It is conceivable, however, that this was mere rhetoric which only superficially resonated with the rank and file. Consequently, we need to take a second look at how and to what extent a religious upbringing and exposure to Christian values and ideas actually influenced the behaviour of members of the SA. As recent historical research has convincingly demonstrated, at least some of the young stormtroopers understood their commitment to the Nazi movement as being in line with their religious identity. In a time when liberals and socialists seemed to dominate the political arena in many parts of Germany and its largest state, Prussia, these men felt called to raise the Christian banner. The swastika was a cross, after all. This general assertion, however, needs further refinement. The SA (as well as the NSDAP) proved highly attractive to young men in predominantly Protestant areas of Germany in particular, and it was in these areas that a phenomenon which might be called ‘Christian National Socialism’ flourished.167 Hitler himself is said to have been acutely aware of denominational differences among his followers, although his understanding of such differences was rather crude. In a 1930 conversation with Franz Pfeffer von Salomon and his Chief of Staff Otto Wagener, Hitler explained the uneven recruitment figures for the SA and the SS in the Reich with reference to a long-established cultural border, the limes Germanicus. This was the former frontier line, fortified in the second century AD, between the Roman Empire and the lands of the Teutonic tribes, which in the modern Reich divided Germany into a larger northern and a smaller southern part. North of this former border, Hitler stated, the majority of people were Protestants and were more inclined to join the SA, whereas in the predominantly Catholic German south, young men largely favoured the SS. For Hitler this difference was not a coincidence: ‘The SA attracts the militant natures among the German breed, the men who think democratically, unified only by a common allegiance. Those who throng to the SS are men inclined to the authoritarian state, who wish to serve and obey, who respond less to an idea than to a man.’168
The historian Richard Steigmann-Gall interprets Hitler’s differentiation as one between the ‘ideological substance’ of National Socialism that proved attractive to many SA men and the ‘authoritarian style’ favoured by the SS.169 Hitler’s peculiar historical explanation echoes an uncritical veneration of the ‘manly’ and strong-willed Germanic tribes, in contrast with the allegedly ‘effeminate’ and degenerate Romans – a popular historical myth since the nineteenth century that found expression in buildings like the gigantic Hermann Monument in the Teutoburg Forest, inaugurated in 1875 by Kaiser Wilhelm I.170 Hitler’s statement nevertheless contains elements that are worth exploring further, particularly regarding the question of the degree to which National Socialist ideology shared basic ideas with particular strands of evangelical Protestantism known as ‘muscular Christianity’. The analysis provided here barely touches the surface of such interrelationships, which can only be explored fully through further detailed empirical investigations.171
That many leading stormtroopers imagined themselves as Christian warriors is less surprising if one compares and contrasts the SA with other Fascist movements in interwar Europe.172 The close relationship between the Spanish and French Fascists and the Catholic Church has long been known.173 Yet in southeastern Europe, most notably in Romania, Slovakia, and Croatia, regional ultra-nationalist or Fascist militias also understood their political activism as a crusade. The Romanian Iron Guard, the Slovakian Hlinka Guards, and the Croatian UstaŠa were ‘deeply mystical movements’ that resorted to excessive violence not despite, but because of, their religious currents. As Rory Yeomans points out with regard to Croatia, ‘Many Ustasha leaders had been educated at seminaries, and, since its establishment, the Movement had been especially influential amongst theological students and the lower clergy.’174 For Corneliu Codreanu, the charismatic leader of the Romanian Fascists, it was the ‘spiritual patrimony’ that constituted the main element of his extreme nationalism, ‘because it alone bears the seal of eternity’. His idea of Fascism was a transfiguration of Christian doctrine into the realm of politics. Codreanu believed in a resurrection not only of individual human beings but also of nations and claimed that his politics ultimately followed the will of God, who had provided the Romanians with their ‘historical destiny’.175 From a trans-national perspective the sometimes close relationship between early SA activism and ideas of Christian renewal is therefore less surprising than previously thought. Without a transcendental Überbau, or superstructure, National Socialism would not have been able to unleash its ultimately deadly energies. The regulations of the SA-Katechismus put this correlation in simple terms: ‘Not only is the National Socialist movement not an enemy of the religions, but on the contrary we believe that the nation as well as the individual imperatively requires religions in order to hold command over the spiritual forces necessary to prevail in the struggle of life [. . .] We are also convinced that our entire German culture for more than one thousand years has been linked to Christianity and that it cannot be imagined without it.’176
Two years later, in 1936, however, the relationship between the NSDAP and the churches had significantly deteriorated, to the extent that the party now prohibited the wearing of party uniforms at church services.177 Nevertheless, a series of woodcut images by the artist Richard Schwarzkopf, a member of the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf, continued to give artistic expression to the fusion of National Socialism and Christianity.178 Schwarzkopf’s woodcuts show highly stylized scenes of Nazi street fighting against Bolshevist Untermenschen; in them, the Communists appear determined to kill and are stirred up by the figure of a skeleton riding a horse, a personification of Death. By contrast, the stormtroopers are depicted as quintessential husbands and fathers, defending the German soil and mourning a ‘fallen’ comrade in a scene modelled after the Lady of Pity.179 The series was showcased in 1937 at the Great German Art Exhibition in Munich and used widely in SA propaganda. From an artistic point of view, it was among the best of ‘SA art’ on offer (Plates 10 and 11).
