Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts

by Daniel Siemens

  A smaller fraction of the Standarte Feldherrnhalle throughout the war years served in their original function as guards in both the Reich and the German-occupied territories. Within the General Government, members of the Feldherrnhalle were also deployed for ‘special purposes’ alongside the SS and the police forces.72 In the city of Warsaw from late 1940 onward, about fifty men from the Feldherrnhalle were charged with standing watch at Brühl Palace, the headquarters of the district chief for Warsaw in the General Government, as well as at other public buildings.73 As self-declared representatives of the new Herrenrasse (master race), they acted as police forces, pressed civilians for money, and in at least one case even staged an attack on the palace as a pretext for killing a Polish man and raping two women. Their behaviour violated even the extremely racist standards of the German occupiers to such an extent that in May 1943, the Warsaw German Sondergericht (Special Court) sentenced thirteen Feldherrnhalle members to prison terms and even imposed the death penalty on one.74 The judges increased the normal penalties because the crimes in question were committed while the men were in the uniform of an elite formation and before the eyes of the Polish population. However, the judges also found mitigating circumstances. They reasoned that all thirteen defendants were Volksdeutsche with allegedly lower moral standards than the (Reich) German norm and as such would simply need more time to adjust to the higher level of German morality.75

  In the autumn of 1939 a third faction of the Standarte Feldherrnhalle formed the third battalion of the 271st Infantry Regiment, initially one of only two regiments that constituted the 93rd Infantry Division.76 This motorized grenadier regiment was led by August Raben, a professional soldier.77 Similar to the paratroopers, the men in this regiment were glorified in OSAF propaganda as the embodiment of SA values and as the representation of the successful merger of the SA’s fighting spirit with the glorious tradition of the German army.78 The 271st Regiment fought on the western front in 1940 as part of the First Army and contributed to the German breakthrough of the Maginot Line near Barst-Marienthal in northern Lorraine. After the victory against the French, the regiment was placed on leave from August 1940 until February 1941. Once reactivated, Herbert Böhme, one of relatively few German soldiers to be awarded the Ritterkreuz, then assumed command of the regiment. Böhme was an early Nazi activist who had joined the SA and the NSDAP in 1930 and later served as SA-Oberführer in the staff of the SA-Gruppe Schlesien prior to joining the Wehrmacht in 1937.79

  With the German attack on the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, the 271st Infantry Regiment was deployed to the northeastern front and participated in the siege of Leningrad.80 The Nazi propaganda praised the regiment’s military achievements as an example of ‘SA spirit at the Eastern Front’. Ideology was a key part of this regiment’s self-image, as can be seen from the bestowal of the honorary title of Horst-Wessel-Kompagnie Leutnant M on those soldiers killed at a battle on the River Volkov.81 On 9 August 1942 the designation ‘Feldherrnhalle’, so far only used for the third battalion, was given to the entire regiment.82 On 4 May 1943 the unit was finally incorporated into the 60th Infantry Division (motorized), which was in dire need of fresh blood after its very heavy losses in the battle of Stalingrad, and was from then on referred to as Panzergrenadier-Division Feldherrnhalle.83

  Apart from personal memories that form the heart of Internet discussions among the few surviving soldiers as well as military enthusiasts, not much is known about the foot soldiers of the Feldherrnhalle, whom SA propaganda during the war glorified as the paradigmatic stormtroopers of the Wehrmacht. The remaining personnel files and troop lists of the former German army are held at the Deutsche Dienststelle in Berlin, but this state-run institution would only grant access to the remaining personnel files of the former members of the third battalion of the 271st Regiment on condition that the soldiers’ names are made anonymous. Unfortunately, only a very small number of their personal papers have survived. The material is nevertheless sufficient to allow at least some tentative conclusions as to the group’s social composition and the motivation of its members to join the Feldherrnhalle. My research focused on the group’s staff and Companies 9 and 10. In November 1939 these two companies each consisted of between 165 and 180 men strong, while the staff comprised 91 soldiers.

