PART IV

10

‘NOT GUILTY’

The Legacy of the SA in Germany after the Second World War

Many do not like to remember the Nazi past. A few others don’t like to be reminded of it: these are the ones who remember it with pleasure!

— Radio and TV journalist Hans Rosenthal, 1983¹

After the armistice of 8 May 1945 civilians only slowly returned to Berlin, now a city of ruins, its inhabitants beset by hunger and disease. From more than four million inhabitants in the early 1920s, the number of ‘Berliners’ had decreased to fewer than three million, many of them physically and morally wounded. One of the early returnees to the capital was the writer Rudolf Ditzen, better known under his pseudonym ‘Hans Fallada’. He had survived the war years in a kind of ‘inner exile’ in a rural area of northern Germany, removed from the centre of political power. However, in 1945, Fallada returned to Berlin and, in a kind of frenzy, wrote his last novel within a few weeks during the autumn of 1946. Shortly afterwards he died at the age of fifty-three.²

This last novel, Alone in Berlin (Jeder stirbt für sich allein), reprinted in recent years and nowadays popular with an international audience, provides a literary panorama of German society between 1941 and the end of the Third Reich. Engagingly written, it testifies to the author’s profound sadness and anger in response to the widespread destruction and despair, as he tells a gripping story based on fact that also charts the mentality of people in the immediate post-war period. It is by and large free of the distortions that would soon penetrate most accounts of life under National Socialism in the following decades.³ The book reveals the degree to which the party uniforms of the SA, SS, and Hitler Youth dominated the streets of the German capital during these years. Far from being mere ornamentation for the Nazi state, SA leaders are portrayed as powerful and dangerous arch-Nazis, capable of intimidating ‘ordinary’ German workers in a factory meeting, sending people to concentration camps, and putting the police under serious pressure. Fallada in his novel used the ‘signal effect’ of the Nazi uniform and simultaneously employed the then popular strategy of excuse, summarily referring to ‘Aryan’ and ‘non-Aryan’ Germans as the first victims of the Third Reich. In his portrait of Berlin in the early 1940s most Germans and German Jews in particular live in a form of prison, kept under guard and tortured by Nazi Party officials, from the SA and SS. In this respect Fallada’s interpretation is typical of the general tendency of people in post-war Germany to concentrate initially on their own suffering, emphasizing the character of the Nazi state as a ‘terror regime’, the German loss of lives during the war, and the expulsion of Germans between 1944 and 1948. In return, the fate of the Sinti and Roma, the non-German Jewry, the up to eight million forced labourers, and the millions of civilians murdered by Germans in Europe was by and large ignored, at least until the 1960s.⁴

In the years after Fallada’s death many Germans shared his view that the SA had been the ugly face of National Socialism. It came to represent the brutal violence, fervent antisemitism, and complete lack of compassion for ‘outsiders’ beyond the ‘people’s community’ that characterized National Socialism. However, many soon drew an important distinction that hinged on historical events. The SA, they claimed, had been a powerful and strong paramilitary group until the summer of 1934, but in the following years it became an organization strong in members but weak in political and social importance: a ‘totally subsidiary organization of the party’ or an ‘insignificant union of beer drinkers’ (unbedeutender Bierverein).⁵ Such an understanding also predominated within the academic scholarship on the SA in the following decades.⁶ To give one example: the four expert opinions written for the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial in 1964, intended to provide the judges with a trustworthy overview of the political and historical developments of the Nazis’ rise to power and the Third Reich, were published in 1967 and entitled Anatomie des SS-Staates – ‘Anatomy of the SS State’.⁷ In this work the SA is only mentioned in passing, and only with reference to its role in the terror campaigns prior to the Nazi takeover of power and the establishment of the Third Reich in 1933–4.⁸

In what follows, I will analyse how the image of the SA as a violent yet politically peripheral organization developed in post-1945 Germany. To begin with, I will argue not only that the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg in 1945–6 constitutes an exemplary test case for analysing the correlation between legal practices and historiography, but that its proceedings against the SA set the tone for subsequent assessments of the stormtroopers. I will then, in the second and third sections, discuss two exemplary case studies from the 1950s and 1960s that demonstrate how the diminution of the SA and its crimes allowed the post-war careers of the jurist and former SA-Standartenführer Hans Gmelin, from 1954 until 1975 mayor of Tübingen, and the historian and former Chief of the SA-Hochschulamt Heinrich Bennecke. In the fourth and final part I will explain how, beginning in the 1970s, the focus of both academic and non-academic research on Germany’s Nazi past shifted from the political to the social, with mixed effects for the history of the SA. Although many local and regional studies underlined the sometimes extreme violence carried out by mid- and low-ranking stormtroopers, particularly in 1933, the SA as a mass organization with political ambitions and clout slowly but surely disappeared from sight. In twenty-first-century Germany, ‘SA methods’ is still used as a term of political combat, but it has become unstuck from its original historical context.

The SA at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg

Even if one does not agree with Robert Kempner’s early assessment that the IMT was ‘the greatest history seminar ever held’, historical research over the last few decades has confirmed that the trial ‘embraced a didactic purpose’, aiming to provide a moral lesson that would stand independent of the sentencing of individual defendants.⁹ The Nazi organizations that stood trial in Nuremberg were therefore of particular relevance, as the outcome of the IMT had the potential to profoundly affect the lives of the former members of those organizations, which in the case of the SA comprised several million men. As the IMT was the first legal authority to embrace an interpretation of the SA that distinguished sharply between its pre-1934 identity and that of later years, it set the course not only for subsequent criminal proceedings but also for the analysis of later historians. In this respect the Nuremberg judges indeed wrote history – with lasting effects.

