Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts

by Daniel Siemens

  Despite the practical problems of recruitment and Kasche’s over-emphasis on his own achievements, his reports demonstrate that the SA continued to pursue its own ‘Germanization’ policies. The SA Supreme Command intensified its settlement planning with the outbreak of the Second World War, despite Hitler’s appointment of Himmler as ‘Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of Germandom’ in October 1939. The Führer’s decree explicitly stated that the new Reich Commissioner would be responsible for the ‘configuration of new German settlement zones by relocation, in particular through the settlement of Germans and ethnic Germans returning home from abroad’.59 Theoretically, the responsibility for carrying out the ‘Germanization’ policies was thus divided. While the SS was responsible for the settlement of Germans ‘returning home’,60 the SA could claim that it was entitled to take care of the resettlement of German peasants originating from the Old Reich. As late as January 1941, Kasche insisted on this division of responsibilities between the SA and SS. He stated not only that stormtroopers would not be employed in settlements ‘where the SS is providing the National Socialist core’, but also pointed out that ‘it needs to be emphasized that the safeguarding of the German east depends on the German peasant taking roots with the soil by the work of his own hands. A German master class [Herrenschicht – here Kasche critically alludes to the tradition of the influential Prussian Junkers] overseeing soil-rooted masses of foreign peoples would not accomplish the task.’61 Such a distinction elucidates how in the SA older ideals of Werkstolz – the pride in work from one’s own hands – were closely related to new geopolitical concepts of racial and cultural superiority. The new German master class was to be a class of nationally conscious (male) workers, Kasche postulated, and it would be characterized, as Ernst Jünger had written as early as 1932, by voluntary discipline, the contempt for pleasure, and a war-minded spirit.62

  However, Himmler, who while studying plans for the creation of a Greater Germany in 1936 had taken a deep interest in questions of ethnicity and race, became with his appointment in 1939 a direct rival of Kasche and Darré.63 The powers wielded by these men were extremely unevenly distributed. By 1939, Himmler, as Reichsführer-SS and chief of the German police forces, had ascended to one of the most powerful positions in the Third Reich. His standing among the Nazi leaders had been further increased by the myriad crimes his SS had committed in the wake of the German attack on Poland.64 Kasche, on the contrary, could only count on the considerably weaker SA, the Reichsnährstand, and a few supportive influential National Socialists like Reich Minister Alfred Rosenberg and Martin Luther of the Foreign Office.65 Kasche certainly lacked the power to challenge Himmler when it came to the implementation of their competing political ideas. For example, when Himmler advocated the creation of larger farms and country estates in the occupied east for German families of particular racial value – a plan directly opposed to Kasche’s more egalitarian vision – the only thing the SA-Obergruppenführer could do was to insist that some of these new large landowners be recruited from the ranks of the SA.66 This is just one example of Himmler’s successful marginalization of the SA in the field of ‘Germanization’ policies between late 1939 and early 1941. Besides the SA’s internal problems of recruitment, this diminished role was another important reason why its settlement plans drafted in 1938 and during the early months of the war could not be carried out. Instead, the SA’s planning concentrated more and more on the immediate post-war period, leaving questions about the actual distribution of powers open.67

  After Kasche took over the position of German envoy to the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) in April 1941, Lutze did not appoint a formal successor for nearly a year, indirectly admitting defeat in the trial of strength with Himmler. Finally, in February 1942, SA-Obergruppenführer Max Luyken was appointed Inspekteur für Neubauerntum und Volkstumspflege in der SA und den SA-Wehrmannschaften, literally the ‘Chief of Staff for New Peasant Settlements and for Matters of Ethnicity in the SA and the SA-Wehrmannschaften’. Unlike the young and energetic Kasche, Luyken, who was aged fifty-six in early 1942, was an SA bureaucrat who felt no need to confront Himmler.68 At this time the SA gave up any direct involvement in the settlement project besides keeping records of potential settlers from its ranks. In the spring of 1942, just weeks after Luyken’s appointment, a propaganda article published in the monthly SA in Feldgrau informed readers interested in participating in the settlement project of the necessary qualifications and application procedure for the Neubauernschein. The regulations governing qualifications implemented under Kasche in 1938 remained in place, but the only institution from now on directly involved in the application procedure was the Landesbauernschaft, the regional dependence of the Reichsnährstand, which handled the paperwork, organized medical examinations of an applicant and his wife, checked their pedigree papers, and obtained information on them from local party chapters and the police. The Landesbauernschaft was even urged to undertake an unannounced visit to the applicant’s home. The SA as an organization was not mentioned once in the outline of these procedures; its judgement on an applicant’s political suitability and commitment to the regime was apparently no longer needed.69

