2

STORMTROOPER STREET POLITICS

Mobilization in Times of Crisis

Propaganda is violence committed against the soul. Propaganda is not a substitute for violence, but one of its aspects. The two have the identical purposes of making men amenable to control from above.

— Franz Neumann, Behemoth¹

The years 1925–6 marked the starting point of the ‘second SA’, which – unlike its predecessor analysed in the previous chapter – quickly transformed into a highly centralized, nationwide organization that ultimately challenged the state’s monopoly on violence. The SA groups that survived the failed 1923 putsch or were founded afterward in many parts of Germany in 1925 and 1926 – often operating under cover names as sports groups – initially enjoyed considerable regional autonomy.² Like the Munich SA between 1921 and 1923, they frequently served as a kind of private militia, commanded by the NSDAP’s regional bosses, the Gauleiter, who used the SA’s strength to hold off potential party rivals. During this period, while in Landsberg Prison and in the year after his release, Hitler had only limited control over the SA. At this time the reorganization of the NSDAP throughout the Reich was his clear priority. Once this was achieved in the summer of 1926, however, he turned his attention to the stormtroopers, installing the Oberste SA-Führung, or ‘Supreme SA leadership office’, under the command of a ‘Supreme SA leader’ (OSAF), whose assignment took effect starting on 1 November 1926.³

Early Reforms

To head this centralized SA leadership office, Hitler chose Franz Pfeffer von Salomon, a former soldier who usually referred to himself as Franz von Pfeffer – omitting the Jewish-sounding ‘Salomon’.⁴ Born in 1888 as the oldest of seven children from a noble family of the Lower Rhine, Pfeffer von Salomon had studied law before opting for a career as a professional soldier. Promoted to the rank of captain during the First World War, after the armistice he became an active paramilitary, commanding his own Freikorps in the Baltic countries and in Upper Silesia between 1919 and 1921. He quickly gained a reputation for being an excellent organizer, a ruthless and violent leader, and an extremely self-conscious personality. During the French occupation of the Ruhr area that began in January 1923 and provoked strong passive resistance by the Germans, he committed acts of sabotage and was sentenced to death in absentia by the French authorities. In March 1925 Pfeffer von Salomon set himself up as the leader of the NSDAP’s Gau Westphalia and its SA group, becoming one of the regional bosses of the 1920s discussed in chapter 1.⁵ Hitler’s choice of Pfeffer von Salomon to be the first nationwide SA leader was aimed at strengthening his position in the important northwestern regions of the Reich while simultaneously containing the aspirations of ambitious party rivals like Gregor Strasser and Karl Kaufmann; at this time Kaufmann was the Gauleiter for Rheinland-Nord and was soon to become the Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter for Hamburg, positions that he held for many years.⁶ It was a clear signal that the SA was now to play a leading role in all parts of the Reich.

Pfeffer von Salomon proved to be a decisive figure for the growth and success of the SA. In close cooperation with Hitler – who, as we have seen, published his ideas on the reorganization of the SA in the second volume of Mein Kampf in February 1927⁷ – the ambitious Pfeffer von Salomon started his new job by issuing a series of orders that aimed both to consolidate his central role and to create a uniform and highly hierarchically structured SA force. With the goal of reducing the regional powers of the formerly quite independent party bosses who directly commanded ‘their’ own SAs, he introduced a top-down chain of command. Final authority over the stormtroopers was transferred to the OSAF in Munich, which was also given oversight of the Schutzstaffeln (SS) and the Hitler Youth (HJ), founded at a party rally held by the NSDAP in Weimar in July 1926.⁸These arrangements made Pfeffer von Salomon a key figure among the National Socialist leadership until his resignation in August 1930. His reforms shaped the SA for years to come – even if many of his guidelines and orders were subject to revision by Ernst Röhm, who would succeed him as head of the SA on 1 January 1931, claiming the new title of Stabschef, or ‘Chief of Staff’. It needs to be emphasized that the subsequent independence and rise of the SS to become the Third Reich’s most notorious and paradigmatic terror organization should not overshadow the historical reality that until 1934 it was the SA that dominated the SS, and not the other way round. Characteristic of the uneven distribution of men and influence between these two sister organizations in their early years is the order of Röhm in early 1931 that SS membership should number only 10 per cent of that of the SA. In reality, by then the SS only comprised 4,000 men nationwide, in comparison with 88,000 stormtroopers. With regard to their activities, the second SA and the SS operated in a largely similar fashion during the Weimar years, although internal conflicts about strategy, competencies, and the distribution of manpower came to light early on.⁹

Pfeffer von Salomon’s new structure of the SA was modelled on the German army. The smallest group of an SA unit became the Gruppe, or ‘group’, comprising six to twelve men.¹⁰ Five to six groups formed a Trupp, or ‘troop’, in place of the former Kompagnie. Three to five Truppemade up a Sturm, literally ‘storm’, and three to five Stürme were united to form a Standarte, previously known as a Regiment. Finally, several Standarten from the same region formed a Gausturm. By late 1927 there existed eighteen Gaustürme, which in 1931 were rearranged into Gruppenand Untergruppen.¹¹ Alluding to the German military tradition, SA Sturm units were often given the same numbers that had previously identified their respective region’s regiments in the Imperial army.¹² To further increase the SA’s similarity with a regular military body like the Reichswehr, Pfeffer von Salomon also made gorget patches mandatory. The colours of each gorget patch indicated a stormtrooper’s regional affiliation, while its numbers offered information about his Standarte and Sturm. The rank of every trooper was indicated by braids, stars, and oak leaves, with the latter reserved for the highest ranks, beginning with Standartenführer, or colonel.¹³ In writing, leadership positions were often given in abbreviated form: apart from the OSAF (the supreme SA leadership), there were Gaustufs, Stafs, Stufs, Trufs, and Grufs – the abbreviations for Gaustumführer, Standartenführer, Sturmführer, Truppführer, and Gruppenführer, respectively.¹⁴ With Pfeffer von Salomon’s reforms, the SA also gained relative financial autonomy. For the first time it was now in a position to administer its own membership fees and thus was no longer entirely dependent on party contributions. However, money remained sparse throughout the next years, forcing the SA to explore other ways to increase funds, including such tactics as centralizing the sales of uniforms and equipment, introducing their own cigarette brand, and approaching sympathizers in German industry.¹⁵

However, by late 1926, when Pfeffer von Salomon installed his supreme leadership command, these reforms were not so much a reaction to a rising number of stormtroopers, as one might assume in light of the SA’s rapid growth in the following years, as they were a statement of the growing professionalism of the SA. Pfeffer von Salomon did not want his organization to be regarded as just another Wehrverband, a controversial stepchild of the Reichswehr that ultimately depended on the goodwill of the authorities and their weapons. His aim was to create a people’s militia that would be firmly in the hands of the NSDAP and its charismatic leader and would be used first and foremost for propaganda, but would not seek out military confrontation with the legal forces. The new structure responded further to the extended geographical space in which the SA was meanwhile operating. Between 1925 and 1930 local and regional cells of the NSDAP and its SA emerged all over the Reich to complement the party’s former strongholds in the south and west. Although party functionaries stressed that the reorganized SA would no longer engage in paramilitary violence, the introduction of SA insurance schemes, in which monthly contributions of 20 pfennig per person became mandatory for all stormtroopers in late 1928, tells another story. Leading National Socialists were fully aware that their policy of aggressively provoking public confrontations with their opponents would inevitably escalate into physical violence, causing injuries and, in extreme cases, death to party members. In the last three months of 1928 alone, the office overseeing SA insurance policies had to deal with 163 cases of Nazi activists injured ‘on duty’ and paid out more than 9,000 reichsmark¹⁶ – numbers that increased significantly in the following years, with 881 reports of such injuries in 1929; 2,506 in 1930; 6,307 in 1931; and 14,005 in 1932.¹⁷

