Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts

by Daniel Siemens

  Hartlaub’s description contradicts the majority of later judgements of such SA training courses, which usually emphasize their dull and uninspiring character.162 His view is certainly not representative, but it indicates that the specific combination of ideological training and physical exercise could prove attractive for well-educated middle-class youth who embraced the SA’s ‘modern’ attitude. Other students and lecturers, however, were clearly appalled by this political element of university life in 1933–4, particularly when confronted with its most extreme forms. In this respect the lyrics of a ‘blood song’ performed by SA students in the spring of 1934, and the controversy that originated from them, are instructive:

  Whet the long knives

  On the curbstone!

  And then let them slip

  Into the Jew’s bone!

  Blood must flow, a whole lot of it,

  And we shit on the freedom of the Jew Republic.

  Come the hour of revenge

  We are ready for every type of slaughter.

  Up the Hohenzollern

  High up the lamppost!

  Let the dogs swing

  Until the heads come loose!

  Blood must flow, a whole lot of it,

  And we shit on the freedom of the Jew Republic . . .

  In the synagogue

  Hang up a black pig,

  Into the parliaments

  Throw a grenade on a stick!

  Blood must flow, a whole lot of it,

  And we shit on the freedom of the Jew Republic . . .

  Pull the concubine

  Out of the prince’s bed,

  And grease the guillotine

  With the Jews’ fat.

  Blood must flow, a whole lot of it,

  And we shit on the freedom of the Jew Republic . . .163

  This was a parody of the original ‘Song of the Persecuted’ or ‘Absalon Song’, which had become highly popular as the ‘Hecker song’ during the 1848 revolution. It had remained popular in the German lands throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and, with the addition of more militarist lyrics, turned into a commercium (academic) song around the turn of the century. The original version praised the indefatigable longing for a German democracy using an intelligent play on the verb ‘to hang’ that contrasted its meaning of to hang somebody versus that of hanging on to the dream of the German republic. The extremely violent lyrics of the Nazi version, by contrast, took linguistic bits and pieces of the original as well as its anti-royalist elements but gave them a very opposite meaning. By adding elements of the well-known anti-parliamentarian clichés of the extreme right from the 1920s, anti-Catholic insults (‘black pig’), and above all threats toward the Jews, the stormtroopers produced one of the most extreme hate songs ever to be heard in German streets.164

  After SA student groups from Munich and nearby Weihenstephan repeatedly performed this song in the towns of Memmingen, Freising, and their vicinity in May 1934, the general vicar of the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising jointly with the directorate of Ludwig Maximilians University lodged a formal complaint with the Bavarian Ministry of Education and Culture. The vicar not only urged the authorities to stop the singing of this ‘coarse, bloodthirsty and filthy song’ but also noted that many residents of Memmingen and even members of the town’s SA group had been annoyed by it. This complaint indicates that the instructors may have actually forced many of their students to sing the song against their own moral and political convictions.165 Nor was this incident an isolated case. As early as 1929 a leader of the SA in Wandsbek near Hamburg complained to his superior about ‘offensive swine songs’ being sung by the stormtroopers in his city. Such songs, intoned by badly dressed and ill-behaved SA men, would not only scare away the wider public, but would also discourage the participation of right-minded Nazi activists, this SA leader claimed, adding that he had forbidden the men under his command to sing them.166 The Munich SA University Office in 1934 likewise banned the singing of the ‘blood song’ for the future but justified its earlier singing on the grounds that it was among the most popular at the Reich leadership school and ‘was not unsuited to teach the young students in the revolutionary spirit of the old SA guards’. In another letter of 19 June 1934 to the Bavarian Ministry of Education and Culture, the SA justified its formal interdiction on performing this song not with regard to its content, but because ‘the inner morale [innere Haltung] of the students to be educated does not yet meet the revolutionary spirit of the established SA guards’.167