  Nevertheless, the SA continued its settlement propaganda and the registration of potential SA farmers until early 1943, with the number of candidates rising from 1,196 on 1 April 1942 to 2,555 on 1 January 1943. In the remaining archival documents no explanation is given for why Luyken’s tenure started with slightly more than 1,000 enrollees, whereas Kasche had specified 2,150 as the overall number of applicants on 30 April 1941. It is likely that some of the original applicants were placed successfully in the interim, while others died on the battlefields between 1939 and 1942. Luyken’s new number comprised all possible settlers, both those who were interested in a transfer within the boundaries of the Old Reich and those who longed to be placed in the new ‘German east’. The latter group comprised 1,304 individuals, or 51 per cent of all those registered on 1 January 1943.70

  These numbers, at least from Luyken’s perspective, reflected the intensified propaganda campaigns that the SA organized in close collaboration with the Reichsnährstand during 1942 and that were intended to whet the Germans’ appetite for farming and rural life. Informational events were organized around topics such as ‘SA settlers tell about their lives’, ‘SA comradeship in the settlements: help from the neighbours’, and, adopting the vocabulary of the life-reform movement, ‘The happiness of our children: breathing freely and growing up in close touch with nature.’71 By this point a few settlers had already made their way from the ranks of the SA into an eastern European farmhouse. However, in August of the same year Lutze prohibited all future transfers of new farmers from the Old Reich into the ‘German east’. Only war veterans and ethnic Germans from abroad were to be settled there for the remainder of the war years.72

  According to an internal statistic from January 1943, the SA had transferred only a total of 422 registered applicants to the settlements. It is not clear whether this number designated all stormtroopers sent between 1939 and late 1942 or only those resettled since Luyken took office, and whether it comprised internal migration settlements or only those in the new German territories. But even with no reliable statistics at hand, it seems likely that the total number of SA peasants settled in the east did not exceed a number of three digits. Finally, on 16 February 1943, two weeks after Germany’s defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad, Lutze eliminated Luyken’s post without providing a substitute.73

  Peasants and Ideologues

  Despite all ideological and practical difficulties, the SA’s relevance for the Nazi settlement policies was not peripheral, mainly for two reasons. First, even after Kasche had reported for duty as the envoy to Croatia, he was still Hitler’s first choice for the new position of ‘Reich Commissar for Moscovy’, a position that was expected to be created after the (allegedly imminent) German victory over the Soviet Union.74 Alfred Rosenberg, as Reich Minster for the Occupied Easte
rn Territories, requested an absolutely ‘ruthless personality’ for this job – and he recommended Kasche.75 In this capacity Kasche’s main task would initially have been to sharply suppress all possible forms of Communist resistance. Provided that the Wehrmacht had successfully defeated and occupied the Soviet Union, Kasche as the SA’s expert on questions of settlements and ethnicity would then have played an active and influential role in carrying out the Reich’s ‘Germanization’ policies in eastern Europe, and maybe even beyond.76

  Kasche’s ambitions, in any case, remained visionary. As late as June 1941 the Hamburg professor of education Gustaf Deuchler, a fanatical stormtrooper himself, produced at Kasche’s request a draft report on the ‘necessity and the tasks of an SA colonial storm, or ‘K-Sturm’.77 According to Deuchler, the SA ‘K-Sturm’ would bring together older Germans with colonial experience in Africa and a new generation of Brownshirts who aspired to ‘go into the colonies’. The older members of the K-Sturm would provide these younger men with the ‘spirit of German colonial policies’, a political attitude that, according to Deuchler, would be required for ‘proper judgement in colonial affairs’ and the development of ‘some basic skills in the treatment of the natives [Eingeborene]’.78 This draft never achieved any political significance, not least because of Kasche’s new position as German envoy to Croatia. Yet even as late as 1944, Kasche maintained that the SA was well prepared to furnish the necessary ‘human material’ (Menschmaterial) for the German settlements in the post-war period. He was convinced that the Third Reich’s social and political order and, within it, the SA as an organization that could mobilize millions of men, would then serve as role models in post-war Europe as a whole.