Alongside leading politicians, military commanders, and business leaders of the Third Reich such as Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Karl Dönitz, and Hjalmar Schacht – to name just a few of the twenty-four defendants – some of the most important repressive and terror-exercising organizations of the Nazi state, such as the SS, the Gestapo, and the SA, also faced trial at Nuremberg. These groups were declared ‘criminal organizations’ if they (1) had provided a framework in which their members had committed ‘crimes against peace’, (2) were responsible for the commission of ‘war crimes’, or (3) had participated in ‘crimes against humanity’. Article 6 of the charter of the IMT defined ‘crimes against peace’ as the ‘planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing’. War crimes, the same article stated, included ‘murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity’. This list was not intended to be exclusive, but rather was meant to set the tone for the proceedings to follow. Finally, ‘crimes against humanity’, a legal category used for the first time by the IMT and highly contested on the basis of its technical applicability, incorporated the murder, extermination, enslavement, or deportation of and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, regardless of whether or not these acts were committed in violation of the ‘domestic law of the country where perpetrated’.¹⁰

The declaration of the SA as a ‘criminal organization’ would have had direct consequences for the judicial proceedings against Nazi criminals that would unfold in the years to come. In post-war Germany a finding by the IMT of membership in the SA would have constituted sufficient grounds for legal punishment, without the courts having to prove the individual guilt of a particular defendant. Understandably, such a verdict would have been a worst-case scenario for millions of former militants.¹¹ Some 10,000 wrote affidavits for the Nuremberg SA defence team which at best acknowledged that some individual SA men had not always behaved properly but exempted the SA as an organization from all charges.¹² This very high number not only demonstrates that the Nazi networks established during the Third Reich still operated effectively after the war, but also suggests that a broad condemnation of the SA would have provoked intense criticism from thousands of former stormtroopers and their families.

Characteristic of the usually apologetic tone of these documents is a detailed memorandum by SA-Obergruppenführer Max Jüttner, written while in American custody in Internment Camp 75 in Kornwestheim near Stuttgart in January 1946.¹³ Jüttner was one of the two surviving individuals who had temporarily led the SA between 2 May and 8 August 1943. According to his memo, he read about the Nuremberg trial in the newspapers available at the camp and ‘as the only SA representative within reach’ immediately contacted the IMT in October 1945. As the court did not pay much attention to his initial correspondence, he set out to write a justification of the SA and himself with the encouragement of the defence lawyer Robert Servatius in January 1946.¹⁴ Jüttner’s nearly 100-page vindication is at times almost comical, particularly with regard to the SA’s attitudes toward Jews and political adversaries. According to Jüttner, neither he nor Lutze had ever ordered the persecution of Jews. Only from the Allies had he learned about the torture and murder of members of these groups within the concentration camps. Any reasonable man who believed in justice would give the SA credit for its honourable motives, Jüttner wrote.¹⁵

The oral proceedings against the SA began on the afternoon of 18 December 1945, the twenty-second day of the trial. The main prosecutor of the SA was the American jurist Robert G. Storey, who, together with nine colleagues, coordinated the evidence and decided on the sequence of the proceedings.¹⁶ Storey began the prosecution’s accusations by defining the aim and scope of the SA, though not without difficulty. According to him, the SA

was an agency adapted to many designs and purposes, and its role in the conspiracy changed from time to time – always corresponding with the progression of the conspiracy through its various phases towards the final objective: abrogation of the Versailles Treaty and acquisition of the territory of other peoples and nations. If we might consider this conspiracy as a pattern, with its various parts fitting together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, we would find that the piece representing the SA constituted a link in the pattern vitally necessary to the presentation and development of the entire picture.

The word ‘conspiracy’, as used here, referred to the Nazis’ attempt to overthrow the democratic state of Weimar and to replace it with a Fascist dictatorship that aimed to transform Germany into a European empire by attacking and occupying other countries. The most distinct feature of the SA, Storey stated, was its members’ ‘fanatical adherence to the philosophies and ideologies conceived by the Nazi conspirators’.¹⁷ This shared belief was easy to prove, but it was much harder to draw a link between such a vague assessment of the SA’s general character and particular crimes punishable by law.

Storey claimed that between 1934 and 1939 ‘the SA developed from scattered bands of street ruffians to a well-knit, cohesive unit organized on a military basis with military training and military functions and, above all, with an aggressive, militaristic, and warlike spirit and philosophy’.¹⁸From 1934 onward, he added, up to 25,000 officers and non-commissioned officers were trained annually in the twenty-five SA troop schools and three SA Reichsführer schools.¹⁹ However, somewhat contradictorily, Storey also claimed that the SA ‘started a rapid decline in its importance’ after the murder of Ernst Röhm in 1934.²⁰ Regardless of such inconsistencies, Storey’s accusations against the late SA appear well grounded. As evidence that the SA ‘had been used as a striking force in the first steps of the aggressive war’, Storey pointed to the group’s role in the Anschlussof Austria and the occupation of the Sudetenland.²¹ In both cases, he argued, the SA provided not only logistical help, but also thousands of fighters forming the ‘backbone’ both of the Sudeten German Free Corps and the Austrian Legion.²² In the last stages of the war, from 1944 onward, Storey noted, drawing on the testimony of SS-Brigadeführer Walter Schellenberg,²³ the SA took over several ‘functions which had previously been entrusted only to the SS, the Sipo [Sicherheitspolizei], and Army’, including the guarding of concentration camps and prisoner-of-war camps and the supervision of forced labourers in Germany and the occupied areas.²⁴ All this evidence proved, Storey concluded, that both individual members of the SA and the SA as an organization ‘were in fact co-conspirators and participants in a conspiracy which contemplated and involved Crimes against the Peace and Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes’.²⁵

