Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts

by Daniel Siemens

  128.Krisztian Ungváry, ‘Robbing the Dead: The Hungarian Contribution to the Holocaust’, in Beata Kosmala and Feliks Tych (eds), Facing the Nazi Genocide: Non-Jews and Jews in Europe (Berlin: Metropol, 2004), pp. 231–61, here pp. 231–3.

  129.Figures according to Szöllösi-Janze, Die Pfeilkreuzlerbewegung in Ungarn, p. 426.

  130.After leaving Hungary in the spring of 1944, von Jagow’s wife and seven children, including a recently born baby, moved from Budapest to the shores of Lake Balaton and then to the more secure Groß-Münche in the Warthegau. It seems likely that the mansion the family inhabited there was one of the estates the SA had acquired in the early 1940s with the intent of transforming it into an SA leadership school after the war (see also chapter 7), but further research is needed to verify this. With the Russian troops approaching, the von Jagow family in late 1944 or early 1945 fled to Berlin and then to the city of Constance in March 1945. I would like to thank Henning von Jagow for his patience in answering my questions on his family’s history in the last months of the war.

  131.Erich Murawski, Der deutsche Wehrmachtsbericht 1939–1945: Ein Beitrag zur Untersuchung der geistigen Kriegsführung: Mit einer Dokumentation der Wehrmachtsberichte vom 1.7.1944 bis zum 9.5.1945 (Boppard am Rhein: Boldt, 1962), pp. 443–4.

  132.Klinkhammer, Zwischen Bündnis und Besatzung, pp. 148–50.

  133.Hachmann, ‘Der “Degen”’, p. 286; Rudolf Rahn, Ruheloses Leben: Aufzeichnungen und Erinnerungen (Stuttgart and Zurich: Europäischer Buchklub, 1951), p. 440; email from Henning von Jagow to the author, 5 April 2015.

  134.Moshe Zimmermann, ‘Das Auswärtige Amt und der Holocaust’, in Johannes Hürter and Michael Mayer (eds), Das Auswärtige Amt in der NS-Diktatur (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2014), pp. 165–76, here p. 173.

  135.Rahn, Ruheloses Leben, p. 390.

  136.Horstenau, Ein General im Zwielicht, vol. 3, p. 90. See also Döscher, Das Auswärtige Amt im Dritten Reich, p. 206, with further references.

  137.Horstenau, Ein General im Zwielicht, vol. 3, p. 91.

  138.An extensive discussion of this topic is beyond the scope of this book. See the instructive remarks on the necessity of such an approach in Magnus Brechtken, ‘Auswärtiges Amt, Sicherheitsdienst und Reichssicherheitshauptamt 1933 bis 1942’, in Das Auswärtige Amt in der NS-Diktatur, ed. Hürter and Mayer, pp. 151–64, here pp. 163–4.

  139.See, among others, the detailed analysis of Adolf-Heinz Beckerle, ‘Die Neuordnung in Rumänien und die Legionärsbewegung Codreanus’, Die SA 1:38 (1940), pp. 6–12.

  140.Wagner, Sudeten SA in Polen, unpaginated.

  141.IfZ Archiv, Bestand Sicherheitsdienst Reichsführer-SS, MA 650, pp. 4,982–8: SD-Report from SS-Hauptsturmführer Dr Börsch on the political situation in Slovakia, 1943.

  142.PAAA, Gesandtschaft Sofia, vol. 59/2, p. 156 (entry from 19 February 1942).

  143.See Kasche’s detailed justification of his position in a letter to von Ribbentrop from 5 November 1943, in PAAA, Personal Papers of Siegfried Kasche, vol. 23, pp. 26–30, esp. pp. 27–8.

  144.As quoted in Chary, The Bulgarian Jews and the Final Solution, p. 75. For Beckerle’s naive trust in his Bulgarian counterparts, see PAAA, Gesandtschaft Sofia, vol. 59/3, p. 4 (entries from 23 and 24 February 1943).

  145.See Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries.