  Less than two weeks later, Röhm and many of the high-ranking SA leaders were shot or imprisoned and – as a consequence – the realization of the highly ambitious plans of the SA University Offices became very improbable. Hence, in another letter dealing with the singing of the ‘blood song’, written at the end of August 1934, the previously self-assured tone of the University Office’s correspondence had largely vanished. The SA functionaries in Munich now admitted that the song had been performed in other cities like Bamberg and Speyer as well, but that they had had nothing to do with its performance. Only forty of the 2,200 students registered by the SA-Hochschulamt Munich had ever sung the ‘blood song’, they now claimed, and in any case the whole affair had to be seen as a deliberate attempt by the Catholic Church to discredit National Socialism, in an attack reminiscent of the ‘most vicious press polemics of yesterday’.168

  Despite the shutdown of the SA University Offices, students and lecturers dressed in brown shirts remained a common spectacle in German universities.169 The National Socialist Wissenschaftspolitik (science policy) clearly benefited a younger generation of scholars with ideological ties to the Nazi movement, many of whom were often only too willing to replace those who had been forced to resign.170 By contrast, established professors soon started to complain about the imposition of politics into the academic world. The Freiburg-based historian Gerhard Ritter lamented in April 1934 that the university authorities would only admit ‘SA student types’ [S.A. Naturen] as freshmen – precisely those individuals who were ‘the least interested in science’.171 Others were more optimistic. Emanuel Hirsch, a well-respected professor of Protestant theology at the University of Göttingen, also acknowledged that the ‘SA students’ of 1934 were less mature and profound than the previous generation, which had been shaped by their experience of the trenches in the First World War. However, Hirsch enthusiastically praised the new era as a most welcome opportunity to reconcile Protestant theology and nationalist politics. He was willing to bow to the new atmosphere in the German universities: ‘Our students are rightly aware that only the band of fighters [Kämpferschar] to which they belong protected and still protects us teachers with our intellectual work and our influence from the threat of Bolshevism. As is the case with the German Volkstum generally, the German mind today exists and has relevance only within the new collective volition established and guaranteed by the Führer and his SA.’172

  Hirsch was by no means an exception. In many universities the SA initially enjoyed considerable support from German lecturers and students, particularly among the faculties of Protestant theology. In Rostock students of theology joined the SA to a considerably higher degree than did students of law and medicine, and in Greifswald two professors of Protestant theology actively contributed to the formation of a Kirchliche Kampfschar Pommern, a student activist group that engaged in the Kirchenkampf by resorting to SA methods.173 In Münster not only many students but also several lecturers and professors of Protestant theology between 1932 and 1934 joined the Brownshirts, if not necessarily the party. In 1946 one of these individuals explained that ‘it was in the interest of the Volksgemeinschaft that confident and active Christians were in the SA’, a statement that echoed the hopes that many younger Protestant theologians from the early 1930s had placed in a genuine renewal of Christian faith through a close alliance with the Nazi movement, which would serve as a starting signal for a new ‘popular mission’ (Volksmission).174

&
nbsp; A few years later such hopes had proven a chimaera. But even in early 1937, when the influence of the stormtroopers had considerably decreased and many faculties in Münster were using the opportunity to withdraw their students from the SA, the faculty of Protestant theology did not.175 For ideologically committed theology students the formal ban issued by the regime only a few months later, which declared the study of theology incompatible with membership in the SA and the Hitler Youth, came as a bitter shock, particularly as it did not distinguish between the different factions within the Protestant churches, that is, between the Nazi-friendly German Christians and the more sceptical adherents of the Confessing Church.176 As clergymen and theology students were explicitly banned from joining the party in September 1937, when the NSDAP again began to accept new members, this combination of regulations constituted a total barrier.177

  By 1938 the importance of the SA at German universities was a far cry from what it had been only a few years earlier, partly because those young men with military ambitions could now enter the Wehrmacht directly. Students at German universities who were still members of the SA had to arrange to carry out their SA duties.178 At the University of Cologne, for example, the majority of students registered with the stormtroopers no longer joined the SA group at the university but preferred to stay within their original units – and often did not show up for duty in either place. As the surviving correspondence in the University of Cologne’s archive makes clear, the SA representatives at the university reacted to this decline in registration with a twofold strategy: first, they regularly granted leaves of absence to those students who were preparing their final exams; and second, they compelled first- and second-year students to attend SA meetings.179 These meetings, however, took place only rarely and in no way demanded the extensive physical presence required of the students in 1933 and 1934.180 Politically and career-driven students were now advised to enter the ranks of the SS, on the grounds that the SA provided little more than an official stamp of one’s political loyalty to the regime.

