a pleasant and august celebration’.165 Several years later, when the SA was on the brink of becoming a mass social movement, its activists still referred to their political mission in religiously tinged language. For example, Joseph Berchtold, the first leader of the SS who in 1928 returned to the SA, prophesied the upcoming victory of the National Socialist movement by claiming that the Brownshirts were ‘the heralds of the German spring, of resurrection’.166
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