Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts

by Daniel Siemens

  189.Speech of Joseph Goebbels on the occasion of the opening of the Berlin Auto Show, 17 February 1939, as quoted in Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 196.

  190.Goebbels, Speech in the Heidelberg Civic Centre on 7 July 1943, as quoted in ibid., p. 196.

  191.This tendency even dominated much of the historiography on the ‘rise’ of National Socialism until the 1980s; see Oded Heilbronner, ‘The Role of Nazi Antisemitism in the Nazi Party’s Activity and Propaganda: A Regional Historiographical Study’, Year Book of the Leo Baeck Institute 35 (1990), pp. 397–439.

  192.Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (ed.), Eine Aussprache über die Judenfrage zwischen Dr. Margarete Adam (mit einem Nachwort: Warum habe ich nationalsozialistisch gewählt) und Dr. Eva Reichmann-Jungmann (Berlin: Centralverein, 1930/1931), pp. 19, 23.

  193.For details on this meeting, see Heinrich August Winkler, Der Weg in die Katastrophe: Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung in der Weimarer Republik (Berlin and Bonn: Dietz, 1987), pp. 432–4.

  194.Letter from Ernst Brandi to his son F. H. Brandi from 7 March 1932, as quoted in Werner Abelshauser, Ruhrkohle und Politik: Ernst Brandi 1875–1933. Eine Biographie (Essen: Klartext, 2009), p. 71.

  195.Ibid., p. 90.

  196.Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Die deutschen Bevölkerungsschichten und der Nationalsozialismus’, in Kracauer, Essays, Feuilletons, Rezensionen 5:4, pp. 433–45, here p. 439.

  197.Reichardt, Faschistische Kampfbünde, pp. 110–11.

  198.Letter from Ernst Brandi to his son F. H. Brandi from 7 March 1932, as quoted in Abelshauser, Ruhrkohle und Politik, p. 71.

  199.On the industry’s support of the NSDAP and its limits, see Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., ‘“Alliance of Elites” as a Cause of Weimar’s Collapse and Hitler’s Triumph?’, in Die deutsche Staatskrise 1930–1933, ed. Heinrich August Winkler (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1992), pp. 205–14; Jürgen John, ‘Zur politischen Rolle der Großindustrie in der Weimarer Staatskrise. Gesicherte Erkenntnisse und strittige Meinungen’, in Die deutsche Staatskrise 1930–1933, pp. 215–37.

  200.Hamburger Echo, no. 250 from 18 October 1932, as quoted in McElligott, ‘“. . . und so kam es zu einer schweren Schlägerei” ’, p. 72.

  201.This term is used by Grzesinski, Inside Germany, p. 130.

  202.Deutsche Hochschule für Politik (ed.), Seminar für SA-Führer: Winter-Lehrgang 1937/38 (Berlin: Deutsche Hochschule für Politik, 1937), p. 16.

  203.Friedrich Lenger, Metropolen der Moderne: Eine europäische Stadtgeschichte seit 1850 (Munich: Beck, 2013), p. 393. The studies mentioned are Schumann, Politische Gewalt in der Weimarer Republik; Blasius, Weimars Ende; and Fulda, Press and Politics.

  204.For different angles on this development, see Michael Wildt, Volksgemeinschaft als Selbstermächtigung: Gewalt gegen Juden in der deutschen Provinz 1919 bis 1939 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2007); Szejnmann, Nazism in Central Germany; Bergien, Die bellizistische Republik; Schmidt, Schützen und Dienen.

  205.Winkler, Der Weg in die Katastrophe, pp. 646–80.

  206.Several SA leaders, among them Wilhelm Stegmann in Nuremberg, were advocating by late 1932 for a return to the Wehrverband strategy should Hindenburg continue to refuse to appoint Hitler as chancellor. After internal disagreements, Stegmann in early 1933 left the NSDAP and organized the Freikorps Franken, which grew to between 2,000 and 3,000 men strong. The events of 30 January 1933 prepared the ground for further agitation by this and similar groups. See Longerich, Geschichte der SA, pp. 163–4.