  146.Döscher, Das Auswärtige Amt im Dritten Reich, pp. 256–61.

  147.PAAA, Personalakten, no. 9246, pp. 54–6: Göpfert to the German Foreign Office, 27 October 1944.

  148.Kroner, ‘Ahnungslosigkeit oder Hochverrat?’, p. 131.

  149.For the verdict, see USHMM, RG-57.004: Selected Records of Trials of the National Court of Slovakia, Including the Jozef Tiso Trial, 1910–1975. On these trials, see also Bradley Abrams, ‘The Politics of Retribution: The Trial of Jozef Tiso in the Czechoslovak Environment’, in István Deák, Jan T. Gross, and Tony Judt (eds), The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 252–89.

  150.For the verdict against Kasche, see HDA, HR-HDA-1561, Sg 013.0.47, File Slavko Kvaternik and others. The bill of indictment against Kasche, written by Jakov Blazevic, the chief prosecutor of the People’s Republic of Croatia, accused him of having contributed to ‘the physical destruction of our peoples and the looting of our property’. More precisely, it mentioned his role in the infamous conference held at the German Embassy on 4 June 1941, as well as his contribution to the ‘organization of terror, arrest and torture of the Yugoslav Jews’. Kasche was also held responsible for his collaboration with the Ustaša in the persecution of Communists and for the formation of so-called volunteer brigades that fought on the side of the Germans in the Second World War. I am grateful to Bojan Aleksov in London for his help in translating relevant passages of these documents.

  151.PAAA, Personalakten, no. 647, pp. 23–4: Information provided by the Swiss Embassy, 5 October 1944; ‘Russians Arrest Nazi Ministers’, Manchester Guardian, 22 September 1944, p. 5.

  152.Meinl, ‘Adolf Heinz Beckerle’; Neef, ‘Die schlimmste Stunde’.

  153.For details on Beckerle’s trials, see Weinke, Die Verfolgung von NS-Tätern, pp. 258–86; Meinl, ‘Adolf Heinz Beckerle’.

  154.The surviving members of the von Jagow and Ludin families still keep in touch today. After the war, the Ludin children spent several summer holidays at the von Jagow family home near Dingelsdorf on Lake Constance, and the von Jagows visited the Ludins at the (now demolished) Schlösslehof near Ostrach in Upper Swabia; email from Henning von Jagow to the author, 5 April 2015.

  155.Malte Ludin, 2 oder 3 Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß, BRD, 2005. See also Régine-Mihal Friedman, ‘All About My Mother – On Malte Ludin’s Film 2 oder 3 Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß (2005)’, in José Brunner (ed.), Mütterliche Macht und väterliche Autorität: Elternbilder im deutschen Diskurs (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008), pp. 152–81.

  156.For the long-term impact of this ‘family heritage’, see also the book by Ludin’s granddaughter Alexandra Senfft, Schweigen tut weh: Eine deutsche Familiengeschichte (Hamburg: Classen, 2007).

  157.Ernst von Salomon, Der Fragebogen, 19th edn (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2011), pp. 635–68.

  158.Malte Ludin, ‘Hanns Elard Ludin’. For a detailed and convincing analysis of Salomon’s novel and the reasons for its success in the early 1950s, see Parkinson, An Emotional State, pp. 73–111 (on Ludin, see pp. 102–3). For a general analysis of this intergenerational phenomenon, see Harald Welzer, Opa war kein Nazi: Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2002). Interestingly, even recent historical scholarship tends to see Ludin as a comparatively ‘moderate’ figure, ignoring his vital role in the Holocaust in Slovakia. See Tatjana Tönsmeyer, ‘Von der Schutzfreundschaft zur Okkupationsmacht: Die Wahrnehmung des deutschen Einflusses durch die slowakische Elite’, in Monika Glettler, L’ubomír Lipták, and Alena Míškova (eds), Geteilt, besetzt, beherrscht: Die Tschechoslowakei 1938–1945: Reichsgau Sudetenland, Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren, Slowakei (Essen: Klartext, 2004), pp. 311–25, here p. 316.

