Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts

by Daniel Siemens

  However uncertain the political consequences of 30 June 1934 appeared to be in the immediate aftermath of the killings, it was obvious to all observers that the SA would ‘doubtless be lessened in size’ and perhaps reduced in status to an ‘unarmed political organization’.107 Yet the political murders not only marked an end point in the sense that they concluded the period of the Nazi takeover and consolidation of power.108 They also indicated the beginning of five relatively stable years that witnessed Germans’ growing approval of Hitler’s domestic and foreign policy. The reincorporation of the Saarland after the plebiscite of 13 January 1935, the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936, and the Anschluss of Austria in 1938 all contributed to the restoration of German hegemony in central Europe and added to Hitler’s ever-growing popularity in the Reich.

  For the SA, however, these five years were anything but stable. The organization underwent a radical transformation, both internally and with regard to its political goals. The days of relative independence from the NSDAP were irrevocably over, as were the times of political brawls with ideological opponents in the streets of the German Reich. The new role of the SA was comparatively unadventurous: they were supposed to educate the male German youth in Nazi ideology and to prepare them for military service in the Wehrmacht. At first glance this mission was a far cry from the organization’s far-reaching ambitions of the previous years. A closer examination will prove, however, that this new role had a lasting effect on the political situation in Germany and the mentalities of its people.

  PART III

  6

  THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE SA BETWEEN 1934 AND 1939

  We are under the impression that within the SA one still finds the most upright Nazis and that many of them are heavily radicalized.

  — Report of a Bavarian Social Democrat, 19351

  The deadly crackdown on the SA leadership in the summer of 1934 shocked many of the organization’s rank and file, who up to then had believed the constant trumpeting of the SA’s central place in the Third Reich. All of a sudden the SA’s ‘achievements’ of the previous years, as well as its members’ far-reaching goals for the future, faced a serious challenge. A November 1934 letter from forty-one-year-old SA-Obersturmbannführer Wilhelm Blessing to his superior illustrates widespread fear and uncertainty among SA men in these troubled times. Although Blessing initially stated that he avoided thinking about the general aspects of the SA, as these thoughts bothered him to such an extent that they could not be dealt with in writing, several lines later he linked his personal material and emotional problems with a lack of respect for the SA and its achievements. Full of sarcasm and helpless anger, Blessing wrote:

  Please do not believe that I have joined the camp of the materialists, only because I look at my future from that perspective. Nowadays, one is forced to act according to that viewpoint. And one certainly has family obligations that one can’t ignore. My first marriage broke down because I did not care enough for it – I am not inclined to let this happen again with my second marriage. That’s simply how it is: who nowadays is skilled at pushing to the fore or at licking the boots of one’s superior makes progress and is soon free of financial worries. Whoever doesn’t fit this mould will croak.

  Whereas the majority of Germans had supposedly managed to obtain secure positions in the Third Reich, the SA leader, said Blessing, was ‘in limbo and doesn’t know what will become of him tomorrow. Nobody is mindful of the fact that it was us who participated in the takeover of power a little bit.’2

  This statement reveals a contradictory tendency. On the one hand, Blessing’s grievance testifies to a Verbürgerlichung, or growing middle-class sentiment, within the SA. In contrast with the ‘time of struggle’, when stormtroopers took pride in the fact that they needed neither material nor social comfort, Blessing in the autumn of 1934 emphasized that his private life did indeed matter, both with regard to his new marriage and in view of his (still limited) ability to free himself from pressing financial worries (Plate 21). On the other hand, his complaint is couched in the language of a ‘Nazi morality’ which started from the premise that personal effort and dedication to the political cause rather than qualifications or professional networks should determine one’s success in the ‘people’s community’.3

