Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts

by Daniel Siemens

  The distinction between these two groups is crucial. It strongly indicates that a straight line cannot be drawn from the pre-1933 violence of the SA to the violence of the Second World War. There was certainly much continuity among the Landsknechtnaturen (mercenary types) of the older SA activists, but this continuity did not exist among their younger SA comrades. To understand the motives and actions of the latter, it will prove fruitful to examine how their education in the SA in the second half of the 1930s translated into military action during the war. I will discuss this point by analysing individuals’ motives in joining the SA, the operations of the SA-Standarte Feldherrnhalle, and the effects of SA propaganda in the last years of the conflict.

  The Beginning of the War

  In the early stages of the Second World War, the SA longed for an intensified level of cooperation with the army under von Brauchitsch, chief of the Army High Command. This was a natural move, as the decree of 19 January 1939 that ordered German men to alternate between participation in the SA-Wehrmannschaften and regular military service automatically brought the Wehrmacht and the stormtroopers closer together. Irrespective of their mutual reservations, this new alliance would prove beneficial for both sides in the years to come.34 The army profited from the SA’s equipment, logistical help, and trained men, while the SA gained at least modest respect as the army’s junior partner. The high recruitment figures of the SA in Memel, Austria, and the Sudetenland in 1937 and 1938 had already contributed to a rise in the organization’s prestige, and many stormtroopers in 1939 saw the outbreak of war as a new opportunity to prove their worth. Consequently, in the first months of the military campaign, many militants longed to be assigned to active duty in the regular army units. A report from the SA-Gruppe Hamburg dated 15 September 1939, just two weeks after the German attack on Poland, stated that 35 per cent of its members had already been drafted into the military, and that many more were eagerly waiting to join the Wehrmacht as quickly as possible: ‘All men are proudly following the news of the lightning combat actions in the East, but they are also afraid of coming too late. The leaders and sub-leaders of the SA in particular suffer from the painful certainty that, later, they will be standing in front of their units knowing that they will comprise men with Fronterlebnis (front-line experience).’35

  To understand the prevalence of this perceived problem, a generational approach is useful. Unlike the stormtroopers who had taken up arms, many of the higher-ranking SA leaders belonged, as previously noted, to the ‘war youth generation’ – those who had been too young to fight in the First World War and had experienced their adolescence in the 1920s as a time of crisis. The same men now feared they were the wrong age again – this time, being considered too old to join the regular forces and therefore confined to the role of involuntary spectators in a war that many perceived as a decisive ideological battle of global importance.36 Active participation in the war was the fulfilment of these men’s political ambitions, the next step that ‘naturally’ followed a period of paramilitary training and uncertain career prospects that had lasted for many years.37 Consequently, with the outbreak of the war the OSAF began to pressure the Wehrmacht for expanded career opportunities for full-time SA leaders from the rank of Sturmführer upward. It reminded the army that in the negotiations following the 19 January 1939 agreement, both sides had consented to particular officer courses for SA cadres. Even if the continuation of these courses was no longer viable with the beginning of the war, a preferential treatment of SA leaders in the German army was desired.38

  On 29 January 1940 von Brauchitsch reacted positively to such demands. He decreed that higher-ranking SA leaders not yet drafted were to be mustered immediately. Those already serving in the army were to be placed in positions in which they could prove themselves fit for later promotions to officers’ ranks. Furthermore, he explicitly declared that SA leaders should not be deployed in subaltern roles, such as typists, drivers, or telephone operators – a common practice in the first months of the war.39 These tasks might have corresponded with the individual SA leader’s skills, yet those assigned to these roles often perceived them as humiliating. The soldier Konrad Jarausch in his diary described a forty-year-old SA-Standartenführer from Magdeburg who had been drafted in reaction to these new orders. Jarausch noted that this officer candidate ‘is one of these down-to-earth men that keep the party organizations running today. He is not lacking in knowledge, at least in some realms. He also has been around quite a bit. Yet he has hardly any connection to the cultural and intellectual traditions.’40 It is not clear to what extent and how long the Wehrmacht observed orders to give SA leaders preferential treatment. The fact that many military service records of former stormtroopers did not contain any information on their paramilitary background suggests that the Wehrmacht did not think too highly of the training provided by the SA, despite all the rhetoric to the contrary.41

