INTRODUCTION

A Night of Violence

Countless images of the saints creep out of the bedroom’s darkness; become living caricatures and close in on him: half hostile, half preposterous.

— August Scholtis, 1931¹

In the East German province of Upper Silesia, 9 August 1932 was a cool summer day, and the following night was unusually fresh. These were to be the last hours of Konrad Pietrzuch,² an unemployed thirty-five-year-old worker from Potempa, an obscure village in the Tost-Gleiwitz district that boasted fewer than 1,000 residents and was located just three kilometres from the Polish border. Here, Pietrzuch lived in a dilapidated hut that he shared with his younger brother Alfons as well as their sixty-eight-year-old mother, Maria. The walls of their home were decorated with holy pictures but lacked any windows.³

All three were asleep when a group of men encircled the house in the early hours of 10 August. These men came from the surrounding villages and were members of the local branch of the National Socialist Sturmabteilungen (SA), literally the ‘storm detachments’ or ‘storm sections’ but better known as ‘stormtroopers’ or ‘Brownshirts’. They stopped in front of the Pietrzuch home, opened the unlocked door, and shouted: ‘Get out of bed, you cursed Polish Communists! Hands up!’ Then the armed men entered the house and, after pushing Maria out of the room, pulled Konrad out of his bed and beat him savagely before one of them shot him in a nearby cabin. Meanwhile, Alfons was forced to stand with his face to the wall and was beaten with equal severity, allegedly with a billiard cue or a truncheon. He suffered a serious head wound, which bled heavily, and lost consciousness for a time. According to his later testimony in court, the whole ordeal lasted half an hour. At nearly 2 a.m. the assailants finally drove away to the nearby village of Broslawitz, today’s Zbrosławice in Poland. By that time, Konrad Pietrzuch was already dead.⁴

The autopsy report by forensic pathologist Dr Weimann revealed the brutality of the attack: the body of Konrad Pietrzuch, he found, was

all in all marked by 29 wounds, of which two were relatively unimportant. The corpse was extremely bruised around the neck. The outer carotid artery was completely shredded. The larynx displayed a large hole. Death resulted from suffocation as blood from the outer carotid artery poured through the larynx into the lungs. The deadly wound must have been inflicted to Pietrzuch while he was lying on the ground. In addition, the neck shows dermabrasion that is definitely the result of a kick. Apart from these wounds, Pietrzuch is battered all over his body. He has received heavy blows on his head with a dull-edged hatchet or a stick. Other wounds look like he was hit in the face with a billiard cue.⁵

Given the extent of these injuries, the authorities feared that Pietrzuch’s maltreated body would immediately become an object of political interest. Consequently, after the crime became known, they confiscated his corpse in order to ‘remove it from the eyes of the Communists’ and prevent them from taking photographs of the body and using those for propaganda purposes.⁶

Although this crime was particularly savage, it was far from an isolated incident. In fact, a glance over the German newspapers from the summer of 1932 reveals daily lists of reports about Nazi attacks, largely on socialist and Communist workers, but also on Jews.⁷ The liberal Jewish newspaper CV-Zeitung covered bomb and hand-grenade attacks in the Upper Silesian cities of Hindenburg (today’s Zabrze), Gleiwitz (Gliwice), and Beuthen (Bytom) between 6 and 9 August 1932 alone.⁸ Historians have described Nazi stormtroopers as engaging in a veritable ‘terror campaign’ through Silesia in the summer of 1932, following the Reichstag elections of 31 July that established the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) as the nation’s strongest party but did not lead to a Hitler-run government.⁹

The killing in Potempa quickly made nationwide headlines, thanks in large part to a new emergency decree ‘against political terrorism’ that had gone into effect at midnight on the night the attack was carried out.¹⁰ Armed with this anti-terror legislation, and in a desperate attempt to stem the wave of everyday political violence that was rapidly becoming impossible to control, the government of Chancellor Franz von Papen requested the death penalty for the perpetrators of these politically motivated murders. Under the new law, those who committed political capital crimes were to be sentenced as soon as possible by newly established special courts. With this legislation, the already fragile German state attempted to insist on its monopoly on the use of force, but the message remained largely unheard and was the last attempt of its kind before the Weimar Republic finally collapsed a few months later.¹¹ Joseph Goebbels, since 1926 the leader (Gauleiter) of the regional branches of the NSDAP in Berlin and Brandenburg, rightly anticipated that this last effort would be in vain. On 10 August 1932, apparently not yet knowing about the Potempa murder, he wrote in his diary: ‘Phone call from Berlin: new emergency decree with martial law . . . But none of this will help anymore.’¹²

On 11 August, just one day after the murder was committed, the police arrested nine men on suspicion of murder: the miner and SA squad leader (Scharführer) August Gräupner (b. 1899); the pikeman and NSDAP member Rufin Wolnitza (b. 1907); the electrician Reinhold Kottisch (b. 1906); the SA troop leader and timekeeper (Markenkontrolleur) Helmuth-Josef Müller (b. 1898); a former police officer named Ludwig Nowak (b. 1891); and the miners Hippolit Hadamik (b. 1903) and Karl Czaja (b. 1894). They also arrested two innkeepers who had played a pivotal role in the crime: the SA man Paul Lachmann (b. 1893), who was also the municipal administrator (Gemeindevorsteher) of Potempa; and Georg Hoppe (b. 1889), who ran an SA tavern in the nearby village of Tworog.¹³ Four other participants, including Paul Golombek, a local butcher and probably one of the main culprits, had already fled.¹⁴ As these men’s dates of birth and professions indicate, the attackers represented a fairly typical cross section of Upper Silesian men aged twenty-five to forty-three. According to historian Richard Bessel, a specialist on the Nazis’ rise to importance in Silesia, the leaders of the attack at least ‘had fairly solid middle-class occupations’, indicating how ‘naturally’ the middle classes perceived, carried out, and justified violent attacks and even political murder in the region.¹⁵

All of those detained stood trial in front of the Beuthen special court between 19 and 22 August 1932. The historian Henning Grunwald has described the infighting at the Potempa trial between the National Socialist Lawyers’ Association, which was under the control of Hans Frank, later the Governor General in Cracow, and the newly established ‘legal advice bureau’ (Rechtsabteilung) of the SA, which was headed by the top SA lawyer Walter Luetgebrune, as a ‘veritable beauty contest’.¹⁶ Given the prominence of the case, both Frank and Luetgebrune used all means available to prevail, including intimidating their rivals and local Nazi lawyers and bestowing gifts on the defendants to win their favour. This infighting was ultimately to the detriment of the accused, as the rivalry of the Nazi jurists ‘made a smooth and effective provision of legal aid virtually impossible’.¹⁷

The judges established a version of the crime that was highly plausible, thanks to detailed testimonies of witnesses and the accused and the well-known political attitudes of the defendants. This chronology indicated that in the early hours of the evening of 9 August 1932, Nowak, the leader of SA-Sturm 26 in Broslawitz, had arranged for a group of SA men to carry out acts of political violence that would ‘terrorize the region’.¹⁸ This group then drove to Hoppe’s tavern in nearby Tworog, another notorious Nazi meeting spot. Hoppe, Sturmführer of SA-Sturm 27 in Tworog, provided the men with additional weapons and instructed them to go to Potempa. There, the local innkeeper, Lachmann, served them large quantities of alcohol and cigarettes. Together with his friend, the butcher Golombek, Lachmann also apparently provided the names of four individuals to be attacked that night.¹⁹ Pietrzuch was on the hit list. By sheer coincidence, the attack on him was the only one that proved fatal. In the course of the night, the heavily intoxicated Nazis approached two other houses as well, but they were unsuccessful in carrying out further attacks.

Lachmann later claimed that the murder expedition against the well-known but harmless troublemaker Pietrzuch was undertaken only partly because of ‘political’ reasons. Personal motives also came into play. Not only had Pietrzuch apparently insulted guests repeatedly at Lachmann’s tavern, a local Nazi hangout, and supported Polish insurgents in previous years,²⁰ but the innkeeper also feared that Pietrzuch would publicly reveal his regular poaching trips to nearby forests.²¹ A Communist pamphlet additionally claimed that Lachmann, in his role as municipal administrator, had denied the unemployed Pietrzuch brothers social benefits.²² In this situation, ‘political ‘ and ‘personal’ motives were inextricably linked, as was the case with so many violent incidents in the late Weimar Republic.

