Ever since the National Socialists had taken control in Germany, the authorities in Austria had feared an SA-led military invasion by the Third Reich.94 Concern focused in particular on the more than 14,000 Austrian political refugees in the Reich who referred to themselves as ‘legionaries’ or members of the Austrian Legion, which was officially part of SA-Obergruppe VIII (Austria).95 According to the Austrian government, the legion possessed 1,500 motorcars and was thus able to reach the German-Austrian border within 24 hours.96 These Austrian stormtroopers in German exile were initially concentrated in several barracks located in different places in Bavaria (Lechfeld, Bad Aibling, Reichersbeuern, Egmating, Wöllershof, and others). Later, operating under the cover name Hilfswerk Nordwest, they were transferred to several locations further north (among them Bocholt, Dorsten, and Lippstadt), far from the German-Austrian border. These men carried out construction work and received paramilitary training from the Reich’s SA as well as from the Bavarian police and the Reichswehr. They also organized the smuggling of arms, explosives, and propaganda material into Austria, contributing to the destabilization of the political order there. As long as the SA in the Reich under Röhm continued to fight for its status as a people’s militia, the Austrian Legion constituted a serious threat to Austria’s sovereignty.97
From the perspective of the Third Reich, its considerable financial and political support for the Austrian Legion, which amounted to approximately 24 million reichsmark in 1935, had mixed success.98 The legionaries more than once attracted negative attention from the German population because of their lack of discipline and education. In particular, their brutal anti-Catholic agitation in areas where the German population was traditionally deeply religious provoked a strong dislike. In Bad Aibling in August 1935, for example, Austrian legionaries drove through the streets of the town in lorries displaying a poster that depicted a Jesuit priest and the biblical verse ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me!’ The poster also contained the phrase ‘§ 175’ in yellow type, alluding to the cliché of the homosexual child abuser in the robe of a man of God.99 On the diplomatic level, the well-known financial support of the Reich for what was internationally perceived as state-sponsored terrorism provoked tensions with both Austria and Mussolini’s Italy. Yet despite its organizational and military shortcomings, the Austrian Legion remained a political weapon for the Nazi regime up to 1938.100
After the SA’s loss of influence following the ‘Night of the Long Knives’, the legionaries were ordered to deliver their weapons – more than 10,300 rifles and 340 machine guns – to the Reichswehr.101 In Austria concern lessened to the extent that the authorities became more willing to interpret the flight of thousands of Austrian stormtroopers to the Reich not as conscious terrorist acts, but as ‘pardonable sins of their youth’. From intercepted letters and other confiscated documents, the Schuschnigg administration knew only too well that the Austrian legionaries were less dangerous than initially feared, and that their military fighting power was limited at best. The authorities furthermore interpreted the substantial numbers of Nazi militants returning to Austria (more than 2,500 between July 1936 and November 1937) as a sign that many had left the country not only for reasons of political ‘entrapment’ (Verhetzung), but also out of ‘youthful ignorance and a thirst for adventure’.102 Although the Austrian Nazis increasingly benefited from sympathizers within the ranks of the Austrian bureaucracy, a certain degree of conspiracy remained necessary to organize its illegal political activities. One of the measures the stormtroopers took was to encode all phone calls that dealt with party affairs. This code relied on a simple language that named SA units according to male family roles: ‘Son’ was the code word for an SA-Schar, an ‘uncle’ designated an SA-Sturm, and ‘father’ meant an SA-Standarte. The numbers of the SA units were replaced with the names of their respective city districts. If the Nazis spoke about a ‘father from Hietzing’, for example, they were actually referring to the Standarte 4 of the SA-Gruppe Vienna. The SA as a whole was, interestingly, referred to as female and called ‘sister’.103
