Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts
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TERROR, EXCITEMENT, AND FRUSTRATION
‘Calm and order’ is the battle-cry of the pensioner, but ultimately one cannot run a state to suit the needs of just pensioners.
— Ernst Röhm, 19281
On 1 February 1933, two days after Hitler was appointed Reich chancellor, the influential liberal Berlin newspaper Vossische Zeitung published a front-page editorial entitled ‘The German Man’, written by Erich Koch-Weser, the former leader of the liberal German Democratic Party (DDP) and Reich Minister of Justice from 1928 to 1929. The newspaper editors, under the spell of the victory parade of more than 10,000 SA men through the Brandenburg Gate, considered Koch-Weser’s analysis of the present times (which was actually an extract from his forthcoming book Und dennoch aufwärts, literally ‘Upwards, in spite of everything!’) a relevant comment on the new government. Although in the first part of his article Koch-Weser lamented in a rather conventional style the negative effects of modern society, in the second part he dissected the recent successes of the Nazi movement in an instructive way. As former Reich Minister of Justice, he had first-hand knowledge of the crimes committed by the SA in previous years. The Nazi appeal, Koch-Weser stated, first and foremost had to be understood as an indicator of widespread frustration:
The German man, in realizing that he cannot push through his own agenda, suddenly bows down to an extrinsic and brutal will. Feeling his inner strife as well as the fragmentation of the people around him, he calls for the strongman and a powerful state, to whom he hands himself in blind obedience. He refuses to justify his allegiance, to himself as well as to others [. . .] If he is not deemed worth anything, at least the large crowd he belongs to should. He snaps out of debates he cannot cope with and instead proceeds to action. Politics of ideas are rejected in favour of the politics of things and men. National Socialism with its superficial fuss, its mass gatherings and its displays of military power is to be understood as such a protest, directed against ideas and against personality. Sure enough, by parading through the streets in proud uniforms, you still feel yourself a personality. Sure enough, by mixing the noble platitudes of the Imperial era with the popular socialist catchwords, you can still believe you are standing up for ideas. Sure enough, by running behind a ‘Führer’, you can think of yourself as actively pursuing a cult of personality. In reality, however, it is the might and the masses that attract people, and the primitiveness that tempts them.2
Certainly, a critical stance toward the masses had been fashionable among European intellectuals since Gustave Le Bon published his influential Psychologie des foules in 1895.3 However, Koch-Weser’s observations went beyond popular cultural pessimism. They struck at the heart of the Nazi psyche of 1933, giving a plausible reason for the sudden paradoxical feeling of resentment and aggression experienced by many SA men at the alleged moment of triumph.4
This chapter explores in a threefold way the widespread terror carried out by the SA – first and foremost against the political left and the Jews5 – which was a central factor in the establishment of the Hitler dictatorship: first, as direct physical assaults that intimidated, hurt, and killed thousands of people all over Germany; second, as a message that communicated the new Nazi code of behaviour to everyone, friends and foes alike; and third, as an expression of the long-pent-up emotions felt by stormtroopers that in the previous years had contributed so decisively to the appeal of National Socialism. However, one should not overestimate the unifying power of these outbreaks. In contrast to Elias Canetti, who in his famous study Crowds and Power defined this ‘discharge’ of the crowd as the decisive moment when all who belonged to it could ‘get rid of their differences and feel equal’,6 I aim to demonstrate that the convulsions of Nazi terror and violence in 1933, besides achieving strategic gains, created at best temporary relief and certainly did not bring about harmony within an increasingly amplified, but internally fractured National Socialist camp.
Mixed Feelings and New Opportunities
With Hitler’s appointment as Reich chancellor, the widespread pessimism that had spread among the SA men in the autumn of 1932 gave way to a new period of excitement and hope. From the perspective of many activists, the vision of a Third Reich, imagined as a racial and social community of Germans in which the stormtroopers’ political commitment would be symbolically and materially rewarded, now seemed a realistic possibility, just one final effort away. In February and March 1933 the Reich government and the governments of the federal states not only started to ban leftist organizations but also liquidated many of the nationalist paramilitary groups. The SPD-dominated Reichsbanner and the ‘Iron Front’ were prohibited on 10 March 1933 and were followed two weeks later by the right-wing Jungdeutscher Orden (Jungdo), the Bund Oberland, the Bayernwacht, and Stennes’s Black Guards.7 At about the same time overambitious stormtroopers, who were eager to provoke the Polish armed forces with the aim of resuming the clashes that had broken out after the conclusion of the First World War, were ordered to stay away from the borders.8 To the frustration of many in the SA, the creation and then consolidation of the Third Reich took priority over territorial matters until the second half of the 1930s.