From Splinter Group to Mass Movement

In what follows I will analyse and discuss the reasons for the remarkable growth of the SA between 1925 and 1932. The internal structural changes outlined in the previous section facilitated this development, but they were just one factor among many others that a thorough historical analysis needs to take into account. To begin with I will concentrate on exemplary midsize and large cities where the SA, in joint cooperation with other paramilitary groups, contributed crucially to the militarization of public and private life, or, in other words, to the ‘politicization of the everyday’.¹⁸The situation in Berlin and Hamburg, the two largest German cities, will be analysed in some detail, not only because there now exist a substantial amount of studies on the rise of National Socialism and the role of the SA on which I can rely, but also because these cities housed strong working-class movements.¹⁹ The stormtroopers regarded these big cities as dangerous and hostile zones of combat, and they described them using military jargon, transforming streets and neighbourhoods into trenches and battlefields.²⁰ Consequently, the Nazis attempted to showcase in these cities what they could achieve in a modern metropolis where large parts of the town were (allegedly) in the hands of the political left.²¹ Alongside an outline of this spatial expansion, the forms of stormtrooper activism and their daily practices will be scrutinized in detail. What made life in the SA of the early 1930s so attractive that more than 300,000 men not only joined its ranks but also displayed unusual forms of commitment to and activism within it? Rising recruitment figures notwithstanding, the SA throughout these years remained a highly volatile organization, repeatedly shaken by scandals and leadership struggles that all too often contradicted the party rhetoric of unity and moral superiority, and negatively influenced the stormtroopers’ public image. By September 1930, when the NSDAP celebrated a massive victory in the nationwide elections, the educated public widely perceived the SA as the embodiment of party-sponsored hooliganism and violence, and an indicator of an increasingly ‘brutalized’ society.²² However, despite their more than ambivalent reputation, the Brownshirts not only experienced exceptional growth in urban milieus but also penetrated large parts of Germany’s rural areas. This ‘Nazification’ of the countryside happened later, but more rapidly and more completely than in the big cities, where the population proved more resistant, if not to the extent that the historiography previously claimed. This Nazi success in the provinces was all the more important because nearly three-quarters of the German electorate resided in cities with fewer than 100,000 inhabitants, the majority of them living in villages and small towns that housed fewer than 10,000 people. ‘Small and middle-sized communities were crucial to Nazi success,’ noted the historian Rudy Koshar, aptly summarizing the results of historical psephology for Weimar Germany.²³ Given the extensive body of regional studies meanwhile available on this subject, the aim of this chapter is not to add even more details to an already vast field, but to synthesize its findings with regard to the SA and to provide some material for future consideration.²⁴

So, to begin with, what did the SA’s situation between 1925 and 1930 look like from a national perspective? Thanks to the moderate success of the völkisch bloc in the two Reichstag elections of 1924, the National Socialists did not totally vanish from sight after the November Putsch, but for the time being their brown-shirted activists remained a marginal phenomenon. Apart from their stronghold of Munich, the stormtroopers’ membership numbers for local branches did not exceed low three-digit numbers, even in Berlin and Hamburg.²⁵ And even in the Bavarian capital, membership stagnated in the middle of the 1920s and, as in the autumn of 1927, even temporarily decreased in response to local party crises.²⁶ In many smaller cities early Nazi sympathizers until the mid-1920s did little more than meet in local taverns, where they organized various kinds of political reading clubs.²⁷ Overall, SA membership statistics for the whole of Germany are not available for the years prior to 1930 – but given the fact that only 6,000 stormtroopers participated in the NSDAP’s party rally in Weimar in July 1926, we can estimate that their number in 1928–9 was certainly less than 30,000.²⁸ In any case, it did not exceed 60,000 before the end of 1930, when the spectacular gains of the NSDAP in the previous months increased interest and membership in the party considerably.²⁹

Some examples illustrate that the marginal presence of the SA in many regions and towns until the late 1920s significantly restricted its activist potential to openly confront its rivals: according to an early party activist, the number of Brownshirts in the free Imperial city of Frankfurt am Main, with its roughly half a million inhabitants, amounted to fifty men in 1925. Two years later that figure had only increased three- or fourfold, and the authorities reported that the Frankfurt stormtroopers were in part composed of ‘the most disreputable mob’.³⁰ Despite all propaganda maintaining otherwise, not before 1929 could they dare to confront their rivals in ‘open battle’.³¹ Similarly, in the entire territory of the Saar Basin, which had a population of more than 750,000, the total number of SA militants in 1929 amounted to a mere thirty men.³² At the same time there existed only a few hundred stormtroopers for the whole of the densely populated Ruhr area and around 600 such men in Württemberg.³³ Finally, in several small cities and administrative districts of the Reich, local SA units were either absent or remained limited to only a handful of activists who did hardly more than organize regular informal gatherings prior to the Nazi takeover of power in 1933.³⁴ Even where the SA was present, its parades and other forms of activism suggest ‘a limited use of violence, since massive use would have proved counterproductive to the image the organization sought to present as well as to its legal survival’.³⁵

Although it is impossible to outline a general pattern of the SA’s expansion, there is no denying that on the whole the SA grew slowly but steadily between 1925 and 1929, not least because it was able to integrate substantial numbers of members from competing paramilitary organizations like Ehrhardt’s Bund Wiking and Röhm’s Frontbann.³⁶ In Hamburg the SA more than doubled its size after a splinter group from the Wehrverband Hindenburg, a former Freikorps, joined in 1927, but as late as April 1929 it still had fewer than 300 members.³⁷ In Berlin many of the SA activists who joined the organization in these years had previously belonged to the paramilitary völkisch sports club Olympia e.V., which after the First World War became a reservoir for the recruitment of right-wing extremists and was outlawed by the Prussian authorities on 12 May 1926.³⁸

In the German capital, where Joseph Goebbels was appointed the new district party leader, violent clashes involving National Socialists became a common feature of the city’s street politics as early as November 1926. Goebbels advocated an aggressive strategy that would prove highly successful and was adopted by the entire party in the 1930s. This approach acknowledged the SA’s initial weakness but speculated that precisely because of it the stormtroopers must seek a confrontation with their rivals, ideally on the latter’s own territory.³⁹ Clashes should happen in the streets of the capital in plain daylight, mainly for three reasons: first, pure and simple, the National Socialists had to increase their visibility in a modern metropolis of more than four million inhabitants where time was limited and Hitler, the tribune of the Bavarian plebs, was a distant and somehow obscure figure. Against this background, a public march that could potentially escalate into violence was a reliable and cheap means to attract attention, a way to provoke a ‘sensation’ in the neighbourhood.⁴⁰ ‘Disturbance is the main thing – never mind how it arises,’ noted the Kreisleiter of the city of Hameln in 1931, testifying to the successful expansion of the Berlin SA’s tactic.⁴¹ Second, Goebbels cleverly exploited the necessary presence of police forces on such occasions. Against their will, the police, who by law had to prevent street violence from getting out of control, was thereby transformed into a protecting power for National Socialists during their propaganda marches.⁴² Third, such seemingly audacious acts of provocation which – it is important to repeat the point – in reality took place precisely because the risk of escalation was contained, elated those who participated in them and thereby attracted new followers. Just two weeks after his move to Berlin, Goebbels’s diary entries go into raptures over the SA ‘community spirit’ built on the foundation of violence: ‘Today I attended the general mustering of the SA. All in shape. We can set ourselves to the great work now. Assault is followed by assault. Blood pours. Binder for the new community! I think revolution.’⁴³ The Berlin stormtroopers, who at this time were overwhelmingly young men in their late teens and early twenties, venerated Goebbels precisely because of his focus on violence. The twenty-one-year-old Sturmführer Horst Wessel, who after his death in 1930 was elevated to the position of a Nazi icon, noted enthusiastically in his autobiography from the summer of 1929: ‘Never did he hold back, but always allowed the entirety of our accumulated energy to discharge explosively. The SA was indebted to him for this, in particular.’⁴⁴ In similar terms Nazi militants in Hamburg emphasized the existence of a ‘generational gap’, claiming that after having lost confidence in their fathers they now understood the need to take their fate into their own hands. ‘Fighting had become our life purpose and goal,’ one of them boasted.⁴⁵