On the other side, the SA’s defence team in Nuremberg consisted of three parties: the lawyer Georg Boehm and his team as well as the two chosen barristers Dr Martin Löffler and Dr Theodor Klefisch.²⁶ The personal papers of Klefisch, who since the late Weimar years had been a respectable though only regionally known criminal defence lawyer from Cologne, were made available for historical research only recently.²⁷ These papers contain, among other things, documents related to his role as a lawyer before the IMT and allow a relatively detailed analysis of the strategy adopted by the defence team. Klefisch never spoke in court and only filed a single ‘speech in writing’ on 15 August 1946, a fact that was partly the result of tensions among the lawyers defending the SA.²⁸

Klefisch’s work concentrated on those SA men who had formerly been members of the Stahlhelm, Bund der Frontsoldaten. As outlined previously, the relationship between the Stahlhelm and the SA had been strained in its early days, not least because of generational differences, and it had remained complicated ever since. In simplified terms the SA appealed to young men, the Stahlhelm to their fathers.²⁹ In the final plea of the SA defence lawyers, delivered on 28 August 1946, Georg Boehm emphasized this divide, as well as the (alleged) strong ideological differences between the NSDAP and the Stahlhelm, concluding: ‘A large number of the members of the Stahlhelm represented a body within the SA, united by common ideals, who regarded the events of the time with the greatest distrust.’³⁰ As this statement illustrates, the overall strategy of the defence team was to use to their own advantage the complexities of the SA’s internal structure and the fact that its form had changed considerably at least twice between 1921 and 1945, arguing that it would be highly unfair and legally unsound to declare such a massive organization, with its up to 4.5 million former members, an outright ‘criminal’ group.³¹ Löffler pointed out that such a declaration would further be incompatible with the denazification laws of the American Zone of Occupation, according to which all SA ranks up to the level of Sturmführer were not regarded as subject to automatic punishment. In fact, Löffler noted, some of the former members of this allegedly criminal organization had recently been elected community councillors.³²

This defence strategy proved successful. On 28 February 1946 chief prosecutor Robert H. Jackson asked that all wearers of the SA sports badge who were not regular SA members, as well as members of the SA-controlled home guard units and the SA Reserve, be exempted from prosecution.³³He now requested that only the main body of the SA be considered for punishment. However, Löffler claimed in the following session on 1 March that criminal proceedings against the SA still affected everyone ‘who ever belonged to the SA, even for a very short time, during the 24 years between its establishment in 1921 and its dissolution in 1945, that is to say, during a period of almost a quarter of a century’.³⁴ Not surprisingly, Löffler downplayed the SA’s importance during the war years as best he could, stating:

Crimes against the laws or customs of war are not charged to the SA. It is true that the Prosecution presented an affidavit saying that the SA also took part in guarding concentration camps and prisoner-of-war camps and in supervising forced labor; but, according to the presentation of the Prosecution, this did not occur until 1944 within the framework of the total war raging at that time, and it has not been charged that this activity of the SA involved any excesses or ill-treatment [. . .] The few offenses against humanity charged to the SA by the Prosecution and committed by individual members in the course of almost a quarter of a century can in no way be compared with the serious crimes against humanity of which we have heard here.³⁵

Löffler went so far as to try to impress the court by presenting figures no one could actually verify, claiming that at most 2 per cent of all SA men had participated in punishable individual actions, whereas 98 per cent had ‘kept their hands clean’. He even argued that the overwhelming majority of all former SA men would strongly deny that their leaders had ordered them to carry out criminal acts.³⁶ Without being explicitly mentioned, the intense and often resentful public debate about German ‘collective guilt’ lingered beneath such reasoning.³⁷

The Nuremberg judges passed their verdict on 30 September 1946. Their findings distinguished between the SA that existed up to the summer of 1934 and the SA that existed thereafter. Regarding the SA of the first period, they determined that although the stormtroopers had committed crimes, these crimes were limited to German soil and did not meet the criteria for the categories of crime established by the tribunal. With regard to the SA of the latter period, the judges tried to reconcile the contradictory perspectives of the prosecution and the defence. ‘Isolated units of the SA,’ the judges ruled, had been ‘involved in the steps leading up to aggressive war and in the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity’, thus confirming the argument of the prosecution. As evidence, the judges explicitly cited the occupation of Austria, the SA’s contribution to the formation of the Sudeten German Free Corps, and the transport and guarding of prisoners of war by the SA-Gruppe Sudeten and SA units in Danzig, Poznań, Silesia, and the Baltic states.³⁸ The judges also noted the SA’s active participation in the anti-Jewish pogroms of 9 November 1938 and the ‘ill treatment’ of Jews in the ghettos of Vilna and Kaunas.³⁹

In contrast, however, the court agreed with the defence inasmuch as it accepted the proposition that ‘the SA was reduced to the status of a group of unimportant Nazi hangers-on’ after the 1934 purge. It was this conclusion that finally brought the judges to a verdict of not guilty: ‘Although in specific instances some units of the SA were used for the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity, it cannot be said that its members generally participated in or even knew of the criminal acts. For these reasons the Tribunal does not declare the SA to be a criminal organization within the meaning of Article 9 of the Charter.’⁴⁰ The same conclusion applied to the Reich Cabinet and the ‘General Staff and High Command’, whereas the SS, SD, Gestapo, and certain groups within the NSDAP leadership were found guilty. The silent majority of Germans, even if they contested the legitimacy of the court, approved of this verdict, not least because it fitted into the prevailing tendency of both small-scale and leading Nazis to downplay their (usually voluntary) participation in the Third Reich.⁴¹

Klefisch attributed the relative leniency of the Nuremberg judges toward the stormtroopers largely to his own defence strategy, which had painted a portrait of the SA as a highly complex but ultimately toothless bureaucratic institution to which many Germans had only involuntarily belonged for a brief period.⁴² Shortly after the IMT’s verdict, in a letter from 5 November 1946, Klefisch claimed that the integration of the former Stahlhelmers into the SA had more or less saved the whole organization from punishment: ‘That the entire SA was not declared a criminal organization was to a good degree a consequence of the fact that it had incorporated a great deal of people from the Stahlhelm within its rank and file. The conduct of the latter had been proven to be without a flaw. It was simply not possible to label an entire organization as outright criminal if it contained such a great number of irreproachable members.’⁴³

