In February 1940 the first SA leadership training course for ethnic Germans living in the territories of these new SA groups was held at the SA Reich School in Dresden. ‘Better than I thought . . . also racially and physically,’ Viktor Lutze wrote in his diary.108 One year later, in early February 1941, the SA-Gruppe Warthe comprised two brigades based in Posen and Litzmannstadt, whereas the SA-Gruppe Weichsel had four brigades headquartered in Danzig, Elbing, Bromberg, and Thorn.109 At the same time, dispersed SA units were also established in the Protectorate, the occupied but unannexed parts of the former Czechoslovakian state. According to the Nazi press, SA-Stürme or even Standarten existed in Königinhof (Dvůr Králové nad Labem), Königgrätz (Hradec Králové), Pilsen (Plzeň), Brünn (Brno), and Prague. Reliable information about these units is sparse, but they seem to have overwhelmingly comprised ethnic Germans from the respective regions. They were at least partly led by professional SA leaders from the Reich and, in addition, received training from the Wehrmacht. Here, as in other German-occupied parts of central and eastern Europe, the SA fostered a sense of ‘Germanness’ among its members, who often performed auxiliary police duties.110
The situation was different in the General Government. In this region, regular SA units were not established until the spring of 1942, although SA leaders were mustered as part of the official festivities held to celebrate the General Government’s first year of existence on 26 October 1940.111 However, at this time all SA leaders in the General Government were citizens of the Reich who had been sent to the east to carry out administrative and military functions. On official occasions they dressed in their SA uniforms, with the symbols of their respective home regions, but they had not been organized into new local units. The first attempt to change this state of affairs occurred in the autumn of 1941, when the NSDAP allowed the formation of an honorary SA storm (Ehrensturm) in Cracow to be used for parades and ceremonies.112 In the following months, however, the situation changed dramatically in response to the increasing ‘security problems’ in the region, which were largely a consequence of the ever more repressive and inhumane German colonial rule. German authorities executed no fewer than 17,386 alleged ‘bandits’ in the General Government in 1942 alone.113 With the conditions of life for Poles and Jews becoming more and more unbearable, armed resistance driven by despair multiplied.114 In order to uphold their rule, Hans Frank and Himmler, usually vying for supremacy in the General Government, tried to come to terms to establish the so-called Wehrschützenbereitschaften, a mixture of an ethnic German militia, a neighbourhood watch group, and an auxiliary police force that was to be trained by SS officers and in some ways was a new version of the SA-Wehrmannschaften established in 1939.115 When these negotiations did not lead to an agreement, Frank, well aware that Lutze and the OSAF were eagerly waiting for an opportunity to increase their importance and influence, called for the SA to take the place of the SS in the region. In late October 1941, SA-Standartenführer Kurt Peltz, who had previously been employed by the SA Reich Leadership School in Munich, arrived in Cracow to organize the Wehrschützenbereitschaften.116 With effect from 17 December, all German men in the General Government aged seventeen or older were registered in such units.117
As was to be expected, Himmler and the SS were furious. They feared that the SA would use its influence on these new Wehrschützenbereitschaften to establish proper SA units that would be at the disposal of the autocratic Frank. On 3 February 1942, Himmler thus decreed the formation of a new rival unit, the SS-Sondersturmbann Ost.118 Several weeks later, on 20 March, Lutze responded by mandating the establishment of a proper SA-Gruppe in the General Government to lead the Wehrschützenbereitschaften. Peltz estimated that ‘after some initial difficulties’ the SA in the General Government could comprise up to 50,000 men, a number he later reduced to 22,000.119 Frank on 16 April finally decreed the formation of a new SA unit for the General Government, the SA-Einheit Generalgouvernement.120 The SA was to take responsibility for the ‘registration, training, and leadership’ of the former SA-Wehrschützenbereitschaften, which from now on would be referred to as the SA-Wehrbereitschaften. Frank, who had previously been an honorary SA-Obergruppenführer, would himself formally command the SA in the General Government.121
As internal documents make clear, the OSAF was convinced that this step ‘would by far’ accomplish more than the organization of a paramilitary defence force. As every German man in the region – with ‘German’ defined in terms of both nationality and ethnicity – who was not an active member of another National Socialist organization was required to serve in these new units, they hoped that a thorough programme of ‘political education that is of invaluable benefit for the colonization in the East’ could be instituted.122 As early as 19 June 1942 the SA-Wehrbereitschaften comprised 8,000 men in Warsaw and 12,000 men in Radom.123 Three months later there were eleven SA-Standarten with more than 200 Stürme in the General Government.124 Detailed membership lists do not seem to have survived, but a very conservative estimate should assume that at least 30,000–40,000 ‘ethnic Germans’ were organized in these SA-Wehrbereitschaften by late 1942.