The conquest of the Weimar state and its transformation into a modern dictatorship went hand in hand not only with waves of terror against all those the Nazis deemed foes, but also with an outbreak of often contradictory feelings: revenge, hate, rage, and excitement. The forty-five-year-old Gerhard Ritter, a professor at the University of Freiburg and later an eminent historian of the early Federal Republic of Germany, in mid-February 1933 claimed that the new German mood reminded him of a ‘National Socialist alcohol frenzy’ (national-sozialistischer Rauschtrank).9 Similarly, the psychiatrist Alexander Mitscherlich in his 1980 autobiography Ein Leben für die Psycholanalyse remembered the time as being dominated by a ‘general consensus, a nationwide, indeed, an almost ecstatic, alignment [rauschhaftes Einschwenken]’. He had been aware of the early concentration camps in the spring of 1933, Mitscherlich added, but had perceived them only as a somewhat ‘latent threat’.10 Franz Göll, an ordinary Berliner who chronicled his life meticulously, never forgot the ‘rejoicing of the masses’ and described his own feeling in 1933 of having ‘fallen into a delirium’ – a feeling that did not last long, however.11
Whether from excitement or as a matter of caution, the majority of Germans trimmed their sails to the new wind. Membership in the SA now became more attractive than ever. Entire shooting associations and gymnastic clubs requested acceptance into the SA, ideally as Sonderformationen, or special units.12 Party members seized these opportunities so eagerly that long-time National Socialists expressed fears that the gold-rush mood within the party would bring self-seeking motives to the fore. Elfriede Conti, the wife of Leonardo Conti, an SA member who since 1928 had been the preferred physician of the NSDAP in the Berlin-Brandenburg Gau and was later promoted to Reichsgesundheitsführer and State Secretary in the Interior Ministry, as early as 3 March 1933 noted: ‘Unselfish people seem to have become nearly extinct in Germany! My experience with the hunt for office, in the dark or in plain daylight, by the powerful and by the powerless, first and foremost taught me a lesson of contempt for mankind.’13 In the spring of 1933 the term Märzgefallene – meaning ‘March windfalls’ or, literally, ‘March Fallen’ – made an unexpected comeback. Originally used to designate those who had been killed during the early days of the 1848 revolution, it was now sardonically adopted to refer to the 1.7 million Germans who joined the Nazi Party between January and late April of 1933 (Plate 15).