  207.Fulda, Press and Politics, p. 201; Lenger, Metropolen der Moderne, p. 393.

  208.Sebastian Ulrich, Der Weimar-Komplex: Das Scheitern der ersten deutschen Demokratie und die politische Kultur der frühen Bundesrepublik (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2009), esp. pp. 79–143, 376–535.

  209.According to Heinrich Bennecke, SA Chief of Staff Röhm was not present on this occasion. Instead, he attended a social evening at the SA--Reichsführerschule in Munich and followed the events on the radio; Peschel (ed.), Die SA in Sachsen vor der ‘Machtübernahme’, p. 76.

  210.Peter Fritzsche, The Turbulent World of Franz Göll: An Ordinary Berliner Writes the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 149.

  211.As quoted in Bernt Engelmann, Im Gleichschritt marsch: Wie wir die Nazizeit erlebten 1933–1939 (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1982), p. 51. For a detailed, yet slightly exaggerated, description of the ‘magnitude’ of this parade, based on later memoirs and Nazi newspaper coverage, see Peter Fritzsche, Germans into Nazis (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 139–41.

  Chapter 3

  1.First printed in Encyclopedia Italiana, vol. 14 (1932), as quoted in Benito Mussolini, ‘The Doctrine of Fascism’, in his Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions (Rome: Ardita, 1935), pp. 5–42, here p. 8.

  2.Ernst Bloch, ‘Reminder: Hitler’s Force’, in Heritage of Our Times (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 145–8, here p. 147 (originally published as ‘Erinnerung: Hitlers Gewalt’, Das Tage-Buch 5:15 [1924], 12 April, pp. 474–7).

  3.Ibid., p. 146.

  4.Martin Blinkhorn, Fascism and the Right in Europe, 1919–1945 (Harlow: Pearson, 2000), pp. 19–24.

  5.Patrizia Dogliani, ‘Propaganda and Youth’, in The Oxford Handbook of Fascism, ed. R. J. B. Bosworth (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 185–202, here p. 186.

  6.See Michael Geyer, ‘The Militarization of Europe 1914–1945’, in The Militarization of the Western World, ed. John R. Gillis (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), pp. 65–102. Rüdiger Bergien has lately criticized the rather loose use of the term ‘militarization’ in many studies and has instead suggested ‘bellicism’ as a substitute; Bergien, Die bellizistische Republik, pp. 33–7. I nevertheless prefer the established ‘militarization’ as long as a very narrow understanding of this term is avoided that equates militarization exclusively with preparation for conventional war.

  7.See, in particular, Merkl, Political Violence under the Swastika, pp. 231–310.

  8.For a recent summary, see Rohkrämer, Die fatale Attraktion des Nationalsozialismus, pp. 151–60.

  9.See, among others, O’Sullivan, Fascism, pp. 33–84.

  10.See Kater, ‘Ansätze zu einer Soziologie der SA’, pp. 815–17; Campbell, SA Generals, pp. 29–79. However, other researchers have emphasized that the SA was not always such a ‘young’ organization as the party propaganda portrayed it. In the Black Forest, for example, the early SA activists were predominantly in their mid- to late thirties. See Heilbronner, Catholicism, Political Culture and the Countryside, pp. 62–3.

  11.For a critical position, see Benninghaus, ‘Das Geschlecht der Generation’.

  12.Ernst Günther Gründel, Die Sendung der jungen Generation (Munich: Beck, 1932). The phenomenon of this self-declared ‘war youth generation’ has been analysed extensively; see Andrew Donson, Youth in the Fatherless Land: War Pedagogy, Nationalism, and Authority in Germany, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 59–107; Herbert, Best; Helmut Lethen, Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany (Berkeley, CA, and London: University of California Press, 2002); Daniel Siemens, ‘Kühle Romantiker: Zum Geschichtsverständnis der “jungen Generation” in der Weimarer Republik’, in Die Kunst der Geschichte: Historiographie, Ästhetik, Erzählung, ed. Martin Baumeister, Moritz Föllmer, and Philipp Müller (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009), pp. 189–214; Christian Ingrao, Believe and Destroy: Intellectuals and the SS War Machine (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), pp. 3–16.