  159.Letter from Dr Carola Wolf to Henning von Jagow, 23 January 2003, as quoted in an email from Henning von Jagow to the author, 5 April 2015.

  160.In this context Ernst von Weizäcker is the most prominent case. For a balanced assessment, see Lars Lüdicke, ‘Offizier und Diplomat: Ernst von Weizäcker im Kaiserreich, Weimarer Republik und “Drittem Reich”’, in Jan Erik Schulte and Michael Wala (eds), Widerstand und Auswärtiges Amt: Diplomaten gegen Hitler (Munich: Siedler, 2013), pp. 225–49.

  161.PAAA, B 83, no. 761: Letter from Hans Kasche to the Ministry of Justice of the Federal Republic of Germany, 10 January 1954. I am grateful to Annette Weinke, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, for directing me to this document.

  162.StA München, Spruchkammerakten, K 843, p. 70: Letter from Hans Kasche to Berufungskammer München, 16 September 1954.

  163.See the two verdicts from 1954 in StA München, Sp
ruchkammerakten, K 843. For the German authorities, the 1947 verdict of the Croatian State Court was irrelevant. In such cases, ‘substantial legal guarantees’ of the defendants had not been granted, the Foreign Office informed the Kasche family. See StA München, Spruchkammerakten, K 843, p. 67: Letter from the Foreign Office to Hans Kasche, 23 February 1954.

  164.On Kiesinger’s time in the Foreign Office, see Philipp Gassert, Kurt Georg Kiesinger 1904–1988: Kanzler zwischen den Zeiten (Munich: DVA, 2006), pp. 105–49.

  165.PAAA, B 83, no. 761: Letter from Hans-Günther Kasche to Willy Brandt, 16 May 1968.

  Chapter 10

  1.Hans Rosenthal, ‘Das gibt’s nur einmal – Noten, die verboten wurden’, as quoted in Thomas Henschke, Hans Rosenthal: Ein Leben für die Unterhaltung (Berlin: Schwarzkopf und Schwarzkopf, 1999), p. 161.

  2.See Almut Giesecke, ‘Nachwort’, in Hans Fallada, Jeder stirbt für sich allein (Berlin: Aufbau, 2013), pp. 687–99; Carsten Gansel and Werner Liersch (eds), Zeit vergessen, Zeit erinnern: Hans Fallada und das kulturelle Gedächtnis (Göttingen: V & R Unipress, 2008).

  3.This holds true even if one considers that Fallada had actually written his novel accepting a suggestion by Johannes R. Becher, the president of the ‘Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands’ and, from 1954, the GDR’s first culture secretary (Minister für Kultur).

  4.For a general assessment of this aspect of post-war (West) Germany, see Norbert Frei, Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), first published in German as Vergangenheitspolitik: Die Anfänge der Bundesrepublik und die NS-Vergangenheit (Munich: Beck, 1996).

  5.UAK, Archives, Zugang 726 (Theodor Klefisch), File 2, no. 11: Affidavit of the merchant and former SA man Dietrich Bölken, 8 June 1946; File 3, no. 37: Affidavit of the railroad employee and former SA man Reiner Pittinger, 7 June 1946.

  6.See also the introduction to this book.

  7.This title alludes to Eugen Kogon’s eye-opening 1946 analysis, Der SS-Staat.

  8.See, above all, the expert opinions of Buchheim and Broszat in Anatomie des SS-Staates, pp. 218–25, 336–51.

  9.Lawrence Douglas, ‘The Didactic Trial: Filtering History and Memory into the Courtroom’, European Review 14:4 (2006), pp. 513–22, here p. 514.

  10.Article 6 of the Agreement for the Prosecution and Punishment of the Major War Criminals of the European Axis, and Charter of the International Military Tribunal, London, 8 August 1945; http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/FULL/350. On the legal aspects of the ‘crimes against humanity’ category, see also the detailed analysis by Daniel Marc Segesser, ‘Der Tatbestand Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit’, in Kim C. Priemel and Alexa Stiller (eds), NMT: Die Nürnberger Militärtribunale zwischen Geschichte, Gerechtigkeit und Rechtsschöpfung (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2013), pp. 586–604.