Despite such martial rhetoric, it is important to keep in mind that SA activism between 1925 and 1929 was not yet a mass phenomenon. In all of the larger cities the stormtroopers remained a tiny minority compared to the much larger Wehrverbände of the right as well as the paramilitary organizations of the left. Consequently, the SA was in the first place concerned with defending its own limited territory, which often did not exceed several bars, the local party headquarters, and their immediate surroundings.⁴⁶ To make those bars that served as Nazi hangouts identifiable, innkeepers could buy 11 inch by 11 inch enamel signs bearing the SA insignia from the SA--Reichszeugmeisterei. It is telling that the Nazis as late as 1930 emphasized the relatively neutral design of these signs, claiming that they were only recognizable to insiders and that their destruction by political opponents was not to be expected – a promise that, of course, could not be upheld.⁴⁷ Once their strongholds were secured, the SA could then venture to explore and temporarily occupy other parts of the city, calling attention to the NSDAP and its paramilitary wing. This strategy of infiltration and expansion had important effects on the mentality of the stormtroopers: as they perceived their surroundings as hostile, confidence in each other became a vital prerequisite for their motivation to endure and achieve success in political terms. At the same time, differences in class and fortune were of limited use in the SA’s semi-legal activities and thus did not matter much. The heart of the SA’s ‘German socialism’ in fact lay in the necessity of closing ranks and operating jointly, rather than in any programmatic statement of Hitler or other party leaders concerning the party’s economic policies, even if the internal schooling of Nazi activists increased considerably from 1927 onward and over the next years contributed to the transformation of the NSDAP into a ‘truly modern activist party’.⁴⁸

Against this background, it is significant that Pfeffer von Salomon’s reforms maintained a central element from the earliest days of the SA: the organization of the group into ‘cells’ that comprised only a handful of activists. The men within such small SA groups knew each other personally and over time developed close bonds, united by a shared ideology and the joint experience of party service. Goebbels freely acknowledged that the Nazis copied this system of small ‘cells’ composed of political activists from their Communist rivals, but this organizational feature of the SA can be traced back to its earliest days in Munich. It is therefore plausible to assume that both the National Socialists and the Communists were ultimately inspired by military units that fought in the Great War and, in particular, by the ‘comradeship’ that existed within the platoons of the post-war Freikorps. The radical left could also build on the long socialist tradition of organized and at times violent industrial action going back to the nineteenth century.⁴⁹ In any case, the National Socialists were successful in adapting this cell framework to the new realities of the SA, with these small groups forming ‘local communities of violence’ – communities that, particularly in larger cities, often acted as gangs, claiming contested territories for themselves.⁵⁰

This approach proved increasingly beneficial for the SA, particularly during the years of economic misery. Many SA Stürme in larger cities now operated like street gangs – understand here less as a violent and often criminal youth organization, than as a ‘specific form of social arrangements’ that provided its members with basic needs including a network of more or less reliable comrades, food and shelter, and a sense of belonging.⁵¹ As is made plain by the young Ernst Haffner’s ‘reality novel’ Jugend auf der Landstraße Berlin, which became a literary sensation in Germany in 1932, the increasing phenomenon of violent youth gangs in the late Weimar Republic was a direct consequence of the miserable living conditions that prevailed in the working-class districts of German cities. Unable to find even badly paid jobs as day labourers, and often originating from dysfunctional families that did not possess the means to support them, such youths organized themselves into ‘cliques’, forms of solidarity communities. These groups were usually structured hierarchically (headed by the Cliquenbullen, or ‘clique bull’) and served as surrogate families for their members.⁵² The SA stormtrooper units, ideally organized around a charismatic local SA leader, resembled such local gangs not only in their organizational layout, but they also fulfilled – or at least promised to fulfil – similar tasks. With the sociological jargon of the 1970s, the SA increasingly functioned as a ‘spontaneous mass organization’: in its basic structure hierarchically organized and applying a strict leadership principle, but built on small units that operated surprisingly autonomously.⁵³

The Nazi Uniform and the Authorities

Regardless of the moderate numbers of these local groups of stormtroopers in those early years, their uniforms alone indicated to the public that they belonged to a larger body of some relevance. The brown shirts were introduced nationwide in 1926 and soon became the most notorious National Socialist symbol of recognition after the swastika. Plainly visible to friends and foes alike and easily identifiable by the police, they demonstrated the courage and determination of those who dared to wear them, particularly during times when the uniform was officially prohibited. Although the psychological effects of military uniforms had been publicized roughly twenty years earlier by Wilhelm Voigt, better known as the ‘Captain of Köpenick’, and some years later were brilliantly ridiculed in Heinrich’s Mann best-selling novel Der Untertan, published in English for the first time in 1921 as The Patrioteer, uniforms remained highly popular in interwar Germany.⁵⁴ Prior to 1914 a symbol that represented above all the authority of the state, over the 1920s uniforms were ‘democratized’ as more and more groups introduced their own versions. Such clothing now became the expression of a voluntary decision and demonstrated not only belonging and conviction, but also an individual’s willingness to submit to certain restrictions of individual freedom. In the case of the SA, the uniform was thus also a tool in the service of what I defined earlier as disciplinary integration. Furthermore, it became a deliberate means of provocation, not least because the law-and-order image usually associated with the police and the military was so often and so openly contradicted by the stormtroopers’ public presence. The uniform, finally, also acted as an element of community formation, empowering the individual wearer by reassuring him that he was part of a larger movement and introducing clear-cut boundaries between insiders and outsiders. Ultimately, it provided the SA men with a sense of agency.⁵⁵

A stormtrooper is on duty every time he puts his uniform on, Hitler claimed in a letter to Pfeffer von Salomon in late 1926, and he requested that neither the consumption of alcohol nor smoking be permitted on these occasions. In public, the marching SA was prohibited from cheering and booing, and even the distribution of party pamphlets was disallowed. ‘Politics is exclusively made by the party,’ Hitler insisted, reducing individual militants to silent recipients of his orders and stripping them of all creative power.⁵⁶ After Röhm was appointed SA Chief of Staff in January 1931, these rules were further tightened. From now on, all SA men, including their leaders – with the exception of members of the Reichstag and those fulfilling special party functions – were prohibited from taking part in public discussions, talking to journalists, or publishing on political questions.⁵⁷ The Brownshirts were expected to make a lasting visual impression in the German streets, but not to explain party politics. This strategy proved beneficial in two ways: it spared the ordinary trooper from defending his political views – a task with which many would not have coped well, as even many Nazis admitted – and it also provided surplus meaning to the utterances of the few chosen Nazi leaders permitted to speak publicly.

The Nazis were by no means the only political party or association to clothe their faithful activists in uniforms, and consequently this alone would not have set them apart at the time. Members of the veterans’ association Der Stahlhelm, Bund der Frontsoldaten, literally ‘Steel Helmet, League of Frontline Soldiers’, which comprised more than 250,000 members in 1925 and thus far surpassed the SA, dressed in grey uniforms, the colour of the official army.⁵⁸ The republican Reichsbanner marched in green shirts and blue caps, and even the Communist Der Rote Frontkämpferbund, or ‘Red Front Fighters League’, wore a kind of proletarian uniform that combined the traditional workman’s cap with military insignias.⁵⁹ These four paramilitary ‘armies’, however, did not fight a civil war.⁶⁰ They marched in the streets and held mass meetings with increasing frequency, but they rarely clashed with other groups or people directly, largely because of the presence of the police. Their public demonstrations nevertheless provided opportunities for violent attacks, which usually occurred before or after the political events proper. These incidents were in fact a vital element of Weimar Germany’s paramilitarism, and at least the Nazis and the Communists factored such violence into their strategies. ‘Beat the Fascists, wherever you find them!’ the Communist functionary Heinz Neumann wrote in the party organ Die Rote Fahne in early 1930, and the Nazis for their part called for nothing less than the complete annihilation of the ‘Communist-Bolshevik Untermenschen’.⁶¹ In contrast to such calls for direct and potentially murderous action, the Reichsbanner and the Stahlhelm largely contented themselves with acting within the symbolic dimension of public marches and rallies.⁶² However, over time, these two organizations likewise radicalized, if more in speech than in action, so that the American journalist Hubert R. Knickerbocker compared Germany in 1931–2 to a ‘town with four fire departments, each ready at the gong to leap down the brass pole and race for the goal. It is a village with four gangs, each ready at the drop of the hat to sally forth and slaughter the others.’ Similarly, the young French author Jacques Decour, who worked as a temporary teacher for a Magdeburg gymnasium in the autumn of 1930, noticed ‘revolts of ideas [Ideenaufstände] on every corner. These are the heroic times of the Republic. Everywhere faith, fanaticism.’⁶³