However, when the Anschluss, the incorporation of Austria into the German Reich, actually took place in March 1938, the Austrian Legion did not play an important role. The decisive steps had been taken in negotiations and through diplomacy behind closed doors. The German military invasion of more than 50,000 soldiers and policemen on 12 March 1938 confirmed on the ground what had previously been achieved at the table. When the Austrian legionaries finally returned home between 30 March and 2 April 1938, they did not come as triumphant liberators but as uninvited conquerors. Their popularity in Austria in the following months was fairly limited, to say the least. Many Austrian state institutions and even bodies of the NSDAP only very reluctantly accepted the former ‘legionaries’ into their ranks, as the latter quickly earned a reputation for being lazy and arrogant.104 Even the Austrian Nazis early on feared that the presence of up to 9,000 legionaries in the country would become problematic, as they might freely vent the rage they had built up over the preceding years.105 Many of them did indeed take part in antisemitic assaults. Furthermore, ever since 1933, promises of future professional advancement, particularly in the Austrian bureaucracy, had motivated the legionaries to remain loyal to the party cause.106 Now, in 1938, they asked and received ‘compensation’ to a remarkable extent, benefiting from the many ‘Aryanizations’ that occurred in the Ostmark and successfully pressuring leaders for employment. Among the tangible benefits recouped were a middle-class car (a Steyr XII), a set of furniture, and even a complete dental practice.107 The aid rendered to former legionaries in the Austrian SA in 1938 and 1939 was so extreme that even long-time members were repelled by the ubiquitous Freunderlwirtschaft, the Austrian term for cronyism. Just weeks after the Anschluss, these members started to romanticize their previous years of illegality, with their allegedly genuine comradeship, in a process similar to that described for the Reich in 1933.108
The Austrian Legion officially ceased to exist on 31 October 1938, half a year after the Anschluss. By then, most of its former members had benefited extensively from the political sea change. Others whose demands for ‘compensation’ and professional advancement were not met in the following year made new attempts to capitalize on the ‘Aryanization’ of Jewish firms and property or to go on the prowl in the protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia.109 Yet, in at least one respect these ‘Old Fighters’ ultimately had to concede defeat. In 1941 the Nazi authorities definitively refused to accept former duties in the Austrian Legion between 1933 and 1938 as an alternative form of military service.110 The Austrian Legion had served its purpose in the days before the Anschluss, but the active role of the SA in the German expansion into central and eastern Europe was just about to begin.
Activities in the Sudeten and Memel Territories
The successful Anschluss of Austria sounded the bell for the annexation of those territories bordering the Reich where a considerable ethnic German population lived. After the internal consolidation of the Third Reich in the first years of the regime was achieved, the NSDAP attempted to fulfil a central ambition of German nationalism that went back to the mid-nineteenth century: to enlarge the Reich until all Germans living in cohesive settlements in neighbouring states could enjoy the benefits of German citizenship. Yet, unlike the vision of the nationalists of the 1848–9 revolutions, in which a democratic Germany would be so attractive that many people in central and eastern Europe would voluntarily opt to become Germans, by the mid-1930s it had become clear that such attempts would provoke fierce opposition in the neighbouring states, particularly as many of them were newcomers on the political scene that had been established in the wake of the First World War. As the decades progressed, German nationalists more and more shared the view that the Volkstumskampf in these regions would have to be carried out by arms more than by promises and persuasion.111
The Sudetenland was historically a part of Bohemia and Moravia that after the dissolution of the Hab
sburg monarchy in 1918 became the heartland of the newly created Czechoslovak Republic. Here, the National Socialist movement was initially closely intertwined with the diverse leagues and organizations of the German youth movement.112 In both rhetoric and action the NSDAP paid particular attention to this densely populated border region of the Reich. From neighbouring Saxony its functionaries attempted to establish SA cells in Czechoslovakia as early as the late 1920s. German Nazi activists in the Sudetenland initially understood the HJ and the SA to be National Socialist youth organizations and compared their political activities in the region to the bündisch youth’s Grenzlandfahrten, which during the years of the Weimar Republic had been organized with the aim of raising the consciousness of the Reich’s youth regarding the alleged German civilizational mission in central and eastern Europe. Because Germany after the First World War was confined to ‘narrow borders’, these activists argued, it was the proper time to instil the nation’s best with a deeply rooted feeling of obligation for the fate of ethnic German minorities in eastern Europe and to prepare them for a leading role in the pending Volkstumskampf.113 A key figure in such attempts was Rudolf Schmidt, the leader of the HJ’s Grenzlandamt, or ‘Borderland Office’, who frequently organized politische Bildungsreisen, that is, politicized educational trips, for the Sudeten German youth. The participants on such trips, which extended as far as Poland, the Baltic States, Hungary, Austria, and Romania, regularly dressed in the Nazi brown shirt or at least carried Nazi gear in their rucksacks.114