  13.Gerwarth, ‘Central European Counter-Revolution’, p. 181.

  14.Ibid.

  15.Weisbrod, ‘Gewalt in der Politik’, p. 393. However, at least in Erlangen, students’ excitement for such units was limited. Only a minority of those students who had received military training during the
war years or had actively fought in battle registered for these ‘student companies’. See Manfred Franze, Die Erlanger Studentenschaft 1918–1945 (Würzburg: Schöningh, 1972), pp. 29–31.

  16.Othmar Plöckinger, ‘Adolf Hitler als Hörer an der Universität München im Jahr 1919: Zum Verhältnis zwischen Reichswehr und Universität’, in Die Universität München im Dritten Reich: Aufsätze. Teil II, ed. Elisabeth Kraus (Munich: Utz, 2008), pp. 13–47, here pp. 14–17; von Oerzen, Die deutschen Freikorps 1918–1923, pp. 422–31 (in particular the sections on Leipzig and Würzburg).

  17.In Budapest the membership of highly violent student battalions that perceived themselves as auxiliary police forces increased from 3,000 men in 1919 to 10,000 men in the summer of the following year. See Bodó, ‘Heroes or Thieves?’, pp. 94–5; Gerwarth, ‘Rechte Gewaltgemeinschaften und die Stadt nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg’, pp. 118–19.

  18.Chris Millington, ‘Political Violence in Interwar France’, History Compass 10:3 (2013), pp. 246–59, here p. 249; Dominique Borne and Henri Dubief, La crise des années 30: 1929–1928 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1989), p. 93; Xavier Cheneseau, Camelots du Roi: Les troupes de choc royalistes (1908–1936) (Boulogne: Éditions Défi, 1997), pp. 46–7.

  19.Plöckinger, ‘Adolf Hitler als Hörer an der Universität München’, pp. 15–16.

  20.The Bavarian Einwohnerwehren also integrated members of the Reichswehr-Zeitfreiwilligen units after the latter were dissolved under the Versailles Peace Treaty on 1 April 1920. See BayHStA IV, Bestand Reichswehr, Brigade 23: Letter from the Reichswehrgruppenkommando no. 4 on ‘Auflösung der Reichswehr-Zeitfreiwilligen’, 9 March 1920.

  21.StA München, Pol. Dir. 6803, pp. 174–83: An early list of SA members (from Maurice), presumably intercepted by the police in September 1921.

  22.Hambrecht, Der Aufstieg der NSDAP in Mittel- und Oberfranken, pp. 45–6.

  23.Geoffrey Giles, Students and National Socialism in Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 26; Steinke, Fritz Bauer oder Auschwitz vor Gericht, p. 54. In the early 1930s SA units that consisted exclusively of students mushroomed in German university towns. In Cologne, for example, the law student Heinz Siepen was appointed the first leader of the local SA university Sturm, see GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 77, titl. 4043, vol. 311, p. 52.

  24.On the ‘Heißsporn’ Klintzsch, see the characterization of the writer Ferdinand Lindner from September 1921 in LArch Freiburg, F 179/4 Nr. 110, p. 9.

  25.Frank Bajohr, ‘Unser Hotel ist judenfrei’: Bäder-Antisemitismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2003), pp. 73–88.

  26.Heinz Wegener, Das Joachimsthalsche Gymnasium – Die Landesschule Templin: Ein berlin-brandenburgisches Gymnasium im Mahlstrom der deutschen Geschichte 1607–2007 (Berlin: Berlin Story, 2007), pp. 113–15; Walsdorff, ‘Hans-Ulrich Klintzsch’.

  27.LArch Freiburg, F 179/4 no. 110, pp. 15–22, here p. 17: Offenburg regional court, Record of interrogation of Hans Ulrich Klintzsch, 16 September 1921.