Not surprisingly, the German authorities attempted to contain the escalation of violence in the streets. The strategies they adopted differed from region to region as well as in timing, intensity, and intention. Whereas Bavaria by and large remained an area of retreat for the National Socialists, the Prussian government in the hands of the Social Democrats repeatedly pushed for action against the party, particularly after the murder of Reich Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau on 24 June 1922 and the November 1923 putsch. Contrary to what has often been stated, they were not unsuccessful, as the following example demonstrates. In 1928 the Berlin police president forbade the holding of a funeral parade for the SA man Hans-Georg Kütemeyer. Official reports stated that Kütemeyer, whose body was found in the Landwehrkanal, the city canal, on the morning of 17 November 1928, had been involved in a brawl with construction workers the night before and had fallen and drowned in the canal in a state of acute intoxication.⁶⁴ The Nazis, by contrast, claimed that political opponents had murdered him, elevating Kütemeyer to one of the earliest Blutzeugen, or ‘blood witnesses’, of their movement in Berlin and Brandenburg.⁶⁵ As would soon become a regular habit, the National Socialists intended to honour an alleged party martyr with a lavish funeral parade. Such funerals were not only political demonstrations but also testified to the all-encompassing ambitions of the Nazi ideology, which provided, or at least heavily contributed to, fundamental services like marriage and death rites. The Prussian police clearly understood the political character of the upcoming procession. They claimed that the Nazi Party had irresponsibly enhanced the level of political emotions among its followers and therefore they feared for public security if these emotions were set free during the parade. The police also declared that they would not respond to Goebbels’s official letter of protest ‘because of its insolent and indecent form’ – and that they would refuse to do so in the future as well.⁶⁶ Such details indicate that the authorities were all but helpless against early Nazi attempts to decide the ‘rules of the game’ – if there was strong political will to fight them and a basic understanding of how symbolic politics worked in an age of mass media and antagonistic ideological worldviews.

The authorities banned the second SA several times. In Prussia it was prohibited twice, first in the capital city of Berlin from 6 April 1927 to 5 April 1928.⁶⁷ This ban certainly made Nazi recruitment in the largest German state more difficult and thus contributed to the slow growth of the stormtroopers in this area between 1925 and 1928. However, this ban had no effect on other parts of the Reich and certainly did not strike at the heart of the SA in Munich.⁶⁸ A few years later, in 1932, the SA was prohibited again, this time on a nationwide level. The ban came into effect on 13 April, but the new chancellor, Franz von Papen, lifted it as early as 14 June. A Bavarian initiative to extend the ban at least in its own territory failed two weeks later.⁶⁹ Overall, the effects of these temporary interdictions on the SA remained limited. When the Nazis were not allowed to wear their brown uniforms, they simply turned up to events in civilian clothing. A marching and singing SA troop operating under a fantastic cover name and with members dressed in white shirts or other surrogate ‘uniforms’ still remained highly recognizable. At times these events boasted up to 1,000 participants, even in midsize cities.⁷⁰ The Nazis’ cat-and-mouse game with the authorities during these ‘white shirt times’ (Weißhemden-Zeit)⁷¹ in the end more than contributed to the atmosphere of excitement and fun surrounding the SA than prevented men from joining the stormtroopers, not to mention the fact that it further undermined the authority of the legitimate governments. Instructive in this respect is the verdict from 13 March 1931 of the Kammergericht in Berlin entitled ‘On the Prohibition of the Public Display of NSDAP Party Uniforms’, which also applied to the well-known ‘substitute’ uniforms. The judges declared this prohibition invalid because, among other things, members of the public could not be expected to understand the Nazi dress code and therefore ran the risk of coming into the firing line of the police.⁷²

Over the years the German states’ pressure on the NSDAP and the SA was furthermore hampered by the growing sympathies for the Nazi movement among parts of the judiciary and the police. Both groups felt closer to right-wing nationalists, who claimed to fight for law, order, and the nation, than to their counterparts on the radical left, who favoured revolution, a profound change in the social and public order.⁷³ A closer look at the different political strategies of the extremist parties is instructive: whereas Nazi propaganda positively reached out to police officers by highlighting their unique grievances – their alleged abuse at the hands of the government, which forced them to clean up the mess the democratic parties were said to be responsible for – the Communists vituperated against the officers as henchmen of the ‘system’, dupes of the capitalist establishment, and traitors to their own class.⁷⁴ In the Free State of Saxony, where the NSDAP was present with ever more local groups since the mid-1920s and was particularly successful in those industrial regions with high unemployment,⁷⁵ the Nazis claimed to have infiltrated the regular police forces to the extent that, by their own statistics, 40 per cent of all officers were members of the NSDAP in 1932. In the working-class city of Chemnitz the number of ‘Nazi policemen’ amounted to more than 90 per cent, boasted a Nazi deputy in the Saxon Landtag, the regional parliament.⁷⁶ Such figures were certainly overstated, but are still indicative of the trend that even in those states and regions where the authorities promoted tough police action against SA violence, police officials did not necessarily share this view.⁷⁷ Social Democrats in Saxony repeatedly complained that the police were too lenient: they neither sufficiently engaged in the prevention of political criminality nor demonstrated zeal and commitment in redressing concrete crimes. As a result, workers in cities like Chemnitz found themselves no longer safe against the ‘terror of Fascist mobs, not even in their own flats’.⁷⁸

Laughing at the Stormtroopers

By 1930 the SA had become a regular and highly visible, but also very controversial, element in the German streets. When local communities showed a determination to prevent the Nazis from gaining a foothold – as was the case in the small city of Michelstadt in the Forest of Odes – several hundred stormtroopers from the region ‘retaliated’. On 6 April 1930 they drove into the city, where they indiscriminately threw stones through windows and at local pedestrians, injuring many adults and at least one child.⁷⁹ Yet not only did the SA provoke the strong emotions of fear, admiration, and repudiation, but it also became the target of satire and ridicule. In December 1930 the weekly Ulk, a supplement of the highly respected liberal Berliner Tageblatt, ironically informed its readers of the unlikely event that ‘recently three SA men had caused a stir at [Berlin’s centrally located] Leipziger Straße by walking along silently and lost in thought’.⁸⁰ Describing the normal operation of Fascist mobs in singing and marching in the streets and committing acts of violence by the wayside, the journalist and writer Siegfried Kracauer laconically stated that events ‘went the National Socialist way’ (nationalistisch zugegangen) – thereby downplaying the political danger posed by the quickly growing number of such incidents.⁸¹ The SA was also mocked in Erich Kästner’s 1931 novel Fabian: The Story of a Moralist, albeit alongside his Communist counterpart. In one chapter Kästner describes a fictional shooting between a Nazi and a Communist that results in mutual injuries. When both of them arrive at the local hospital, the doctor on duty comments on the scene:

‘You’ve brought me two politicians?’ he said, with a smile. ‘Altogether, we’ve had nine cases brought in tonight, one with a serious bullet wound in the stomach. All workmen and clerks. Have you ever noticed that these fellows come from the suburbs, and generally know each other? These political brawls are indistinguishable from the dance-hall scraps. In both cases they represent a perversion of German social life. It looks as if they are trying to reduce the unemployment figures by potting each other off. A queer kind of self-help.’⁸²

