Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts

by Daniel Siemens

  8. The aggressive Nazi foreign policy from the second half of the 1930s onward furthermore provided the SA with new opportunities to regain some of its former might and influence. The SA contributed to the militarization of male civilian life by expanding and coordinating its paramilitary activities with those of the German shooting associations and riding clubs, carrying out auxiliary duties for the Wehrmacht in the wake of the occupation of the Sudetenland and Memelland, and providing many of the leaders of the Sudeten German Free Corps. After the successful occupations it helped tie many of the regions’ ethnic Germans to the NSDAP. Beginning in 1936 the OSAF even made plans to retrain its men as hereditarily valuable ‘armed peasants’ who would settle in the borderland regions of the Reich and the annexed or occupied territories and defend the German race there by cultivating land and having children. However, the appointment of Heinrich Himmler to the position of ‘Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of Germandom’ in October 1939 severely hampered the SA’s plans. Although the ambitious targets of its recruitment campaigns were never met and the entire programme was finally suspended in early 1943, exemplary ‘peasantry settlements’ were constructed, schools for the training of ethnic German SA men as settlers were established, and at least several hundred SA men were successfully placed in the German-occupied east.

  9. Farther south, in the German-allied states of Slovakia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Croatia, five high-ranking SA generals were appointed as German envoys in late 1940–1. For the remaining years of the war these diplomats attempted to push through the political, economic, and cultural interests of the Third Reich in their respective countries. Although these ‘Old Fighters’ did not demonstrate a distinctive style of SA diplomacy, their conditioning in and through the SA contributed to a belief in the desirability – and possibility – of a kind of ‘fascist International of the multi-colored shirts’ in the Balkans.10 As the war progressed, this became an ever more naive position, particularly after the German defeat at Stalingrad, when the national governments in the region began to prepare for the time after the Third Reich’s military domination. By 1944 at the latest, the SA general-diplomats were fighting a lost cause.

  10. Previous histories of the SA that have proposed a narrative of decline and failure for the years after 1934 missed out on these important aspects of the organization’s history. As has been demonstrated in this study, one reason for this oversight is that such accounts have followed a line of argument that was developed as a legal defence strategy for the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg and that over the following two decades helped former stormtroopers to downplay their earlier involvement in the SA. Even as historical research on all aspects of National Socialism has vastly expanded and improved, the post-war image of the SA has gone unquestioned. This book was written in an attempt to challenge this established narrative and in line with recent studies on the popular appeal of the Third Reich which stress that the Nazi people’s community was widely perceived as a ‘moral community’ or a ‘quasi-religious community of shared moral engagement and common interest’.11 Attempting to recalibrate the place of the political activists of the Nazi movement within the larger framework of modern German history, this book has demonstrated that while the prevalent image of the stormtroopers as rowdies and political hooligans is not wrong, it covers only one side of the story and systematically neglects other factors that contributed to the appeal of the SA, particularly in the early 1930s. From the perspective of party activists as well as substantial segments of the German populace who did not necessarily embrace the regime’s violence but cherished its social aims, the anti-capitalist and – within its imagined racial boundaries – egalitarian SA empowered millions of ordinary German men to make politics their own. It allowed them to enrich themselves materially while at the same time claiming to fight class snobbery, and, most importantly, to consider themselves valuable members of the national community. These feelings of empowerment survived long after the summer of 1934 and have shaped many Germans’ post-1945 memory of the Third Reich until today.

  NOTES

  A full bibliography is available for download at https://wwwhomes.uni-bielefeld.de/dsiemens/bibliography.pdf

  1.Letter from Boris Pasternak to Warlam Schalamow, 9 July 1952, in Boris Pasternak, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii s prilozheniiami, vol. 9, ed. E. B. Pasternak and E. V. Pasternak (Moscow: Slovo, 2005), pp. 684–90, here p. 686.

  2.Wolfgang Sofsky, Traktat über die Gewalt (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2005 [1996]), p. 10.

  Introduction

  1.August Scholtis, Ostwind: Ein schlesischer Schelmenroman (Munich: dtv, 1986 [1931]), p. 275.

  2.The spellings ‘Pietczuch’ or ‘Pietzuch’ can also be found in the documents related to this case.

  3.Unless noted otherwise, the facts of the following account are drawn from APK (Archiwum Państwowe w Katowicach), akt nr 15/28 Starostwo Powiatowe w Gliwicach (Politische Angelegenheiten, 1928–1933), vol. 5, pp. 334–45: Bill of Indictment of the Senior Prosecutor in Beuthen, 14 August 1932; Richard Bessel, ‘The Potempa Murder’, in Central European History 10:3 (1977), pp. 241–54; Paul Kluke, ‘Der Fall Potempa (Dokumentation)’, in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 5 (1957), pp. 279–97; Günther Schmerbach, Der Kampf der Kommunistischen Partei Deutschlands gegen Faschismus und Kriegsgefahr im Bezirk Oberschlesien 1932/33, diss., Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, 1957, pp. 104–27; and newspaper coverage by the liberal Vossische Zeitung (Berlin).