  11.Initially, only those members of the SA who by the end of the war held the rank of Sturmbannführer or higher were to be arrested and detained by the Allied forces. By late 1944 the number of those stormtroopers was expected to total about 30,000 men; US Army Center of Military History, Fort McNair: Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force (ed.), Handbook for Military Government in Germany prior to Defeat or Surrender (December 1944), unpaginated, http://www.history.army.mil/reference/Finding%20Aids/Mil_gov.pdf.

  12.Statement of the President of the IMT, Geoffrey Lawrence, 30 September, in Secretariat of the Tribunal under the Jurisdiction of the Allied Control Authority for Germany (ed.) (hereafter Secretariat of the Tribunal), Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 14 November 1945–1 October 1946, The Blue Series (Nuremberg, 1947–8), vol. 22, p. 413.

  13.IfZ Archive, ZS 251/1: Max Jüttner, ‘Führung, Aufgaben und Tätigkeit der SA und Nürnberger Prozess’.

  14.Ibid., pp. 3–4. Dr Robert Servatius defended the Thuringian Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel and the NSDAP leadership corps before the IMT and later also served as the defence lawyer for Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem; Priemel and Stiller, NMT, pp. 761–2.

  15.IfZ Archive, ZS 251/1, pp. 11–12, 22: Max Jüttner, ‘Führung, Aufgaben und Tätigkeit der SA’.

  16.Dorothea Gaitner, ‘Robert Gerhard Storey, a Prosecution Counsel at Nuremberg Trials’, The New York Times, 18 January 1981, http://www.nytimes.com/1981/01/18/obituaries/robert-gerard-storey-a-prosecution-counsel-at-nuremberg-trials.html.

  17.Statement of Robert G. Storey, 18 December 1945, in Secretariat of the Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals, vol. 4, p. 124.

  18.Ibid., p. 125.

  19.Ibid., p. 151.

  20.Statement of Robert G. Storey, 19 December 1945, in Secretariat of the Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals, vol. 4, p. 138.

  21.Soviet Chief Prosecutor Roman Rudenko made a similar point on 2 March 1946; see Secretariat of the Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals, vol. 8, p. 473.

  22.See chapter 6.

  23.On Schellenberg, see Reinhard R. Doerries, Hitler’s Last Chief of Foreign Intelligence: Allied Interrogations of Walter Schellenberg (London and New York: Routledge, 2007).

  24.Statement of Robert G. Storey, 19 December 1945, in Secretariat of the Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals, vol. 4, p. 158.

  25.Ibid., p. 159.

  26.The biography of Georg Boehm (1900–52), a Nuremberg-based lawyer since 1929, is virtually unknown. Martin Löffler (25 January 1905–4 February 1987) was a member of the DVP between 1927 and 1933 and received his PhD in law from Tübingen University in 1928. He opened a solicitor’s office in Stuttgart in 1933 and joined the Reiter-SA. In Nuremberg he thus also acted in a kind of self-defence. During the Second World War, Löffler served in the Wehrmacht in, among other places, Africa, before he was appointed a military judge in 1944. After the Third Reich fell, he became one of the leading authorities in press law in the Federal Republic. For a short biographical sketch, see his entry in the Munzinger archive, as well as the information provided on the homepage of the solicitor’s office he founded, at http://www.rae-loeffler.de/geschichte.php. At the IMT, Klefisch acted as the lawyer of Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, at least until 15 November 1945; Christoph Safferling and Philipp Graebke, ‘Strafverteidigung im Nürnberger Hauptkriegsverbrecherprozess: Strategien und Wirkung’, Zeitschrift für die gesamte Strafrechtswissenschaft 123:1 (2011), pp. 47–81, here p. 49; Hubert Seliger, Politische Anwälte? Die Verteidiger der Nürnberger Prozesse (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2016), pp. 191–3.