On 22 August 1932 the Beuthen special court sentenced five of the attackers to death: Lachmann because of ‘incitement for political homicide’ (Anstiftung zum politischen Totschlag) and Kottisch, Wolnitza, Gräupner, and Müller for ‘homicide committed out of political motives’. Hoppe received a prison sentence of two years for ‘abetment to dangerous bodily injury’. The remaining three culprits (Hadamik, Czaja, and Nowak) were acquitted.²³ The defendants reacted with shouts of ‘Heil Hitler!’ and ‘Down with the justice system!’²⁴ During the trial they had shown a surprisingly ‘nonchalant and almost lively humour’ in the courtroom, as press reports emphasized. They had greeted several Nazi officials who attended the trial, among them the notorious Silesian SA leader Edmund Heines, with Fascist salutes, and they did not seem overly bothered by the threat of capital punishment. A local Nazi newspaper expressed support for such behaviour by claiming that if the court ‘should dare pass a single death sentence’, a storm of protest would be raised throughout the nation.²⁵ This prediction proved true, at least on a local level and within particular segments of society: the verdict provoked fierce protests and some local acts of rebellion among the National Socialist supporters who had gathered in the streets around the courthouse in order to put pressure on the judges. The correspondent of the London Times covering the case reported that ‘the disturbances around the Court became so serious that police wearing steel helmets and armed with carbines and automatic pistols were called out’. With the support of SA units that had arrived from the Silesian capital of Breslau, the Nazis, at least on that particular day, dominated the streets in Beuthen – not only in the vicinity of the court, but also in more remote areas of the town, where the windows of several shops and of a Socialist newspaper building were smashed. Jewish shopkeepers closed down their businesses and put up their shutters.²⁶

After the verdict, the Silesian SA leader Heines, who since September 1930 had also served as a member of the Reichstag for the NSDAP, loudly predicted that ‘the German people will soon render other sentences’. The Beuthen judgement, he added, would become a beacon of hope for the German awakening.²⁷ Several hours later he repeated this message from the balcony of a nearby café to a crowd of followers.²⁸ Heines felt at ease in his self-declared role of judge. Twelve years earlier, in 1920, when he had been a member of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Roßbach, an infamous Freikorps unit fighting in West Prussia and the Baltic countries, he had ‘judged’ and executed an alleged traitor. Although the German courts ultimately sentenced him to a prison term of five years for this crime in May 1929, Heines – who had quickly regained his liberty after providing a bail of 5,000 reichsmark – soon afterwards proudly identified himself at an NSDAP party rally at the Berlin Sports Palace as a ‘Feme judge’, or a ‘judge’ in a kangaroo court.²⁹

After the national election of 31 July 1932, the NSDAP became the largest political party in the German Reichstag. Its leader, Adolf Hitler, turned the local events in Upper Silesia into a political attack on the national government. Several hours after the verdict in Beuthen became known, Hitler sent a telegram in which he declared his ‘unreserved loyalty’ to the attackers and condemned the death sentences as a ‘most outrageous blood verdict’. Officially addressing the five men sentenced to death, he aimed to reach out to Nazi followers more broadly when he sharply criticized von Papen’s conservative government and declared a revision of the verdict a national necessity: ‘From now on, your freedom is a question of honour for all of us, and to fight against the Government which has rendered possible such a verdict is our duty.’³⁰ Hermann Göring likewise sent a telegram of encouragement to the condemned men and provided 1,000 reichsmark to their families. The SA Chief of Staff Ernst Röhm even travelled to Beuthen and visited the SA men in prison.³¹

The Nazi leaders’ open defence of the Potempa murderers, although their crime caused widespread indignation and outrage in Germany as well as in the international press, becomes more intelligible by looking at the extensive ‘proclamation’ Hitler had printed in his name in the official Nazi paper Der Völkische Beobachter on 24 August 1932. With even more than his usual exaggeration, he claimed:

More than 300 massacred – one could literally say, butchered – party comrades number among our dead martyrs. Tens of thousands and even more tens of thousands have been injured . . . Only when the cup began to run over and the terror of the red bands of organized murderers and criminals became unbearable did von Papen’s ‘National Government’ rouse itself to take action . . . Whoever of you harbours sentiments to fight for the honour and freedom of the nation will understand why I refuse to join this bourgeois Government . . . We shall liberate the word ‘national’ from the grip of an objectivity whose real innermost essence is inflamed by the judgement passed in Beuthen against national Germany. Herr von Papen has thus engraved his name in German history with the blood of national fighters.³²

Joseph Goebbels, already notorious for his defamatory attacks on the political opponents, added another characteristic note to the Nazi propaganda in the Potempa case: antisemitism. In a leading article for Der Angriff, the capital’s Nazi newspaper that he himself had founded in 1927 and edited thereafter, Goebbels printed in bold letters: ‘The Jews are guilty.’³³ He repeated this slogan over and over again but did not establish any logical connection between the crime and his charge. Goebbels’s strategy was as simple as it was effective among Nazi followers: he deflected their feelings of anger and frustration with the verdict, as well as with the political and economic situation more broadly, onto the usual scapegoat, the Jews. Goebbels went so far as to threaten them with violence: ‘The hour will come when the Executive of the State will have other duties to fulfil than to protect from the wrath of the people those who have betrayed the people.’³⁴ In reaction to such slander and calls for pogrom, the authorities suspended the publication of Der Angriff for a week, but with no lasting effect.

By twisting the facts and using them to form an explicit political threat, Hitler and his entourage reached out to millions of his followers, and in particular the SA, who in the summer of 1932 expected an immediate seizure of power, not further sitting on the fence. Under such a weight of expectation, the Nazi leadership speculated that, in a political climate marked by fundamental ideological conflict and mutual hatred, not too many people would care about the fate of a simple worker, especially one who was supposedly a former Polish insurgent.³⁵ Hitler could count on his stormtroopers to perpetrate new bloody run-ins every day.³⁶ Under the circumstances, the details of the Potempa murder would be quickly forgotten and only their political interpretations would survive. The Nazi Party and its press made every effort to shift the blame for the Potempa murder onto the victim, the Communist movement, or the ‘Judeo-Marxist system’ more generally.³⁷ The following poem, allegedly written by an ordinary member of the SA and printed in a Silesian Nazi paper in early September 1932, illustrates the interchange of roles perfectly:

Beuthen!

Beuthen! It stands there on the horizon.

Still gleaming red and fresh.

Beuthen! Five comrades accuse

And what’s lurking behind them is death.

Germany! Don’t you hear their threats?

Not the millions’ shout?

It sounds through the streets, it roars through the land:

We want our comrades out!

An army is marching for their freedom,

Bound together by blood.

One leader, one faith and one banner,

Sustained by fealty and pluck.

The faith in people and fatherland.

The loyalty for the leader, our stand.

The bravery of the fighting brown dead,

Falling in towns and throughout the land.³⁸

It is hard to imagine a more complete conversion: the real victim of the crime, the murdered Pietrzuch, was eliminated for a second time, now rhetorically, whereas the five murderers sentenced to death were elevated to heroes, extolled as brave men who were faithful to the Nazi cause and allegedly were supported by millions of fellow countrymen. The excuses put forth for this reaction by leading Nazis are telling of what the British journalist F. A. Voigt in 1932 called the ‘terrible barbarisation of German political life’.³⁹ According to one article in the Nazi press, the murdered Pietrzuch was a ‘Polish rogue’ and a ‘sub-human’ who had ‘long ago forfeited the right to live on German soil’.⁴⁰ In similar terms, the writer and Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, known to the wider public as the author of the book The Myth of the 20th Century, published in Germany in 1930, justified the killing of Pietrzuch as an act of lynching – a practice he decribed as the ‘only possible corrective to an unnatural law’. In the United States, Rosenberg explained, there is ‘formal equality between the white man and the negro, but in practice there is a differential treatment’. The Nordic German was called upon to make similar and potentially lethal distinctions between ‘Aryans’, Slavs, and Jews.⁴¹

Nevertheless, the leadership of the Nazi Party was in serious trouble in the autumn of 1932. If the SA men sentenced to death were executed, the situation would become ‘unbearable’, Goebbels wrote in his diary.⁴² In that event, he feared that the pressure from the impatient Nazi following would become so strong that an open confrontation with the authorities, termed by Hitler the ‘guillotine Government’, might become inescapable.⁴³ Regardless of the outcome of such a confrontation, this would have ended the alleged legal character of the Nazis’ rise to power. Luckily for them, the Prussian Staatsministerium, which after the coup of 20 July 1932 (Preußenschlag) had fallen into the hands of the Catholic reactionary von Papen, gave in to pressure from various nationalist groups and altered the death sentences to lifelong imprisonment beginning on 2 September 1932.⁴⁴ The Nazi Party was thus able to maintain the pretence of being devoted to the rule of law.