  According to the surviving membership lists, most soldiers of the third battalion of the 271st Regiment were young men, overwhelmingly born after 1914. Information is rarely provided on their dates of enrolment in the SA, but it is evident that those men who would have referred to themselves as ‘Old Fighters’ (i.e. those with experience in the SA from 1933 and earlier) constituted only a small minority of the group. Instead, on average the soldiers of this regiment in late 1939 were between nineteen and twenty-three years of age, similar to the norm in other Wehrmacht units. The biography of Karl A., from the city of Walsum on the Lower Rhine, was in many ways typical of the men in the 271st Regiment. Born in 1920, this married storekeeper joined the SA in early 1938, around his eighteenth birthday.84 After serving as a regular member of the Luftwaffe between 20 June 1938 and 31 March 1939, Karl A. served in the SA-Standarte Feldherrnhalle until he was transferred to the 271st Regiment on 9 September 1939. In the following years he participated in the regiment’s battles in France and then, from the summer of 1941 onward, in the Soviet Union. Highly decorated, with the Infantry Assault Badge, the Iron Cross (II. Category), and the East Front Winter Campaign Medal to his name, he joined the Grenadier Regiment Feldherrnhalle on 1 November 1942 and was promoted to non-commissioned officer on 1 September 1943. On New Year’s Eve in 1943, Karl A. was severely wounded but seems to have quickly returned to the front. He went missing in the area of Mogilew near Minsk ‘between 24 June and 7 July 1944’, at a time when the Wehrmacht had stopped providing the exact location and date of individual soldiers’ deaths in the east.85

  Herbert M. from Dortmund, a floor tiler by training, was born in December 1920 and also joined the SA at a very young age, several weeks before his eighteenth birthday. Initially a member of the Feldherrnhalle’s Sturmbann I and later its Sturmbann V based in Prague, he was transferred to the 9th Company of the 271st Regiment’s third battalion in the autumn of 1939. Herbert M. participated in the military campaigns against France and the Soviet Union and was wounded by shellfire on 19 April 1942 near Spasskaja-Polist on the eastern front. Probably because of his lasting injuries, Herbert M. was exempted from further front-line duties and sent back to the Feldherrnhalle’s Vienna Sturmbann in March 1943. Information about his life in the next twelve months is not available. On 26 April 1944, Herbert M. died in the military hospital for reserves in Prag-Reuth (Prague, Krč district). At the request of his wife, his remains were transferred to Düsseldorf and buried there.86

  Kurt M., to provide a final example, was among the youngest members of the Feldherrnhalle when he joined in 1938. Born in Munich in May 1921 into a lower-middle-class family, he attended a gymnasium for four years before transferring to a commercial school (Handelsschule), where he remained for another three years. He joined the Hitler Youth in 1935 and then entered the ranks of the SA in 1938. Kurt M. volunteered for the Feldherrnhalle because of the prestige of Göring’s Luftwaffe and was integrated into the fourth Sturmbann, based in Erding near Munich, on 20 June 1938. However, he was unable to become a paratrooper ‘because of an illness’ and instead joined the 271st Regiment on 9 September 1939. Despite mixed evaluations from his superiors, Kurt M. advanced quickly and was recommended to participate in an officer-training course in August 1941.87 A letter of recommendation written by one of his superiors in 1941 portrays the young man as the paradigmatic SA fighter: ‘Intellectually average, sparsely yet clearly thinking, tall and slim, thoroughly fit and tough [. . .] In combat M. reveals himself as a cool-blooded daredevil, who by his personal example had led his group even in situations of extreme enemy action and never lost control of his leadership.’ Despite such qualities, Kurt M., later promoted to the rank of staff ser
geant (Oberfeldwebel), was still alive in April 1944.88

  These three case studies are certainly not representative of the 271st Regiment’s membership in a technical sense, but the existing data strongly suggest that their biographies are typical of the average men in the regiment. Among the soldiers of the Feldherrnhalle, working-class professions heavily dominated. Several of these young men joined this elite formation as early as 1938, attracted by the prestige of the Luftwaffe under Göring and the prospect of avoiding regular military duty and building a stable career in the military branch of the SA. In particular, young men of low educational background saw the Feldherrnhalle as an available path to modest upward mobility that was in line with their ideological preferences (Plate 30).89