Such forms of irony barely concealed the moral despair and political frustration that were widespread within the left-liberal intelligentsia of Germany in the early 1930s, particularly after the Reichstag elections of 14 September 1930 in which the NSDAP won 18.3 per cent of the votes (Plate 8). With a sixfold increase in support compared to 1928, it now represented the second strongest party in the new parliament. There was no denying that the Nazis had become a considerable political force, to the extent that just over one year later, in December 1931, a report from a secret meeting of KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands) propagandists in Berlin complained that the Communists had utterly underestimated the National Socialist danger: ‘By now everyone accepts that sooner or later Hitler will come to power and reconciles himself to the idea that our time will come after the Nazis’ failure [Abwirtschaft].’⁸³ Whether National Socialism became attractive because of the brown-shirted activists so prone to violence is still a matter of debate.⁸⁴ In addressing this question, one needs to take into account local varieties of the party as well as the general consequences of the fragmentation of the public sphere in Weimar Germany. As historian Stephan Malinowski has argued, an ‘increasing dichotomisation of awareness’ became a dominant feature of these years. He defined this ‘dichotomisation’ not only as the tendency to distinguish sharply between ‘us’ and ‘them’, but also as a basic operation that structured one’s perceptions even before reflection could set in.⁸⁵ National Socialists and Communists were both successful in creating distinct public spheres that were tangible and compelling for their followers, but inaccessible to those who did not share their basic ideological assumptions. Both movements encouraged their adherents to block out unwelcome facts and worldviews, to the benefit of an idealized version of the party’s own, allegedly ‘proper’, understanding of social and political realities.⁸⁶The former SA-Brigade Leader, Franz Bock, summarized this attitude when interrogated at the International Military Tribunal in 1946: ‘Every desire for self-preservation demands a struggle. The realization of National Socialistic ideas, with the aim to assume power in the State, required political struggles and fighting. Our weapons, however, were spiritual ones – propaganda, the spoken word, and mass demonstrations.’⁸⁷ While the latter part of this statement downplays the SA’s central use of physical violence for tactical reasons, it testifies to the fundamental perception in 1920s Germany that politics was above all a matter of antagonistic and mutually exclusive worldviews.

The political theorist and legal scholar Carl Schmitt, who in 1932 justified the Preußenschlag, the unlawful removal of the SPD-led Prussian government, and soon afterward became the Third Reich’s crown jurist, elevated this foe–friend distinction into a political philosophy. Within the SA, Schmitt’s sophisticated academic reasoning clearly was less relevant than more concrete arguments, won through fists and fights. However, a similar trend of overstating political differences as fundamental ideological confrontations of utmost importance characterized both ends of the intellectual spectrum. Nazi propaganda constantly reminded the rank-and-file stormtrooper that he was part of a bigger picture, an eyewitness to a crucial period in history that he could actually and personally shape. Such optimistic determination was by no means exclusive to Germany; it was a common feature of all Fascist movements in interwar Europe, as Roger Griffin in particular has forcefully argued: extreme nationalists unanimously believed ‘that Western history was itself at a turning point from which it could collapse into terminal barbarism and anarchy amidst social breakdown and war, or give birth to a new type of society beyond the current age of chaos and decadence’.⁸⁸ A random survey of several editions of the capital’s two Nazi dailies, Goebbels’s Der Angriff and Strasser’s Berliner Arbeiterzeitung, confirm this ultimately eschatological view. In both papers, journalists aimed not at factual accuracy, but at creating an alternative public sphere in which extreme partisan views could find expression and their activists achieve recognition and salvation. For the uninitiated, the Nazi headlines at least provided ‘sensation’, a welcome stimulation for those Berliners who tolerated everything except boredom, speculated Goebbels, who was, as always, of two minds about the ‘city of the intelligence and the asphalt’.⁸⁹ The public reaction to the stormtroopers’ presence and actions can thus not be evaluated from a higher, ‘objective’, outlook but must be embedded in a careful reconstruction of the different situational contexts without glossing over the strong partisan views expressed in the historical documents.

What holds true for the SA is likewise relevant for the analysis of political violence in the late Weimar Republic more generally. Even those official – and by and large reliable – statistics at our disposal, which indicate a strong rise in political crimes between 1928 and 1932, do not tell us about the perspective of contemporaries.⁹⁰ All organizations involved in this violence regarded their own men as ‘firefighters’ and those of the other groups as members of criminal ‘gangs’ – to revert for a moment to Hubert Knickerbocker’s colourful metaphors. Stormtroopers interpreted the risk of being personally attacked in the streets as just another indicator of this grave national danger. And this risk was indeed high, particularly in those working-class districts that the SA was determined to ‘conquer’. As Anthony McElligott has demonstrated for the city of Altona, which in 1938 became a part of Hamburg, not only were early Nazi activists prior to 1933 greeted in the streets with shouts of ‘Perish Nazi!’ (Nazi verrecke!) or ‘Heil Moskau!’, but several were forced to move home after their flats were broken into and ravaged. Communist and Reichsbanner men repeatedly attacked individual Nazis when the latter left well-known Nazi hangouts, were recognizable by their uniforms, or were personally known to their assailants. Such attacks at times resembled genuine hunts. They were often carried out by a large group of armed attackers against a single man or a very few victims, who were hit in the faces and on the heads with nailed fencing stakes, stabbed, beaten, or trampled until they were severely injured or dead.⁹¹ If one compares the actual acts of violence that occurred in the early 1930s, there were few practical differences between the street crimes of Nazi, Communist, Reichsbanner, and Stahlhelm perpetrators. Situational factors mattered more than ideological ones, which served above all as ex post-facto legitimization.

The Escalation of Violence

Official nationwide statistics for the year 1931 counted 8,248 people who had been injured or killed as a result of political violence. National Socialists represented the largest group of victims (4,699), followed by members of the Reichsbanner (1,696), Communists (1,228), and Stahlhelmers(625).⁹² Regional figures overall confirm this pattern: official statistics for the Hanover administrative district in 1931 note injuries to seventy-one Nazis, forty-seven members of the Reichsbanner, seven Communists, and six Stahlhelmers. In addition, one Reichsbanner man was killed in the region.⁹³ In Saxony 683 people were injured and fourteen died as a consequence of political violence in the same year. Among the dead were six National Socialists, two Communists, and four ‘adherents of other parties’.⁹⁴ In Leipzig, of the six people killed for political reasons between 1929 and March 1933, three were National Socialists, one was a Communist, and one was a Reichsbanner man.⁹⁵ However, another statistic for the Reich, published by the left-liberal weekly Die Welt am Morgen, reported 155 deaths and 426 people injured as a result of political activities between 1929 and July 1931, with the majority of casualties belonging to the political left (108) and only thirty-one members of nationalist organizations being killed.⁹⁶ According to the Nazis’ own data, 143 SA men were killed between 1930 and 1932 nationwide, with eighty-four deaths in 1932 alone.⁹⁷ Judging from these statistics, National Socialists seem to have been the group that was most often attacked and injured, whereas Communist and Social Democratic activists, while exposed to a significant risk of being killed, were attacked less frequently. If one considers, furthermore, that between 1929 and 1931 the number of stormtroopers and Communist paramilitaries was significantly smaller than the number of Reichsbanner and Stahlhelm men, it is safe to deduce that the activists of the two former organizations behaved in a considerably more violent manner than those of the latter.