  4.For more details on the night of the murder, see also ‘Raus aus dem Bett, Ihr verfluchten Kommunisten!’, Sozialistische Arbeiter-Zeitung (hereafter SAZ) (Breslau), 12 August 1932; ‘Nine Nazis on Trial’, The Times (London), 22 August 1932, p. 9.

  5.Quoted in ‘So wurde Pietrzuch ermordet’, SAZ (Breslau), 26 August 1932, http://library.fes.de/breslau/sozialistische-arbeiterzeitung/pdf/1932/1932-192.pdf. See also Kluke, ‘Der Fall Potempa’, p. 291.

  6.APK, akt nr 15/28, vol. 5, pp. 333–4: ‘Letter from the Landjägerhauptmann Seeliger to the Landrat in Gleiwitz’, 15 August 1932; Bessel, ‘The Potempa Murder’, p. 248; Schmerbach, Der Kampf der Kommunistischen Partei, p. 109.

  7.Naturally, all of the parties involved portrayed themselves as victims who only reacted to the violence of the other side. Instructive in this respect is a comparative reading of Nazi and Communist propaganda in the Potempa affair: Gerhard Pantel, Potempa-Beuthen: Ein Signal für alle deutschen Deutschen (Munich: Eher, 1932); Robert Venzlaff, Der Schuldige . . . Die Mordnacht von Potempa, ed. Rote Hilfe (Berlin: Tribunal Verlag, 1932).

  8.‘Rückblick auf eine Woche “Burgfrieden”’, CV-Zeitung, 15 August 1932, pp. 1–2.

  9.Bessel, ‘The Potempa Murder’, p. 243; Marjorie Lamberti, The Politics of Education: Teachers and School Reform in Weimar Germany (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2002), p. 228.

  10.See Reichsgesetzblatt 1932, vol. 1, no. 54 (9 August 1932), pp. 403–4.

  11.For the final stage of the Weimar Republic, see in particular Dirk Blasius, Weimars Ende: Bürgerkrieg und Politik 1930–1933 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005); Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (London: Penguin Books, 2004), pp. 231–308; Detlev J. K. Peukert, Die Weimarer Republik: Krisenjahre der klassischen Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), pp. 243–65. With regard to the SA’s violence in Upper Silesia, see Richard Bessel, Political Violence and the Rise of Nazism: The Storm Troopers in Eastern Germany 1925–1934 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 75–96.

  12.Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Teil I: Aufzeichnungen 1923–1941, vol. 2/2 (Munich: K. G. Saur, 2004), p. 336.

  13.APK, akt nr 15/28, vol. 5, pp. 334–45, here pp. 334–5: Bill of Indictment of the Senior Prosecutor in Beuthen, 14 August 1932.

  14.Bessel, ‘The Potempa Murder’, p. 248.

  15.Ibid., p. 249.

  16.Henning Grunwald, Courtroom to Revolutionary Stage: Performance and Ideology in Weimar Political Trials (Oxford: Oxford Univ
ersity Press, 2012), p. 168.

  17.Ibid., p. 169.

  18.Bessel, ‘The Potempa Murder’, p. 246.

  19.Kluke, ‘Der Fall Potempa’, p. 288.

  20.Nazi propaganda and the arguments of SA lawyer Luetgebrune in court emphasized that Pietrzuch had repeatedly ‘betrayed’ the Germans of Upper Silesia in the years following the First World War through such actions as disclosing illegal arms depots to the French authorities and threatening those determined to vote for Germany in the plebiscite of March 1921. The radical left, in defence of the ‘worker and communist’ Pietrzuch, however, claimed that he had courageously supported the German minority in his home village of Potempa against Polish insurgents in that same crucial year. See Pantel, Potempa-Beuthen, pp. 9–13; Venzlaff, Der Schuldige, p. 4.

  21.In 1936 Lachmann was sentenced to a seven-year prison term for fraud and perjury, and in 1940 an NSDAP Gau court sentenced him on two charges of poaching; Sopade (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschland in exile), Deutschland-Berichte, vol. 3 (1936), p. 239; Bessel, ‘The Potempa Murder’, pp. 245–6.

  22.Venzlaff, Der Schuldige, p. 4.

  23.Kluke, ‘Der Fall Potempa’, p. 287.

  24.‘Fünf Todesurteile in Beuthen’, Vossische Zeitung, 23 August 1932, p. 1.