  Yet, at least until they joined the Feldherrnhalle, these young men’s personal experience with the SA was limited. For them, the typical SA narratives of the Kampfzeit were stories from and for another generation. Compared to their forerunners, this new generation of SA men had grown up in a political climate in which National Socialist values were already the norm; consequently, they did not represent the opposition, but the new mainstream. Many of them seem to have regarded service in the Feldherrnhalle as a regular career path within the Nazi regime – a conclusion supported by the substantial number of stormtroopers in this unit who were already married, despite their young age and their often incomplete vocational training. Finally, the men in the Feldherrnhalle were not drawn from any particular region but came from all parts of the Greater German Reich, including the annexed territories. At least in this respect, they represented a cross section of the German male population.

  Communist Propaganda

  In an immediate reaction to the German attack on the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, the propagandists of the Communist International in Moscow decided to launch additional German-language radio programmes to reach out to particular audiences. The programme Sturmadler, literally ‘Storm Eagle’, was meant to appeal to German youth, while SA-Mann Hans Weber was designed to influence the rank-and-file National Socialist. In 1942 both programmes became part of the Deutscher Volkssender, the umbrella radio station in the Soviet Union that served as the unofficial voice of the German Communist Party in exile.90 The journalist Fritz Erpenbeck, who later in the war became the deputy director of the radio programme Freies Deutschland, took the role of renegade stormtrooper Hans Weber. It is impossible to assess the impact of these twenty-minute-long daily broadcasts, which could be heard in many parts of the Reich. The creators of the programme nonetheless believed in its efficacy, as they quickly added a companion for Weber, a fellow SA man called Max Schröder, voiced by the journalist Max Keilson. This anti-Nazi comedy show built on the German Communist tactic of the 1930s of infiltrating the SA through Zersetzungsschriften, subversive ‘SA journals’. Written in simple popular language, at times in the form of fictitious dialogues, these works had attempted to draw dissatisfied ‘Old Fighters’ over to the other side by emphasizing the mismatch between the SA’s rhetoric of social revolution and the ‘selling out’ of the party establishment.91 The new radio programme was also influenced by the clandestine British radio station Gustav Siegfried Eins, or GS1, which had started up some months earlier, in May 1941. On this station an anonymous ‘boss’ uttered verbal slanders against both Nazis and Communists. In contrast to the British broadcast, the German Communist programme was intended to be ‘less vulgar and obscene’, Erpenbeck remembered after the war, not least because of initial Soviet censorship.92 In light of what we know about Nazi humour today, this was a wise decision, as the Germans at the time preferred rather innocent and tame jokes to outright, aggressive abuse that directly pointed the finger at what was perceived as ridiculous or scandalous.93

  The key mission of SA-Mann Hans Weber was to reach out to the everyday Nazi using the colloquial language of the heavily industrialized and densely populated Ruhr, a dialect complemented later by the popular Berlin idiom. Both SA characters, modelled after the familiar type of the committed but limited Nazi, demonstrated the imperfections of the Third Reich by commenting on the affairs and endemic corruption of Nazi functionaries. Again and again they emphasized the discrepancies between the party propaganda and the social realities in Germany.94 Particularly memorable episodes that were allegedly based on accounts from intercepted German letters included a ‘thick description’ of party officials from a Westphalian town who had taken part in sexual saturnalia with a teenage girl, and a request from a German mother to her husband in the Waffen-SS to ‘send children’s clothing’ with the addendum, ‘I don’t mind if it is bloody, I’ll wash it out.’95 As such examples make clear, accusations of sexual abnormalities were still a regular feature of anti-Fascist propaganda. The Communists portrayed the National Socialists as sadistic perverts, in sharp contrast to the regime’s own morally saturated propaganda.