  Immediately after the beginning of the war, the OSAF began to emphasize the SA’s contribution to the German war effort in 1939 and early 1940. The ‘liberation’ of the free city of Danzig was a frequently cited example. Beginning in June 1939, the SA-Standarten 5, 14, and 128 of the Danzig SA--Brigade 6 furnished the men for ‘enhanced border control units’ (Verstärkter Grenzaufsichtsdienst, or VGAD) in this region who were officially charged with the mission of preventing Polish attacks. These units were armed with machine guns and hand grenades, weapons that were used in the following weeks in regional skirmishes that cost the lives of at least one Polish soldier and one SA man. Immediately prior to 1 September 1939, those men in the border control units who had detailed local knowledge were integrated into the Wehrmacht, and local Sturmbanne of the Danzig SA were transformed into complete Wehrmacht companies, which were later involved in an attack on the small town of Dirschau, today’s Polish Tczew, located south of Danzig. The city’s Marine-SA contributed to the capture of Westerplatte and Gdingen/Gdynia.42 On 15 October the Gruppe Eberhardt, or Eberhardt Brigade, under the command of the professional soldier Friedrich-Georg Eberhardt and composed of men from the Danzig police, stormtroopers, the ‘Heimwehr’, and individual volunteers, became the 60th Infantry Division.43 Although the National Socialist propaganda certainly played up the involvement of these organizations, it is highly likely that the pre-military training of the 3,000 militants from the city and its neighbouring areas used in the attack on Poland facilitated their integration into the regular army.44

  Farther south a 1,600-man-strong SA unit of ‘Old Fighters’ and newly integrated ethnic Germans from nearby Poland was formed on 25 August 1939. From 1 September onward, these men penetrated Polish territory dressed in civilian clothes and are reported to have successfully prevented the destruction of important industries in the Upper Silesian industrial region. According to an unpublished OSAF paper, Standarte 22 from Gleiwitz, today’s Polish Gliwice, and Standarte 62 from Ratibor, today’s Racibórz, suffered heavy casualties in these missions.45 In the first weeks of the war, SA men dressed in uniform started to establish ‘homeland security units’ of Volksdeutsche in several newly occupied Polish cities in an attempt to copy the successful model pioneered in the Sudetenland in 1938. In the future these units were expected to provide the basis for the formation of local NSDAP chapters.46 A little later, a formal SA position called Beauftragter für die Organisation der volksdeutschen Mannschaft, literally, the ‘Commissioner for the Organization of the Ethnic German Formations’, was created and filled with a certain SA-Obersturmbannführer Schröder.47 Very soon these ethnic German units became known as Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz, a paramilitary organization that was dominated by the SS but whose men semed to have provided the nucleus for later SA units in the area. In close cooperation with the Einsatzgruppen of the security police, its members killed more than 40,000 people in the former Polish territories in 1939 alone.48

  SA units were also involved in the German attack on Poland’s southern borders. In the autumn and winter of 1939 an SA unit from the Sudetenland l
ed by Leo Bendak, a former leader of the Sudeten German gymnastics movement, was placed in charge of the procuration of weapons for the Wehrmacht, the safeguarding of munitions transports, and the ‘cleansing and securing of the area’ of action, a task that included the construction and oversight of prisoner-of-war camps.49 Stormtroopers with a knowledge of foreign languages – and particularly those from multilingual border regions – interrogated prisoners and passed on relevant information to the army command. Such tasks were not confined to the early stages of the war. In 1941 the OSAF boasted that no fewer than eighteen SA-Gruppen were involved with the transport and guarding of prisoners in their respective territories.50