However self-congratulatory this statement may have been, it is hard to ignore that the Nuremberg acquittal set a precedent for the handling of trials of former stormtroopers over the following decades, at least in the Federal Republic of Germany. Convictions by West German courts of individual stormtroopers remained limited to those implicated in the SA’s crimes during 1933, 1934, and Kristallnacht. The ‘public’, highly visible nature of attacks by the Brownshirts now backfired, as it often allowed for detailed reconstruction of these acts, even fifteen to twenty years later.⁴⁴ Unsurprisingly, in the Soviet Zone of Occupation, Soviet and later also East German authorities took a particularly vivid interest in the prosecution of SA crimes that had been directed against members of the Communist and Socialist parties.⁴⁵ Yet even in the Soviet Zone judicial attempts to punish Nazi crimes, initially intended to help legitimize the new political order, decreased dramatically once the GDR was firmly established in the early 1950s, demonstrating a remarkable parallel to the West German process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or ‘overcoming history’.⁴⁶ By the mid-1950s even the long prison sentences imposed on SA guards from the former Hohnstein concentration camp could be suspended if the former stormtrooper agreed to spy for the newly established Ministry of State Security.⁴⁷ In 1950, after a visit to her homeland, Hannah Arendt remarked that many Germans had willingly sought refuge in the belief that they had been victims of the nation’s ‘culture of obedience’ (Gehorsamkeitskultur).⁴⁸ Millions of former stormtroopers ceased to acknowledge their prior (usually voluntary) commitment to National Socialism as ‘little guardians of the people’s community’.⁴⁹ Furthermore, the West German Straffreiheitsgesetz of 31 December 1949, which granted an amnesty to those offenders sentenced to prison terms of less than six months, meant in practice that the majority of SA criminals were spared incarceration.⁵⁰

From the mid-1950s onward even former high-ranking SA leaders were able to live unmolested, with a few notable, yet ultimately unsatisfactory exceptions, such as that of Adolf-Heinz Beckerle.⁵¹ Across the board, convictions from the early post-1945 period were often suspended, and prison terms considerably shortened. The case of Wilhelm Schepmann, the last SA Chief of Staff, is instructive in this respect. In 1950 a Dortmund jury court had sentenced Schepmann to a modest prison term of nine months – not for his leadership role in the SA, but because of his involvement as Dortmund’s police president in the violent Nazi takeover of power in 1933.⁵² However, Schepmann, who had been successfully ‘denazified’ by a German court in Lüneburg in 1952, appealed the decision and was ultimately acquitted in 1954.⁵³ Two years later he was elected deputy mayor for the city of Gifhorn in Lower Saxony. He died in 1970.

The posthumous denazification of the former SA-Obergruppenführer and Nazi diplomat Dietrich von Jagow as a ‘lesser offender’ further illustrates the general tendency of post-war proceedings. The Freiburg Spruchkammer, the local denazification court, ruled on 13 February 1950 that von Jagow had not been involved in the production of propaganda for the Nazi cause and had held his offices – as SA-Obergruppenführer, Prussian state councillor, ambassador, and member of the Reichstag – ‘in an idealistic and decent spirit’. Consequently, the court granted him extensive extenuating circumstances.⁵⁴ With von Jagow’s wife and seven children living in cramped conditions, it appears that the judges’ ruling was intended more to create the legal conditions that would permit his widow to receive a pension than to give a realistic portrayal of the deceased.

The continuing use of key terms from the Nazi regime’s vocabulary long after 1945 testifies to the lasting effect of the National Socialist ‘revolution’ in morals and manners. In the words of the historian Bernhard Gotto, during the years following the ultimate defeat of the Nazi regime, its former leaders on the local, regional, and national levels actively and often successfully worked toward the ‘invention of a “decent National Socialism”’ – one purified of ‘aberrations’ such as the persecution of the Jews or the Third Reich’s racial and exterminatory character. Instead, its proponents now emphasized the regime’s social goals and achievements.⁵⁵ The 1949 attempt by Otto Strasser to re-establish his ‘Black Front’ under the cover name of Liga für die Wiederauferstehung Deutschlands (literally, the League for the Resurrection of Germany) fitted this pattern.⁵⁶Other former Nazis clung to their aggressive rhetoric. Such was the case, for example, with Gustaf Deuchler, the former professor of pedagogy at Hamburg University and stormtrooper who had enjoyed giving lectures in his brown shirt and had glorified the stormtroopers’ services on the home front. In 1952 he became one of the leading figures in the Hamburg branch of the Verein der Entnazifizierungsgeschädigten – literally, the Association of the Victims of Denazification. Deuchler characterized the denazification process in Hamburg as an effort of ‘reckless brutality’ and ‘boundless hate’, fuelled by an ‘obsession with retaliation’ that would never be extinguished.⁵⁷

By the mid-1950s even prior convictions for active participation in pogroms against and deportation of Jews – actions often euphemistically labelled in official documents as Aussiedlung, or ‘resettlement’ – no longer prevented an individual from being fully integrated into German post-war society. Such formulations stood in remarkable continuity with the language of the Nazi regime a decade earlier and often betrayed the intention of their users, who urged the public to overcome the burdens of the past and close the prior chapter of German history. As the municipal council of the Bavarian city of Treuchtlingen in 1956 explained with rare clarity, a harsh stance toward former National Socialists could no longer be justified, as the former Nazis who had taken part in the ‘anti-Jewish pogroms’ (Judenpogrome) and had therefore lost their positions in the first years after the war had since, to a large degree, had their former rights reinstated.⁵⁸