The stormtroopers were among those who benefited from the new opportunities. In the words of Karl Ernst, the leader of the SA-Gruppe Berlin-Brandenburg: ‘It is a matter of course that the fighters of the SA must not be excluded from the manifold advantages that the new state is able and obliged to provide them.’14 The provision of employment for Nazi partisans, a task that the official language of the regime glorified as the ‘battle for work’ (Ar
beitsschlacht), ranked particularly high on the party’s agenda. As early as June 1933 the German employers’ associations, the employment agencies of the Reich, and representatives of the SA and the Stahlhelm agreed to a set of principles for a ‘special action’ (Sonderaktion) that would provide members of the SA, the SS, and the Stahlhelm with privileged access to jobs – on condition that the men in question had joined these organizations prior to 30 January 1933 and thus qualified as ‘Old Fighters’.15 In order to make sure that municipal jobs and public contracts would be given preferentially to true members of the SA, and not to their recently discovered ‘friends’ and ‘cousins’, so-called SA-Verbindungsführer, or SA liaison officers, were established at several levels of the municipal and state bureaucracies. In some places such liaison officers did hardly more than collect the papers of unemployed stormtroopers and pass them on to regular employment agencies. In other places, such as the city of Detmold in Lippe, the SA successfully took control of the job market. In this town it formed a powerful executive committee within the local job agency that was composed of newly hired stormtroopers who ruthlessly pushed their interests through.16
By the autumn of 1933 the SA’s influence had been extended to the semi-private and private sectors. In the capital, the SA-Brigade Berlin-Mitte appointed a ‘consultant for the provision of employment’ (Arbeitsbeschaffungsreferent), who forced local companies to hire substantial numbers of unemployed militants under threat of being excluded from public contracts or accused of sabotage.17 Previously unemployed SA men also found ‘shelter’ in the Association of Local Health Insurance (AOK) and private insurance companies and banks, in which low-paid jobs were filled and at times newly created for this group.18 For employers, such recruitment seemed the order of the day, a suitable way to demonstrate national responsibility and political compliance. For ordinary people, and particularly the Jews, such behaviour contributed to the surprisingly quick Nazification of the German public sphere, which, in turn, fostered a retreat into the intimacy of the family wherever possible.19 Precise figures on how many German men benefited from the National Socialist ‘battle for work’ in 1933 are not available, but in light of the significant decline in numbers of unemployed stormtroopers between 1933 and 1935, it is safe to assume that the majority of them in one way or another profited from SA aid, whether outside legal bounds or through the official job placement programmes.20
Yet despite such preferential treatment, not all stormtroopers could be successfully provided with jobs – and not only because the remaining few consisted largely of ex-convicts, handicapped persons, and persons over sixty, as the Nuremberg job centre in July 1934 sardonically noted.21 Certainly, in the days following the ‘Night of the Long Knives’, widespread public frustration with the autocratic SA found expression in such dismissive characterizations. Yet there was unquestionably a lasting mismatch between the self-image of many ‘Old Fighters’ and their professional qualifications that often did not allow them to occupy even the most basic positions. Furthermore, many of the stormtroopers did not like the jobs available, which were usually in construction work or farm labour, preferring ‘clean’ office jobs. In the latter domain, however, the Alte Kämpfer were forced to compete with better-educated men who had joined the NSDAP and its organizations only recently.
As a consequence, early Nazi activists of lower rank and modest educational background soon began to express contempt for those Germans who had not previously been involved in the Nazi movement. From the SA’s perspective it was scandalous that the experienced ‘streetfighters’ who had allegedly risked their health and lives for the Nazi cause could not reap the fruits of their previous labour, but had to struggle against a quickly growing number of opportunists.22 Across the nation, the more than sixty SA-Hilfswerklager, or ‘welfare camps’, that housed up to 20,000 men in 1933 and 1934 developed into centres of local unrest and dissatisfaction, despite the fact that the salaries paid to SA leaders in these camps were more than generous compared to the economic misery most Germans were suffering at the time.23 In contrast to their superiors, however, the barracked rank-and-file stormtroopers received only very modest weekly allowances. Not surprisingly, small-scale benefits granted by city administrations to the SA, such as reduced entrance rates for public swimming pools, the allocation of city buildings for SA purposes, and exempted taxes for SA messenger dogs, did not pacify party activists.24 Violent clashes with the local population in bars and taverns made the SA’s Hilfswerklager fairly unpopular among the public. These incidents were often provoked by intoxicated Nazis from the camps who committed acts of vandalism, threatened local dignitaries with arrest, or used their guns to go trout ‘fishing’.25
This economic and social background must be taken into account when assessing the stormtrooper violence of the early years of the Third Reich. It hardly needs mentioning that, first and foremost, such violence was directed against the Nazis’ real and perceived political and ideological opponents: Communists, Socialists, unionists, and Jews. In addition, however, this violence more and more became a message to those within the Nazi camp that demanded respect for the SA’s ambitions and a fulfilment of the social promises made to them. That several SA leaders quickly rose to positions of power and considerable income did not do much to calm the unrest within the party. It gave these leaders the financial and sometimes also the social capital to support their subordinates, but it also quickly widened the gap between the party establishment and its followers.