  The liquidation of several dozen SA leaders in the summer of 1934 cast serious doubt on such high expectations. Many militants reacted to the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ with initial disbelief and showed signs of apathy in the following months. According to Gestapo reports from the second half of 1934 and 1935, feelings of despair were widespread within the ranks. In the autumn of 1934 many stormtroopers stayed away from duty. Those who showed up declared that they were no ‘sports students’, but soldiers who required military training with real weapons.4 A report from May 1935 plainly stated that ‘the ordinary SA man does not know at all why he is taking part in SA activities’.5 And the Gestapo observed that a specifically designed programme of ‘SA employment therapy’, which consisted of frequent but mostly tame duties and sporting events like the SA Reich Sport Contest (Reichswettkampf der SA), kept the men busy but barely concealed the Brownshirts’ lack of perspective and ‘firm purpose’.6 Accordingly, the Social Democratic Party in exile came to the conclusion that the SA units more and more resembled a ‘container’ for ‘primitive forms of comradeship’. The SA’s ideology would be like dust on the surface of that container – unable to penetrate the minds and hearts of the stormtroopers.7

  There was a degree of wishful thinking in such assessments, yet even so, all empirical evidence suggests that the SA’s mobilizing power declined sharply in the wake of the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ and that its members suffered from feelings of uncertainty and vulnerability. As late as April 1936, Alfred Rosenberg, on the occasion of a speech he had given in front of several thousand Brownshirts, noted in his diary that his listeners had been extremely thankful for his encouragement, an encouragement that was ‘unfortunately still needed’.8 A report on the future of the SA produced at the end of 1934 from the American Embassy in Berlin analysed the situation aptly by outlining two possible developments: ‘It remains to be seen whether the educational work set forth by Hitler can afford a satisfactory substitute for the excitements and hopes of the past. If the morale and prestige of the organisation cannot be maintained, it will either decline in importance or become a focus of growing discontent in the party.’9

  Searching for New Tasks

  In the three years following the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ the SA went through a period of decline, uncertainty, and reorientation. It lost its financial autonomy and came to be dependent on the NSDAP and its Reich Treasurer, Franz Xaver Schwarz.10 The regional SA-Gruppen were granted the authority to expel all rank-and-file stormtroopers whom they deemed unsuitable for ideological or personal reasons, and the SA leadership corps (defined as the rank of Sturmführer and above) was subjected to thorough investigation by a newly created SA court, the Sondergericht der Obersten SA-Führung.11 It is not without irony that the fulfilment of Röhm’s aspiration to establish a special SA court did not lead to the protection of his men against criminal charges from the authorities, but to the impeachment and instigation of disciplinary actions against them. Between 1934 and 1939 more than 15 per cent of all high-ranking SA leaders – or 1,900 men – received disciplinary penalties, mainly for alcoholism, embezzlement of funds, or illegal violent acts.12

  The high number of punishments handed out as well as the public humiliation of the SA that accompanied them combined to make it appear less a Nazi elite formation and more a bunch of conceited fools. This development provoked very different reactions among the organization’s men. As the declining membership numbers between the summer of 1934 and April 1938 indicate, one out of two stormtroopers during this period left the SA for good, with the majority departing voluntarily.13 Yet the decline in membership was actually surprisingly moderate, given the SA’s traditionally high turnover rates, falling une
mployment in Germany from 1935 onward, and the mismatch between the rather bleak present and the official new narrative that extended the SA’s ‘mission’ of the Kampfzeit into the circumstances of the consolidated Third Reich. Whereas Viktor Lutze and the OSAF propaganda glorified the SA as the ‘birthplace of the German Volksgemeinschaft’ and the individual SA man as someone who had transformed from a pioneer of Nazism into a guardian of the new state, the stormtroopers’ everyday activities in the mid-1930s not only lacked a sense of purpose but were sometimes as ‘unheroic’ as the uprooting of trees in the local communal forest or the provision of help after a car accident.14 At a time when Communists with daggers drawn were no longer to be found in the smoky taverns of the German cities, the evils of nature, poverty, and self-righteous individualism were presented as the new adversaries. Getting up early to participate in an SA activity was sufficient grounds to be elevated into a model of sacrifice for the Volksgemeinschaft. Consequently, the contribution of Silesian stormtroopers building new settlement houses was praised as a ‘symbol of the comradeship of our times’. At least in propaganda, the militants’ duty of ensuring the cohesion of and solidarity among the ‘Aryan’ Germans now replaced their previous task of street-fighting against political rivals. The militarized language of this propaganda nevertheless remained the same. The SA’s fundraising efforts for Winter Aid were characterized as a ‘peaceful expedition’, and on the occasion of the annual Christmas celebrations the SA was to be found ‘at the very front’.15 Such formulations contribute to the unintentionally hilarious impression such texts have on today’s readers, and even at the time of their publication, in the late 1930s, they had only a limited popular appeal. Yet, despite all these shortcomings, the SA of 1938 was still three times as big as it had been in the worst period of economic depression in 1932.