  28.Email from the archive of the Technical University (TU) of Munich to the author from 7 June 2016; LKA Stuttgart, A 127, no. 1293: Personal information form Hans-Ulrich Klintzsch (1949/50). I have also checked with Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) student registers for the years 1921 to 1925–6, but to no avail. Digitized registers with the names of professors and students are available from LMU’s university library website, epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/view/lmu/pverz.html.

  29.LArch Freiburg, F 179/4 no. 153, pp. 81–3, here p. 83: Tübingen local court, Record of interrogation of Dietrich von Jagow, 2 February 1922; Brigitte Riethmüller and Hermann-Arndt Riethmüller, Osiander. Die Geschichte einer Buchhandlung, http://www.osiander.de/download/Osiander_Geschichte_Stand_2013.pdf.

  30.Barbara Hachmann, ‘Der “Degen”. Dietrich von Jagow, SA-Obergruppenführer’, in Die Führer der Provinz: NS-Biographien aus Baden und Württemberg, ed. Michael Kißener and Joachim Scholtyseck (Konstanz: UKV, 1997), pp. 267–87, here pp. 271–2; Ernst Piper, Alfred Rosenberg: Hitlers Chefideologe (Munich: Blessing, 2005), p. 52; Rafael Binkowski, Die Entwicklung der Parteien in Herrenberg 1918–1933: Ausprägungen der Parteienentwicklung auf lokaler Ebene in der Weimarer Republik am Beispiel der Stadt Herrenberg und anderer südwestdeutscher Vergleichsstädte, university diss., Universität Stuttgart, 2007, http://elib.uni-stuttgart.de/opus/volltexte/2007/3273/, pp. 296–7, 313–14.

  31.Hermann Schützinger, ‘Tübingen’, Die Weltbühne 22:2 (1926), no. 32, 10 August, pp. 207–10, here 209–10. Actual historical research has come to very similar conclusions, and not only for Tübingen: ‘The cultural political milieu that operated at German universities tended toward the political Right, and like their professors, German students tended to be nationalists, anti-Communists, and anti-Semitic, a perfect match for the burgeoning Nazi party’; see Hilary Earl, ‘“Bad Nazis and Other Germans”: The fate of SS-Einsatzgruppen Commander Martin Sandberger in Postwar Germany’, in A Nazi Past: Recasting German Identity in Postwar Europe, ed. David A. Messenger and Katrin Paehler (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2015), pp. 57–82, here pp. 60–1. For a balanced assessment that emphasizes the widespread sympathy for the Nazi movement at Tübingen University but at the same time points to the fact that Nazi organizations for a long time did not recruit there more easily than elsewhere, see Hans-Joachim Lang, ‘Die Universität Tübingen im Nationalsozialismus’, in Forschung – Lehre – Unrecht: Die Universität Tübingen im Nationalsozialismus, ed. Ernst Seidl (Tübingen: MUT, 2015), pp. 33–49.

  32.The students were led by the Hochschulring deutscher Art under the young Theodor Eschenburg. See Benigna Schönhagen, ‘Stadt und Universität Tübingen in der NS-Zeit’, in Die Universität Tübingen im Nationalsozialismus, ed. Urban Wiesing et al. (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2010), pp. 731–58, here p. 743; Uwe Dietrich Adam, Hochschule und Nationalsozialismus: Die Universität Tübingen im Dritten Reich (Tübingen: Mohr, 1977), p. 22; Trauthig, Im Kampf um Glauben und Kirche, p. 64. On Gumbel, see in particular Christian Jansen, Emil Julius Gumbel: Porträt eines Zivilisten (Heidelberg: Wunderhorn, 1991).

  33.Adam, Hochschule und Nationalsozialismus, pp. 22–3. Initially, however, the SA did not allow for the formation of genuine student Stürme, as this was perceived to be a new form of elitism that ran contrary to the party’s ideal of a Volksgemeinschaft transgressing class boundaries. The situation changed fundamentally in 1932 with the establishment of the new Studentenbundorganisation that attempted to intensify the paramilitary training offered at German universities. See BArch Berlin, NS 23/510: Transcript of the Munich police’s Lagebericht from 20 October 1932.