  Sacking the State

  The years 1933 and 1934 not only fundamentally changed the SA’s relationship to the state and its police forces, but also considerably improved its financial situation. Prior to 1933 money was usually short, to the extent that political activism for the rank-and-file stormtrooper often went hand in hand with painful financial sacrifices. The Nazis’ successful takeover of the state granted the SA access to Germany’s financial resources and in addition allowed members to benefit from illegal extortion schemes that at times developed into proper protection rackets. Beginning on 21 June 1933, for example, an ‘SA Self-Help Working Group’ (Selbsthilfe-Arbeitsgemeinschaft der SA) in Berlin-Brandenburg sold signposts stamped with the words ‘German Business’ to ‘Aryan’ enterprises for an annual subscription fee.181 In Wuppertal racketeers from the SA even handed out receipts for the ‘protection money’ they received, which amounted to substantial sums for those small-scale grocers who were most affected.182

  Yet the sums generated by such practices were ‘peanuts’ in comparison to the money the Brownshirts now received from the German Reich. Starting on 19 May 1933 the High SA Command received regular payments from the Ministry of the Interior, at times as often as twice per month. While the first instalment of 100,000 reichsmark was comparatively moderate, the payments quickly multiplied and reached up to 8 million reichsmark in January and again in March 1934. All in all the German taxpayer supported the Brownshirts with slightly less than 45 million reichsmark between May 1933 and April 1934, of which more than 42 million reichsmark were immediately spent. The Ministry transferred all of these payments to the Ingolstadt branch of the Bayerische Hypotheken- and Wechselbank in which the OSAF had no fewer than seven different bank accounts. Only two of these accounts were used for deposits from the Reich, one for the above-mentioned payments from the Ministry of the Interior and one for payments from the Ministry of Finance, which provided the OSAF with another 28 million reichsmark.183 The total state budget for the SA of more than 72 million reichsmark for the financial year 1933–4 neither included payments from membership dues or voluntary contributions by the relatively small group of well-to-do stormtroopers nor from big business.184

  The SA used this money to modernize its equipment, to support the SA training camps (Hilfswerklager) that were now established all over Germany, and to fund the regular budget of its groups and sub-groups. Personnel expenses of more than 33 million reichsmark represented the lion’s share of expenditures. The training camps ranked second in spending, using up slightly less than 5 million reichsmark, followed by one-time investments such as the acquisition of uniforms, boots, and underpants for 150,000 ‘stormtroopers in need’. The Reich Court of Auditors in a detailed report from 8 June 1934 stated that the SA had expressed the intent to use the money in an ‘economical’ fashion, but that a detailed tracing of most expenses was not possible. A transparent picture could only be provided if the finances of the SA groups in the different provinces could be scrutinized in detail.185

  The NSDAP in the summer of 1934 had no interest in state control of its financial conduct, particularly as regional investigations of its activities by the Court of Auditors had revealed illegal practices. The SA--Gruppe Berlin-Brandenburg, for example, in 1933 had labelled all regular salaries as ‘expense allowances’, with the result that neither the SA as an organization nor the individual stormtroopers had paid income tax or social security contributions for the whole year. The group had also paid salary advances to some of its members without asking for a payback. Finally, the SA in the capital had spent more than 10,000 reichsmark for ‘political purposes’ in April 1933 alone. What precisely was financed by this sum is unclear.186 The Reich’s support of the SA-Gruppe Österreich, an organization that the Austrian government had made illegal with its ban on the NSDAP on 19 June 1933, amounted to a subsidy of 1,326,000 reichsmark for the group’s personal expenses and nearly 3 million reichsmark for its winter clothes in 1933–4.187