  Many longstanding stormtroopers remained in the humiliated and ‘cleansed’ SA because they lacked alternatives and feared the professional disadvantages that might result from leaving. Although high expectations for the SA’s central role in the new societal order of the Third Reich were clearly unrealistic after the summer of 1934, a relatively stable position in the organization proved for many their only advantage in competing for jobs and influence against their many more qualified, younger, better-born, or simply more ambitious rivals.16 Furthermore, those stormtroopers who had joined the ranks of the SA in the 1920s had been taking a radical step that had frequently caused ruptures with old friends and pre-existing social networks. In return, the new ‘SA family’ provided them with bonds and emotional shelter, but it also made them dependent on the organization. The writings of these men often reveal a fragile self-esteem; in the words of historian Peter Merkl, they even display a pattern of ‘psychological marginality’.17 This insecurity was barely concealed by rough manners and was reinforced by the uncertainty of the political situation and the persistent financial problems many activists continued to face. All of these factors produced a situation that discouraged members from making independent, let alone brave decisions.

  There were also those who remained committed to the Nazi ideology and for precisely that reason remained loyal to the SA. One of them, the Austrian stormtrooper Herman Stühlinger, co-founder in 1930 of the National Socialist German Doctors’ League, claimed as late as July 1938: ‘There is only one formation that represents the people’s community, only one that passes on the idealism and the willingness to sacrifice, and that is precisely the SA!’18 Regardless of the degree of wishful thinking such a statement expressed, it should not be dismissed as unimportant, as it points to a striking continuity in the self-understanding of the SA, which persisted in seeing itself as the guardian of core Nazi values and as the organization that guaranteed social cohesion in the Third Reich. High-ranking SA generals assured each other as late as 1940 that ‘the SA not only possessed an educational mission on its own terms, but is rather responsible for the National Socialist political education per se’.19 If anything, well into the Second World War, Germany remained not an ‘SS State’, as Eugen Kogon famously put it in 1946, but an SA state.20 During the war years, the SS dominated in the occupied territories and abroad, but within the Old Reich men in SA uniforms prevailed.

  Particularly among the ‘Old Fighters’, widespread disappointment at the lukewarm ‘social revolution’ that had accompanied the Nazi takeover of power and the humiliation and trauma caused by the ‘Röhm purge’ prevailed and led to an intensification of their aggressive attitude. The first stanza of the song Achtung SA!, popular in northern Germany in 1935, is a particularly characteristic expression of this mood:

  The Reds are defeated,

  The whole bigwig pack is overcome.

  And yet the cheeky fat bourgeois arises,

  Who never bled and had no fighting done.

  All you bourgeois and bigwigs, on guard we stand!

  We are our old selves, even today.

  We bled, fought and earthworks we manned,

  For Germany, but never for you.

  So forward, forward, clear the streets!

  Bourgeois, beat it!

  Bourgeois, beat it!

  We’ll break all your bones like treats,

  And smoke out your temples while at it!21

  In light of such aggressive songs it is no surprise that for many Germans the brown shirt signalled danger, before and long after 1934. The German Jew and later historian Fritz Stern of Breslau remembered that he saw his first SA man at a North Sea resort in the summer of 1931, at the age of five. At the time, the young boy could not have been fully aware of the violence the SA was capable of performing, but in the historian’s recollection this seemingly unimportant detail is portrayed as the first direct contact with an organization that turned out to be a deadly enemy.22 Among the oldest memories of the political activist Reinhard Strecker is the noise of SA units on the evening of 9 November 1938 as they stormed the apartment house in Berlin-Charlottenburg where the then eight-year-old boy lived with his family. ‘The trampling of hobnailed boots, rushing up the stairways, is for me the sound of the Third Reich,’ Strecker remembered (Plate 22).23 People throughout the 1930s knew that a stormtrooper propaganda march could easily turn into a violent brawl. For the young mother Helene Fußhoeller from Cologne, the characteristic sound of a group of SA men tramping through the streets was even more frightful than the howling of aerial mines during the Second World War.24

