Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts

by Daniel Siemens

  Even if, for obvious reasons, the SA attempted to impose its will on the German judiciary in a particularly forceful manner, this effort was only one element of a larger project that aimed at nothing less than the total control of the national and state bureaucracies. In order to achieve this aim, Röhm appointed so-called special representatives who were to ‘take immediate and urgent corrective action against friction that occurs’ during the Nazi takeover of power.126 SA leaders were encouraged to oversee virtually all aspects of the political and social transformation of the public administration, a clear example of Röhm’s attempt to consolidate the SA’s preeminent role in the process of Machtergreifung (takeover of power). Röhm’s claims were as clear as they were presumptuous, blatantly dismissing legalistic concerns: ‘The special representatives need to push their interests through ruthlessly. I demand of them an energetic and target-oriented presence.’127

  Such special representatives were appointed in most German states, including Prussia, Bavaria, and Württemberg. In some parts of Germany their power did not last longer than a few months, as the regular state administration quickly became embarrassed by their energetic but unbureaucratic new masters. In Württemberg, for example, the special representatives’ term of office came to an end as early as May 1933.128 In Prussia and Bavaria, however, the SA’s special representatives (Sonderbevollmächtigte as well as Sonderbeauftragte) remained in office until the days following Röhm’s death on 1 July 1934.129 Special representatives were even installed at universities, but the civil authorities soon realized that their way of ‘doing business’ had a damaging effect on the institutions’ academic reputations and thus soon stopped this unhappy liaison between politics and science.130 However, as late as 9 March 1934, Röhm was still declaring that the civil administrations and the SA’s special representatives were both called to work for the common goal of the ‘build-up of the state in the interest of the National Socialist movement and its revolution’. In particular, he urged all ministries to contact the special representatives prior to making decisions that concerned the SA. This request was less ambitious than those made one year previously and indicated the regained strength of the traditional state bureaucracy, which as a rule despised the often rough and seldom properly qualified stormtroopers. Yet, had Röhm’s demands been satisfied, this would have resulted in the SA continuing to exercise a kind of political control over the state administrations and the elevation of Röhm into a second ruler in Bavaria, next to Reichskommissar Franz von Epp.131

  In reality, Röhm never ascended to such heights. A closer look at the special representatives in Bavaria nevertheless demonstrates to what extent they helped him secure power and influence. In Bavaria between 12 March and September 1933 the OSAF appointed 133 special representatives (Sonderbeauftragte) and special agents (Sonderbevollmächtigte), who each earned between 125 and 300 reichsmark per month (starting on 1 October, their pay rose to 200 and 400 reichsmark, respectively).132 When combined with related expenses, this resulted in costs to the state of at least 371,520 reichsmark for the year 1933, according to the Bavarian Finance Ministry. However, the real costs were considerably higher, as the SA leadership also demanded at least an extra 100,000 reichsmark from the Bavarian state, to be spent at its discretion. The authorities in the autumn of 1933 did not fail to remark that all payments for the SA’s special representatives had been disbursed illegally, as a legal basis for such payments did not exist.133 However, in a meeting on 20 October 1933 between Röhm and the Bavarian Prime Minister, Ludwig Siebert, the latter agreed to pay Röhm 25,000 reichsmark per month, including retroactive payments as far back as 1 September, to be used primarily for the special representatives.134 This provided Röhm with the financial means to sustain his autocratic rule over the Bavarian SA in the following months. After Röhm’s execution on 1 July 1934, his bank informed the authorities that besides a private bank account containing nearly 40,000 reichsmark, he had also maintained a checking account entitled SA-Spendenfonds des Stabschefs Ernst Röhm, München worth 56,000 reichsmark.135

  The Integration of the Stahlhelmers

  In the first twelve months after Hitler was appointed chancellor, the SA grew dramatically. While there had been fewer than 430,000 stormtroopers in Germany by late 1932, their number rose to four million by April 1934.136 A decisive factor in this spectacular growth was Röhm’s successful attempt to integrate the majority of the members of previously competing organizations into the SA. Most prominent among those groups was the Stahlhelm, the nationalist paramilitary organization popular among the German middle class and the aristocracy, which in 1932 still boasted about 500,000 members and thus surpassed the SA by several 10,000 men.137

  Up to 1933 the relationship between the SA and the Stahlhelm was marked by a general consensus on the rejection of liberal democracy, despite obvious differences in the class affiliation of the groups’ bases and their fighting tactics. Between 1923 and 1933 the Stahlhelm had been transformed from a genuine veterans’ organization to a kind of ‘surrogate Reichswehr’.138 Against this background the rise of the paramilitary SA constituted a thorn in the flesh of the Stahlhelm, even if both organizations on the local level continued to cooperate in joint ‘patriotic’ rallies and protests against political rivals.139 Yet the youthful activism of the stormtroopers starting in the mid-1920s contributed to a deepening rift with the Stahlhelm, whose members continued to regard the Fronterlebnis in the First World War as the central criterion for leadership. Consequently, Stahlhelmers too young to have fought in the war were required to accept a subordinate role in the organization, regardless of the level of their everyday commitment. Not surprisingly, ever more Jungstahlhelmers therefore began to see the Nazi SA as a model to follow, a young organization that not only allowed but forcefully encouraged its members to prove themselves in battle against an ideological enemy who was depicted as at least as dangerous as the Allies of the Great War, even if these battles were for the time being only fought in the German streets.140