Schwarzkopf’s six woodcuts were influenced by the long tradition of the danse macabre, an allegory of the all-conquering universal power of Death whose earliest pictorial representations date from the fifteenth century. His direct model was a cycle of six woodcuts made by the Romantic painter Alfred Rethel, who in early 1849 had depicted the social revolutionaries of his days as inveigled by a political ideology that would only bring death and destruction to the people.180 Rethel’s cycle was extremely successful after it appeared in print in May 1849, not least because conservative associations bought the prints and distributed them for free in schools and barracks. For decades to come, his woodcuts remained popular among the middle and upper classes.181 Schwarzkopf transformed Rethel’s revolutionaries of 1848 into supporters of interwar Communism, but at the same time presented a possible saviour: brown-shirted stormtroopers, the new knights in shining armour. For the first time in the history of German arts, the press in 1937 rejoiced, an artist had created a danse macabre in which not Death but Life remained victorious – an outcome heralded as a consequence of the allegedly fundamental shift toward the ‘life-affirming worldview of our times’.182 The SA’s struggle was thus elevated to an eternal fight between good and evil, between an organic nation willing to defend itself and the barren and ultimately deadly doctrine of Bolshevism. German Passion, the title of the series, directly evokes Christ and his suffering.183 The parallel to the Christian message is obvious: as Jesus Christ gave his life for the salvation of his believers, so the Nazi stormtroopers sacrificed their lives for the nation. Their ‘victory of faith’, as the title of the last woodcut proclaimed, ultimately prevailed.
Relations with the Reichswehr
The stark contrast between the self-images of these young ‘crusaders’ and the dismal realities of their actions have long inspired critical observers to dismiss the Nazi self-image as the fantasy of an initially small group of misguided men who were unfit for modern life. The G
erman scholar Joachim C. Fest was among the first to speak of the National Socialists as a ‘veritable lost generation’. In his view its members were lastingly shaped by their experiences in the Freikorps and other nationalistic paramilitary formations in which they ‘expressed their inability to live in a civilized way’ by practising a ‘radically tempered adventurism’ and committing outright criminal acts that were barely concealed behind a facade of patriotism.184 Consequently, Fest identified the ‘nihilism in rank and file’ (Nihilismus in Reih und Glied) as one of the central features of the Nazi stormtrooper units. The profoundly disturbing personal and cultural experiences of the first modern war on European soil had nourished such nihilism, Fest argued. The SA had to be understood as a product of the dynamism of the war youth generation coupled with a ‘purposeful revolutionary will’ that made it ‘almost irresistible’, he admitted, and devoid of any sympathy for the SA.185
However, such statements easily overshadow the fact that by the late 1920s the ‘adventurers’ of the SA were increasingly attracting the interest of the regular armed forces. In particular, younger Reichswehr officers came to see the NSDAP’s paramilitaries less as dangerous rivals than as potential allies. Against the background of rising tensions in Germany and the ever more apparent weakness of its democratic regime, the Reichswehr from 1929 onward began to explore political alternatives. As is well known, the alliance between the army and the SPD, being the strongest democratic party after the war, was from the start no permanent love match but a temporary liaison. Although the Social Democrats more than once relied on the Reichswehr to put down Communist uprisings, the army only proved willing to support democratic politics as long as this system was seen as the only viable one among worse outcomes – be they a foreign invasion or a successful Communist takeover of power. After the November revolution of 1918 the German military repeatedly complained about the erosion of authority that ‘came with the defeat and collapse of the monarchy’.186 The following statement by Horst von Metzsch, in the 1920s one of the most prolific military writers in all of Germany, was characteristic. He wrote that for generations the great military heroes of Germany’s past had provided ‘far better prophets, more selfless friends, and more visionary pedagogues for the German people’ than had the democratic politicians of the day, whom he defamed as ‘demagogues [. . .] of the masses’.187
It was precisely this perception of visionary pedagogy that led some young Reichswehr officers to make contact with the rising NSDAP in the late 1920s.188 Although the relations between the Reichswehr leadership and the Nazis remained officially strained, the two groups were increasingly connected by their shared goal of intensifying the military education of German youth despite existing Allied restrictions. On 15 March 1929, Hitler in a public speech proposed transforming the existing Reichswehr into a proper people’s army (Volksheer), an idea that was followed by similar statements in the months to come.189 At about the same time Richard Scheringer, Hans Friedrich Wendt, and Hanns Elard Ludin, three young lieutenants from the Fifth Artillery Regiment based in Ulm, started to discuss possible solutions for what they perceived as the most urgent problem of the Reichswehr and a major moral conflict: the challenge of remaining loyal to a ‘pacifist’ government that prevented the necessary restoration of the Reichswehr to its former greatness and thereby threatened the security of the nation. Although many young career officers had already developed sympathies for the NSDAP, the three lieutenants were among the first to officially engage in talks with the SA, a move that legally qualified as high treason. All three were taken into custody in March 1930, indicted, and sentenced on 4 October by the Reichsgericht in Leipzig to one and a half years of detention.190