To justify and at the same time further increase the hostilities, Nazi propaganda claimed that the collective national body and the individual stormtrooper’s body were intrinsically linked, and consequently the personal risk of and harm inflicted on the latter was thus to be regarded as a direct assault on the nation. The establishment of such parallels between individual experience and the nation’s fate – ultimately a grandiose gesture of self-empowerment – was a key element in the expansion of the Brownshirts’ appeal in these crucial years. Another element was the SA’s militancy. Although the group’s leaders repeated, mantra-like, in public speeches that stormtroopers were not allowed to carry arms and would resort to physical violence only for legitimate self-defence, it was an open secret that the truth was often quite different. Even if the many SA men serving in border protection units who had been officially trained by the Reichswehr by and large did not (yet) engage in violent confrontation, this claim certainly did not hold for the SA ‘gangs’ in the larger German cities, where the possession of a gun was tantamount to an elevation in status. Admittedly, the early days of the Munich SA, when whole units could walk into a Reichswehr barrack to pick out heavy artillery and machine guns for their paramilitary exercises, were over. But the sheer amount of smaller firearms circulating in Germany more than made up for the loss of access to military equipment, particularly as these arms were now used more frequently, for training purposes as well as for attacks. During these years the police regularly confiscated from members of the SA such weapons as knuckledusters and rubber truncheons, but increasingly also pistols, daggers, guns, and explosives.⁹⁸ If one believes the memoirs of the former Prussian Minister of the Interior and Berlin police president Albert Grzesinski, the Berlin police in early 1932 even confiscated two ‘life-size effigies’ of the Prussian Minister of the Interior Carl Severing and himself, ‘the heads of which were neatly punctured by bullet holes’. Both men had ‘proven a convenient target for the young soldiers of the Third Reich,’ Grzesinski remarked dryly.⁹⁹

Finally, in 1931 and 1932 the authorities uncovered National Socialist plans to overthrow the legitimate government by force and to establish a dictatorship. In the autumn of 1931 they published the ‘Boxheim documents’, which contained detailed plans for a Nazi takeover of power in reaction to a possible Communist putsch. Drafted most notably by the twenty-eight-year-old probationary judge Werner Best of Darmstadt in Hesse – who later became SS-Obergruppenführer, chief of Section l of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), head of the civil administration of German-occupied northern France, and finally, in 1942, Reich plenipotentiary in Denmark – this strategy paper described how a state of emergency would be put in place and then upheld by the SA and other right-wing paramilitary ‘defence’ groups. Everyone who attempted to interfere in the Fascist takeover of power was to be executed on the spot.¹⁰⁰ Half a year later, in March 1932, the police in the Palatinate discovered that a series of bomb attacks that had started in the region the previous summer were perpetrated not by Communists, as had been assumed initially, but by the National Socialists. The leading figure behind these terror attacks was the regional SS leader Theodor Eicke, who in the summer of 1933 was to become commander of the Dachau concentration camp. In the early 1930s he had been in charge of plant security for I. G. Farben Ludwigsburg, a position in which he was well placed to procure explosives for approximately eighty bombs.¹⁰¹

In both cases Hitler and other leaders of the NSDAP hastened to persuade the authorities that such incidents had to be seen as excessive but ultimately legitimate reactions to the imminent Communist threat. Over-ambitious regional Nazi functionaries had drafted the plans and prepared the bombings against explicit orders from party headquarters, they claimed. At the same time the Nazi leadership exploited the mounting pressure on the government that resulted from such threats: public order in Germany, they argued, could now only be maintained with the help of the NSDAP and the SA, and not by turning against them. Reich Chancellor Heinrich Brüning personally requested the Oberreichsanwalt (attorney general) to handle the Boxheim scandal with care and to avoid drastic judicial action – not least in order to calm down the liberal and Socialist press that was determined to expose the Nazi doublespeak. It hardly came as a surprise that Best was acquitted of charges of high treason in October 1932.¹⁰²

Starting in 1930, the boundaries between political criminality, ‘organized’ criminality, and petty criminality became more fluid than ever. In these times of widespread poverty and even starvation, a simple theft of food could be turned without further ado into a political act – justified, for example, as Communist self-help against capitalist exploitation.¹⁰³ In Berlin the (officially banned) Communist Red Front Fighters as well as the National Socialist stormtroopers occasionally formed political gangs that developed close ties with the underworld.¹⁰⁴ That many SA men combined their political and criminal activities was so obvious that, in the vernacular, Sturm 25, which operated in the working-class district of Berlin-Neukölln, was referred to as Ludensturm, the ‘storm of pimps’ – a characterization that the SA’s historiography several years later bragged about as a kind of honorary title.¹⁰⁵ The notorious Sturm 33, based in the western city district of Berlin-Charlottenburg, was locally known as ‘murder storm’ because its members were repeatedly involved in fatal shootings.¹⁰⁶ Such criminal activities not only shook public opinion of the SA, but at times also diminished its assets: in 1931 police reports stated that penniless stormtroopers had repeatedly staged political raids in order to claim SA insurance benefits, a topic that anti-Fascist publications eagerly exploited.¹⁰⁷

Propaganda marches increasingly began to escalate into violence, with Berlin’s Blutmai, or ‘Blood May’, of 1929 and the Altona ‘Bloody Sunday’ of 1932 being the most fatal encounters. Most victims on these occasions were killed by police bullets, fired in an attempt to restore order. The Berlin Blutmai, provoked by the Communists, claimed thirty-one lives, while its Nazi-provoked Altona counterpart took seventeen lives. In both cases more than 100 people were injured.¹⁰⁸ Apart from those spectacular incidents, party meetings that ended in fisticuffs, direct assaults, and shootings involving members of competing political organizations mushroomed in ever more German cities. The ‘pseudopacification’ of these urban ‘communities of violence’ that had characterized the previous years was over.¹⁰⁹ Grzesinski described this change in retrospect: ‘Ordinary brawls had given way to numerous attacks. Knives, blackjacks and revolvers had replaced political argument. Terror was rampant.’¹¹⁰ Goebbels characterized the situation in similar terms as a ‘bloody conflict with chair legs and revolvers’ that, in his eyes, would be ‘ever more necessary’.¹¹¹

Whereas this phenomenon of intensified violence was initially largely confined to disadvantaged working-class neighbourhoods, it soon burst through the unofficial social boundaries, as the following example from Cologne demonstrates: on the evening of Friday, 6 March 1931, the local chapter of the Catholic Centre Party in Cologne-Braunsfeld met for an evening of discussion on the fashionable topic of ‘Soviet Star and Swastika’. About seventy people were present in the room, among them a considerable number of uninvited local Nazis who had arrived on bicycles and motorbikes. They left the engines of the latter running, in case a quick exit would prove necessary. In the hall the Nazis initially listened quietly to the main speaker of the evening, a certain Dr Hertz, but soon began to heckle and insult him. Finally, Toni Winkelnkemper, a twenty-five-year-old student of law at the University of Cologne who had already risen to become NSDAP Gau office leader (Gauamtsleiter) for the Rhineland, and at least for this night was acting as the leader of the SA Sturm present, called the speaker a ‘coward’. This seems to have been a prearranged code word, as the Nazis immediately started to throw chairs in the direction of the table where the organizers sat. The prosecutor later described the following minutes vividly:

The defendant Winkelnkemper tossed a heavy ashtray in the direction of the pastor Dr Frings [. . .] At the same time, another person, who could not be identified, struck at the speaker Dr Hertz. The participants of the meeting who belonged to the Centre Party confined themselves to protecting the women who were present and to parrying off those ashtrays and chair legs that were used as missiles. The whole process lasted about five minutes. During this period, 58 chairs were partly damaged, partly completely smashed; some other fittings of the room (glass door, lustre, panelling) were also spoiled. The damage amounts to 400 marks.¹¹²

Several men from the Centre Party were injured and needed medical care. The forehead wounds suffered by Pastor Frings – he would be elected Archbishop of Cologne in 1942 and elevated to the cardinalate after the Second World War – had to be stitched up.¹¹³ Winkelnkemper was initially sentenced to a prison term of six months, but was granted a reprieve on his appeal.¹¹⁴ Free to move in public, he continued to assault political opponents.¹¹⁵ After the Nazis came to power, Winkelnkemper carved out a remarkable career: in 1933 Goebbels appointed him regional director for the Rhineland (Landesstellenleiter Rheinland) in the newly established Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, and he also became a member of the Prussian parliament and of the (largely defunct) Reichstag. In 1937 the now Dr Winkelnkemper became director of the Reich radio station Cologne and later director of the Reichsradiogesellschaft. In 1939 he was promoted to SS-Standartenführer. His brother Peter became mayor of Cologne in 1941, occupying a position held some years earlier by Konrad Adenauer, the future first chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany.