Borderland Mentalities

The Potempa murder was a rather typical case for the period in that it linked the hardships of the immediate post-First World War period to the SA violence of the early 1930s. In many respects, these earlier grievances shaped the later patterns of violence within the nationalist faction in Germany as well as in some other central and eastern European states.⁴⁵ With regard to the actual crime, the close collaboration between the SA and other nationalist organizations in the region was key. The two youngest attackers sentenced to death, Reinhold Kottisch and Rufin Wolnitza, were in fact not yet officially SA men, but members of the Upper Silesian Self-Defence force (Oberschlesischer Selbstschutz). Both organizations overlapped heavily in the early 1930s, as can be seen from the fact that at least Wolnitza was also a member of the NSDAP.⁴⁶ Up to the time of their imprisonment, both men had lived in the ‘SA home’ in Broslawitz, where they engaged in paramilitary training that focused on the occupation of streets and forest edges, preparing for shooting battles, and the build-up of attacks by shock troops.⁴⁷

The Upper Silesian Self-Defence force was an officially tolerated paramilitary organization created after the First World War to fight against the Poles in this highly contested borderland region between the German Reich and the re-established Polish state.⁴⁸ In the autumn of 1918, the Poles had initially demanded that the whole area of Upper Silesia, a region developed since the nineteenth century into one of the German Reich’s industrial centres because of its rich natural coal reserves, be integrated into the new Polish state. Leading politicians as well as the public in Germany bitterly opposed this idea, insisting on national self-determination and putting forward the argument that the area was, regardless of a strong Polish ethnic element, predominantly German. They further claimed that these territories were indispensable for their national economy, which had been badly hit as a result of the recent military defeat.⁴⁹ Three Polish uprisings between 1919 and 1921, inspired by the strong missionary zeal to ‘re-Polonize’ the diverse population of the region, did not help to calm the passions running high in the towns and villages of Upper Silesia.⁵⁰

The activities of German Freikorps militia, commanded by men like Peter von Heydebreck, Hermann Ehrhardt, Wilfried von Loewenfeld, and Horst von Petersdorff, further increased hostilities. These militias not only engaged in fighting with the Poles but also persecuted alleged German traitors, thus demonstrating that not only linguistic and ethnic but also political boundaries were highly contested.⁵¹ The founder of the so-called ‘special police’ of the Upper Silesian Self-Defence force, Heinz Oskar Hauenstein, who later became one of the first members of the Berlin SA, claimed in a 1928 trial that his organization had been responsible for more than 200 ‘Feme murders’. The term Feme, alluding to a medieval Germanic practice of penalization, was used in interwar Germany to designate the political murder of a ‘traitor’ by perpetrators from the extreme right.⁵²German Freikorps also summarily executed numerous alleged Polish spies.⁵³ One former Freikorps man later declared cynically, ‘We actually spared the bullets when killing this riffraff.’⁵⁴ However, in a 1922 bill of indictment against members of the Freikorps Ehrhardt Brigade, even the Reich prosecutor in Leipzig described the anti-Polish efforts of the German militia sympathetically as acts of legitimate self-defence. He regarded them as necessary to fight off Polish attacks that were intended to ‘smash the state and economic order in Germany’ and were carried out ‘with the help of foreign powers’. In these statements, the Reich prosecutor alluded to decisions made by the Inter-Allied Control Commission, which was widely accused of pro-Polish sympathies in Germany after the First World War.⁵⁵

These currents of the immediate post-war years still reverberated in the nationalist and strongly anti-Polish sentiments of the Upper Silesian SA in the early 1930s. The group’s firm anti-democratic convictions tied in with older, well-established political beliefs in the region. Many ethnic Germans shared widespread frustration with the supposedly lenient stance of the Weimar governments on questions of national security and in particular with regard to the defence of the German border to the east.⁵⁶ To a certain extent, the Upper Silesian SA was successful in passing itself off as a legitimate successor to the former Freikorps units.⁵⁷ Its rhetoric drew heavily on such comparisons, and was propagated by leading men of the extreme right like Manfred von Killinger, a former Freikorps leader who later joined the SA.⁵⁸ In particular, in regions close to the German frontier, the SA units presented themselves as veritable border guards, called to defend national unity against the Czechs and Poles in the east and the French in the west (Plate 6).⁵⁹ The effects of such a borderland mentality were not confined to the SA alone, as the following example illustrates. After the Nazis took power, the National Socialist Teachers’ League (Nationalsozialistischer Lehrerbund) in Silesia repeatedly organized ‘training camps’ for its members. These two-week-long courses were designed to raise the ‘border-consciousness’ of German teachers, which was defined as the racial and historical awareness of Silesia’s particular role within the ‘pan-German East’.⁶⁰ Since the early 1920s, many teachers had been profoundly hostile to Poland and its protecting power, France. Now, they proudly boasted of their alleged ‘German frontier perspective’ and passed these attitudes and ideas onto their disciples.⁶¹

This mental orientation, which has not yet received enough attention in the existing research on the SA,⁶² was indeed one of the most important ideological drivers that guaranteed the SA’s identity up to 1945. In particular, in light of the German expansionist policies since the mid-1930s that chronologically coincided with the profound crisis of the SA following the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ (30 June–2 July 1934), the self-image of the SA as an organization that promoted ‘Germanness’ – through paramilitary training, physical exercise, ideological education, and later active fighting in the Second World War – became key. Starting in the late 1930s, at the latest, this held true well beyond the boundaries of the Reich. The high numbers of ethnic Germans who joined the SA in the Sudetenland and the Memel region between 1937 and 1939 testifies to the SA’s lasting appeal, at least in regions that were to be integrated into the Reich.⁶³

The history of the SA after the Nazi takeover of power in late January 1933 remained one of violence, hatred, and fighting. With regard to the Potempa case, already on 23 March, as the first political prisoners filled the newly erected concentration camps in Oranienburg, Dachau, and elsewhere, Hitler had the condemned SA murderers released from prison.⁶⁴ These former inmates were now ‘acclaimed jubilantly’ by the Upper Silesian press, complained the Union of Poles in Upper Silesia in October 1933 in a petition to the League of Nations. Since murderers were now officially treated as heroes, the Union claimed, the Polish minority had lost all sense of security.⁶⁵ The following years would confirm and even exceed its most pessimistic fears. Reflecting on the history of violence and bloodshed in Upper Silesia, the writer August Scholtis – an Upper Silesian native from the village of Bolatiz, today’s Czech Bolatice – wrote gloomily in his 1959 autobiography: ‘In this region, Middle Europe still seems to be in the Middle Ages. From generation to generation, the individual human being is torn apart between the Prussian and the Polish state borders here. People are interchangeably deprived of their free will by both sides; they are bullied, hunted down, looted or simply slaughtered along the roadsides.’⁶⁶

The two decades following the Potempa murder of 1932 were no exception to this pattern. On the contrary, the Nazi takeover of power and the party’s policy of enforced conformity through coercion were carried out with an extreme level of violence, not least in Lower and Upper Silesia. Several years later, the German-Polish borderlands and the territories farther east became lands of mass murder and genocide, the ‘bloodlands’ of the Second World War.⁶⁷ The SA, as will be demonstrated in this book, was among the organizations responsible for this radicalization of ethnic and political hatred. Taking up Ian Kershaw’s dictum that in Nazi Germany violence was ‘built into the system’,⁶⁸ one might equally say that violence was built into the SA – not only as a means of actual behaviour, but also as a core element of its propaganda, the socialization of its members, and, finally, the establishment of a National Socialist identity.

Ruffians, Killers, Political Hooligans

Although excessive, the Potempa murder was just one of hundreds of politically motivated crimes that shocked Germany between 1927 and 1932, a foretaste of the systematic persecution of political opponents and other alleged enemies that would follow in the wake of the establishment of the Third Reich in 1933–4. Every one of these crimes helped unsettle the public’s faith in the capability of the Weimar Republic to fight successfully against the increasing wave of political terror. The Republic was a fragile democracy but by no means doomed to fail from its inception in 1919.⁶⁹Although the Nazi SA was not the only paramilitary organization to engage in violent clashes with opponents, its contribution to the rise of political violence was significant, both in quantitative and in qualitative terms.⁷⁰ On the eve of the national elections of 31 July 1932, tensions escalated. In June and July 1932 alone, politically linked street riots, shootings, brawls, and assassinations in Germany caused the deaths of more than 300 people and injured more than 1,000.⁷¹ Within a political climate verging on civil war, the Potempa murder would probably not have made more than local headlines had it not been the first political felony to occur after President Hindenburg’s emergency decree on political terrorism came into effect.

The Potempa murder case contains many of the elements on which I will elaborate in the following chapters: the forms and motives of the SA’s political violence, the reaction of the democratic state vis-à-vis the increasing threat from the National Socialists, and their exploitation of border disputes between Germans and their neighbours that stretched back to the nineteenth century. After the National Socialists took power in 1933, the SA remained the party’s Praetorian Guard and, at least according to the official propaganda, the embodiment of its values, attitudes, and readiness for combat. The individual SA man was expected to represent the ‘most ideal National Socialist type’⁷² and as such was propagated as a role model for (male) German youth, building in part on the Freikorps myth but also incorporating newer trends commonly associated with muscular Christianity and the ‘conservative revolution’ in Germany around 1930.⁷³ However, the murder of SA Chief of Staff Ernst Röhm and several dozen of his followers between 30 June and 2 July 1934 in the infamous ‘Night of the Long Knives’ considerably hampered the SA’s ambitions to shape the politics of the Third Reich. According to the historiographical consensus, these events reduced the stormtroopers to a ‘second-line propaganda group within the movement’ for the remaining eleven years of the Third Reich.⁷⁴

Against this well-known background, a new study on the SA does not necessarily need justification, but certainly an explanation of its intention, scope, and methodological approach appears to be necessary. This book will demonstrate not only that the narrative of the SA’s rise and fall as outlined above is incomplete, but that it obscures the Brownshirts’ deep and long-term effect on large numbers of Germans living in the Third Reich, an effect that lasted even longer than Nazi rule. The SA was, in the words of American sociologist Lewis A. Coser, a ‘greedy institution’, an organization characterized by ‘omnivorous’ demands on its members yet based on voluntary compliance, loyalty, and commitment. Such organizations attempt to ‘encompass within their circle the whole personality’.⁷⁵ The SA throughout the Third Reich remained an important organization for forming German men according to the regime’s needs and wishes, but it also allowed the rank-and-file stormtrooper to participate in the Nazi project.⁷⁶ In this sense, the SA was highly relevant politically until 1945 – a contention that runs counter to the mainstream historiography on the SA, which emphasizes its fundamental loss of power and influence after the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ in 1934 and considers the SA in its later years an organization that was numerically still considerable, but politically irrelevant. To take up Hans Mommsen’s famous interpretation of the course of Nazi politics as a ‘cumulative radicalisation’, particularly regarding its attitude toward the extermination of the Jews,⁷⁷ the existing literature of the later SA may be summarized as suggesting a cumulative banalization.