Stormtroopers as Misguided Idealists

A telling example of the general tendency to integrate previously committed National Socialists back into society was the remarkable post-war career of the jurist Hans Gmelin, who in 1954 was elected mayor of his home town of Tübingen in Württemberg. A former law student at Eberhard Karls University who descended from one of the city’s respectable middle-class families, the ambitious Gmelin joined the Stahlhelm on 12 December 1931 and then was integrated into the SA in the autumn of 1933. In the years following he occupied several leading positions in the Württemberg branch of this organization while at the same time pursuing his professional goals. According to his own account from 1939, Gmelin served as the leader of four different SA Stürme (13/216, 56/125, 2/180, and 1/119) and was promoted to SA-Sturmbannführer on 9 November 1938. Gmelin had joined the NSDAP on 1 May 1937, after the entrance ban was lifted, and in the following year assumed leadership of the ‘Hanns Ludin’ company of the Sudeten German Free Corps, which was active from 19 September to 15 October 1938. Having passed this military litmus test, Hanns Ludin, at that time the leader of the SA-Gruppe Süd-West, offered Gmelin the position of a full-time SA-Standartenführer. Initially, the gifted young jurist preferred to enter the ranks of the Reich Ministry of Justice, but thanks to a compromise between the state judiciary and the SA he was appointed to the rank of Landgerichtsrat for life in May 1939, with the Reich Minister of Justice granting him a two-year leave to continue his career in the SA.⁵⁹ After serving in the Wehrmacht until the end of 1940, Gmelin followed his mentor and friend Ludin into the Foreign Office in January 1941. Both men arrived in Bratislava in April of the same year.⁶⁰

In the Slovakian capital Gmelin’s office was located next door to his boss and he was also a friend of Franz Karmasin, the infamous Volksgruppenführer. Gmelin’s initials on several official documents from the German Embassy in Slovakia confirm his intimate knowledge of the deportation of the Slovakian Jews.⁶¹ In a lecture delivered at a party leadership meeting in Vienna in January 1944, Gmelin freely acknowledged that the policy of ‘Aryanization’ had served the Reich’s interests well. Even the fact that some Jews remained in Slovakia would help the Germans, he added, because as long as the Slovaks could still rob the Jews, it was unlikely that they would turn their backs on their protecting power, despite the Red Army’s advance.⁶² Later the same year, however, in November 1944, Himmler requested a complete overhaul of the German Embassy in Slovakia including the removal of Gmelin. After four years in office there, Gmelin would be on the way to turning into ‘half a Slovak’, Himmler argued.⁶³ The Reichsführer-SS feared that Ludin’s and Gmelin’s good relations with local Fascists had made them blind to the risks of the latter changing sides as the Red Army’s advance became increasingly unstoppable.

After spending more than three years in American and French internment camps from 1945 to 1948, Gmelin was classified a ‘lesser offender’ (category III) in Tübingen in July 1948.⁶⁴ The court sentenced him to the minimum penalty for this category: a two-year probation period during which he was forbidden from becoming politically active. Despite this verdict the denazification panel stated that Gmelin had an ‘impeccable, clean character’. He had been a committed National Socialist, the judges admitted, but ‘he was no fanatic’ and during the days of the Third Reich he had believed that by ‘positive work’ the NSDAP could return to ‘moderate and reasonable positions’.⁶⁵ Six years later Gmelin attempted to demonstrate precisely that.

During his mayoral election address in Tübingen, printed verbatim in the regional newspaper Schwäbisches Tagblatt on 2 October 1954, Gmelin promised that he would deal openly with the Nazi past. In light of what the electorate in the city knew anyway, Gmelin opted for a kind of pre-emptive defence, addressing his time as SA--Führer and Nazi diplomat openly, but claiming that such functions within the Third Reich could not be taken as clear-cut indicators of one’s standpoint or actual behaviour at the time. When he was a young man, there had simply been no political alternative to the Nazis, Gmelin said. Later, ‘when the ship was sinking’ (i.e. when Germany was about to lose the war), he and the vast majority of his fellow Germans did not have the option of leaving the country – a thinly veiled jab against those who had left Germany for political reasons between 1933 and 1945.⁶⁶ Gmelin asserted that he had suffered internal conflict during the war but insisted that, at a time when one could either obey orders or follow one’s conscience, he had always helped those who were dear to him (im eigenen Lebenskreis) and who had asked him for assistance. Tolerance had always been the guiding star of his personal and official conduct, he assured his listeners (Plate 32).⁶⁷

Even more characteristic of the zeitgeist of the mid-1950s was the controversy that followed Gmelin’s election. It started with the publication in Schwäbisches Tagblatt of an open letter of protest from Gerhard Ebeling, a professor of Protestant theology at Tübingen University. Ebeling lamented that the election of Gmelin indicated that the majority of voters did not care about the new mayor’s Nazi past – or, what was more likely, that they had voted for Gmelin precisely because of it. Calling the election an alarming sign of ‘re-Nazification’, Ebeling argued that even the end of the war had not produced a true victory over National Socialist ideology.⁶⁸ In response, a storm of protest broke loose, filling the newspaper columns over the next few days. Most of the letters printed were written in favour of the new mayor. Several of them urged Christian clemency. Qualified men like Gmelin who had been successfully denazified should not be blamed for their youthful idealism until the end of their lives, these writers declared. A colleague of Ebeling, a certain Professor E. Hennig, even praised Gmelin’s personality as a true leader who had been admired by most of the rank-and-file stormtroopers. Hennig ascribed a ‘post-war psychosis’ to those criticizing Gmelin for his Nazi past and demanded an urgent end to the ‘collective verdicts of the Spruchkammern’.⁶⁹ Many other writers complained about Professor Ebeling’s alleged arrogance, testifying to the endurance of the anti-intellectualism of the Nazi years, even in an old university town.

