Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts

by Daniel Siemens

  Defining the Limits of Volksgemeinschaft: Antisemitic Violence

  One of the fields of action for which the Brownshirts are best known was their antisemitic agitation against and physical attacks on Jews, which intensified with the NSDAP’s rise to power and culminated on 9 and 10 November 1938 in Kristallnacht, or the ‘Night of Broken Glass’. As historian Alan E. Steinweis noted, although this was ‘the single instance of large-scale, public, and organized physical violence against Jews inside Germany before the Second World War’, it built on a series of previous attacks on Jews that in many cases were carried out by stormtroopers.28 It was precisely the SA’s record of long years of antisemitic activity that – in conjunction with its ideology – made the outburst of 9 November possible. Furthermore, in order to understand the behaviour of ordinary Germans during this time who often not only took no action to stop the violence or plundering of Jewish property but in many cases joined in, an analysis of the appeal and reach of the SA’s anti-Jewish violence between 1933 and 1938 is key.29 That physical assaults on Jews were a major factor in the establishment of the Nazi terror regime in 1933–4 has already been explained in chapter 4. Therefore, in what follows, the focus is on the period beginning in the second half of 1934 and lasting until the spring of 1939.

  The ‘Röhm purge’ did not constitute a halt of the SA’s anti-Jewish attacks. On the contrary, precisely because the militants from 1934 onward often lacked the opportunity to engage in the physical violence that during the ‘years of struggle’ had so successfully served as a means of bonding for SA units, they welcomed opportunities to attack Jews. Engagement in interpersonal violence steadied the shaken confidence of those stormtroopers who participated in such actions, particularly as the SA man’s self-image was to a substantial degree based on his ability to impose himself on others physically. The widespread frustration among the SA rank and file after the executions of the summer of 1934 therefore more than once translated into attacks on Jews, the regime’s scapegoats; this violence both acted as a valve for the Brownshirts’ pent-up aggression and was a consequence of their ideological convictions.

  When the authorities ordered the SA to abstain from antisemitic ‘pillory actions’ (Prangeraktionen) in the city of Breslau in June 1935, the stormtroopers formally requested permission to continue such violence in plain clothes. Nazi mobs composed of young men and women, with many Brownshirts among them, assaulted Jewish and ‘Jewish-looking’ passers-by during the following weeks in the streets of the Lower Silesian capital. They hit, spat on, and insulted even children. A Jewish café was attacked with the purpose of ‘dragging out’ and beating up its guests. When police officers called to help arrived at the scene, they were greeted with insults such as Judenknechte! or ‘servants of the Jews’, and accused of defending the regime’s enemies.30

  Besides such barely disguised SA attacks were incidents that were indeed spontaneous, the outcome of a dangerous combination of ideology, personal frustration, and alcohol. Late on the night of 10 October 1935, for example, a drunken stormtrooper dressed in his uniform rang the bell of a Jewish Berliner, Alice Meyer, and threatened to invade her apartment and to ‘crush the small of her back’.31 The multitude of similar incidents that occurred throughout the Reich made it clear to the German population that, despite the regime’s repeated calls for moderation, the Brownshirts continued to pose a significant risk to whoever happened to come into their firing line. It is significant that the perpetrator of the above-mentioned attack in Berlin was released from police custody the same night, and that the victim did not press charges. As in Breslau, the capital’s uniformed police complained about repeated verbal and physical attacks on its officers, particularly on occasions when the latter attempted to stop ‘anti-Jewish demonstrations’ in the area of the Kurfürstendamm.32

  Such anti-Jewish attacks also had another, more political dimension. Whereas the Nazi regime from 1933 onward systematically marginalized Jews by legal means, stormtroopers made such racial exclusion highly visible (Plate 19). Their violence in the years 1933 to 1938 regularly took place in public, in front of the eyes of the local and regional communities. Insulting, spitting at, and beating Jews not only humiliated and terrified the victims of such assaults but also illustrated the new, highly unequal balance of power in German society. This was a ‘lesson’ that many non-Jewish as well as Jewish Germans learned quickly. They could either join in such actions or, in case of disagreement, at least they understood it was best not to oppose it. The Brownshirts’ belief in the SA as the educator of the German masses could thus be upheld. From this perspective SA anti-Jewish violence was a key strategy in the regime’s attempt to create a politically loyal ‘people’s community’. It not only served to intimidate those deemed ‘outsiders’ but also clarified the extent to which the criteria for processes of integration and exclusion were racially grounded.33 By early 1936 this process had advanced to the point that SA Chief of Staff Lutze, in an official address to the diplomatic corps in the Reich’s capital, referred to the German Jews as ‘unwelcome guests’ who had committed ‘countless crimes against the German people’ and would now face the stormtroopers’ legitimate punishment.34