This short episode demonstrates not only how violent ‘politics of the streets’, criminal behaviour, and SA student activism were increasingly interrelated, but also that such acts were not restricted to young men with a wannabe ‘gangster’ attitude or to disadvantaged youth beyond party control. Instead, such incidents were a vital element of the officially sanctioned NSDAP street politics of the early 1930s. Those who ‘rule[d] the street’ would sooner or later also come to political power, as leading Nazis repeatedly argued.¹¹⁶ In turn, this political strategy meant that every kind of public violence could now be elevated to a political act and praised as a further contribution to the final goal of abolishing the Republic. A characteristic, if extreme, example is the so-called Kurfürstendamm riots of 12 September 1931. On this day – Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year holiday – hundreds of stormtroopers walked the famous Kurfürstendamm boulevard in Berlin,¹¹⁷ shouting antisemitic slogans and savagely beating passers-by whom they believed to be Jewish. What was meant to look like a spontaneous eruption of violence was in fact a well-prepared attack arranged by Goebbels and the Berlin SA leader Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorff. With the stormtroopers strategically dispersed in small groups, the police, who were caught by surprise, had a hard time establishing order. In the end, more than thirty attackers were identified, prosecuted, and sentenced to prison terms and monetary penalties.¹¹⁸ Many of the Nazi activists in Berlin felt betrayed by their party, which on the occasion of the trial denied that the SA had acted on previous orders. Thus, by the end of 1931 up to 400 discontented stormtroopers from the capital had formed the Comradeship Social Help group (Kameradschaft soziale Hilfe), a self-help group that advocated for a split from the Hitler movement and was – allegedly – even willing to support the Reichsbanner in case of an intensification of political violence in the capital.¹¹⁹ Despite this internal dissatisfaction and the comparatively harsh sentences handed down in the Kurfürstendamm trial, from the perspective of the NSDAP leadership the riots were a symbolic success: the SA had demonstrated that its antisemitism and anti-democratic hate were no longer confined to beer halls and other venues of limited respectability, but that the party was strong enough to ‘rule’ even the most respectable streets in the nation’s capital – if only for an hour. In the eyes of the party faithful, the stormtroopers had thus served the role dictated by propaganda of an ideologically driven attack force, always ready for action.

Unemployment and Social Unrest in the SA

However, it would be misleading to take the claims of party leaders at face value. In 1931 and 1932, when the number of unemployed in Germany rose to over six million, men joined the SA for practical reasons as much as for ideological commitment.¹²⁰ In these years more than one out of two stormtroopers was temporarily or even permanently out of work, with unemployment figures in particular Stürme as high as 80 per cent. In Berlin between 60 and 80 per cent of all Nazi militants were underemployed in 1931.¹²¹ The situation was similar in Hamburg, where 2,600 of 4,500 SA men – or slightly more than 56 per cent – were without a job in 1932.¹²² With monthly membership turnover rates at times higher than 20 per cent, many who aligned themselves with the SA did not remain in it for more than a few weeks or months. What is more, hundreds of thousands of these newcomers only joined the SA, but not the Nazi Party, although membership in the party was officially compulsory starting in 1927.¹²³ Financial considerations certainly played a role in these decisions, a view supported by the fact that even those who held membership cards did not necessarily pay their dues. Participation in the SA’s social life and paramilitary exercises, which now more than ever ‘provided [an] alternative full-time activity to work’ for German men, ultimately did not depend on such formalities, at least as long as the superiors deemed someone’s active service to the movement as satisfactory.¹²⁴

Group dynamics, the prospect of professional advancement, or simply the need for subsistence in these years, often constituted a more persuasive inducement for joining the SA than did ideological affiliation. Case studies point in the same direction. In Osterode, a small industrial city on the verge of the Harz Mountains with 9,000 inhabitants, only forty-eight of the seventy-one men who had joined the SA prior to 1933 had also become members of the Nazi Party.¹²⁵ And in one particular impoverished part of East Prussia there existed in 1931 a local SA Sturm of whose 118 men not one was a regular party member.¹²⁶ It is therefore safe to generalize that, throughout Germany, many of those who joined the stormtroopers in the last two to three years of the Weimar Republic were workers who were looking for protection against looming job cuts or, if already unemployed, speculated that the growing Nazi network in the region might provide a possibility of re-entering the job market.¹²⁷ In the meantime an increasing number of unemployed men spent their days and evenings in so-called Sturm taverns, bars that targeted a party-affiliated audience in the hope of economically surviving the sharp decrease in alcohol consumption that had begun in Germany in the late 1920s.¹²⁸ At the peak of the economic crisis, the SA established its own job agencies, trying to persuade party members to employ fellow stormtroopers. The SA even created ‘work storms’ (Arbeitsstürme) in which otherwise jobless and penniless militants offered their labour on the private job market.¹²⁹ The General Association of Christian Trade Unions in 1932 emphasized the close connection between the increasing political radicalism of German youth and the devastating economic situation: ‘A social and economic system that fails to provide the youth both with a task and any hope for earning a living pushes them into the role of adventurers who have nothing to lose but all to gain from an overthrow. The political elections of 1931 demonstrate with utmost clarity that all those who are uprooted [. . .] run after those whom they sense to be engaging in deliberate action, even if this action is purely negative and destructive.’¹³⁰

In light of these economic and political problems, the SA became increasingly difficult to run, despite its broad appeal and social activities. Nevertheless, its membership increased in ever-growing figures between late 1930 and the summer of 1932 – from 77,000 in January 1931 to 221,000 in November of the same year and 445,000 in August 1932.¹³¹ As became characteristic within the Third Reich more generally several years later, networks and personal loyalties among leading National Socialists were often more important than instructions written on paper. Internal quarrels and personal rivalries, particularly among party functionaries and regional SA leaders who now commanded thousands or even tens of thousands of men, were common and at times even disgusted Nazi sympathizers. The former lieutenant and early NSDAP supporter Hellmuth von Mücke bluntly stated as early as August 1929: ‘The party is totally rotten and corrupt, both when it comes to organization as well as in the domains of strategy and ideology. The dominant aspect of the party is publicity [. . .] In short, it is a pigsty.’¹³²

There were, however, not only personal, but also substantial ideological differences that threatened the cohesion of the SA as well as the National Socialists’ image as a unified and strong movement more generally. Particularly in the industrial centres of northern Germany, many stormtroopers became associated with the ‘socialist’ left wing of the NSDAP, which in the late 1920s was led by the brothers Otto and Gregor Strasser, Goebbels, and the Berlin SA-Führer Walther Stennes.¹³³ These men regarded national renewal and a social revolution as two sides of the same coin, if only sometimes for tactical reasons, and aimed at winning over in particular the young proletariat and parts of the impoverished middle classes. Whereas the NSDAP usually encapsulated its social promises in popular slogans like ‘Breaking interest slavery’ or ‘Work and Bread’, the ‘Nazis of the Left’ asked for more sweeping changes, like the nationalization of the big banks, the ‘persecution of the profiteers’, the introduction of a capital tax, and, of course, an immediate end to reparation payments according to the Young Plan, which was finally adopted in May 1930.¹³⁴ Although these demands were hardly more than a popular and left-leaning sampling of the völkisch repertory embellished with anti-capitalist rhetoric that complemented the constant Nazi hammering of the Jews, some of these positions demonstrate a remarkable overlap with Communist views. Unlike the Hitler faction of the Nazis, the followers of Stennes advocated a close alliance with the Soviet Union (largely for tactical reasons that focused on opposing the Western Allies and in particular England) and championed the national independence movements in India and Egypt. They argued against German federalism (and for a strong centralized Germany), against the Catholic Church (using basically the same arguments that were put forward in the Kulturkampf of the late nineteenth century), and against the inviolability of private property.¹³⁵

In this factional struggle ideological leanings and practical concerns were closely intertwined: with the SA growing into a veritable mass organization since 1930, its northern leaders impatiently requested greater financial contributions from the party for their institution, claiming that it was the SA, and not the party bureaucracy, that did most of the work in furthering the NSDAP’s aims. Furthermore, many of them still favoured a violent putsch over the current strategy of a legal takeover of power – a slow and uncertain tactic that attracted voters and new party members but otherwise did not change much. This basic conflict not only led to the resignation of Pfeffer von Salomon as OSAF on 29 August 1930, to be replaced by the reactivated Ernst Röhm in January 1931,¹³⁶ but also lay at the heart of a series of violent clashes within the Nazi movement, most notably the two ‘Stennes revolts’ that occurred in late August 1930 and late March 1931.