  In reaction to this tendency the leaders of the Stahlhelm increasingly distanced themselves from the ‘plebeian’ yet ‘pretentious’ SA. Typical of the confrontational style of the leaders of both organizations was a statement of Gottlob Berger, later a general in the SS. In 1932, when he was still a member of the SA-Untergruppe Württemberg, Berger described the situation in his region as follows: ‘We fight each other. The spoiled sons of the aristocracy [Herrensöhnchen] and the calcified active officers set the tone in the Stahlhelm. In the countryside we now start to organize riders’ storms [Reiterstürme] and thereby do the best possible harm to the Stahlhelm.’141 On the other side, Theodor Duesterberg, with Franz Seldte one of the two national leaders of the Stahlhelm, made no attempt to hide his contempt for the SA. In a speech delivered to Stahlhelmers in the capital in early February 1933 he expressed embarrassment that ‘fully fledged shirkers and juveniles who during World War I were still in their swaddling clothes or went to school’ now dared to openly accuse the Stahlhelmers of a lack of patriotism.142

  Duesterberg, who had run for president in April 1932 and won more than two and a half million votes, insisted in the spring of 1933 on the Stahlhelm’s independence from the Nazi movement. Seldte, however, adapted more flexibly to the political changes and quickly outmanoeuvred his co-leader. Since 30 January 1933 he had served as Reich Minister for Labour and as such had a seat in the Cabinet. He joined the NSDAP on 27 April 1933 and in the following weeks and months negotiated what turned out to become a step-by-step integration of the Stahlhelm into the SA.143 The concerns of sceptical Stahlhelmers who feared that their organization would be turned into a ‘second-class SA’ were pushed aside.144 As early as June 1933 Jungstahlhelmers were transferred into the SA, while the members of the Scharnhorst Bund, the youth organization of the Stahlhelm, were integrated into the HJ.145 In the following month a separation was established between the Wehrstahlhelm, which comprised all Stahlhelmers up to the age of thirty-five, and the Stahl
helm. The leader of the Wehrstahlhelm, Elhard von Moroczowicz, became a member of the OSAF and was charged with the task of ‘bring[ing] the Wehrstahlhelm into the SA’.146 On 6 November 1933, Röhm finally implemented a new structure for the considerably enlarged SA. There now existed three different sub-groups. First, there was the ‘active’ SA, which comprised all regular SA and SS men between eighteen and thirty-five years of age, including the more than 300,000 former Wehrstahlhelmers who had been integrated into the organization the previous July. Second, there was the ‘SA-Reserve I’ (SA-R I), in which all former Stahlhelm members between thirty-six and forty-five were organized.147 Third, an ‘SA-Reserve II’ (SA-R II) consisting of men over the age of forty-five (i.e. members of the Kyffhäuserbund, other veterans’ organizations, and colonial lobby groups) was established and placed under the control of Röhm and his SA.148 As of 28 March 1934 the remains of the Stahlhelm were referred to as Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Frontkämpferbund (NSDFB). Already the new name indicated that the days of the independent Stahlhelm had passed.149

  The Nazification of German Academia

  By the end of 1933 the Nazis had acquired complete political and symbolic control over Germany. The journeyman Patrick Leigh Fermor’s first impression of the small city of Goch, situated at the Lower Rhine close to the border with the Netherlands, can be taken as fairly representative. The then eighteen-year-old noted that ‘the town was hung with National Socialist flags and the window of an outfitter’s shop next door held a display of Party equipment: swastika arm-bands, daggers for the Hitler Youth, blouses for Hitler Maidens and brown shirts for grown-up S.A. men; swastika button-holes were arranged in a pattern which read Heil Hitler and an androgynous wax-dummy with a pearly smile was dressed up in the full uniform of a Sturmabteilungsmann.’150 In the memoirs of his journey on foot to Constantinople in 1933 and 1934 that would make him famous decades later, Leigh Fermor recalled several encounters with SA men while hiking through the hibernal western and northern parts of Germany. Writing with hindsight, he remarked on a certain mismatch that existed between his actual memories and his historical knowledge. In the same city of Goch the young Leigh Fermor encountered a bunch of SA men in a local tavern who ‘looked less fierce without their horrible caps. One or two, wearing spectacles, might have been clerks or students.’151 These SA men started singing popular folk songs. Leigh Fermor remembered the situation as ‘charming’ and stated that ‘the charm made it impossible, at that moment, to connect the singers with organized bullying and the smashing of Jewish shop windows and nocturnal bonfires of books’.152