  The illustrated book Sudeten SA in Polen published in February 1940, part of the OSAF’s renewed attempts to present the SA in the proper light, provides additional information on the operations of stormtroopers in southern Poland – both on a factual level and on the mentality of the SA troops involved.51 In his foreword to this book Franz May, leader of the Sudeten SA, tellingly wrote that the stormtroopers who in the autumn of 1939 crossed the Polish-Slovak border were overwhelmingly men who – due to the high level of volunteers – had not been accepted into the Wehrmacht. Within this context they were said to have been ‘grateful’ to be used for organizational and logistical functions.52 One group, the Grenzwachregiment Zirps, operated for eight weeks as a ‘battalion’ at the request of the Armed Forces High Command (OKW), while another initially received training in the Austrian Alps. The book provides a flattering account of the SA’s achievements in Poland, beginning with the securing of the border in a joint operation with Slovakian forces and ending with Lutze’s late October 1939 visit to Spiš, or Zipser Land, a small strip in northern Slovakia that had been home to a relatively small group of ethnic Germans since the thirteenth century, usually referred to as Carpathian Germans.53

  Most of the activities described in Sudeten SA in Polen indicate that the group followed the Wehrmacht troops but did not actually fight on the front lines. However, some entries clearly reveal the violent character of the SA’s ‘cleansing’ of villages and small towns, stating that the SA was repeatedly involved in nightly clashes with ‘Polish and Jewish snipers’ who allegedly plundered the camps and murdered German soldiers under the screen of night. Unsurprisingly, the SA is said to have quickly located and ‘neutralized’ these enemies. On the very same page of the book, a photograph of a burning house is provided, graphically adding to the image of the SA as a dangerous and determined unit. The antisemitism of this work is striking, even by the standards of the Third Reich. The typical stormtrooper is portrayed as hands-on and clean, ‘always ready to help’, in sharp contrast to the ‘dirty Jew’. A caption under two photographs allegedly showing two Jewish men suggestively reads: ‘The SA’s help, however, cannot heal the wounds that these Jewish exploiters have opened in the course of several generations.’ Historical research has so far not analysed the extent to which SA units behind the front lines were involved in the mistreatment and killing of Jews in this particular region in the autumn of 1939. Yet the prominence of the alleged Jewish danger in this book of propaganda, as well as the previous terrorist attacks on Jews carried out by the Carpathian-German Freiwilliger Selbstschutz (FS) since early 1939, strongly suggest that its graphic examples reflected real operations.54

  A simple Manichaean worldview also characterized the SA’s attitude toward the non-Jewish Poles. In his political diary for the year 1940, SA Chief of Staff Lutze justified even excessive retaliation against Polish civilians as long as the approval of such violence was not to be interpreted as a licence to kill: ‘It is ultimately for reasons of state, the political situation, the necessities of the future that determine whether one asks for 10 or 100 or 1,000 or even 10,000 Poles [to be executed] in retaliation for a German,’ Lutze wrote. ‘It is never, however, permissible to hand over the enemy or the defeated man as fair game to an individual, a group of men [Menschen], or to organizations. One cannot accept that a man, with a gun in his hand, becomes a “master of life and death” at any given moment that pleases him.’55 In light of German brutalities and war crimes against Poles and Jews, which during this period caused the deaths of more than 10,000 civilians murdered behind the front lines,56 Lutze in his personal writings advocated a more careful line of action. However, his attitude was more one of political caution than of categorical criticism. Lutze preferred the deportation of Poles from German-occupied territories to the illegal killing of them because ‘a family cannot be exterminated completely without someone taking notice. Someone from the family, from the village, from the neighbourhood, from the kin [Sippe] always remains [. . .] and these people become much more dreadful accusers, much more wicked agitators and much more unforgiving, bloodthirsty avengers than could otherwise be the case.’ Aside from all these reasons, Lutze added naively: ‘I know for certain that the Führer never ever approves of it, simply because it is not the German way!’57