The SA repeatedly served as a point of reference in this debate. One writer noted that a speaker at a party rally had been prevented from continuing his speech after addressing the audience with the words ‘My dear comrades from the old SA’, while another writer assured Ebeling that ‘a brown shirt soaked in blood’ was no longer an item in demand in German society. According to this latter writer, he had dressed in such a shirt at the age of sixteen, but had since exchanged it for a prosthesis – an allusion to a war injury.⁷⁰ Whereas most writers in defence of Gmelin signed their letters with their full names, those who sided with Ebeling more often remained anonymous. One female writer felt so threatened by the heated atmosphere in Tübingen that she explicitly asked to be identified by her initials only, declaring: ‘I have seen and heard the short-tempered and primitive supporters of Herr Gmelin!’⁷¹

The highly popular Gmelin remained in office for twenty years after being re-elected as the only candidate in 1962, with a landslide victory of more than 94 per cent of the vote (on a 51.7 per cent turnout). He became a towering figure in local politics, committed in particular to the Franco-German reconciliation process.⁷² To his supporters, his post-war career symbolized West Germany’s successful transformation from Nazi dictatorship to Western democracy.⁷³ According to his daughter, the SPD politician Herta Däubler-Gmelin (Germany’s Minister of Justice from 1998 to 2002), after the war Hans Gmelin devoted himself fully to the reconstruction of a democratic Germany in order to atone for his Nazi past, even as he continued to meet with ‘old comrades’ and actively helped them when possible. ‘This was one of the points that frequently led to heated arguments in our family,’ Däubler-Gmelin remembers, yet she also stresses that her father, after his initial reluctance, finally faced up to such criticism from within his own family.⁷⁴ However, it is worth remembering that Hans Gmelin’s post-war career was only possible because of a combination of three factors: first, his trivialization of his SA activities in the 1930s as participation in a kind of sports club; second, his whitewashing of his time as a German diplomat in Slovakia; and third, a political environment in Württemberg that throughout the 1950s and 1960s continued to hold the National Socialist vision of a ‘people’s community’ in high esteem – perverted, or so it was argued, by the Nazi establishment once lured by the temptations of power.

Mutilated Stories

During the 1950s historians also started to contribute to the narrative of the SA’s relative political impotence. Particularly relevant in this respect was Dr Heinrich Bennecke, leader of the SA University Offices in 1933–4.⁷⁵ This formerly high-ranking SA leader started to work in the late 1950s as an associate researcher with the prestigious Institute for Contem-porary Research in Munich (IfZ), established in 1949 as the Deutsches Institut für Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Zeit, literally the ‘German Institute for the History of the National Socialist Time’.⁷⁶ The surviving correspondence between the IfZ and Bennecke begins in 1958 and ends in the late 1960s. Both parties benefited from their collaboration, exchanging documents, expertise, and money. Bennecke prepared notes and short exposés on the history of the SA for the institute’s internal use, commented on manuscripts and books, and interviewed former National Socialist leaders, most often using a set of questions provided by the IfZ.⁷⁷ From time to time the institute paid him modest sums: initially, he received a kind of honorarium of between 50 and 200 marks,⁷⁸ but ultimately a contract was drawn up that guaranteed Bennecke a total of 3,600 marks for interviews to be held with former Nazis between 1 July and 31 December 1963.⁷⁹

Bennecke’s attempts to be employed by the IfZ on a regular basis failed.⁸⁰ Nevertheless, his collaboration with the institute not only provided him with the financial means to conduct interviews with fellow high-ranking Nazis, but also helped him become a respectable scholar on the SA in the 1960s. Based on his inside knowledge from twenty years as a leading stormtrooper, combined with his unique access to unpublished documents provided by the IfZ, Bennecke completed two monographs: Hitler und die SA (1962) and Die Reichswehr und der ‘Röhm-Putsch’ (1964).⁸¹Both books concentrated on the SA’s history between the mid-1920s and the ‘Röhm purge’ and remained standard German-language books in the field until the 1980s. In early 1963 he also prepared a manuscript on the history of the SA between 1918 and 1923 that was bought by the IfZ but never appeared in print.⁸² Another of his manuscripts, commissioned by the German Federal Archives, was published only in 2012.⁸³ Bennecke knew very well that these books only dealt with the middle period of the SA’s existence, completely leaving out the post-1934 period.⁸⁴Nevertheless, based on his reputation as a researcher, Bennecke was invited to teach various courses on the political history of the Weimar Republic at the Hochschule für Politische Wissenschaften in Munich (today’s Hochschule für Politik) between 1967 and 1972.⁸⁵

In his works, Bennecke took a traditional political history approach that focused on a close circle of Nazi leaders and belittled the level of violence exercised before and after 30 January 1933. Although his publisher claimed that the first book on the SA was not written ‘with the intent of justification’ but had been inspired by the author’s ‘love of truth’, a critical reading demonstrates that Bennecke made every effort to distinguish between Hitler and the SA. Writing about the organization’s early days in Munich, he described the SA as a Wehrverband by the grace of Ehrhardt and Röhm, diminishing the role played by the NSDAP and Hitler in its formation.⁸⁶ In this respect the title of the book should be translated as ‘Hitler and the SA’, not ‘Hitler’s SA’. Bennecke consistently downplayed the stormtroopers’ notorious antisemitism and the Nazi terror campaign that unfolded in the summer of 1932, which for him was only a reaction to ‘pre-election terror from the left’.⁸⁷ Discussing the Nazi leadership’s strong support for the Potempa murders, which peaked with Hitler’s telegram promising ‘unreserved loyalty’ to the perpetrators, Bennecke emphasized that these actions were above all intended as a declaration of war to von Papen. He even claimed that not only Hitler, but ‘probably also many of the newspaper readers back then’, had thought it embarrassing that the National Socialists involved in the Potempa murders had received much harsher sentences than had those members of the Reichsbanner who were standing trial at the same time in another Silesian city, Brieg, for their involvement in a political clash that had taken place in Ohlau on 10 July 1932. What Bennecke did not say was that the lighter punishments in the Ohlau case were partly attributable to the fact that the crimes had been committed in the weeks before the emergency decree against political terror came into effect.⁸⁸ The late Weimar logic of setting one crime in opposition to another still very much shaped Bennecke’s political thinking in post-war Germany.⁸⁹