To the OSAF’s disappointment, the SA was only allowed to organize and train these men, whereas the decision to call them to action resided with the SS and the regular police forces.125 As the security situation in the General Government further deteriorated, however, the SS’s attempts to minimize the military clout of the SA in the region lessened considerably.126 In the spring of 1943 the new SA-Gruppe already participated in the ‘inspection’ (Überprüfungsaktion) of ethnic German settlers in the General Government.127 Hans Frank at the same time complained that with a mere 11,000 policemen to oversee the 16.5 million people living in the General Government, he could only secure the public order in Cracow, Warsaw, and some of the smaller cities.128 In this context, stormtroopers recruited from among the Volksdeutsche became indispensable, and the SA came to ‘very largely dominate the political life in the General Government’, as one of its leaders in December 1943 boasted.129 By this time, entire groups of ‘completely armed’ stormtroopers were carrying out regular police duties.130
The regional SA leader, Peltz, had meanwhile fully adapted to the local habits of the German occupiers. Previously, in 1938, his SA superiors had deemed him a ‘very reliable SA leader’, but had noted a certain ‘softness’ and reticence in his character. In 1944, by contrast, one of his subordinates complained to the OSAF about Peltz’s luxurious lifestyle in Cracow. Peltz, he declared, would request additional food ration coupons for his wife and himself and would send his men to buy rare goods at the city’s black market. Peltz defended himself against these charges rather half-heartedly, insisting that the additional food was needed to live up to the standards of a German bureaucrat with social obligations.131 Accusations that high-ranking SA leaders were ravaging the occupied territories in fact went back to the beginning of the war. Erich Reimann, for example, preparing for a trip home from Poland in December 1939, filled his car with parcels for his wife and the spouses of his SA and Wehrmacht comrades.132 Even the OSAF in Munich had benefited from the booty, receiving 20,000 metres of Polish uniform cloth.133
With the SA’s increasing participation in the German ‘policing actions’ in the General Government, stormtroopers more and more came within the crosshairs of Polish resistance fighters. SA-Oberführer Peltz was the target of a failed bomb attack in 1943, and on 15 July of the same year a squad of the Polish resistance group Gwardia Ludowa threw a hand grenade at a marching SA column in Warsaw, severely wounding several men. The German authorities executed about 130 Poles in retaliation.134 A year later, when the Warsaw Uprising broke out in August 1944, the city’s stormtroopers actively participated in the counter-insurgency and suffered heavy losses.135 By this time, Hans Frank’s characterization of the SA in the General Government as the ‘Sturm fist of fighting Germandom’ (Sturmhand des kämpfenden Deutschtums) was more than the usual Nazi rhetoric. Since 1943 the SA in the General G
overnment had been heavily involved in the ever more violent attempts to control the population and uphold German rule through the recruitment of forced labourers for defence work, punitive expeditions, and an unknown number of acts of local violence that left few traces in the remaining documents.136 These former latecomers (in comparison to those regular SA units established in the Warthegau, Alsace, and Lorraine) had been transformed into the spearhead of an ever more brutal German occupation regime.