  Second, the SA’s settlement plans and activities under Kasche also merit recognition because a comparison with the later SS settlement policies reveals some important continuities. Although the number of German settlements required increased substantially with the Nazis’ territorial gains between 1939 and 1942, the SS’s deliberations on the transfer of Germans from the Old Reich closely resembled the previous statements of the SA. Furthermore, the SS suffered from the same problems. In its preliminary work on the Generalplan Ost in the spring of 1941, the Reichsführer-SS’s Main Planning Office in Berlin noted that roughly 200,000 families would be needed for the formation of a German peasantry in the newly occupied and annexed territories of eastern Europe.79 In order to accomplish the goal of 35 per cent of the population in these areas working in agriculture, the planners calculated that a total of 1.46 million agricultural workers of German origin would be needed.80 The new farmers were expected to provide ‘the foundation of the entire ethnic German build-up’ (Volksaufbau). Unlike many farmers of the Old Reich, whom the SS characterized as politically conservative and narrow-minded, these new farmers were supposed to represent a new kind of peasantry, one that was fully conscious of its national and racial tasks. The SS claimed that the German farmer in the newly conquered eastern territories had to regard himself as a true political fighter ‘on the attack’.81

  Such formulations did not reflect the realities of the German occupation, which was initially characterized by the largely uncoordinated settlement of ethnic Germans from Galicia, Volhynia, Bessarabia, and the Baltic region.82 Germans who were living within the borders of the German Reich of 1937, however, did not show much enthusiasm for a permanent migration eastward. Himmler acknowledged that by June 1942 the SS had only received 4,500 settler applications from the German heartlands. Two-thirds of those applications had been submitted in the previous year, after the German attack on the Soviet Union that summer.83 The attempt to increase the number of ‘Germanic’ Wehrbauern by tapping into the pool of farmers from the Netherlands, who had been targeted by German and Dutch propaganda since 1941 and whom Himmler had praised as ‘racially incredibly valuable’ (blutsmäßig unerhört wertvoll), was likewise at best an ephemeral success. Many of the 5,000 settlers from the Netherlands who moved to the ‘German East’ between 1941 and 1944 only remained there for a short while. A report from the Dutch Commissie tot Uitzending van Landbouwers naar Oost-Europa, literally the ‘Commission for the Secondment of Farmers to Eastern Europe’, in February 1942 lamented the regularly very low level of education of the Dutch peasants in the east and contemptuously called them a ‘bunch of adventurers’ with very little professional knowledge and insufficient leadership skills.84

  Such numbers and remarks put the aforementioned failure of the SA’s recruitment attempts within their own rank and file in perspective. It was apparently not only the SA’s inadequate organization but a much more deeply rooted problem that was to blame for the relatively low numbers of applicants. Despite intense Nazi propaganda prior to and during the Second World War, only a few Germans living in the Old Reich warmed to the idea of leaving their home towns and villages for good in order to build a new existence as ‘defensive peasants’ in eastern Europe. As everyone with a grain of historical and political knowledge knew, control over these areas had been fervently contested by numerous national groups, and in the 1940s these regions were characterized by excessive violence. One might say that the relative failure of earlier ‘internal colonization’ attempts repeated itself in these areas on a larger scale. Theory and practice did not converge.