  Such official statements made it clear to the German Jews that in the years to follow they could not expect anything good from the SA. The territorial expansion of the Reich in the second half of the 1930s only made things worse. In particular, the Anschluss of Austria in March 1938 was a decisive watershed for the Jews, both in Austria and in the Old Reich.35 Social relations in what now became the Reich’s Ostmark literally changed overnight. Even seventy-five years later the last remaining eyewitnesses of this time remember particular incidents that shed light on this transformation. According to the Jewish Viennese pensioner Vilma Neuwirth, the local SA became particularly insolent after this event. The daughter of a local hairdresser, aged ten in 1938, remembered a steady customer visiting her father on the day following the Anschluss. This man requested his regular haircut but now sported a tailored SA uniform and shining boots. From now on he would rule the roost, this long-time customer declared boldly. Instead of paying for the haircut, he simply walked away once it was done – but not before he had spat on the ground in front of the hairdresser to humiliate him and illustrate the new power relations in the city.36 In the weeks and months to follow, many Austrian Jews had similar experiences. As a consequence, half of the 190,000 Jews living in Austria had left their home country by the spring of 1939 – including several thousand who were illegally deported by the SS and the SA.37

  In the Old Reich, the same situation could be seen, with the months following the Anschluss witnessing a dramatic rise in antisemitic violence everywhere in Germany. This violence aimed to exclude the Jews, factually and symbolically, from their local communities and force them to emigrate. Starting on 13 June 1938, police forces arrested thousands of male Jews on an order from the Reichskriminalpolizeiamt, signed by Heydrich. Every police headquarters had to take at least 200 male Jews who were ‘fit for work’ into ‘preventive custody’. On the same occasion all male Jews who had previously been sentenced to a prison term of at least one month’s length were to be arrested also.38 In the following weeks, the authorities seized about 12,000 Jewish men and sent the vast majority of them to concentration camps.39

  Such raids and imprisonments were not only carried out by regular police forces. According to the authorities, local groups of SA and HJ jointly arrested about 1,000 Jews in the capital city of Berlin between 17 and 21 June 1938 alone.40 In the predominantly middle-class neighbourhood of Berlin-Schöneberg nearly all Jewish shop windows were ‘decorated’ with antisemitic graffiti, French newspapers reported. In the eastern parts of town, which were generally more working class, SA troops went from shop to shop, bowing to ‘Aryan’ customers and abusing Jewish tradesmen.41 Stormtroopers even cordoned off cinemas and arrested their Jewish viewers, ordering the cinema operators not to let any Jews watch movies in the future.42 The lawyer Hans Rei
chmann, a long-time board member of the liberal CV-Verein, remembered in his memoirs that in the days following these arrests, German Jews were frightened by persistent rumours that 100,000 militants had been ordered to seize all Jewish homes in Germany.43 Even though these rumours turned out to be false, they strongly suggest that the German Jews had come to fear the stormtroopers no less than the political police or the SS.

  On the occasion of this increase in what the Nazis referred to as Judenaktionen, or ‘Actions against Jews’, the acting Bavarian Minister of the Interior, Adolf Wagner, informed the five Bavarian Gauleiter – Fritz Wächtler, Julius Streicher, Otto Hellmuth, Karl Wahl, and Josef Bürckel – on 31 October 1938 that such attacks were harmful to the reputation of both the NSDAP and the state. However, his reasoning makes it clear that his criticism did not stem from any disagreement with the goals of these acts:

  We no longer have to resort to violent acts in order to reach our objectives, in particular with regard to the Jews, as our state and its institutions are not only strong enough, but also absolutely determined to do everything that is necessary to reach our goals and to preserve public calm and order. Should it happen that a Jew commits a serious offence, that he is tedious or that his removal becomes necessary, then the police are at any moment in the position to operate properly and lawfully, to take the Jew into protective custody or to remove him in some other way. Not under any circumstances can we tolerate violent measures being taken.44

  This statement indicates the defencelessness of the Jews in Germany in 1938 – if not in the legal, then certainly in the political sense. The report was not worth the paper it was written on.