With the Nazi takeover of power in the Reich, the relationship between Czechs and Germans in the region became even more complicated. Despite official restraint, Nazi propaganda as well as the Reich’s clandestine financial support for nationalist German organizations like Konrad Henlein’s Sudetendeutscher Heimatbund, the predecessor of the Sudeten German Party, promoted the public expression of patriotic sentiments on both sides.115 In 1933 and 1934 German stormtroopers from neighbouring Saxony more than once felt called upon to arrange illegal border patrol units that regularly advanced into Czechoslovakian territory, claiming that the local authorities there were trying to suppress the German ‘liberation movement’. In turn, German men dressed in SA or SS uniforms increasingly ran the risk of being arrested by the Czechoslovakian police in the border regions.116 Yet, despite passions running high on both sides, the official German policy toward the German minority in Czechoslovakia in the first years of the Third Reich was marked by prudence and restraint – at times in sharp contrast to the regional German nationalism promoted in particular by the increasingly chauvinist Deutscher Turnverband (German Gymnastics Association) and, from May 1938 onward, the Sudeten German Freiwilliger Schutzdienst (FS; literally Voluntary Protective Service), a kind of unofficial SA that was 15,000 men strong.117
After the successful Anschluss of Austria, the German nationalist community in the Sudetenland actively expected and prepared for an analogous development. The Reich’s public calls for moderation contradicted its actual policies, which aimed at aggravating the ethnic conflicts in the region to the extent that a German military intervention could finally be justified. In early September 1938, German nationalists in the region engaged in a series of assaults and bomb attacks.118 The Czechoslovakian authorities responded using the police and the judiciary. After the successful suppression of a violent Sudeten German putsch in the first half of September, tens of thousands of German nationalists fled across the border into the Reich.119 In the Free State of Saxony alone, there existed at least nineteen different camps for Sudeten German political refugees.
On 18 September, in direct reaction to these developments, the Sudeten German Party published a proclamation that requested the formation of a Sudeten German Free Corps (Sudetendeutsches Freikorps), or SFK.120 At about the same time the Saxon SA immediately launched a recruitment programme among the refugees that offered them ideological and paramilitary training in the hope of subsequently integrating them into the regular SA. On 19 September an internal report from the Saxon SA claimed that it had already registered about 5,000 Sudeten German refugees and provided them with swastika armbands and badges, insignias of the NSDAP that many men in the camps wore with ‘nothing less than a touching pride’. A few days later the total number of Sudeten Germans won over to the SA had doubled. These men were to form the core of the future Sudeten SA and were divided according to their regional provenance. Yet the report warned that they were not to be used for an immediate military operation, as their equipment and weapons were ‘totally insufficient’.121 The Munich agreement of 29–30 September 1938 at least temporarily exchanged peace for land and provided the Reich with the long sought-after Sudetenland. In its wake the previously illegal paramilitary activities of the German nationalists now became state-sponsored politics. In the four weeks of its existence the Sudeten German Free Corps, with a total strength of 40,000 men, killed more than 110 people, deported about 2,000 Czechoslovakian citizens to Reich territory, and caused about 200,000 Czechs, Germans, and Jews to leave the region.122