  25.‘Nine Nazis on Trial’, p. 9. See also Goebbels’s diary entry from 23 August 1932: ‘In Beuthen 5 Todesurteile gegen unsere Leute. Das Ungeheuerlichste, das auszudenken ist. Die Regierung wird nicht wagen, sie zu vollstrecken’; Goebbels, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Teil I: Aufzeichnungen 1923–1941, vol. 2/2, p. 346.

  26.‘Nazi Death Sentences’, The Times (London), 23 August 1932, p. 10; ‘Five Nazis to Die: Sentences at Trial’, The Manchester Guardian, 23 August 1932, p. 9; ‘Krawalle nach dem Urteilsspruch’, Vossische Zeitung, 23 August 1932, p. 3.

  27.As quoted in Max Domarus, Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations 1932–1945. The Chronicle of a Dictatorship, vol. 1: The Years 1932–1934 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1990), p. 160.

  28.‘Five Nazis to Die’, p. 9.

  29.BArch Berlin (Bundesarchiv Berlin), NS 26/2515: Letter from Landeskriminalpolizeiamt Berlin to the Police President Bielefeld, May 1931; BArch Berlin, NS 26/1348: ‘Fememörder Heines als MdR’, Vorwärts, 5 October 1930.

  30.Adolf Hitler, telegram to August Gräupner, Reinhold Kottisch, Paul Lachmann, Helmuth-Josef Müller, and Rufin Wolnitza, in Adolf Hitler, Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen: Februar 1925 bis Januar 1933, vol. 5: Von der Reichspräsidentenwahl bis zur Machtergreifung. April 1932–Januar 1933. Part 1: April 1932–September 1932, ed. Klaus A. Lankheit (Munich: Saur, 1996), p. 317.

  31.Kluke, ‘Der Fall Potempa’, p. 284; Bessel, ‘The Potempa Murder’, p. 251.

  32.Adolf Hitler, ‘Nationalisten! Deutsche!’, Völkischer Beobachter, 24 August 1932, as quoted in Domarus, Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations 1932–1945, vol. 1, pp. 159–60. Hitler had publicly justified immoral political deeds for the sake of the nation in similar terms as early as 1922; see BayHStA (Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv München), MInn (Ministerium des Innern), no. 81594: ‘Die Maischlacht Hitlers’, Bayerischer Kurier, 3 May 1923.

  33.With remarkable consistency, Goebbels used this wording again and again in the following years; for example, see his notorious article ‘Mimicry’, published in the highbrow Nazi newspaper Das Reich on 20 July 1941. See Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. 2: The Years of Extermination (London: Phoenix, 2008), p. 204.

  34.Joseph Goebbels, ‘Die Juden sind schuld!’, Der Angriff, 24 August 1932, pp. 1–2.

  35.Interestingly, there were cases in which Social Democrats likewise accused their Nazi opponents of being former Polish insurgents; see ‘Der “Märytrer”’, Vossische Zeitung, 4 November 1932, p. 6.

  36.According to official statistics, political violence in 1932 caused 155 deaths in all of the provinces of Prussia. Of these casualties, 55 had been members of the NSDAP, 54 had belonged to the Communist Party, and twelve had been members of the Reichsbanner and/or the Social Democratic Party; see Dirk Schumann, ‘Political Violence, Contested Public Space, and Reasserted Masculinity’, in Weimar Publics / Weimar Subjects, ed. Kathleen Canning and Kerstin Barndt (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), pp. 236–53, here p. 244.

  37.For the most impudent distortions of this kind, see Pantel, Potempa-Beuthen.

  38.IfZ Archive (Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Archiv, Munich), ED 414 (Herbert Frank), vol. 181: Joachim Leo, ‘Beuthen!’, Schlesischer NS-Beobachter (Breslau), 3 September 1932. I am grateful to Marcel Krueger, Berlin, for his help in translating this and other poems and songs in this book.

  39.‘Five Nazis to Die’, p. 9.

  40.Such was the logic of the Nazi Hamburger Abendblatt, as quoted in ‘Why Nazi Newspaper was Suppressed’, The Manchester Guardian, 26 August 1932, p. 9.

  41.Alfred Rosenberg in Der Völkische Beobachter, as quoted in ‘Killing Not Murder’, The Manchester Guardian, 27 August 1932, p. 15.

  42.Goebbels, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Teil I: Aufzeichnungen 1923–1941, vol. 2/2 (Munich: K. G. Saur, 2004), pp. 346–7.

  43.‘Defence of the Nazi Murderers’, The Manchester Guardian, 24 August 1932.

  44.Bessel, ‘The Potempa Murder’, p. 252.