This development was not unique to the General Government. Between 17 April and 15 May 1941 armed SA units comprising Austrian residents and refugees from the Bukovina region operated in Southern Styria and Carniola, areas that had been occupied by the German military in early April 1941.137 As had occurred in western Poland in the first weeks of the war, undercover SA units from the SA-Gruppe Südmark, with a total strength of between 3,500 and 4,500 men, followed the Wehrmacht’s advance in the Balkan campaign. As a euphemistic report written on behalf of the SA noted, the stormtroopers established order in the ‘liberated areas of Southern Styria and Carniola’. They secured vital public utilities and ‘cleansed the areas of roving hordes’. These tasks were completed quickly and rigorously, wrote the embedded journalist in the service of the SA.138 This article, however, was never published – perhaps because of its very direct language, which made it clear that the SA in the border regions of the Reich had been transformed into an armed political police and fighting force that was deeply implicated in the war. In contrast to this official restraint, a publication of the SA-Gruppe Südmark in May 1941 openly boasted of the stormtroopers’ ‘special operation in the liberated lowland’ in Styria and beyond. Whereas the majority of the men deployed there were used for the protection of industrial plants and for ‘general security tasks’, 600 of them were sent into the Pohorje Mountains to cleanse the area of ‘franc-tireurs’ and dispersed ‘Serbian troops’. This operation was placed under the command of SA-Gruppenführer Walther Nibbe, the leader of the SA-Gruppe Südmark, and was carried out by ‘closed SA units’ (geschlossene SA-Einheiten).139
From the early summer of 1941 onward such tasks were taken over by the newly formed SA-Wehrmannschaften under the command of the Steirischer Heimatbund and the Kärntner Volksbund, two organizations created to serve as regional NSDAP branches. One year later, in the summer of 1942, the Nazi weekly Illustrierter Beobachter printed a photo essay under the headline ‘Border patrol against bandits’ (Grenzwacht gegen Banditen), which stated that armed Wehrmannschaften under the leadership of the SA were successfully fighting ‘Bolshevist rabble-rousers’ and dispersed groups of soldiers from the former Yugoslav army in the new borderlands of Upper Carniola.140 Similar to the development in the General Government, the SA-Gruppe Südmark thus played a vital role in the ‘securing’ of Southern Styria and Carniola, an effort that included the persecution of both alleged and real partisans. However, the official task of the SA-Wehrmannschaften was not to pacify Southern Styria and Carniola by fighting partisans, but to provide their members with a ‘National Socialist education’ that included paramilitary training, in line with the SA’s general mission since 1939. Service in the SA-Wehrmannschaften was considered the main way to ‘show its members the way back into Germandom [Rückführung zum Deutschtum]’.141 As in other annexed or occupied parts of the Greater German Reich, regional policing went hand in hand with attempts to ‘Germanize’ those parts of the local populations deemed racially sufficient.142
Yet the activities of the Steirischer Heimatbund and the Kärntner Volksbund in conjunction with the SA-Wehrmannschaften did not have the intended effects. Instead, only one year of National Socialist rule produced a complete change of mood among the local population, largely because of the violence and corruption of the German organizations put in place.143 The situation became so critical that the SA-Wehrmannschaften of the Kärntner Volksbund were dissolved in October 1942. In its place, a proper SA-Standarte Oberkrain was formed, but only slightly more than 1,000 men had joined its ranks by January 1943.144 From that autumn onward, the continuing operations against ‘partisans’ were increasingly carried out, with an extreme level of violence, by the so-called SS-Karstwehr under the command of SS-Standartenführer Hans Brand.145 Once more, the SS ultimately surpassed the SA.
On the Home Front
Not all SA men served in the Wehrmacht or in units within the occupied territories. In particular, those too old for active duty instead took on auxiliary roles on what the regime’s propagandists referred to as the ‘home front’. Such duties were diverse and started immediately with the beginning of the war. In Greater Hamburg, for example, the local SA was placed in charge of air-raid alert duties starting in September 1939, a task that kept nearly 500 SA men busy. Large numbers of stormtroopers were also ordered to support the work of the ‘provision aid organization’ (Ernährungshilfswerk) of Greater Hamburg (600 men) and to build air-raid protection trenches in the region (400 men).146 These jobs were certainly less prestigious than front-line duty, but as the war progressed they became increasingly important for the maintenance of public order in the Third Reich.