  The ‘Night of the Long Knives’ served as a welcome opportunity for the NSDAP to once and for all solve its problem with the Reich Court of Auditors. In a letter from 23 July 1934, NSDAP Reich Treasurer Franz Xaver Schwarz, who had recently been appointed SS-Obergruppenführer, informed the president of the Court of Auditors that all financial affairs of the SA would from then on be the sole responsibility of the NSDAP. As Hitler’s plenipotentiary, Schwarz would personally oversee all further payments from the Reich to the SA.188 Two weeks later Schwarz informed the Reich Ministry of Finance that all state funding for the SA was with immediate effect to be transferred to the party’s OSAF bank account at the Bayerische Staatsbank in Munich. More important, all further financial oversight was to be handled not by the Reich Court of Auditors, but by the NSDAP itself.189 This new system effectively blocked state attempts to control and oversee the SA’s budget in the years to come. Further letters from the Reich Court of Auditors to the Nazi Party, with the last written on 21 June 1935, went unanswered. The NSDAP meanwhile declared itself a ‘public body’ and became an integral part of the state, with unlimited access to the Reich Treasury.

  Because of the lack of independent financial reviews of the SA after 1934, attempts to provide exact figures for its total budget in the following years have proven futile. Most of the money used by the stormtroopers continued to come from the state via the NSDAP, which, with its oversight of financial matters established, came to effectively control the formerly semi-autonomous SA. Within this framework the SA Chief of Staff continued to enjoy a relative autonomy that he seems to have exploited in a manner similar to that seen in the pre-purge SA. On 4 November 1938, for example, SA Chief of Staff Lutze ordered that all leaders of the SA-Gruppen and at the OSAF be granted an expense allowance of 200 reichsmark per month in addition to their regular income as full-time SA leaders as long as they did have another source to generate an extra income.190 Lutze himself, like many other Nazi luminaries, became a very rich man du
ring the nine years he served as SA Chief of Staff.191 According to information that he provided to the Berlin-Mitte tax office in 1932, he possessed no assets in 1931 and only earned a modest 12,194 reichsmark in 1932.192 After his death on 2 May 1943, however, his testamentary executor discovered that Lutze had accumulated a fortune of more than 200,000 reichsmark, in addition to a considerable amount of outstanding money from a Hanover-based company, two country residences, and a stud farm.193 The overall value of his estate amounted to 396,000 reichsmark. Lutze’s sources of income had been diverse: next to his monthly salary as SA Chief of Staff and several expense allowances related to his official functions, Lutze had also benefited from the provision by his hometown of Bevergern of a vacant tract of ten acres, on which he built a splendid manor house, the Saltenhof, in 1936–7. He also received at least one donation from Hitler, who, on Lutze’s fiftieth birthday on 28 December 1940, personally wrote him a cheque for 100,000 reichsmark.194 Despite his considerable assets, Lutze paid no taxes at all between 1939 and 1943, passing off Hitler’s endowment as a debt that the Reich Chancellor could reclaim at any moment. However, as Hitler did not wish formal inquiries for tax evasion to be opened, Lutze’s wife and sons held most of the money and assets until after the Second World War. A post-war British-inflicted ‘blockade of finances’ (Vermögenssperre) was finally lifted in 1956. After the death in August 1957 of Lutze’s last remaining son, Adolf, who at the age of twenty-one died, like his father, in an accident with his Porsche sports car, the community of heirs sold the Saltenhof for 280,000 deutschmark in 1958. Even divided by the twelve parties to benefit, these proceeds were still a considerable amount of money in the early years of the Federal Republic of Germany.195 The promises of SA propaganda on social equality within a national community never materialized, but at least for some of the group’s propagandists and their families it had paid very real dividends.