  This observation reminds us of the complexities of the SA’s appearance in the first one and a half years of the Third Reich. Not all stormtroopers of the time engaged in physical violence, burned books, or guarded and tortured inmates of the early concentration camps. The short-lived episode of the SA-Hochschulamt (literally, the SA University Office) and its regional branches demonstrates this diversity.153 On 9 September 1933, Hitler ordered the establishment of the SA-Hochschulamt, which was located at Berlin’s Wilhelmstraße and headed by SA-Brigade General Heinrich Bennecke, an early Nazi activist and a trained historian who held a PhD from Leipzig University.154 The task of the SA University Office was to educate every student at a German university physically and mentally ‘in the spirit of the forerunners of the German revolution’, which meant heavy ideological indoctrination as well as constant physical exercises.155 This new orientation was an important aspect of the Gleichschaltung, the forcible coordination, of the German universities. Intellectual training and contemplation from this time on mattered far less than physical boldness and mental determination, for the National Socialists first and foremost understood leadership as the toughness to push one’s will through, regardless of the quality of the arguments employed. It was the personality and charisma of the new generation of academic leaders that counted, not their reasoning. Adolf Hitler had expressed such views as early as 1922, when he urged the male youth of Munich to join the nascent SA: ‘The boy who does not find the way to where the destiny of his people is campaigned for in a good way now, who at this crucial moment prefers to study philosophy and sits behinds his books or is a stay-at-home, such a boy is not a German boy!’156

  Whereas Hitler’s anti-intellectual statement in 1922 expressed the opinion of a radical minority in Germany, for a short time in 1933 and 1934 such views were highly popular. At Rostock University, for example, as many as 71 per cent of all students enrolled in 1933 were members of the SA.157 Yet even in light of the inclination of substantial parts of the male student youth population to embrace the ideas of National Socialism since the second half of the 1920s, the initial plans of the newly founded SA-Hochschulämter were extremely ambitious, as the example of Munich illustrates. There, the adjutant leader of the city’s regional branch of the SA University Office, the twenty-three-year-old law student Karl Gengenbach, in a letter to State Minister Hermann Esser from 24 January 1934 outlined a set of plans that in practice would have resulted in a complete transformation of German student life.158 He urged that male students be educated and trained during their first three semesters with the ultimate aim of winning every student over to the SA. While freshmen during their first semester would only be subjected to political indoctrination, male student life during the following two semesters would be largely devoted to the SA. Besides weekly three-hour ‘theory lessons’, students would be required to take part in four hours of practical training that comprised shooting exercises, marching, and the vaguely defined ‘political education according to the standards of the SA’. In addition, weeks of practical military training and field exercises in nearby SA camps would occupy most weeks of the student holidays. However, the SA University Office in Munich lacked the necessary facilities to train the approximately 2,000 second- and third-semester students who were enrolled in the city’s universities every year. Gengenbach therefore made plans to build a large SA training and sports camp that could accommodate up to 800 students in Oberstdorf, a popular tourist spot in the Allgäu Alps. As the SA-Hochschulämter were shut down shortly after the ‘Röhm Putsch’, it is unlikely that these plans ever materialized, but from Gengenbach’s surviving correspondence with the Bavarian authorities, it seems that large parts of the 250,000 reichsmark necessary for the construction of the school were secured, then promised by the Bavarian Ministry of Culture and the municipality of Oberstdorf, which saw the plan as a great opportunity to increase tourism in the region.159

  At another prestigious German university, in Heidelberg, SA paramilitary training courses were in full swing by 1934. As in Munich, starting in the summer semester of 1934, male students in their first and second years were obliged to participate in SA field exercises. One of the participants in the spring of 1934 was the twenty-one-year-old Felix Hartlaub, who was then studying Romance philology and history and would become one of Germany’s most talented young writers of the 1930s and early 1940s.160 In a letter to his father, the museum director Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, young Felix in 1934 described the atmosphere of such SA training exercises at some length. Having participated in them for several weeks, his impressions were mixed. On the one hand, he was critical of most of his fellow students, who did not behave in a comradely fashion but were overambitious and selfish, without any ‘proper soldierly ethos’. Their methods of socializing were dominated by the ‘heavy drinking intimacy’ (Bierinnigkeit) of corps students. Among them, no traces of the new ‘manly community spirit’ could be found (Plate 16). On the other hand, Hartlaub was impressed by the SA leadership corps who organized these training courses, many of whom he perceived to be ‘great fellows’ (großartige Typen). None of them were of the ‘unpleasant type of non-commissioned officers’, Hartlaub wrote, alluding to the bad reputation that lower-ranked military leaders had had since the First World War. Instead, the young student praised the combination of the military and the ideological beliefs and skills of the party’s most dedicated activists and sup
porters (weltanschauliches Parteijüngertum) as ‘very decent’.161