This assessment is misleading as it conveys the impression that the SA after 1934 was solely geared toward promoting a kind of nostalgic drinking companionship – an argument initially put forward by many SA activists after the war. Such a view ignores important activities that the SA performed in the pre-war years of the Third Reich, including its antisemitic violence, which peaked in the summer of 1935 and again in June and November 1938; its contributions to the Second World War; and its role in stabilizing the Nazi regime within Germany and the occupied territories well into the last weeks of Nazi rule. The following study therefore covers the entire period from 1921, when Nazi Sturmabteilungen were organized in Munich for the first time, until 1945, when they ceased to operate in the context of the ultimate collapse of the German war effort.⁷⁸Furthermore, the situation of transitional justice in the German zones of occupation, as well as within the jurisdiction of the two German states founded in 1949, will be explored inasmuch as it deals with the SA and its crimes. I will argue that the courts decisively influenced the way in which the history of the stormtroopers was written during the first decades after the Second World War. Finally, the SA’s importance within a comprehensive social history, or Gesellschaftsgeschichte, of National Socialism will be reassessed.

Given the myriad studies that exist on the history of National Socialism, the Third Reich, the Second World War, and the Holocaust – fields that no individual researcher can claim to know in all their detail any longer⁷⁹ – the number of works that concentrate on the SA is surprisingly limited. With the exception of the controversy surrounding the SA’s social appeal and the composition of its membership – as predominantly working class or middle class – the existing studies are quite uniform when it comes to interpreting the organization.⁸⁰ They overwhelmingly concentrate on the years from the mid-1920s to 1934, with a clear focus on the forms and consequences of SA activism.⁸¹ An early and characteristic if unusually lively example of historical judgement is Ernst Niekisch’s assessment of the stormtroopers in his book Reich of the Menial Demons (Das Reich der niederen Dämonen), published in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1953. As Niekisch wrote:

The SA was a counter-elite; it attracted all those characters who were rotten and frail from within. In the SA, all criminal inclinations were let loose. The SA barracks were dens of vice; there were work-shy individuals, drunkards, losers [Lebensbankrotteure], homosexuals, ruffians and killers who hatched their sinister attacks by which Germany should be ‘awakened’. The human quality of this brown heap, in which the sons of the German bourgeoisie were trained in gangland methods, illustrated the desolate human decline of the German middle classes.⁸²

The former ‘National Bolshevik’ Niekisch, whom the Nazis had imprisoned in 1937, was later appointed a professor of sociology at East Berlin’s Humboldt University. His personal anger at and hatred of the Nazis coincided with contemporary political doctrines, at least with regard to the stormtroopers. Both the educated West Germans and the Socialist establishment in the east regarded the SA men’s violence and lack of morality as a cornerstone of Fascist rule, albeit for somewhat different reasons. In the Federal Republic, SA violence was often used to delegitimize National Socialism as a perverted political ideology and the ‘rule of the mob’. The undertone of this claim was clearly apologist, as this image contrasted negatively with the alleged attempts of the middle classes to ‘soften’ the Nazi excesses. One might say that the stormtroopers were portrayed as ‘fanatical Nazis’ against whom even supporters of the regime and regular party members could be compared positively. At best, the members of the latter group could now perceive themselves to be ‘tactical’ or ‘upright’ Nazis. In the Communist East, the situation was more ambivalent: in the immediate post-war years, SA violence that had been committed in the early 1930s was severely persecuted, at times in show trials, particularly when it had been directed against Communists. However, attempts to win over the mass of former Brownshirts for the benefit of the new socialist state prevailed, beginning in the early 1950s, and criminal persecution diminished accordingly. In both parts of Germany, disdain dominated, at least until the 1970s. For the influential journalist and author Joachim Fest, to quote a respected conservative intellectual in the West, the SA was a barely disguised criminal mob, a ‘racket with a political slant’ (Ringverein mit politischem Akzent).⁸³ The historian Hans Buchheim in 1965 similarly regarded the ‘SA rowdies’ as the ‘most reprobated form of a perverted soldierly tradition’ (verkommenste Form einer abartigen soldatischen Tradition),⁸⁴ and the American historian William L. Shirer even claimed that many of the SA leaders were ‘notorious homosexual perverts’.⁸⁵

However, such damning assessments tell us more about the preferences of post-war historiography than about social realities in the SA. In sharp contrast to these judgements, a 1931 internal police memorandum ‘on the fighting principles of radical organisations’ emphasized that there was ‘undoubtedly a lot of valuable Menschmaterial’ among the stormtroopers, who were led by ‘highly qualified leaders’.⁸⁶ Karl Otto Paetel, a ‘national revolutionary’ during the late Weimar years who survived the Third Reich in exile and later introduced the West Germans to American beatnik poets, formulated an intermediary position. He rightly emphasized as early as 1965 that the difficulty in writing about the stormtroopers would be to not content oneself with a reconstruction of the SA’s ‘administrative schemes’ and orders. Instead, Paetel thought it paramount to convincingly explain how, under such an ‘administrative heap’, two types of SA men could come into existence and coexist: the ‘idealists’ and those he described as possessing the ‘jungle mentality of sadist hooligans’.⁸⁷ This is still a difficult task for the historian, particularly because in the SA ‘idealists’ and ‘sadists’ – to stick to Paetel’s terminology for the moment – were hard to distinguish and sometimes not identifiable at all.

Since the 1970s, several important studies on the SA that took up this challenge have appeared in print. Whereas the aforementioned earlier literature usually emphasized the ‘criminal character’ of the SA – admittedly, an important task of popular pedagogy in Germany, given the fact that until the late 1950s many Germans still regarded National Socialism as a good idea that had unfortunately gone wrong⁸⁸ – the authors of these new studies took a closer look at the social composition, mentalities, and political organization of the SA. Pioneering works – by Peter Merkl on the self-images of the stormtroopers, by Mathilde Jamin on the SA leadership corps and its problems after the so-called ‘Röhm purge’, and by Richard Bessel on the rise and the political violence of the SA in Silesia prior to 1933 – became cornerstones upon which recent research still builds. Peter Longerich’s seminal political history of the SA, published in 1989, marks the provisional end point of this renewed interest during the 1970s and 1980s.⁸⁹

From the 1990s onward, three different types of research on the SA have emerged. First, there have been a range of works that combine social historical approaches with more recent attempts to write histories of violence, often from a praxeological and micro-historical perspective, and at times even with a deliberate comparative design. These investigations stress that the SA units constituted ‘communities of violence’ (Gewaltgemeinschaften) that preached a particular ‘way of life’ in which excess and discipline complemented each other.⁹⁰ Sven Reichardt’s imposing dissertation from 2002 comparing the German SA with the Italian Squadristi stands out as a particularly influential work of this school of thought.⁹¹ Second, important aspects of the SA’s history have also been analysed in the many regional and local studies dealing with the Nazi takeover of power, as well as in historical studies on the German police, the judiciary, and the early concentration camps.⁹² In addition, books have appeared in which family members explore the past of those relatives with an ‘SA career’. Largely based on ego-documents, these books often contain relevant information about the motives that individuals had for their commitment to the stormtroopers – information that is rarely documented in state archives.⁹³ Third, there have been increasing numbers of studies that are informed by the new cultural history. The authors of these studies take a vivid interest in the ‘body images’ of the men in the SA and SS, and analyse National Socialist rituals and symbols, particularly the death cult that has been so characteristic of Fascist ideologies.⁹⁴ Others explore the gendered dimension of interwar paramilitarism, scrutinize the cliché of the ‘gay Nazi’, or re-examine the relations between Nazi activists and the various Churches.⁹⁵

New Perspectives

Although the SA can hardly be characterized as an understudied subject, no comprehensive account of its history and development has been attempted so far. This book attempts to fill this lacuna, not only by weaving the numerous loose ends together, but also through its presentation of information drawn from archival research in more than a dozen state, regional, and local archives in several countries, producing a more multi-dimensional and balanced view than has hitherto been presented.⁹⁶ This investigation aims to provide the first comprehensive history of the stormtroopers that combines extensive archival research with a thorough analysis of existing studies in order to reassess the SA’s importance in the history of the Third Reich and Western modernity more generally.