  The SA-Standarte Feldherrnhalle

  The SA also participated directly with combat units in the Second World War, albeit operating under the supreme command of the Wehrmacht. As early as October 1935 an elite SA unit was formed under the name of Wachstandarte Stabschef, intended as an SA equivalent to the SS-Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler.58 The first recruits to the Wachstandarte Stabschef comprised members of the former SA-Feldjägerkorps who had not been incorporated into the regular police forces and stormtroopers who had been previously barracked in the SA ‘welfare camps’.59 According to recruitment guidelines from April 1936, only unmarried and unemployed (or poorly salaried) men aged eighteen to twenty-five who had a ‘racially immaculate look’ were to be accepted into the ranks. Those who wore glasses were to be excluded, as were those who did not possess an ‘average command of orthography’.60 The men of the Wachstandarte were used for official ceremonies and parades and as guards of symbolically important places such as Hitler’s New Reich Chancellery in Berlin. At a party rally held in Nuremberg on 11 September 1936, Hitler bestowed the name SA-Standarte Feldherrnhalle on this unit, alluding to the central location of early Nazi martyrdom in Munich’s city centre. By late 1936 the Feldherrnhalle consisted of six Sturmbanne based in Güterfelde near Berlin, Erding, Hattingen, Fichtenhain, Stettin, and Stuttgart. After the Anschluss in 1938 a seventh Sturmbann was installed in Vienna-Kaltenleutgeben, and in 1939, after the dismantling of Czechoslovakia, an eighth was established in Prague.61

  Hermann Göring received the Feldherrnhalle’s ‘honorary command’ on 12 January 1937 as a kind of present for his forty-fourth birthday.62 This was another humiliation for Lutze, who knew only too well of Göring’s central role in the ‘Night of the Long Knives’.63 Although the new unit comprised fewer than 2,000 men dispersed throughout the Reich and was thus only an extremely poor consolation for the stormtroopers’ failed plan for a people’s militia, the Standarte Feldherrnhalle became the SA’s flagship group during the remaining years of the Third Reich. The men of this elite unit were the only German soldiers who were allowed to wear SA insignias to symbolize the fusion of ‘SA spirit’ and military skills. In the eyes of the OSAF, the Feldherrnhalle represented the successful transformation of the NSDAP’s paramilitary organization of the Weimar years into a serious military formation that worked hand in hand with the regular armed forces to instil Wehrwillen in the hearts and minds of the German people. Service in the Feldherrnhalle was voluntary and, as of 27 October 1938, recognized as equivalent to regular military service. Men who now opted to join the SA instead of the Wehrmacht were required to bind themselves to the organization for at least three years. Service in the Feldherrnhalle was also attractive to many men because of the prospect it brought of full-time employment by the SA after the completion of active service.64 It was thus a prestigious elite formation with the entitlement to lifelong service.

  On 20 June 1938, Göring, in his function as Reich Minister of Aviation, formally assigned the Feldherrnhalle to the Luftwaffe, an assignment that rema
ined in place until 31 March 1939. During this period the Feldherrnhalle was an independent airborne regiment that belonged to the 7th Air Division (Fliegerdivision 7), even though it was trained as an infantry regiment.65 As such its participation in the occupation of the Sudetenland in October 1938 and in the dismantling of the rump of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 served as a kind of mock ‘baptism by fire’. According to Viktor Lutze’s personal notes, he himself piloted one of 160 Junkers 52s that departed from Breslau in October 1938 and flew south to penetrate the Czechoslovakian airspace. However, as the Munich agreement of 29–30 September had already fixed the line of demarcation between the two states, a violent encounter with the enemy did not take place, and the Feldherrnhalle’s contribution to the ‘liberation’ of the Sudetenland thus remained more peaceful than anticipated. ‘No casualties, just seven airplanes with some kind of damage to the landing gear,’ recorded Lutze almost disappointedly.66

  Over the course of 1939 the Feldherrnhalle split into several factions. This development put an end to the OSAF’s hopes of having an armed corps completely at its disposal and left its commander, SA-Gruppenführer Erich Reimann, ‘totally embittered and discouraged’.67 Already in the first quarter of 1939 the majority of his men, about 1,200 stormtroopers, had been formally integrated into the regular air and paratrooper divisions of Fliegerdivision 7, removing them from the OSAF’s control.68 Nevertheless, these stormtroopers continued to be used as important role models in SA propaganda. Their contribution to their new units was indeed considerable. Of those German paratroopers deployed in 1940 in Belgium and the Netherlands, the OSAF claimed in 1941 that up to 90 per cent came from the SA.69 Later, paratroopers with a Feldherrnhalle background fought in Greece and southern Italy.70 It is therefore safe to deduce that the esprit de corps of the German Fallschirmtruppe was at least partly based on the ‘SA mentality’ and its particular values.71