Nevertheless, his studies were seen as important contributions to the field in the 1960s and 1970s, not only because of their intimate knowledge but also because of a lack of alternatives on the book market.⁹⁰ In hindsight, Bennecke’s historical writings on the SA illustrate the general problem that dogged the early IfZ’s efforts to write an ‘objective’ and purely ‘factual’ history of the recent past. As critics like historian Nicolas Berg have argued, the heavy emphasis on ‘primary sources’, which necessarily relied on official documents in which the Nazi perspective was encoded, involuntarily favoured a narrative that followed the paths chalked out by the regime – all the more so in cases such as Bennecke’s, in which the interpreting historian was identical to the former historical agent.⁹¹

Politics of Remembrance

The most up-to-date historical scholarship inevitably has only limited power in resolving contemporary public debates, as the public perception and memory of the stormtroopers in Germany after the Second World War demonstrates.⁹² Historians ranging from the academically trained Bennecke to the journalist Heinrich Höhne with his best-selling book Mordsache Röhm (1984),⁹³ also serialized in the influential weekly Der Spiegel, remained interested in the SA’s role in politics in the 1920s and early 1930s. However, beginning in the 1970s, many Germans were more disposed to remember the Brownshirts’ public appearances, marches, brawls, and terror alongside their standing in their local communities. Whereas most ordinary people had not had close personal contact with the SS, SD, or Gestapo, the Nazi organizations mainly responsible for the regime’s crimes, the stormtroopers had been familiar figures – neighbours, colleagues from work, the ambitious schoolteacher, or, in more unfortunate circumstances, the notorious village underachiever, who, merely because of his uniform, was for once in his life given the opportunity to look down on and dominate others.

The vast majority of former Nazi activists were able to enjoy the fruits of the German Wirtschaftswunder, or ‘Economic Miracle’, after the war. The social and interpersonal networks of the pre-1945 period often survived the war, particularly in the countryside and in small cities. German shooting associations, riders clubs, and sports clubs – which in many cases had been integrated into or at least presided over by the SA in the 1930s – continued to operate, ignoring or passing over in eloquent silence the twelve years of the Third Reich. When German men told stories of the Nazi past, they usually spoke about the years of the Second World War, in which the majority of them had been conscripted. Fighting for the homeland and suffering as a soldier of the allegedly ‘clean Wehrmacht’ made a much better impression than insisting on one’s voluntary contribution to the Nazi project as a brown-shirted stormtrooper.⁹⁴ Because of the modest educational background of many former rank-and-file SA men, detailed autobiographies recounting their youthful political activism remained extremely rare. Whereas the veterans of the Waffen-SS in post-war West Germany regularly met for ‘comradely gatherings’ that attracted up to several thousand people, no SA veterans’ organizations were created.⁹⁵ Slowly but surely the SA as an organization that had not only contributed to the Nazi terror, but also shaped the lives of millions of German men and their families, vanished from public memory.

Against this background it is not surprising that some former SA leaders even became respected local dignitaries or had successful second careers as journalists, politicians, and environmental campaigners. Particularly noteworthy is the post-war career of the long-time SA propagandist and SA-Obersturmbannführer Hans Sponholz, whose books about the stormtroopers from the 1930s and early 1940s have been cited in previous chapters.⁹⁶ A journalist for the conservative Bavarian newspaper Merkur for many years, he also enjoyed a modest political career in the Bavaria Party. Sponholz became regionally famous as a highly regarded conservationist who initiated the Association for the Protection of the Ebersbach Forest (Schutzgemeinschaft Ebersberger Forst), an environmentalist group that decisively prevented the Bavarian State government from permitting the construction of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in the extensive woodlands east of Munich. Sponholz’s rhetoric in the environmental campaigns of the 1960s illustrates the degree to which the passage from Volksgemeinschaft to Schutzgemeinschaft was at times a short one: ‘Nature conservancy must be ready for battle,’ the former SA propagandist now urged.⁹⁷ For his commitment he was awarded the Bavarian Conservation Award (Bayerischer Naturschutzpreis) in 1973, together with the famous behaviourist and Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz.⁹⁸Sponholz also received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1980, and two streets in the region were named in his honour. However, his Wikipedia entry as of late 2015 provided no details of his post-1945 career and listed the date of his death as ‘unknown’.⁹⁹

Starting in the late 1970s, the history of the everyday gained prominence in the Federal Republic, inspired by the History Workshop movement in Britain and by the Swedish author Sven Lindquist, who memorably proclaimed, ‘Dig where you stand!’ Action groups now began to work on local and regional histories of the Third Reich, tracing the roots of former Nazi networks and identifying their main participants.¹⁰⁰ Members of these groups located former SA prisons and early concentration camps and recorded the biographies of those ordinary men and women who had fallen victim to the Nazi terror. After what were often long delays, some of these historic places of violence were transformed into museums, as with the prison of the SA Field Police in Berlin’s General-Pape-Straße, which opened to the general public in 2013. Some thirty years passed after residents of the area had learned about the former use of their cellars before the commemoration of SA violence could be institutionalized in the form of this museum.¹⁰¹ In the eastern part of the city, by contrast, ‘Köpenick’s week of bloodshed’ in June 1933 was commemorated as early as 1945. In the decades to follow, the GDR made considerable efforts to remember the early Nazi terror, yet it also shaped this remembrance to fit its own anti-Fascist founding myth. As with the former SA prison in General-Pape-Straße, the district of Berlin-Köpenick today supports a small museum to commemorate the early Nazi terror.¹⁰²