  In the context of this study, it is remarkable that the surviving German Communists in Soviet exile – whose ranks had been heavily decimated by the Stalinist terror of the previous years – still believed in the potential to turn those working-class men whom the Communist movement had lost to the Nazis in high numbers between 1928 and 1934 back toward Communism.96 As the German Communists had done during the first years of the Third Reich, provoking confusion and discontentment within the ranks still appeared to be a reasonable strategy. Despite the fact that most stormtroopers had been drafted into the military, they still mattered. The German Communists not only identified them as a vital group for maintaining order in the Nazi state, but also deemed them re-educable. A few years later the Communist policy in the Soviet Zone of Occupation, from 1949 onward the GDR, would prove consistent with this policy. Whereas the judiciary continued to take a harsh stance toward the SA, at least in the first years after the war, it also worked toward the conversion of petty Nazis into good Socialists.97

  Auxiliary Police in the General Government, the Protectorate, and in Slovenia

  The German military victory in 1939 was the prerequisite for the subsequent break-up of the former Polish state. Its western parts were annexed and incorporated into the Greater German Reich, while its eastern parts became Soviet territory. The Polish heartlands, however, with the capital cities of Warsaw and Cracow, were transformed into a German zone of occupation called the General Government. Although the jurist and SA-Obergruppenführer Hans Frank ruled over this part of occupied Poland, the stormtroopers did not initially play a role in the region. Unlike the earlier cases of Austria, the Sudetenland, and the Memelland, the National Socialist regime in the General Government had no significant ethnic German population to mobilize as part of the newly established stormtrooper units. Whereas in the earlier cases the SA had helped pave the way for a later German occupation of the respective territories, in the case of the General Government it was the other way around. The military occupation had established a status quo that the stormtroopers in the following years attempted to uphold.

  On 30 October 1939 the first instructions issued by SA-Obergruppenführer Max Jüttner on the ‘set-up of the SA in the German territories of the former Polish state’ made the SA-Gruppen Ostland, Ostmark, Silesia, and Sudeten jointly responsible for creating SA ‘cells’ in the adjoining regions. However, no regular SA structures beyond the most basic levels of Scharen, Trupps, and Stürme were to be created. Uniforms and money would follow but could not be provided for the time being.98 A few weeks later, with the district borders of German-occupied Poland redrawn, responsibility for the build-up of the SA in this area was redistributed among the SA-Gruppen Ostland and Silesia, which each became responsible for the Gaue of the same name. In addition, the SA-Gruppen ‘Weichsel’, headquartered in Danzig (responsible for Danzig-Westpreußen), and ‘Warthe’ (for the Warthegau), based in Posen, were established.99 As early as November 1939 the SA started to recruit in cities like Łódź and Bielitz, ‘with excellent results’.100 On 22 January 1940 the SA-Obergruppenführer Heinrich Hacker was promoted to the leadership of
the SA-Gruppe Warthe, which, according to SA statistics, comprised more than 10,000 men by March 1940 and more than 25,000 by the summer of 1941.101 Most of these men were so-called Volksdeutsche who had either lived in the region prior to the outbreak of the war or had moved into the area from regions farther east, such as Volhynia, Galicia, and Bessarabia.102 The leaders of these new SA units, which initially often came from the Old Reich, but also consisted of many Baltic Germans, quickly realized that a considerable proportion of the ‘robust men [kernige Menschen] with a German look’ under their command did not speak German.103 They therefore organized German language and history lessons for the stormtroopers in the Warthegau – a fact that demonstrates the extent to which the SA literally ‘made’ German men.104

  A fanatical anitisemite, Hacker cooperated closely with Gauleiter Arthur Greiser in the years that followed.105 However, Hacker was extremely ambitious and in September 1941 requested to be transferred farther east, preferably to the Caucasus. His motivation for this transfer was that ‘the fight of the SA would be quite naturally completed by ruling over Russia. The triumph of the SA spirit over Bolshevism calls first of all the stormtrooper to take the lead in the East.’106 This reasoning elucidates the extent to which the proponents of such ‘escapism for fanatics’ grounded their ambitions in a language that invoked early Nazi stereotypes of the enemy as much as colonial fantasies.107