Several points underline the importance of this study. First, as mentioned above, the history of the SA has been thoroughly researched only for the period up to the summer of 1934. Despite Bruce Campbell’s pioneering article urging scholars not to overlook the later SA that was published more than twenty years ago, only a few historians have followed his call.⁹⁷ This has had consequences. I will argue that the historians’ concentration on the SA’s violence in the second half of the Weimar Republic – the Systemzeit, as the Nazis derogatorily called it – helped obscure two issues: (1) the fact that the SA not only survived the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ but even managed to have a partial comeback in the late 1930s; and (2) the extent to which this organization helped the Nazis to permeate German society. In 1939 the SA still comprised more than 1.3 million men – roughly three times as many as in 1932.⁹⁸ Violent mobilization and disciplinary integration into the SA were features of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft, or ‘people’s community’, until 1945. Over the past decade, historians of modern Germany have vigorously debated the appropriateness of this term and the nature of the society it designated, agreeing at least that the Volksgemeinschaft was a highly popular political promise, but never a social reality. However, the participants in this debate have not paid much attention to the stormtroopers. Against this background, the present study is not only an empirical contribution to this debate but also a critical comment on its mode of discussion and preliminary results.⁹⁹

Second, then, this comprehensive view, which encompasses the SA’s history in the Weimar Republic and in the Third Reich, enables us to see the SA more clearly than has hitherto been possible in a comparative and transnational context.¹⁰⁰ Not only the early years of the SA’s existence have to be seen against the background of the White Terror in large parts of post-First World War central Europe and Mussolini’s successful takeover of power in Italy in 1922. Beyond this, the increasingly transnational dimension of the SA in the 1930s – including the appearance of the so-called ‘Austrian Legion’, a branch of the SA that consisted of Austrian Nazis who had taken shelter in the Reich prior to the Anschluss of 1938,¹⁰¹ and the geographical extension of the SA from the late 1930s onward into the territories annexed to the Nazi Empire – must also be acknowledged. By 1942, SA units existed not only in the territory of the former Czechoslovakian state, but also in Alsace, Slovenia, the Warthegau and the General Government in occupied Poland. The history of the SA in these regions is virtually unknown and allows us to gain important insights into the problems of ‘Germanization’, defined as the transformation of individuals from these regions into ‘proper’ Germans – as deemed by the Nazis’ cultural and racial standards. My analysis thus also adds to an excellent body of studies that have focused on the SS, the Foreign Office, and the several agencies concerned with German settlement questions.¹⁰² With regard to the ‘SA diplomats’, the German envoys from the highest ranks of the SA who were appointed to posts in southeastern European vassal states in the early 1940s, this book demonstrates that SA generals even had influence over Germany’s foreign policy. They were experts in violence who were directly concerned with the implementation of the Holocaust.

Third, although the level of physical violence in which the SA was involved was certainly high, particularly in the excessive year of 1933, it does not stand out on an international scale – at least in comparison to the different cases of extreme mass violence in the twentieth century.¹⁰³ The SA is, however, a particularly useful example in scrutinizing what made and what makes the use of violence so attractive to young men in particular environments and times. Not only is violence a fact of human life, but its exercise also comes with considerable advantages and is thus often employed in a manner that is ‘purposively rational’.¹⁰⁴ In the face of a capitalist modernity that not only produces economic winners and losers but also largely prevents the individual from experiencing feelings of excitement and belonging, the use of violence can provide key benefits, as the German philosopher and literary scholar Jan Philipp Reemtsma has recently argued.¹⁰⁵ It is a kind of exit strategy, in that middle-class considerations based on careful planning and subordination to an allegedly universally binding morality are replaced by feelings of liberation (to destroy), individual empowerment, and momentous gains, both material and spiritual. Violence therefore allows for a specific form of pleasure that is particularly attractive at times when alternatives become, or seem to become, less likely to materialize in the foreseeable future.¹⁰⁶ Consequently, political thinkers like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels who did not believe in the reform of capitalism embraced revolutionary violence as the ‘midwife of history’ and as a legitimate ‘tool’ for new social movements in their attempts to destroy ossified political forms.¹⁰⁷ One can generalize from this point: if the temporary empowerment of individuals through violence can be justified as a way of serving higher ends – such as by rendering service to a nation or by doing God’s will (or, ideally, both) – the actors of such barely restrained but self-legitimized violence will also profit from a relatively stable alternative group identity that is not necessarily weaker than the more established moral order they are fighting.¹⁰⁸

Two Sides of Violence

As this book will demonstrate, the stormtroopers’ use of violence was in many ways such a purposively rational and self-empowering choice. However, the possession of dangerous weapons that not only scare opponents but also serve to elevate their users into an identity constructed in sharp contrast to the mainstream society and its values, and an elaborate and highly skilful system of propaganda that encourages the violent individual to perceive himself or herself as a modern crusader for the nation and God, empowered to legitimately fight unbelievers, or even on behalf of mankind – all this was not exclusive to SA men of the 1920s and 1930s. Obviously, this is a history book on a particular organization and its members within the framework of a distinct period, and as such it cannot be considered a long-term study that systematically compares forms and regimes of violence until the present day. Yet, despite this reservation, the history of the SA is in many respects paradigmatic of the way politics, media coverage, violence, and grassroots activism were interwoven in the twentieth century.

Such a broad focus requires methodological rigour, and thus some additional methodological explanations are needed here. The focus of my book is on violence and its personal, strategic, and cultural implications, but it also concerns the integrating power that an organization like the SA was able to wield. I will pay particular attention to processes of violent mobilization and disciplinary integration. With regard to the stormtroopers, both phenomena were inextricably linked. The Nazi movement not only used violence as a means to mobilize its supporters and to fight its enemies, but also used it to discipline the population at large and its activists in particular. Whereas the first use of violence dominated up to the years 1933–4, in later years of the Third Reich the second usage prevailed. Yet even then, processes of disciplinary integration through violence always contained elements of mobilization – and, vice versa, the earlier mobilization had at the same time disciplinary effects on the rank and file of the SA.¹⁰⁹

The history of violence is a field of study that has expanded considerably over the last twenty years.¹¹⁰ The period 1914–45, at times described as a ‘European civil war’, has received particular attention from historians with an interest in the study of violence – not only because of the two world wars and their extremely high levels of destruction and death, but also because of the two opposing ideologies of Communism and Fascism that challenged democratic rule based on ideas of political liberalism.¹¹¹ National Socialism, as the German variant of Fascism or, more precisely, of ‘authoritarian rightism’, has been firmly embedded in a broad field of transnational and comparative studies on authoritarian, Fascist, or extreme nationalist movements and regimes in interwar Europe that replace older notions of totalitarianism.¹¹² The forms of political violence that these movements exercised have increasingly come under comparative and transnational scrutiny.¹¹³ In effect, the history of National Socialism, or at least its early phase, is now increasingly analysed as a variant of a European phenomenon and less prominently interpreted as the keystone of the Sonderweg, the special path of modern German history that can be compared negatively with the imagined progressive course of modern Western history that unfolded elsewhere, a framework adopted in particular by the influential Bielefeld School of social history.¹¹⁴ Nevertheless, to stress similarities does not mean to neglect differences. National Socialism became excessively violent with the establishment of the Third Reich and then again radicalized during the Second World War, when it implemented a programme of destruction and mass murder on an unprecedented scale, enslaving and killing millions of people whom the regime deemed ‘undesirable’, most notably the European Jewry.¹¹⁵

The present study follows this transnational historiographical trend without losing sight of the SA’s national specificity. It analyses the changing patterns of stormtrooper violence and its effects, from the organization’s early years as a genuine paramilitary Wehrverband to its heyday as a violent social movement, to the Nazi regime years when the SA was transformed into a mass organization with auxiliary police responsibilities but decreasing influence on the central government.¹¹⁶ For the sake of clarity, I sometimes refer to these different stages as the first (1920/1–1923), second (1925/6–1933/4), and third SA (1933/4–1945). In order to adequately cover these different periods, with their changing forms of political activism, I rely on praxeological analyses of violent action, following the pioneering work of Sven Reichardt, who using the example of interwar Fascism has successfully demonstrated that praxeology as a method of studying social interaction allows for the reconciliation of structure and action, ideology and daily practices. By analysing the physical routines of the Nazi militants, their collectively shared worldviews, and their ‘subjective attribution’ of sense (to the acts they committed), it is possible to reconstruct the particular modes of Vergemeinschaftung in the SA.¹¹⁷ However, I will also re-evaluate Reichardt’s principal argument that in the SA, committing violence and feeling a sense of community were inextricably linked.¹¹⁸ This is all the more important as his analysis predominantly concentrated on the narrow period of time between the late 1920s and the early 1930s. I will ask to what extent Reichardt’s observations match the realities of the third SA and thereby attempt to clarify whether rupture or continuity prevailed in the history of the stormtroopers.

In scrutinizing the violence employed, I analyse the physical, psychological, cultural, and structural elements that such violence contains.¹¹⁹ Whereas the first two forms are rather self-explanatory – physical violence is a direct assault on someone else’s body, while psychological violence is a conscious attempt to compromise someone else’s well-being – cultural and structural forms of violence, as well as forms of symbolic violence, are much harder to define and even more difficult to assess in retrospect. Apart from possible harmful intentions on the interpersonal level, such violence is here (also) the result of larger social and political processes.¹²⁰ The latter forms of violence thus blur the boundaries between the perpetrator and the victim, as they ultimately exert force on both of them. Responsibility is thus more difficult to attribute.