After the German occupation of the Sudetenland in the first days of October 1938, regular SA formations were quickly established in the region, building on the preparatory work of the previous months (Plate 24). Many members of the FS and the Sudeten German Free Corps, which were officially dissolved on 9 October, were eager to join National Socialist organizations like the SA and the SS, to such an extent that the new SA-Standarte Aussig as early as December 1938 had to impose a temporary ban on new members ‘for organizational reasons’.123 To cope with the demand the OSAF sent no fewer than 600 SA leaders from the Old Reich into the region. These individuals mostly occupied central administrative positions, whereas the leadership of the SA-Stürme and Standarten was placed in the hands of stormtroopers from the Sudetenland.124 The latter were in many cases identical to the former leaders of the Deutscher Turnverband.125 During the pogrom of 9 November the newly formed SA units in the Sudetenland played roles similar to those assumed by their counterparts in other parts of the Reich, with the exception that here not only local Jews but also non-Jewish Czechoslovakians and ethnic Germans critical of the Nazis were attacked. ‘First the Jews and then the Czechs!’ was the SA’s battle cry in the region.126
The leader of the Sudeten SA was the charismatic Franz May, a Catholic peasant from Warnsdorf, a rural district near to the Czechoslovakian-Saxon border. When he was appointed SA-Gruppenführer on 15 October 1938, May could look back at several years of political activities in support of the German ‘liberation’. He had also been the leader of Group 4 of the Sudeten German Free Corps in the weeks prior to his official appointment in the SA.127 ‘May is familiar with the questions of the borderland struggle [Grenzlandkampf], he knows how to adequately confront upcoming dangers with his well-known energy and his clear ambitions,’ Henlein stated. May would be ‘one of the most reliable and genuinely popular’ German leaders in his Gau, Henlein added in a letter to SA Chief of Staff Lutze, attempting to secure a deferment from military service for his former campaigner in November 1941.128
The SA’s practice of imposing itself on established, traditional structures worked well in the context of Germany’s territorial expansion. The continued support of the SA for nationalist Sudeten Germans over the previous years made the organization genuinely popular among the German population of the former Czechoslovakia at a time when the SA in the Old Reich was still struggling to define its future role. In January 1940 the SA-Gruppe Sudeten comprised slightly fewer than 129,000 men. This amounted to 4.4 per cent of the overall population of the Gau Sudetenland, compared to the roughly 1 per cent of the Reich population who at the same time served in the SA. This made the Sudeten SA the strongest of all SA-Gruppen of the time.129
A similar development on a much smaller scale took place in the Memelland (in Lithuanian, the Klaipėdos kraštas, or Klaipėda region), a small strip of land north of the German province of East Prussia. Inhabited by predominantly ethnic Germans, this province had been
separated from the Reich in 1919 as part of the post-war rearrangements of central and eastern Europe.130 In the immediate post-war years administered by the French on an interim basis, Memelland became an autonomous region of Lithuania in 1923. In the following years local political initiatives and media that advocated close cooperation with Germany were regularly suppressed.131 With the increasingly aggressive German foreign policy between 1935 and 1938, the fate of the ethnic Germans in this border region became again an ever more pressing item on the political agenda. The Lithuanian government carefully observed the growing ambitions of the Third Reich and the intensification of calls for a ‘return’ of the Memelland. They feared that their region might follow the example set by the Saar region, which had been incorporated into the Reich after a referendum was held on 13 January 1935.132 Caught between much larger and more powerful states and in particular confronted with both German and Polish territorial claims, the Lithuanian government finally agreed to backdoor negotiations with Berlin. With the Munich agreement signed and the subsequent German annexation of the Sudetenland, the Lithuanian government put one and one together and introduced their own appeasement policy in order to avoid a similar fate. On 1 November 1938, Lithuania lifted the state of emergency in the Memelland and thereby allowed German nationalist organizations to again operate legally in the region.133 Just over a month later, on 11 December, a Unified German list of candidates (Memeldeutsche Liste) won the provincial elections with a landslide victory of 87 per cent of the votes.134 Six days later Hitler secretly told the leader of the German nationalists in the Memelland, Ernst Neumann, that he intended to annex the territory in the spring of 1939.135
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