  Only ten days later, on the night of 9–10 November 1938, thousands of Jewish citizens throughout the Reich were violently attacked, imprisoned, injured, or killed, their businesses destroyed, and their synagogues burnt down. Today’s estimates of the total number of Jewish men arrested on this night vary between 30,000 and 60,000. Whereas Nazi leaders on 12 November 1938 stated that the number of synagogues destroyed was slightly higher than 100, the Social Democratic Party in exile provided the more reasonable figure of 520. At least ninety-one Jews were killed.45 Contemporaries immediately understood the symbolic dimension of ‘Crystal Night’. The Nazi regime did not need to put its message into words: it was clear that it wanted centuries of Jewish life in Germany to come to a violent end, once and for all. The social composition of the mobs that participated in Kristallnacht differed from town to town, from region to region. Most perpetrators were adult men, but women and even children also took part, often to a considerable degree.46 Despite variations, the large majority of accounts agree that the stormtroopers were the most active group carrying out the crimes, although not all eyewitnesses might have realized this immediately, as the SA men were officially prohibited from dressing in their uniforms during that night.

  Few accounts explain the SA’s role in and overall character of this pogrom better than a report provided by the SA-Gruppe Nordmark in early December 1938, four weeks after the events had taken place. Written by the group’s leader, SA-Obergruppenführer Joachim Meyer-Quade, this four-page-long report reveals with rare clarity the chain of command and actions taken in the city of Kiel. On the evening of 9 November, Meyer-Quade had been in Munich at the Hotel Schottenhammel on the occasion of the annual NSDAP celebrations of the failed Hitler Putsch fifteen years previously. At about ten in the evening, Goebbels informed the party leaders present that in retaliation for the murder of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris by the Jew Herschel Grünspan, a concerted operation against German Jewry was necessary. Meyer-Quade immediately offered the services of his men to Hinrich Lohse, the Gauleiter of the Nordmark. At about twenty minutes past eleven, Meyer-Quade telephoned his Chief of Staff in Kiel and ordered the destruction of Jewish businesses and assembly rooms in the larger cities of the Gau. According to his report, he explicitly prohibited any mistreatment of Jews. Yet other orders he gave over the course of the night – ‘foreign Jews must not be touched’ and ‘in case of resistance weapons are to be used’ – reveal that physical violence, at least against German Jews, was not only tolerated but strongly encouraged.

  By midnight the regional police president as well as the state police had been informed about the upcoming pogroms. Over the following three hours, the SA leaders of Kiel met with other leading representatives of the SS and the NSDAP in the Nordmark at the city’s ‘brown house’ to discuss the imminent operation. The Kiel police delivered to them lists of Jewish homes and businesses in the city, lists that were to provide the basis for the destruction carried out by the SA mobs. According to Meyer-Quade’s report, all Nazi leaders present agreed that the Jews of Kiel had to be taken into custody and should be transported to the city’s police headquarters. They likewise agreed that ‘blood should be paid by blood’, and that ‘at least two Jews’, chosen from a blacklist of the ‘politically most dangerous Jews’, were to be executed. The Nazis even arranged the organization of two veritable execution squads comprising a member of the SA and the SS and an officer from the state police.