  These examples underline the extent to which the ‘brown army of millions’ characterized the outer appearance of the Third Reich to a considerable degree. This impression was no longer achieved by the provocative marches and brawls of the late Weimar years, but by the sheer presence of hundreds of thousands of SA men who were continuously encouraged to create and to defend the ‘people’s community’ even within the most remote corners of society. One of these remote corners was the little village of Weildorf located near the market town of Teisendorf in the Alpine foothills and not known as a stronghold of anti-Nazi activities. Yet in the winter of 1936–7 a violent incident occurred there that was in many ways typical of the problems and the agitation caused by the SA in traditional rural milieus. Although the origins of this incident remain obscure, Weildorf in 1936 was the site of a kind of local revolution after its honorary mayor, a local peasant named Johann Helminger, was forced to step down for political reasons. After some months of interim, he was finally succeeded in November of the same year by a farmer from neighbouring Hörfing, the twenty-five-year-old Johann Traxl. As one of his first actions in office, this young Nazi mayor launched a kind of ‘punitive expedition’ with the goal of strengthening his authority and disciplining the peasants. To this end, he ordered between thirty and forty stormtroopers to come to Weildorf on Sunday, 6 December 1936. Upon their arrival the SA men disturbed the regular Catholic afternoon mass by marching and singing around the church. Soon afterward they entered the local inn, where they mingled with the farmers and announced, among other things, that a showcase of Julius Stre
icher’s notorious antisemitic weekly Der Stürmer would be installed next to the local classrooms. These provocations of a devout Catholic population had an instant effect, as several of the peasants objected to the public display of Der Stürmer propaganda. Interestingly, one of them argued that he had once regularly read this publication and now thought it irresponsible to confront schoolchildren with such graphic detail of the ‘moral misdoings of the Jews’. Although this statement hardly indicated fundamental opposition to the Nazi regime, the SA leader present used such tame criticism as an opportunity to have the peasant arrested for several days. Another farmer from Weildorf explained that although he would in principle not object to participating in a paramilitary exercise he was ordered to attend, for the time being he was needed more at home to run his farm and take care of his large family. For this statement alone he was insulted, beaten severely, and finally taken into ‘protective custody’. The Brownshirts furthermore called several guests in the inn ‘bastards’ (Schweinehunde), ‘buggers’ (Misthackl), and ‘traitors of the fatherland’. An official report concluded that the peaceful, modest, and hardworking peasants of Weildorf had not deserved such treatment by the SA. ‘This is not the way to win someone over, but to make the well-meaning stubborn.’25 Nevertheless, the young Nazi mayor responsible for the violence remained in office until the end of the Third Reich, a fact that points to the limits of local resistance – understood here as a more restrained form of discontent than outright political opposition.26

  As incidents like this one in Weildorf make obvious, the role of stormtroopers after 1934 cannot simply be reduced to that of ‘collecting box rattlers’ (Sammelbüchsenrassler), block leaders, or air-raid wardens.27 They also served as a kind of semi-official party police that intimidated, molested, and often arrested those the regime deemed in need of punishment, be it for racial, political, or – as in Weildorf – religious and at times very personal reasons. Variations notwithstanding, the SA therefore remained a relevant and violent organization, particularly on the local and regional levels. On the national and international levels, stormtroopers were ordered to fulfil more directly political tasks that were closely related to the SA’s paramilitary origins. In what follows, I will analyse three fields of action that demonstrate to what extent the SA still heavily influenced the lives of millions of Germans in the years between 1934 and 1939. This influence was exerted, first, by its repeated antisemitic boycott actions, riots in the streets, and outright acts of unprovoked physical violence; second, by its successful takeover of the leadership of Germany’s shooting associations and riding clubs; and third, by its renaissance as a paramilitary strike force in the context of the Anschluss of Austria, the reintegration of the Memelland, and the destabilization and dismembering of Czechoslovakia in 1938–9.