An incident from the city of Koblenz illustrates the growing expectations of the SA leadership as well as popular dissatisfaction with their ever more autocratic habits. On 17 April 1934 a ‘higher SA leader’ who was house-hunting ran an advertisement in a local newspaper looking for a ‘modern apartment with 5–6 rooms, with all modern conveniences’, preferably located close to the River Rhine, a good address.26 Although it was and still is common in Germany to use one’s professional status to convince landlords of one’s respectability, this ad aroused criticism. An alleged ‘old Party member’ complained about it in an anonymous letter to Rudolf Hess, who in 1933 was appointed Deputy Führer to Adolf Hitler. The writer argued that the wording of the ad had created negative feelings among the people of the town. Everyone would agree, he added, that a high-ranking SA official who would make such demands clearly ‘lacked National Socialist spirit and conviction’.27 The social divide between the upper SA leadership and the foot soldiers, characteristic of the SA since the days of Pfeffer von Salomon, was never overcome, despite all party propaganda to the contrary.28
Hunting and Humiliating the Enemy
With Hitler appointed Reich chancellor of the new nationalist government, the Communist Party (KPD) expected to be formally banned and prepared to become illegal. The Nazis, however, opted to engage in barely disguised terrorism instead of respecting legal procedures. The burning of the Reichstag building on the night of 27–28 February 1933 was used by the Nazis both as a highly symbolic event and as a pretext for the systematic persecution of their political enemies. The parliament building was still in flames when police forces, supported by the SA and the SS, started to raid the KPD offices and the homes of their activists and supporters, arresting them using previously compiled blacklists. Not least because of this temporal coincidence, many contemporaries assumed that the Nazis had been directly involved in the arson. In contrast, the post-1945 historiography largely embraced the so-called ‘single-perpetrator thesis’, identifying the Dutch anarchist Marinus van der Lubbe as the only culprit, acting as a lone wolf.29 Recent research by historian Benjamin Hett and others, however, has successfully challenged this long-held view. Hett has convincingly argued that it is indeed most likely that a special group of stormtroopers with detailed knowledge of explosives set fire to the building on the orders of Karl Ernst and Göring.30
While the causes of this event are still a matter of debate, there is no disagreement about its consequences. The emergency ‘Decree of the Reich President for
the Protection of People and State’, signed by Hindenburg on the afternoon of 28 February 1933, suspended key civil rights guaranteed by the Weimar constitution. In the weeks following, the Nazis used this decree as justification for their ruthless campaign to track down all those who stood in their way. In Berlin alone 1,500 Communists, ranging from the rank and file to high party functionaries and even members of parliament, a clear breach of the latter’s immunity, were incarcerated in immediate reaction to the Reichstag fire. Ultimately, the Nazi raids effectively destroyed most of the party structures that existed on the local and regional levels. In Leipzig the Nazis took 476 people into ‘protective custody’ in March 1933. By April, SA and regular police forces in the Ruhr and the Rhineland had arrested as many as 8,000 Communist Party functionaries. In Bavaria the number of arrests amounted to 3,000, while in the district of Halle, it was as high as 1,400, and in Baden in the southwest as high as 900.31 A second large group of victims was, of course, the Jews. Ideological prejudices and economic interests coalesced in this wave of persecution. The best illustration can be found in the Nazi boycott actions of March and April 1933. In these months stormtroopers not only stood guard in front of Jewish shops and painted antisemitic slogans on their walls, but also abused Jewish tradesmen and their families, often to the gratification of the victims’ business competitors (Plate 12).32
It is impossible to determine the precise number of Nazi victims during this period. The New York Evening Sun reported on 8 April 1933 that Hitler himself had estimated the ‘rebirth of Germany’ had cost 330 lives, with an additional 40,000 wounded and 100,000 driven from commercial life.33 Hitler, however, in giving these figures, had in mind the Nazi ‘victims’ of the previous ‘years of struggle’, not those Germans whom his followers had hunted down, incarcerated, and murdered in the weeks after his accession to the chancellorship. From today’s perspective, even a conservative estimate has to assume that the Nazis interned more than 80,000 people over the course of 1933. More than 500 people, and maybe even twice as many, were killed directly by the Nazis or died later as a result of beatings and torture.34