Contrary to Bennecke’s attempts to portray the stormtroopers as misguided idealists, the increasingly dominant view saw them as little more than ruffians, dim-witted toughs, or uniformed philistines (Spießbürger), who under the influence of alcohol turned into part-time hooligans. In light of this development, it is not surprising that comparisons with the SA were used early on in both German states to denounce organizations and individuals for political purposes (Plate 33). Two examples demonstrate the tone and character of such comparisons. First, in the heated atmosphere of the Cold War, Heinrich von Brentano, Foreign Minister of the Federal Republic, in a parliamentary speech in 1957 defended the decision of his ministry not to financially support a guest performance in Paris by the Bochum municipal theatre of Bertolt Brecht’s famous Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera), using the argument that the writer’s ‘late lyrics’ could only be compared with the poems of the SA bard Horst Wessel. Such a comparison was utter nonsense, of course, at least from an artistic point of view. Brentano was taking deliberate aim at Brecht the politician, who after the war had accepted a call from East Berlin and, at least in the eyes of West Germany, was now providing the Communist rulers with support in return for personal privileges.¹⁰³ Brentano’s comparison might also have been a clumsy attempt to counter the persistent revelations by the GDR, the self-declared ‘Better Germany’, of the Nazi past of several high functionaries within the Federal Republic.¹⁰⁴

The second example dates back to the late 1960s. With emotions running high in the streets, lecture halls, and newspaper offices of West Berlin in the summer of 1968, the best-selling staunchly anti-Communist tabloid Bild, published by Springer Press, denounced the protesting students as being like new Brownshirts: ‘They must see blood. They wave the red flag and believe the red flag. Here the fun ends [. . .] and democratic tolerance. We have something against SA methods.’¹⁰⁵ The Marxist philosopher Theodor W. Adorno joined in such criticism, yet on a very different intellectual and personal level. The former emigrant of German-Jewish descent was shocked when confronted with the tumultuous ‘teach-ins’ at West German universities in the late 1960s. He regarded the most radical students not as members of a new political avant-garde but as ‘stormtroopers in jeans’.¹⁰⁶ Similarly, the political scientist Ernst Fraenkel, who in The Dual State (1941) had offered a pioneering analysis of National Socialism, warned members of the left-wing Socialist German Student League (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, or SDS) to abstain from ‘exactly the same methods as the raiding squads of the SA’.¹⁰⁷

More recent scholarship has sometimes echoed such views when accusing the more radical protesters of 1968 of ‘Nazi hooliganism’, a charge referring in particular to these students’ frequent shouting down of those professors who were not to their liking.¹⁰⁸ Students in the late 1960s in turn used similar metaphors to denounce the alleged ‘pogrom journalism’ of the Springer Press.¹⁰⁹ In their eyes the work of these journalists deliberately sought to provoke physical violence. The students regarded Springer as a cornerstone of the repressive ‘capitalist system’ that had allegedly been established in the Federal Republic. Both antagonistic views shared common ground in referring to the Nazi past to denigrate their political enemies. Remarkably, these political fights continued to carry echoes of the interwar period.

Over the last decade or so the number of people who could personally remember the SA has diminished for natural reasons. However, the Brownshirts have remained a point of reference in German public debate, particularly with regard to acts of political and criminal violence. This was most obvious in the early 1990s, immediately after reunification, when waves of xenophobic riots broke out across the country. The most notorious incidents were the assaults in Rostock-Lichtenhagen, a Plattenbau area in one of the largest cities of the former GDR, in August 1992, and the arson attacks in the West German cities of Mölln in November 1992 and Solingen in May 1993 during which, respectively, three and five people were killed. The liberal politician Cornelia Schmalz-Jacobsen of the Free Democratic Party, acting as federal commissioner for foreigners, commented at the time on these outbursts of violence in a way that illustrated the still-vivid memory of the Nazi years, at least among older Germans: ‘Human beings are being hunted down as they were in the worst times of the SA.’¹¹⁰ This comparison was obviously incorrect insofar as the xenophobic riots of the 1990s, unlike those of the Third Reich, were not sponsored by the government. The perpetrators rather understood their violence as a sign of their frustration with the political establishment, and their excessively nationalistic slogans were at least partly a sign of desperation in the face of a quickly changing political and economic environment.

New outbursts of political and racial violence have taken place in Germany since the autumn of 2015. However, despite this development, ‘SA’ as one of the most contested political catchwords of twentieth-century Germany has continued to lose its power. Attempts by right-wing extremists to re-establish the stormtroopers as exemplary role models of patriotic pride and political activism have failed and seem unlikely to achieve success in the near future.¹¹¹ The history of the SA meanwhile is a genuine historical topic, yet it amounts to more than an academic exercise. The defeat of National Socialism and the subsequent establishment of a capitalist democracy in Germany is rightly seen as a political, economic, and social success story, yet it will not be the end of history. Significant numbers of youths in search of a transcendental, national, or social vision that provides them with meaning and a place in the world continue to be attracted to physical violence. A society that glorifies the satisfaction of consumer and bodily desires through means that are beyond the reach of many of its younger citizens invites both criticism and violence, if only as a means to express frustration and helplessness. The history of the Nazi stormtroopers between 1921 and 1945 provides a poignant example of the forces that this mixture of youthful longing, political exploitation, militaristic predisposition, and social degeneration can unleash. Although this particular example is historically specific, its patterns are not unique to either a single time or a single place. Political regimes based on violent mobilization and disciplinary integration are still widespread; to overcome them by advocating more peaceful and humane ways for communities to coexist remains as important as it has ever been.