Regardless of such practical problems, two quick examples will make plain why a broad understanding of violence is needed for this study. First, a public SA march through a working-class neighbourhood around 1930 was meant by its participants and perceived by its political opponents as a violent provocation, even if no one was actually injured. Second, some years later, after the Nazi dictatorship was established, the sheer presence of a group of uniformed stormtroopers sufficed to scare potential dissidents and bystanders alike.¹²¹ This was more than an aesthetic occupation of the public space. Everyone knew how quickly even a seemingly peaceful SA cohort could resort to physical violence, and many likewise knew that to ask for help from the police or the judiciary was often useless, if not a direct invitation to trouble.¹²² The present study argues that this structural element of SA violence, its men’s Aktionsmacht, or ‘power of action’,¹²³ remained in force throughout the Third Reich. Following Thomas Kühne, who has recently emphasized that in the Third Reich even seemingly harmless concepts as ‘comradeship’ contained a highly aggressive and ultimately genocidal tendency,¹²⁴ the present study likewise not only covers the SA’s tangible violence, as documented in the press, court files, and memoirs, but also pays attention to the less spectacular forms of SA sociability and community and inquires into the extent to which they contributed to a social climate in which belonging and exclusion complemented each other and which ultimately made central Europe a Gewaltraum, a ‘territory of violence’ where forms of security that had structured human interaction in peacetime were no longer valid.¹²⁵Whereas actual outbursts of SA physical violence remained relatively limited after the Nazi takeover of power was completed in 1934 – although, for the reasons just mentioned, we can assume that violent incidents involving stormtroopers were in fact more frequent than court and police records of the Third Reich suggest – it was the permanent menace posed by the Brownshirts’ psychological and cultural violence in combination with other Nazi institutions that explains their lasting power and social impact.

To concentrate the historical analysis on the perpetrators and the structural framework in which they were operating would still be incomplete, however. A book on the stormtroopers is ipso facto also about those who were on the receiving end of their violence. Although in what follows I explore the intentions, actions, and mindsets of the men in the SA, I also hope to do justice to all those who directly experienced SA violence between the early 1920s and 1945. To analyse historical violence is not to excuse it, but it inevitably leads to a kind of rapprochement – a fact I tried to keep in mind while researching and writing this book.¹²⁶

The Line of Argumentation

The following eleven chapters are arranged according to both chronology and topic and are divided into four parts. The first part, encompassing chapters 1 to 3, provides an overview of the early SA, from its inception in Munich in 1920–1 to its transformation into a kind of controlled social movement ten years later. I thus analyse the organizational and political history of the SA in light of the increasingly antagonistic and hostile political culture of the Weimar Republic. Without the experience of the First World War and the culture of paramilitary leagues in the 1920s, the phenomenal rise of the SA by the late 1920s would not have been possible, but this environment alone is not sufficient to explain its ‘success story’ between 1926 and 1933. The book therefore takes up the task of integrating the SA’s institutional and political history into a study of everyday violence, of the palpable as well as the rhetorical kind. Both forms of violence were closely intertwined. My study scrutinizes more closely some of the (political) clashes that occurred in ever growing numbers starting in the late 1920s in order to demonstrate the mechanisms of a political strategy that was, to a large extent, built on the communicative aspects of violence and terror. I likewise re-evaluate the SA’s crucial importance for the Nazis’ growing success at the polls and – against this background – account for the growing dissatisfaction within the SA caused by the pretended ‘legalistic course’ of the NSDAP. Finally, this part of the book will explore the political motifs and the self-understanding of the oppositional groups within the SA, commonly identified with the brothers Gregor and Otto Strasser as well as Walther Stennes, the SA commander in Berlin until his expulsion in 1931. I will demonstrate that a closer look at the history of the SA does not attest to a straightforward ‘march to power’, as the party propaganda attempted to portray, but reveals an often complicated path of development, full of conflicts and internal quarrels.

The second part of this study, encompassing chapters 4 and 5, examines the SA’s crucial role at the beginning of the Third Reich. In the first two years of the regime, until the summer of 1934, the SA was the most important organization responsible for the incarceration and murder of political opponents. Although a considerable number of local and regional studies on SA terror have been written in the last thirty years, we still lack an expert overview that goes beyond the mere retelling of particular crimes and biographies to synthesize the forms and aims of the SA’s para-police violence.¹²⁷ This book thus analyses in depth how SA violence was embedded in the political transformation of Germany from a democratic to a dictatorial state. Exemplary case studies show how the SA interacted with the Nazi Party leadership, the police, and the judiciary, illuminating larger trends. It will be demonstrated that the SA’s violence in this crucial period was hard to control and even threatened the same people who had contributed to the rise of a violent political culture in the preceding years. Furthermore, I explore in what ways the individual SA man ‘made sense’ of these violent acts (for himself and his peers), and how this meaning-making fits into the broader National Socialist understanding of the times. By taking a closer look at individual perspectives as well as the more systematic effects of SA violence, this book provides not only a fuller picture of the SA but also a better understanding of the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship. The second part concludes with a chapter on the murder of Röhm, several dozen high-ranking SA leaders, and other reputed enemies of National Socialism, in an event today known as the ‘Night of the Long Knives’, in early July 1934. I will re-evaluate the latest literature on these thoroughly examined events with a particular focus on their mid- and long-term effects.

The third part of the book, comprising chapters 6 to 9, analyses the extent to which the SA not only survived the murder of considerable parts of its leadership corps but also contributed to the militarization of society in the following years and engaged in preparations for the Second World War. Up to now, not much has been written about the SA in this period, with the exception of its antisemitic violence in Germany and, later, also in Austria. In order to paint a comprehensive picture of the stormtroopers’ relevance between 1934 and 1939, I will argue in chapter 6 that one should not only focus on such high-profile outbursts of violence but also take into account the structural aspects of the SA’s transformation into a mass organization that penetrated German society on several levels. Beginning in the mid-1930s, the Brownshirts were increasingly concerned with paramilitary tasks related to the annexation of Austria and the Memelland and the dismantling of Czechoslovakia. Chapter 7 will demonstrate that the SA leadership even made settlement plans for eastern Europe, a task that it was ultimately forced to hand over to the rival SS. During the war years, analysed in chapter 8, the SA suffered from the drafting of the majority of its members into the Wehrmacht. Some fighting units, however – in particular, the SA-Standarte Feldherrnhalle – were composed exclusively of SA men. The earlier National Socialist concept of the ‘political soldier’ appeared during this period in an updated form: he was fighting Bolshevism now not in the German streets but on the Russian plains. Chapter 9 will for the first time ever provide a thorough analysis of the tasks and actions of those high-ranking SA generals who were sent as German envoys into the countries of southeastern Europe. I will argue that their appointment not only was an attempt to further bring the German diplomatic service under party control but also was intended to entrust diplomatic preparations for the murder of local Jews in these states to men who had been proven loyal NSDAP activists and fanatical antisemites. Even if the SA was no longer one of the dominant Nazi organizations in Germany, these examples demonstrate that it remained highly relevant as a network of ‘committed’ Nazi activists who contributed to the war and the Holocaust.

Finally, the fourth and last part, consisting of chapter 10 and the conclusion, is concerned with the legacy of the SA after 1945. I will demonstrate, first, that understandings of the third SA as utterly unimportant in the Third Reich were popularized in the immediate post-war years as a means of juridical defence and met with considerable success. Second, I will show that such partisan views were quickly taken up by the early historiography on the SA and have influenced our understanding of the stormtroopers until today. Against this background I will finally reassess the role of the SA in a comprehensive history of National Socialism, with the aim of providing a stimulus for further research that transcends narrow temporal and spatial boundaries.