  The attacks were set to start at 3.45 a.m. Shortly before that time the stormtroopers met at the Adolf-Hitler-Platz at the heart of the city. Many had spent the evening hours in bars and pubs, celebrating the Hitler Putsch jubilee. Those who were still dressed in their brown shirts at this time received civilian clothing from the nearby town hall. From there, they then started their campaign of demolitions and arrests, accompanied by police officers who stood guard outside the places of destruction. Under their eyes the organized mob vandalized the local synagogue and at least eleven Jewish shops, as well as an unknown number of private homes. Fifty-eight Jews in Kiel were imprisoned. However, the ‘execution squads’ were only partly successful, as the two Jews targeted – the middle-class shop owners Paul Leven and Gustav Lask – were shot and severely wounded but survived the assaults and later emigrated to the United States.47

  Similar scenes occurred in many other German cities.48 An eyewitness described the events that unfolded in the city of Bocholt on the Lower Rhine as follows: ‘SA men with torches. Völkisch songs. Roaring. Devastation of Jewish shops and flats. Men beaten and jeered at. Attack on the synagogue, the sexton and his wife.’49 In Niedermarsberg, a small city in southern Westphalia, the SA Sturm that was most active during the pogroms consisted of men who were employed by the town’s psychiatric clinic as physicians and carers. Nursing personnel helped destroy the local synagogue, attacked Jewish citizens, and vandalized their homes.50 In the spa town of Bad Harzburg, the Nazi mob arrested at least seven men and several women. They were brought to the local town hall, and the men were later transported to the state prison in nearby Wolfenbüttel. Two of the city’s Jews were so heavily beaten that they died shortly afterward. However, when the widow of one of them requested that the local Protestant church inter the urn of her deceased husband in its cemetery, the parish refused to do so – alarmed by the city mayor who claimed that he could not guarantee that the SA and the SS would not dig up the grave and have the remains removed.51 Viktor Lutze in his otherwise detailed personal records noted the events of the night in very terse fashion, without a word of remorse or a sign of empathy for the victims: ‘Retaliation for the murder of v. Rath in Paris – Jewish businesses shut down, synagogues put down.’52

  These examples, taken from one larger city and several provincial towns, not only testify to the preeminent role that SA units all over Germany played in these events but also make clear the extent to which the stormtroopers’ antisemitic violence had become official state policy. The SA provided the Nazi state with shock troops that were quick to mobilize and experienced in carrying out violence. Yet, unlike the SA of 1933–5, the SA in 1938 was a disciplined organization under the control of the NSDAP that respected the limits of its operations set by the regime. In turn, the Nazi leadership made sure that the activists’ longings for personal benefits were satisfied. The confiscation of Jewish propertie
s in Vienna in the pogrom allowed 2,200 flats to be provided to party members, claimed the Gauleiter Odilo Globocnik. The NSDAP’s local Untere Donausstraße chapter in the Austrian capital used the opportunity to provide its party office with new furniture and typewriters, stolen from an allegedly Jewish stockbroker. In Upper Silesia schoolchildren in the days after the pogrom boasted of the new valuables their fathers had brought home from their raids. And in the small Franconian town of Markt Berolzheim near Weißenburg, a stormtrooper on the afternoon of 10 November 1938 even organized an auction of the private belongings of Jewish families and the Jewish community.53

  It would be wrong to assume, however, that the mass participation in these antisemitic attacks indicated unanimous agreement – in other words, that the ideology and practices of the SA had so deeply penetrated the minds and hearts of the majority of Germans that pogroms like Kristallnacht were widely embraced. ‘Are we upright Germans or just a mob [Pöbelhaufen]?’ an exasperated German woman asked rhetorically in her diary.54 And the historian Gerhard Ritter, writing to his mother two weeks after the events, expressed what many thought, but rarely said openly: ‘What we have experienced throughout Germany in the last two weeks are the most disgraceful and dreadful events to have happened for a long time. How did we come to this?! One of the many consequences is [. . . ], for the first time now, general shame and indignation.’55 Yet the moral indignation expressed here – even if sincerely felt – makes one wonder how Ritter had interpreted the many acts of antisemitic violence that had taken place in the months and years before. From today’s perspective, it is obvious that Kristallnacht was the most excessive incident of its kind, yet in many ways not a singular event. Its scale and dimension were unique, but the perpetrators’ rationale and the forms of violence to which they resorted were not. In defence of Ritter and his fellow Germans, however, it should not be overlooked that even many SA men did not necessarily associate their organization with attacks on the Jews. Although the stormtroopers spread the regime’s obsessive antisemitic ideology and propaganda, not all of them translated that ideology into practical action, as personal notes and diaries of SA men from this period will demonstrate.