Today, the so-called ‘Ulm Reichswehr Trial’ is best remembered because it was on this occasion that Hitler, called to the witness box, publicly asserted that his party would attempt to gain power only by legal means and no longer through a violent overthrow of the government. The trial was, however, also an important event that contributed to a further rapprochement between revolutionary-minded officers and the Nazi movement precisely because those officers who sympathized with the National Socialists felt humiliated by the trial’s outcome and the fact that they stood trial at all. The violent conduct of the SA did not deter this growing connection, as ‘the military ethos’ of the time likewise ‘believed that the failure or the betrayal of politics could be repaired by the virtues of violence’.191
The trial ultimately radicalized its key figures, albeit in different ways. Richard Scheringer converted to Communism during this time, while Hanns Ludin after his release joined the NSDAP. Ludin, the son of a gymnasium headmaster in Freiburg, represented the party in the Reichstag from July 1932 onward and was appointed leader of the SA--Gruppe Südwest on 1 April 1933.192 Both men, who remained friends for the rest of their lives despite their different political leanings, regarded themselves as members of an ‘activist generation through and through’. They wanted to be seen as idealists who, faced with the difficult task of reconciling their oath as professional soldiers with the duties of a German patriot, had opted for the latter.193 Ludin at the time appeared a well-mannered and aesthetically inclined young man who only later adapted to the rough manners of the SA, Ernst Niekisch remembered, basing his judgement on a personal meeting in 1932 and later rumours.194 By contrast, the young radical historian Eckart Kehr in 1930 sharply but prophetically criticized the younger Reichswehr officers for their lack of courage: ‘The Reichswehr officer corps always looks for the Führer, the great man; they desire to be ordered about as the Praetorian Guard, yet they don’t want to inquire as to the reason for this command.’195
The public notoriety of lieutenants like Ludin added to the growing respectability of the SA among the middle and upper classes in Germany in the early 1930s and the public perception of them as figureheads for the successful merger of German military tradition, Bildung, patriotic pride, and the fighting spirit. Even members of the aristocracy, who certainly had no interest in levelling social differences, had complex views of the SA in the early 1930s, particularly when they were young.196 The later leader of the German military resistance effort against Hitler, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, born in 1907 and therefore – like Ludin and Scheringer – a member of the war youth generation, as a Reichswehr lieutenant during the last years of the Weimar Republic moved freely within the esoteric and highly elitist circle of young men who gathered around the famous poet Stefan George and met nightly in illegal training courses that Stauffenberg organized for the SA.197 As his sympathetic biographer Peter Hoffmann notes, the idea of a militia-based army, included in paragraph 22 of the Nazi Party platform of 1920 and strongly advocated throughout the early 1930s by SA Chief of Staff Ernst Röhm in particular, enjoyed widespread sympathy among aspiring military leaders like Stauffenberg.198 The Reichswehr in the early 1930s offered training courses for the SA in ‘nearly all garrison towns’, one former instructor later remembered.199 The army hoped to win over and transform the SA into a kind of Notpolizei, or ‘auxiliary police’, which could be called on in times of domestic upheaval or foreign attack.200 In turn, Röhm restructured the SA according to military needs in February 1931.201
From the perspective of many nationalist Germans, a political movement that could win over men like Stauffenberg and mobilize their fellow Germans across social classes was worth serious consideration. Regardless of the fact that the SA’s practices were at least as violent and aggressive as those of its competitors, many contemporary observers from the middle and upper classes framed them differently. Whereas these groups perceived the political violence of the left as a serious threat to law and order, they excused Nazi violence as a regretful but necessary and therefore ultimately legitimate means of national self-defence. By early 1932 the NSDAP estimated that nine out of ten Reichswehr members were sympathetic or loyal to the party.202 Although this figure seems excessively optimistic, it sheds light on the exuberant confidence felt among the Natio
nal Socialist leadership corps. And, regardless of the questionable factual accuracy of these estimates, the following years would undoubtedly prove that the party was right in its assumption that no sustained resistance against the implementation of Nazi policies could be expected from the German military.
PART II
Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts Page 20