A few years later, in July and August 1943, such preparatory work yielded fruit when massive Allied airstrikes on Hamburg in ‘Operation Gomorrah’ destroyed substantial parts of the city and killed about 37,000 people.147 This was at least the perspective of Gustaf Deuchler, one of the most fanatical Nazi activists within German academia. A committed storm-trooper since 1934, Deuchler euphorically praised the emergency aid administered by the Brownshirts in the days of the bombings. At a time when centralized commands could not be given, the local SA units had demonstrated a remarkable level of self-organization, he claimed. He and his fellow comrades had to carry out the extraordinarily difficult tasks of providing for the hundreds of thousands who had been bombed out of their homes, helping the injured, and locating the dead. The SA also secured buildings at risk of collapse, organized the evacuation of those made homeless, and fought the fires that blazed all over the city. The fulfilment of these tasks was all the more remarkable as many of the stormtroopers had themselves lost their homes and relatives, Deuchler claimed. He even maintained that, at this time of crisis, the men of the SA had been the main ones providing help and consolation: ‘Where an SA man appeared, he immediately drew the attention and had the respect of the Volksgenossen [. . .] The trust in the SA man was simply boundless. The SA man knows everything, can achieve anything, is capable of doing anything. That was the discernible conviction of the Volksgenossen vis-à-vis the SA.’148
This uncritical glorification of the SA by one of its members was of course exaggerated, yet it contained a grain of truth. Since the beginning of the war, the SA had been involved in a range of activities that had not always flattered the stormtroopers’ self-esteem but had indeed contributed to what Nazi propaganda referred to as the ‘securing of the home front’. Those SA men who were not drafted participated in an SA ‘care service’ for the families of their comrades in the military, were repeatedly called on to donate blood, and helped with the transport of wounded soldiers. By 1941 some SA groups also disbursed funds to pay for cigarettes, books, newspapers, and pocket money for injured comrades being treated in military hospitals.149 SA units furthermore helped in the construction of anti-aircraft gun shelters and the Siegfried Line on the Reich’s western border, aided German farmers during the harvest, helped in the resettlement of ethnic Germans ‘returning home’, attempted to prevent forest fires, and supported the regular border police as ‘auxiliary policemen’, as they had done in 1933–4.150 Of particular importance was the policing of those foreign slave labourers who were being put to work in the factories and fields of the Reich in ever larger numbers. By August 1944 the number of foreigners in the Reich had risen to nearly eight million, with the vast majority of them being forced labourers. In order to keep these large numbers of foreigners under control, the regime relied on more than one million German men, who, as auxiliary policemen or Land- or Stadtwachtmä
nner, were responsible for preventing escapes and racially undesirable intimate encounters and upholding public morale in the wider sense.151
The Landwacht and Stadtwacht were under Himmler’s control, and, in light of the SS’s pressure on the SA since 1934, the OSAF understandably feared that the new bodies would recruit heavily from the ranks of the SA. In April 1942 the SA leadership therefore requested that at least its leaders be excluded from recruitment. Otherwise, the SA’s ‘mass work’ (Breitenarbeit) risked coming to a complete standstill. The OSAF was not willing to hand over its last remaining cadres on the ‘home front’ to Himmler. At least this time it won the tug of war against the chief of the German police, who in June 1942 gave in to its demands.152
Later in the war, with the increased destruction of German cities, the stormtroopers were ordered to collect those remains of bombed-out flats that were still usable, such as stoves and bathtubs, and to make them available for those in need.153 They also enforced the frequent lights-out orders and, in cooperation with the National Socialist People’s Welfare (NSV) group, provided civilians in need with carbon during cold periods.154 All these activities served the purpose of maintaining public order. In this capacity the stormtroopers also strictly disciplined both foreigners and the German population. Deuchler, in his above-mentioned report on Hamburg, did not fail to note that among the SA’s tasks was the ‘inconspicuous watch of dubious or suspicious people’155 – a description that was applied to various foreign slave labourers as well as everyday German civilians.
Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts Page 39