This outline makes it clear that I take seriously the ‘cultural politics of emotion’ of the Nazis and the self-images that guided its activists.¹²⁸ I thereby aim to demonstrate how powerful the SA actually was – not only as a militia that targeted Communists, Social Democrats, and Jews in the German streets until 1934, but also as an organization active in the later years of the Nazi regime. The stormtroopers regarded themselves as a visible embodiment of the National Socialists’ promise and as guardians of a racially structured ‘people’s community’. That the majority of highbrow intellectuals despised the Brownshirts for all kinds of good reasons does not diminish the force of this belief. Against the background of the popular idea of an egalitarian society, defined as a society in which every individual shares the same basic social obligations, the importance of the brown uniform as a social unifier should not be downplayed. Egalitarianism had a strong appeal in Germany throughout the twentieth century and was reinforced by the First World War and the social promises of the Weimar Republic, which raised expectations to a new level. The National Socialist ideology played into these expectations but sharply distinguished between those whom it considered to have legitimate social rights and those whom it excluded for fundamental ideological, racial, or social reasons. The party’s idea of Volksgemeinschaft thus built on the discourse of national unity and inter-class solidarity that was also dear to the democratic parties, but it perverted this idea by making it conditional along racial and ideological lines while simultaneously fostering autocratic rule and a messianic leadership cult that contrasted sharply with the idea of democratic participation.¹²⁹

The National Socialists’ combination of a charismatic yet ultimately autocratic rule and popular demands for national belonging proved attractive not only to the marginalized, but even to men of the aristocracy. When, from the late 1920s, the last Kaiser’s son, Crown Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia, nicknamed ‘Auwi’, wore the SA uniform on public occasions and even gave stump speeches on behalf of the NSDAP, many perceived him as a fool. For others, however, such symbolic gestures seemed to confirm that the Nazis were on their way to achieving something of considerable value: a true and not just imagined community that could unite patriotic Germans, from the ordinary man in the street to those born into the highest levels of the aristocracy and living in castles. This ideal of a union sacrée among the political leadership, the monarch, and the people had been established as a powerful political myth in the early nineteenth century with the alleged ‘wars of liberation’ against French troops led by Napoleon Bonaparte, and the Nazis successfully capitalized on it. However, the NSDAP was a modern political party and as such did not advocate for a monarchy based on the fortune of noble birth, but for a Führerstaat based on individual merits.¹³⁰ That Hitler regularly wore the SA uniform at party rallies and on the occasion of public speeches seemed to confirm the Nazi promise: in their state, every German, regardless of his social background, should be able to make it to the top on condition that he possessed the necessary leadership qualities and the right ideological convictions – and even then, he would remain the first among his peers.¹³¹

After the Second World War was lost and Germany lay in ruins, the Nazi promises of racially structured equality were not forgotten, as demonstrated by the case of Wehrmacht soldiers who openly defended the SA even when they were in American captivity. A certain Helmut Richter, a former lieutenant colonel, said that he still believed in the ‘idea’ of National Socialism, characterizing himself as an ‘outright supporter’ of Nazi organizations like the Hitler Youth and the SA, and declaring that he regarded the latter as a cornerstone of the people’s community: ‘Within the SA, a factory director counts as much as a worker, and the troop leader is even above the factory director, if the latter is no troop leader . . . It is simply the affinity to the people that is required; this is just the new thing.’¹³² That a former Wehrmacht soldier could utter such a statement, even when he must have known that it would not be to his advantage, is a strong indicator that the SA had remained in the German mindset during the war, regardless of its limited direct political influence. To staunch National Socialists the SA even in 1945 remained a core element of Nazi ideology and rule, an organization that – despite all its limitations – stood for the central promises of Nazi ideology: social participation and national belonging for ‘racially’ pure Germans.¹³³

1. This photograph depicts a street in the centre of Munich in 1919, with the towers of the Frauenkirche in the background. On the left-hand side are heavily armed soldiers in a car decorated with a skull and crossbones. The original inscription on the upper left-hand side translates as ‘Crushing of a pocket of Spartakists by governmental troops with machine gun.’ However, looking more closely, the viewer realizes that a large female figure, the companion of the soldier on the extreme right, has been made invisible. The same has happened to a figure walking in front of her. Thus, the actual street scene photographed here was rather peaceful. The retouching served the purpose to dramatize the political situation in post-war Bavaria and justify the – at times extreme – violence employed against the far left.

2. This portrait of Ernst Röhm depicts him as a man of several worlds. It was taken in his temporary Bolivian home between 1928 and 1930. Röhm is wearing the full dress uniform of the Bolivian army, yet he also has on the medals he had received in the First World War. Behind him, one can see the flag of Bolivia and, above, the German Imperial War Flag. The framed photograph on the table to the left is probably a portrait of Rupprecht, Crown Prince of Bavaria.

3. A group photograph of ‘Trupp Bötzow’, later to become Berlin SA-Sturm 2, taken in Weimar’s central market square on the occasion of the NSDAP party rally on 3–4 July 1926. The Swastika banner in front of the well-known Neptune fountain symbolizes the Nazi occupation of the city centre. Particularly noteworthy are the five girls in the first two rows. At least three of them are dressed in the brown shirt and also exhibit the party badge. Such images are extremely rare yet important. Although in their writings young male Nazi activists rarely mentioned closer contacts with girls and young women, travelling the country in the company of fellow Brownshirts was a way of making contact with the opposite sex. The young man in the third row, fourth from the left, is Horst Wessel, the later Nazi martyr; his brother Werner is in the same row, second from the left.

4. This group photograph from 1928 shows uniformed members of the SA on a farm in the surroundings of Prenzlau in Brandenburg, located some 100 kilometres north of Berlin. Some people, standing on the left, are in civilian clothing, among them a young woman. The stormtroopers are holding brooms, barrows and pitchforks in their hands, suggesting that they are helping out on the farm. However, cleanliness also mattered to them, as demonstrated by the water bowl and two towels that feature prominently in the foreground. Two uniformed Brownshirts are posing on horses. ‘Work trips’ to the countryside, usually on weekends, contributed to the SA’s popularity in rural areas of Germany, yet they also served other purposes such as paramilitary training and propaganda marches. Especially in the eastern provinces of Germany some owners of large estates voluntarily invited SA units in on a temporary basis.

5. This photograph depicts members of the Berlin SA-Sturm 1 standing in front of a fruit plantation in the vicinity of the small town of Ketzin near Potsdam on 27 January 1929. According to the original caption in the photo album from which this image was reproduced, the purpose of the trip was Landpropaganda – ‘propaganda in the countryside’. The banner on the car translates as ‘Away with Dawes’ (referring to the reparation regulations of the 1924 Dawes Plan), ‘First bread, then reparation’, and ‘Read the Angriff [Goebbels’s Berlin Nazi newspaper]’. The young boy standing on the far right is holding copies of the Angriff in his hands. The man in the grey coat is Horst Wessel. The poses of the young Nazi activists show determination and pride in their own propaganda ‘achievements’, in sharp contrast with the idyllic snow-covered and empty landscape around them.

6. Poster by Leo von Malotki from Danzig-Langfuhr (today’s Polish Gdansk), printed by the publishing house A. W. Kafemann GmbH in Danzig around 1933. A multi-headed snake marked with two Stars of David, as well as the abbreviations ‘SPD’ (Social Democratic Party), ‘KPD’ (Communist Party of Germany), and ‘RF’ (Red Front), attacks a stormtrooper marching on the right-hand side. In the background, across the harbour basin, one sees the city of Danzig and, above, effectively a shadow of the stormtrooper, a white figure of Saint George, venerated as a ‘Christian soldier’. Contemporary viewers, familiar with the idea of a German Volkstumskampf in eastern Europe, could not fail to get the message: the Nazis were fighting a religious and ideological war against the evils of the present, similar to the Teutonic Knights who had ‘Christianized’ large parts of Pomerania, Prussia and the Baltic region since the thirteenth century.

7. A propaganda image of an SA-Sturm marching through the streets of Berlin-Spandau in 1932. Two officers of the Prussian police guard this political demonstration. Parades and processions were common spectacles in the German capital at this time, and, consequently, only some of the many people in the streets took a closer look at the marching Brownshirts.

8. This cartoon by Erich Schilling, ‘Germany’s autarky’, first published in the satirical weekly Simplicissimus in August 1932, was a sarcastic comment on the increasing hostilities and bloody run-ins on German streets at the end of the Weimar Republic. The cartoon depicts two armed Reichsbanner men on the left and two armed Brownshirts on the right, each pair ready to confront the other. The subtitle translates as ‘What progress since 1914! When it comes to warfare, the Germans finally made themselves completely independent from abroad.’

9. This 1932 poster advertises the cigarette brand Trommler (Drummer), a product from the Dresden-based Sturm company that reached out to the rapidly growing number of Brownshirts as consumers. A share of the company’s profits was handed over to the SA; in return, the organization requested their men smoke cigarettes made by Sturm exclusively. In doing so, the poster claimed, they were acting Gegen Trust und Konzern – ‘Against Trust and Big Business’.

10 and 11. These two woodcuts by the Düsseldorf-based artist Richard Schwarzkopf from 1936 were part of a series of six, entitled ‘The Fight of the SA: The German Passion’. The woodcuts depict the fight of the SA in the form of a danse macabre. Next to traditional motifs of marching Brownshirts in the woodcut ‘The Victory of Faith’, ‘The Red Devil Rages’ features the stormtrooper as a farmer and a father, alluding to the changing purpose of the SA after 1934.

12. Members of the SA block the entrance to the Ehape department store on Cologne’s Bahnhofstrasse on 1 April 1933. The Ehape Einheitpreis-Handelsgesellschaft mbH was part of the department house consortium Leonhard Tietz AG that, from July 1933 onwards (and after the Tietz family was pressured to sell their shares), became known as Westdeutsche Kaufhof AG. The photograph shows at least three different reactions to the boycott. While the women pass by the SA men rather quickly, ostensibly not paying attention, two men are pictured in conversation with the Brownshirts. The man with the bicycle seems to be having a relaxed chat with the SA leader present, while the body language of the man with the hat suggests he is more critically minded.