  45.For an overview, see Robert Gerwarth and John Horne, ‘Vectors of Violence: Paramilitarism in Europe after the Great War, 1917–1923’, Journal of Modern History 83:3 (2011), pp. 489–512.

  46.Kluke, ‘Der Fall Potempa’, p. 292.

  47.Ibid., p. 287; GSt PK (Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz), I. HA, Rep. 77 titl. 4043, vol. 311, p. 325: Racliffe (Polizeimajor), ‘Denkschrift über Kampfvorbereitung und Kampfgrundsätze radikaler Organisationen’ [1931].

  48.On the political context, see Enno Eimers, ‘Oberschlesien während der Unruhen in den ersten Jahren der Weimarer Republik’, in Geschichte, Öffentlichkeit, Kommunikation: Festschrift für Bernd Sösemann zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Patrick Merziger (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2010), pp. 383–404; Dawid Smolorz, ‘Die deutsch-polnische Grenze in Oberschlesien 1922–1939’, in Granica: Die deutsch-polnische Grenze vom 19. bis zum 21. Jahrhundert, ed. Karoline Gil and Christian Pletzing (Munich: Meidenbauer, 2010), pp. 75–86; Bernard Sauer, ‘“Auf nach Oberschlesien”. Die Kämpfe der deutschen Freikorps 1921 in Oberschlesien und den anderen ehemaligen deutschen Ostprovinzen’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 58 (2010), pp. 297–320; Kai Struve (ed.), Oberschlesien nach den Ersten Weltkrieg: Studien zu einem nationalen Konflikt und seiner Erinnerung (Marburg: Herder-Institut, 2003); Karsten Eichner, Briten, Franzosen und Italienier in Oberschlesien, 1920–1922: Die Interalliierte Regierungs- und Plebiszitkommission im Spiegel der britischen Akten (St Katharinen: Winkel Stiftung, 2002); Ralph Schattkowsky, Deutschland und Polen von 1918/19 bis 1925 (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1994); Günther Doose, Die separatistische Bewegung in Oberschlesien nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg: 1918–1922 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1987).

  49.C. A. Macartney and A. W. Palmer, Independent Eastern Europe: A History (London: Macmillan, 1962), pp. 105–6.

  50.The first uprising took place 16–24 August 1919; the second 19–28 August 1920; and the third 3 May 1921 and the early days of July 1921. For the Polish efforts to ‘re-Polonize’, see Richard Blake, ‘Interwar Poland and the Problem of Polish-Speaking Germans’, in The Germans and the East, ed. Charles W. Ingrao and Franz A. J. Szabo (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2008), pp. 262–3.

  51.Sauer, ‘“Auf nach Oberschlesien”’, pp. 302–3; Daniel Schmidt, ‘Der SA-Führer Hans Ramshorn. Ein Leben zwischen Gewalt und Gemeinschaft (1892–1934)’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 60:2 (2012), pp. 201–35, here p. 228. Many Freikorps leaders, in particular those from the gentry in these borderlands, later joined the SA; see Stephan Malinowski and Sven Reichardt, ‘Die Reihen fest geschlossen? Adelige im Führungskorps der SA bis 1934’, in Adel und Moderne: Deutschland im europäischen Vergleich im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Eckart Conze and Monika Wienfort (Cologne: Böhlau, 2004), pp. 119–5
0, here pp. 126–8, 138–42. For an instructive case study, see Kai Langer, ‘Der “Fall Flotow” – vom Aufstieg und Fall eines mecklenburgischen SA-Führers’, Zeitgeschichte regional: Mitteilungen aus Mecklenburg-Vorpommern 7:2 (2003), pp. 5–13.

  52.See Irmela Nagel, Fememord und Fememordprozesse in der Weimarer Republik (Cologne: Böhlau, 1991), with further references.

  53.Sauer, ‘“Auf nach Oberschlesien”’, pp. 308–9, 316.

  54.Idem, ‘“Verräter waren bei uns in Mengen erschossen worden”: Die Fememorde in Oberschlesien 1921’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 54:7/8 (2006), pp. 644–62, here p. 645.

  55.Archive of Der Spiegel, Hamburg (hereafter HA-Spiegel), Personal Papers of Heinz Höhne, no. 124: Bill of indictment of the Reich Prosecutor against Alfred Hoffmann, Manfred von Killinger, and others, 16 May 1922.

  56.For details, see Hagen Schulze, Freikorps und Republik 1918–1920 (Boppard am Rhein: Harald Boldt Verlag, 1969), pp. 214–35. Recent research has emphasized that this widespread presumption did not match the ‘realities’; see Rüdiger Bergien, Die bellizistische Republik: Wehrkonsens und ‘Wehrhaftmachung’ in Deutschland 1918–1933 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2012), esp. pp. 355–406.