  Undoubtedly, millions of German men and women, as soldiers, policemen, officials, teachers, nurses, and auxiliaries, participated in the racially motivated quest to conquer large parts of eastern Europe. They looted, robbed, and murdered.85 However, this did not imply that they were committed to implementing the National Socialist vision of a post-war ‘German East’ with a will of their own and presumably far-reaching personal consequences. This holds true in particular for peasants, who were usually closely attached to their family’s soil. Whereas many of those who actually moved east were young and unmarried, thus relatively open for change and excitement, the SA men targeted in the National Socialist propaganda were middle-aged husbands and family fathers, a group whose members in many cases had already decided on where to live, with whom, and how to sustain a living. For these men, the economic risk of possible failure loomed large, especially as many lacked the necessary financial and social capital to recover quickly in the event of losing their income and home.

  This observation qualifies the assumption that the Nazi regime attempted to satisfy the expectations and demands of German peasants by the acquisition of new ‘living space’ and new settlements there.86 The actual implementation of the far-reaching SS settlement plans that, in 1942, provided for the migration of up to 220,000 peasant families from the Old Reich, would have required massive state force.87 Yet social and political protests on the ‘home front’, a persistent fear for First World War veterans like Hitler, were to be avoided at all costs. The contemporary catchword Ostrausch, meaning ‘a frenzy for the east’, thus described a phenomenon that was largely confined to a small number of people, particularly planning experts and young unmarried ‘adventurers’ who wished to contribute to the ‘German mission’ in the east. Peasants from the Old Reich, by contrast, who were wearied by the Erzeugungsschlacht, the ‘battle of agricultural production’, and suffered from a shortage of available labour, reacted far less enthusiastically. Against this backdrop the regular assurances of SA and SS leaders that ‘no German soldier fighting at the front’ would return too late to benefit from the new settlement projects had little significance in practice.88

  Contributing to the Formation of a ‘People’s Community’ in Eastern Europe

  Farming in the occupied east proved attractive only to a minority of Germans. In consequence, resettlement experts like SS brigade leader Herbert Backe acknowledged as early as July 1942 that the ‘new formation of German peasantry in occupied Europe’ should be seen as a long-term project that would probably not be completed until after the war.89 This outlook was consistent with SA propaganda, which continued to assert that after the war the stormtroopers, as ‘exemplary fighters’ for the Greater German Reich
, would also become peacemakers in the ‘greatest and most durable settlement initiative of all time’.90

  The SA’s ‘Germanization’ policies were far more than an obscure footnote in the history of National Socialism for three reasons. First, the SA’s plans constituted – temporally as well as in terms of content – the connecting link between the Reichsnährstand   ’s earlier ‘internal colonization’ projects and the later, more radical, ‘Germanization’ projects of the SS. The plans and steps taken to implement them thus contributed to the ‘racial mobilization’91 of the Third Reich by increasing the individual SA man’s ‘racial consciousness’ (Blutsbewusstsein) and by strengthening his (imagined) ‘bonds to the soil’ (Bodenverbundenheit).92 In this way, they merged the traditional discourse of the German ‘defensive settlements’ (Wehrsiedlungen) with the National Socialists’ new racial categories.

  Second, the SA’s ‘Germanization’ plans remained important for the organization’s activities in the final years of the war. Despite the fact that the original plans were never put to a broad practical test, their principles continued to have an effect on the SA’s conception of itself. The settlement plans therefore serve as a paradigmatic example of the construction of the late SA’s initiatives and activities around the two poles of discipline and integration with the aim of contributing to the formation of the Volksgemeinschaft along racial lines. Consequently, Kasche ranked the bringing into line and the ‘steering’ (Führung) of his fellow Germans as among the most important aspects of the SA’s settlement initiative.93 The concrete plans for the resettlement of SA men in conquered eastern Europe, developed as early as 1938, were an important element of the larger process of transforming the Erwartungsraum, or ‘space of expectations’, for a racially and politically homogeneous ‘people’s community’ into an Erfahrungsraum, or ‘space of experience’, in the near future.94 That the SA possessed barely any practical experience in ethnic settlement issues (Volkstumsarbeit), as Kasche himself freely acknowledged in 1941,95 paradoxically contributed to the ability of the organization to maintain its expectations for the future, despite being, to all intents and purposes, ousted by Himmler and the SS.