  34.By the Nazis’ own accounting, forty-eight SA leaders and between 600 and 700 rank-and-file SA men were members of the National Socialist Student League as early as 1929; see Baldur von Schirach, Wille und Weg des Nationalsozialistischen Deutschen Studentenbundes (Munich: NSDAP, 1929), p. 11. Historians’ opinions on this issue differ considerably. Michael Kater in the 1970s argued that student activism in the SA remained limited, despite the prominent place that the union of ‘brain and hand’ – that is, of students and workers – occupied in Nazi propaganda. In reality, Kater claimed, no more than 40 per cent of all students who were members of the National Socialist Student League also became members of the SA. Yet whether or not this is a small number – given the importance of the National Socialist Student League in many German universities starting in 1928 – seems highly debatable; Michael Kater, Studentenschaft und Rechtsradikalismus in Deutschland 1918–1933: Eine sozialgeschichtliche Studie zur Bildungskrise in der Weimarer Republik (Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1975), pp. 186–97. Contrary to Kater, contemporaries like Theodor Geiger identified middle-class male youth and in particular students as the ‘pillars of national activism’; Geiger, Die soziale Schichtung des deutschen Volkes, p. 115. On the rise of the National Socialist Student League and its relation to the SA, see also Giles, Students and National Socialism in Germany, pp. 44–100; Michael Grüttner, Studenten im Dritten
Reich (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1995), pp. 19–61; Schön, Die Entstehung des Nationalsozialismus in Hessen, pp. 104–16.

  35.As an example of such reasoning, see LArch Freiburg, F 179/4 Nr. 110, pp. 15–22, here p. 19: Offenburg regional court, Record of interrogation of Hans Ulrich Klintzsch, 16 September 1921. Students with more liberal tendencies likewise stressed that they felt called to shape the people’s community; see Fritz Söhlmann, ‘Akademiker und Volksgemeinschaft. Die Aufgabe einer studentischen Selbstverwaltung’, Der Jungdeutsche, 27 June 1929, in GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 77, titl. 4043, no. 160, p. 90.

  36.RGVA, Osobyi Archives, Fond 720, Opis 1, no. 47, pp. 372–437, here p. 374: Werner von Fichte, Typescript of a booklet on the SA, untitled and undated, sixty-five pages.

  37.On the development of and positions within the German youth movement, see the recent publications by Ahrens, Bündische Jugend, and Barbara Stambolis (ed.), Die Jugendbewegung und ihre Wirkungen: Prägungen, Vernetzungen, gesellschaftliche Einflussnahmen (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2015). For examples of the biographical overlap of the youth movement and the NSDAP, see BArch Berlin, NS 26/370: Letter from Rudolf Schmidt, ‘Anschriften Egerland’, undated.

  38.Instructive in this respect is a travel report from the SA-Sturmführer Horst Wessel, who cycled from Berlin to an NSDAP party rally held in Nuremberg in 1927. He interwove his description of the German landscape and its people with political deliberations. See Gailus and Siemens (eds), ‘Hass und Begeisterung bilden Spalier’, pp. 157–183.

  39.RGVA, Osobyi Archives, Fond 720, Opis 1, no. 47, pp. 372–437, here pp. 374–5: Werner von Fichte, Typescript of a booklet on the SA.

  40.Stefan Vogt, ‘Strange Encounters: Social Democracy and Radical Nationalism in Weimar Germany’, Journal of Contemporary History 45:2 (2010), pp. 253–81; idem, Nationaler Sozialismus und Soziale Demokratie: Die sozialdemokratische Junge Rechte 1918–1945 (Bonn: Dietz, 2006).

  41.Carl Mierendorff, ‘Republik’, in Sozialistische Monatshefte 38:2, 1932, p. 793, as quoted in Vogt, Nationaler Sozialismus und Soziale Demokratie, p. 222.