13. This photograph depicts prisoners of the SA-run concentration camp at Oranienburg who are forced to engage in physical exercises, so-called SA sports. One SA man in the middle gives commands and demonstrates what to do, while other Brownshirts standing behind the prisoners are overseeing the correct execution of the exercises. The photograph was probably taken on behalf of the camp management in the spring or summer of 1933 as part of a series used for publications inside Germany and distributed to foreign press agencies to counter reports of torture in the early camps. Such Nazi propaganda often focused on the bodies of prisoners that were to be ‘educated’ and ‘disciplined’ through sports and hard labour, so that, ideally, the prisoners could one day return to the Nazi ‘people’s community’ as valuable members. Propaganda images of this kind took care to present the prisoners in good health. The clearly visible SA man with the Red Cross on his armband suggests that the prisoners were well taken care of. The photograph also demonstrates that the concentration camp was located in direct proximity to family houses.

14. This photograph depicts SA guards and their prisoners from the early concentration camp at Hohnstein Castle in Saxony. This staged scene was presumably made on behalf of the stormtroopers, as a kind of trophy. The carefully written board translates as ‘Labour battalion of the Preventive Detention Camp Hohnstein Castle 28 April 1933’. Two prisoners were later highlighted on the photograph with the numbers ‘1’ and ‘2’, yet they could not be identified.

15. After the Nazi takeover of power in 1933, many German producers attempted to benefit from the political sea change by launching products that targeted driven National Socialist consumers. This photograph from December 1933 shows a young saleswoman working for a puppet factory in Schönhauser Straße, located in central Berlin, presenting a puppet in SA uniform giving a Hitler salute. The picture suggests that a wide variety of similar figures, in SA and BDM uniforms, was available to German boys and girls for Christmas.

16. A drawing by the German student and writer Felix Hartlaub on the occasion of his time as a participant in an SA paramilitary student camp in Heidelberg during the spring of 1934. The banner in the background reads Schlachtfest (‘Country feast with freshly slaughtered meat’). The Latin toast Amico pectus, hosti frontem translates as ‘Friends stretch forth your heart and enemies your forehead’, alluding to the traditions of German student fraternities, here intermingled with the new soldierly but equally ‘wet’ habits of the SA.

17. The new SA Chief of Staff, Viktor Lutze, leaves the SA offices in Berlin, Wilhelmstraße 6, on 24 July 1934, and is greeted with the Hitler salute. At the time, more than a thousand men incarcerated in the alleged Röhm purge were still held in prisons and concentration camps. Lutze repeatedly tried to restore the organization’s reputation after 1934, leading the SA until his death in a car accident in 1943.

18. This photograph from 1935, made for propaganda purposes, was taken on the occasion of the second anniversary of the ‘Day of Potsdam’ (21 March 1933), the symbolic reunion of the National Socialist government with proponents of the conservative elites. Men of the ‘SA motor unit’ (SA-Motorstaffel) M 28 serve hot chocolate and cakes to children in the Tivoli, a club house and cinema in the working-class neighbourhood of Berlin-Moabit.

19. Members of the SA stand on lorries in preparation for a propaganda tour through the streets of Recklinghausen in the Ruhr district on Sunday, 18 August 1935. The banners translate as: ‘He who knows the Jews knows the devil!’ and ‘The bourgeois: . . . “The economy is everything.”’ The poster in the middle depicts a stormtrooper using a swastika to strike two heads caricatured as Jews, who have aggressive-looking snakes emerging from them. The Jews are associated with the dangers of Communism, as the hammer and sickle next to the snakes makes plain. Such violent propaganda slogans, which blended together anti-Communist, anti-Jewish, anti-capitalist and, at times, anti-Church sentiments, were typical of the SA in the 1930s.

20. In the 1930s, the SA promoted riding as a particularly ‘manly’ sport that would train German men for future military operations. This photograph depicts three Brownshirts jumping off their horses at Alt-Möderitz in Mecklenburg, an exercise that was part of the obligatory ‘riding test’.

21. A group photograph at a wedding in front of the restaurant Zum Erbprinzen in Inzighofen near Sigmaringen in the southern part of the Swabian Alps, taken between 1933 and 1938. The bridal couple is standing behind a flower-adorned portrait of Hitler. The groom is wearing an SA uniform, as are many of the middle-aged guests, whereas members of the older generation are in their traditional Sunday best. The young boys sitting in front are dressed in children’s SA uniforms. This photograph demonstrates the Brownshirts’ pride in their uniform as well as their integration within local communities.

22. A journalist bows down to capture the noise of a marching SA unit on his microphone. The photograph was taken at an SA festive parade on 15 August 1937 in Berlin. By this time, the trampling of SA boots was a well-known and recognizable symbol of the regime – deliberately recorded for use in mass media, yet feared by many ordinary Germans as a symbol of Nazi violence.

23. Photograph from the Reichswettkämpfe der SA, the ‘SA National Sports Competitions’, in the well-filled Olympiastadium Berlin on 17 July 1938. Pairs of SA men from the SA-Gruppe Nordsee are holding hands, balancing on the backs of their comrades. This exercise symbolized the aim of SA sports in general. It was not about individual record performances, but about collective efforts that could foster the bonds among the participants.

24. A group of SA men marching through the city of Eger, today’s Cheb, in the Sudetenland, greeted by the local population with the Hitler salute. This photograph from early October 1938 was taken at the ‘liberation festivities’ that occurred when German troops, including SA units, took occupation of the area. In the following months, young men from the local German population flocked to the newly established SA-Gruppe Sudeten in high numbers.

25. In preparation for future military confrontations, SA men in full gear and wearing gas masks run through a middle-class neighbourhood in Berlin on Sunday, 2 April 1939, accompanied by an SA man on his bicycle. A few passers-by in their Sunday best are watching the scene. The numbers fixed to the men’s trousers, referring to their respective SA unit, suggest that this was a kind of competition between different SA units in the capital.

26. The SA settlement scheme was limited in scale, yet rewarding for Nazi propaganda. This photograph, taken in Rosenheim-Kastenau in 1937 or 1938, depicts workers unloading a wagon of excavated soil onto a dump truck, instructed by a stormtrooper in uniform. A teenage boy is watching the scene. The banner translates as ‘This company is driving gratuitously for the SA settlement’.

27. This postcard, distributed around 1940 by the Hanover-based company Graphischer Kunstverlag H. Lukow, consists of nine photographs celebrating the Nazi settlement initiatives in the city of Bad Salzgitter near the Harz Mountains. With the founding of the Reichswerke AG für Erzbergbau und Eisenhütten ‘Hermann Göring’ in 1937, the area developed into a highly industrialized part of the German Reich. The streets in the ‘SA settlement’ were named after ‘martyrs’ of the Nazi movement (Dietrich Eckart, Horst Wessel), and streets in the nearby Fliegersiedlungcarried the name of First World War fighter pilots, such as Ernst Udet and Oswald Boelke.

28. A photograph of recruits of the SA-Standarte ‘Feldherrnhalle’, sworn in on 3 May 1941 at an unknown location.

29. On the occasion of taking office as the new Germany envoy to Croatia, SA-Obergruppenführer Siegfried Kasche (right, in uniform) greets the Croatian general Ivan Perčević (left, in civilian clothes) on the airfield in Agram, today’s Zagreb, in April 1941.

30. During the Second World War, SA propaganda attempted to win over young men for its Feldherrnhalle division. The war transformed marching stormtroopers into a powerful tank crew, and boys into men – as suggested by this recruitment poster by Werner von Axter-Heudtlaß from October 1944.

31. Until the very end of the Second World War, the leaders of the SA not only issued morale-boosting slogans but also engaged in the practical training of the Volkssturm and the Hitler Youth. This photograph depicts the last Chief of Staff of the SA, Wilhelm Schepmann (far right), and the General Labour Leader, Wilhelm Decker (second from the left), inspecting an RAD (Reich Labour Service) training department for young volunteers who registered for the ‘Feldherrnhalle’.

32. The mayoral election poster of the former SA-Standartenführer and diplomat Hans Gmelin in his home town of Tübingen in 1954. While the official slogan translates as ‘Hans Gmelin the right man for Tübingen’, protesters have added the note: ‘When he’s finally mayor / Then he can properly flaunt / With the “steel helmet” on his head / Confront all storms! Tandarady!’ After a controversial yet ultimately successful campaign, Gmelin became the uncontested strongman in local politics, remaining in office for twenty years.

33. This 1957 caricature by Leo Haas, a cartoonist living in the GDR, depicts the Minister of the Interior of the Federal Republic of Germany, Gerhard Schröder, in SA uniform, ‘securing the election path for the CDU’, the conservative party of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. In 1933, Schröder – then a junior lawyer in Bonn – had applied for membership in the SA. In the caricature he secures a narrow path by placing signposts next to the abysses saying ‘Interdiction of democratic organizations’, ‘Interdiction of DFD [the East German Democratic Women’s League of Germany, prohibited in the Federal Republic in 1957]’, and ‘Interdiction of KPD [the Communist Party of Germany, banned in West Germany in 1956]’. The caricature illustrates the popular accusation of East Germany’s Socialist Unity Party (SED) that the democratic governments in the West were essentially former Nazis in disguise.