  27.So far no biographical study of Theodor Klefisch exists. On his reputation in Weimar Germany, see Ismar Lachmann, ‘Die Größen der Berliner Advocatur’, Das Kriminal-Magazin 3:29 (August 1931), http://www.anwaltsgeschichte.de/kriminal-magazin/kriminal-magazin.html.

  28.Seliger, Politische Anwälte?, pp. 192–3; Statement of Geoffrey Lawrence, 15 August, in Secretariat of the Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals, vol. 21, p. 175.

  29.For details, see Hoffstadt, ‘Stahlhelm und SA’, pp. 270–7.

  30.Statement of Georg Boehm, 28 August 1946, in Secretariat of the Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals, vol. 22, p. 157.

  31.This number was the estimate given by Dr Kuboschok, the defence lawyer for the former Reichsregierung, at the Nuremberg hearings on 28 February 1946; see ibid., vol. 8, p. 392.

  32.Statement of Martin Löffler, 1 March 1946, in ibid., vol. 8, p. 415. It remains unclear whether this statement was correct and, if so, how many former SA men were actually elected.

  33.Statement of Justice Jackson, 28 February 1946, in ibid., vol. 8, p. 370.

  34.Statement of Martin Löffler, 1 March 1946, in ibid., vol. 8, p. 409.

  35.Ibid., p. 410.

  36.Ibid., p. 411.

  37.See the ‘canonical’ work by Karl Jaspers, Die Schuldfrage (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1946). For a recent discussion, see Barbara Wolbring, ‘Nationales Stigma und persönliche Schuld: Die Debatte über Kollektivschuld in der Nachkriegszeit’, Historische Zeitschrift 289:2
(2009), pp. 325–64; Markus Urban, ‘Kollektivschuld durch die Hintertür? Die Wahrnehmung der NMT in der westdeutschen Öffentlichkeit, 1946–1951’, in Priemel and Stiller, NMT, pp. 684–718. For a broader discussion of resentment in post-war Europe, see Frank Biess, ‘Feelings in the Aftermath: Toward a History of Postwar Emotions’, in Frank Biess and Robert G. Moeller (eds), Histories of the Aftermath: The Legacies of the Second World War in Europe (New York: Berghahn, 2010), pp. 30–48, esp. pp. 40–2.

  38.Verdict of the International Military Tribunal, 30 September 1946, in Secretariat of the Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals, vol. 22, p. 518.

  39.Ibid., vol. 22, p. 519. On the Jewish ghetto in Kaunas, see Jürgen Matthäus, ‘Das Ghetto Kaunas und die “Endlösung” in Litauen’, in Wolfgang Benz and Marion Neiss (eds), Judenmord in Litauen (Berlin: Metropol, 1999), pp. 97–112; Christoph Dieckmann, ‘Das Ghetto und das Konzentrationslager in Kaunas, 1941–1944’, in Ulrich Herbert, Karin Orth, and Christoph Dieckmann (eds), Die nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager – Entwicklung und Struktur, vol. 1 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1998), pp. 439–71.

  40.Verdict of the IMT, in Secretariat of the Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals, vol. 22, p. 519.

  41.Donald Bloxham, ‘Prosecuting the Past in the Postwar Decade’, in David Bankier and Dan Michman (eds), Holocaust and Justice: Representation and Historiography of the Holocaust in Post-War Trials (Jerusalem and New York: Yad Vashem, 2010), pp. 23–43, esp. pp. 37–9. On the methodological problems of assessing the German reactions to the IMT, see H. Krösche, ‘Abseits der Vergangenheit: Das Interesse der deutschen Nachkriegsöffentlichkeit am Nürnberger Prozess gegen die Hauptkriegsverbrecher 1945/46’, in Jörg Osterloh and Clemens Vollnhals (eds), NS-Prozesse und deutsche Öffentlichkeit: Besatzungszeit, frühe Bundesrepublik und DDR (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), pp. 93–105.