After frustrated Berlin stormtroopers led by Stennes attacked the capital’s local NSDAP headquarters on 30 August 1930, Hitler intervened and personally rushed to the capital, where he agreed ‘in tears’ to several of the SA’s demands, promising the left wing of the party better pay and more influence. With the important Reichstag election only two weeks away on 14 September, internal quarrels had to be avoided at all costs.¹³⁷ However, Hitler and the NSDAP party leaders in Munich from this point on became determined to curb the influence of Stennes and his followers, whose constant agitation for revolutionary action threatened to derail the party’s ‘legal’ course. The opportunity to strike came on 28 March 1931 when the Reich president passed an emergency decree to prevent political riots and requested that the NSDAP control its stormtroopers tightly or else run the risk of being outlawed. In reaction, Hitler deposed Stennes and his right-hand man, the Stabsleiter Walter Jahn, from office. Technically, this dismissal was achieved through a decree from the new SA Chief of Staff Röhm on 31 March 1931.¹³⁸ In return, Stennes and his followers opted to begin a new mutiny and on the next day once again occupied the Berlin party headquarters and the editorial offices of Goebbels’s 80,000-circulation Der Angriff.¹³⁹ This time they found their internal party adversaries well prepared, however. To take the wind out of the opposition’s sails, Röhm promised that as of 1 May 1931 all SA-Gruppen would be allocated fixed budgets. Most Berlin stormtroopers quickly pledged allegiance to the Führer, ensnared and partly also directly bought by Hitler who in the capital could rely on Kurt Daluege, Göring, and Goebbels. The agile Gauleiternot for the last time in his life had switched sides just in time. The fate of Stennes was sealed.¹⁴⁰

Nevertheless, about 500 stormtroopers – roughly one-third of all Berlin’s SA men at the time – went along with Stennes, creating the Kampfgruppe Revolutionärer Nationalsozialisten, or ‘Fighting Group of Revolutionary National Socialists’, which on 3 June 1931 merged with the Nationalsozialistische Kampfbewegung Deutschlands, the ‘National Socialist Fighting Movement of Germany’, founded in the summer of the previous year.¹⁴¹ In contrast to the regular SA men, who – according to their critics – received basic paramilitary training but remained politically uneducated, ‘fobbed off with catchphrases’, these dissidents regarded themselves as true ‘revolutionary fighters’. They claimed to represent National Socialism in its ‘original form’, as a Kampfbewegung – in contrast to the ‘bourgeois’ character of the current iteration of the party, dominated by ‘office hunters’, ‘philistines’, and ordinary party functionaries.¹⁴² The new revolutionary fighters still referred to each other as ‘SA men’, with Stennes even claiming the title of Oberster SA-Führer, or the ‘anti-Hitler’, and his former adjutant Walter Jahn referring to himself as Chief of Staff, copying the position held by Röhm.¹⁴³ These alternative stormtroopers no longer dressed in brown, but in black shirts and blue caps – often after having redyed their original SA uniforms.¹⁴⁴

Stennes initially claimed to have considerable support for his ‘Black Front’ and his alternative SA (also referred to as ‘Black Guards’) from dissatisfied Nazi activists throughout the Reich. Besides his strongholds in northeastern Germany, there were also dissident groups in Leipzig, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Hanover, and several other cities. However, the vigour of this left wing of the Nazi movement quickly grew weak. As early as September 1931 the leaders of this alternative SA met with Hermann Ehrhardt in Berlin to explore the option of a potential alliance. This looked like a rather desperate attempt, given Ehrhardt’s bad reputation among the stormtroopers after he had joined the Stahlhelm in the spring of 1926.¹⁴⁵ In the remaining months prior to Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, the Stennes-led alternative SA, soon renamed as the ‘revolutionary fighter movement’ and in 1932 as the Kampf-Staffel, or ‘Fighting Team’, remained marginal. After the Hitler-led Nazis took power in January 1933, the leaders of the Nationalsozialistische Kampfgemeinschaft found their lives in danger. Gregor Strasser was murdered in the course of the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ in 1934; his brother Otto as well as Walther Stennes fled into exile. The latter subsequently served as a military advisor to the Kuomintang nationalists and as chief of Chiang Kai-shek’s bodyguards in China where he remained until 1949.¹⁴⁶

Similar but less prominent conflicts also broke out in many industrial cities of northern Germany between 1930 and 1932. In the blue-collar town of Bremerhaven, for example, the local SA in August 1931 interrupted a meeting convened by the NSDAP Gauleiter for the Weser-Ems district. After the instigators were expelled from the ranks of the party and the SA, they published an open letter to Hitler in which they accused him of exploiting for his personal and strategic ends the political ‘sacrifices’ made by the rank-and-file stormtroopers in recent years; they claimed that he had built ‘a million-mark palace in Munich’ (a reference to the new party headquarters, the Brown House), precisely at a time when unemployment among the SA had reached a catastrophic peak. Furthermore, they wrote, the party leadership was concerned only with its own political ambitions and repeatedly let the stormtroopers down. These Nazi dissidents concluded that ‘only through revolutionary action’ (meaning the SA) and not through a ‘parliamentary party’ could Germany be saved.¹⁴⁷

Such reproaches were usually couched in a populist rhetoric that demanded a thorough clean-up of the current mess and an end to corruption and social injustices.¹⁴⁸ The divergences between the different factions in these conflicts were not so much about political goals as they were about the method of achieving them, laying bare fundamental differences between theory and practice, agitation and negotiation, boisterousness and deliberation.¹⁴⁹ The prevailing tensions in fact continued to strain the relation between the NSDAP and parts of its semi-independent SA until the violent submission of the latter following the murderous ‘Night of the Long Knives’. Even if attempts to establish competing factions ultimately failed, discontent within the SA remained high. As the NSDAP successfully moved toward a legal takeover of power by making compromises with Heinrich Brüning and other leaders of the conservative right and by establishing close bonds with parts of German industry, many activists in the SA – particularly those affected by the economic misery – slowly but surely lost faith in the party and its promises. As we have already seen in the case of the Potempa murder, this situation became particularly problematic in the summer and autumn of 1932, when large parts of the SA were suffering from ‘[economic] depression’, as Goebbels realized.¹⁵⁰ The Munich police in a detailed report from 20 October 1932 likewise noticed a ‘massive despondency’ in the SA and predicted a substantial exodus of stormtroopers if the party did not find a way to at least participate in the next government.¹⁵¹ For the first time in years membership in the SA dropped.¹⁵² By and large, however, Hitler not only managed to contain the popular unrest in the SA, but also succeeded in channelling his followers’ dissatisfaction into aggressive and increasingly violent attacks on his political adversaries.

Brownshirts in the Countryside

Most of the examples provided in this chapter so far have been concerned with the growth of the SA and its activities in the German cities. Although this reflects the prevailing focus of most studies, it would be severely misleading to regard the stormtroopers as an exclusively urban phenomenon. At least as important for explaining the spectacular gains of the NSDAP at the polls starting in the late 1920s, and for a comprehensive analysis of SA activism, was the group’s appearance in rural Germany. Surviving membership lists from several German provinces suggest that beginning in 1930 the SA recruited members more successfully in the countryside than in the cities. According to exemplary studies by Detlef Mühlberger, nearly 70 per cent of all stormtroopers in the early 1930s lived in small communities with no more than 5,000 inhabitants, whereas only 17.6 per cent came from cities with a population larger than 100,000.¹⁵³ In contrast to the big cities, where the official eight-hour day allowed young men, particularly those without family obligations, to reconcile work and party duties, recruitment for the SA in the countryside was more difficult. Here, people were generally more involved in family life, and traditional authority had not eroded as quickly as in urban areas.¹⁵⁴

Falling prices for agricultural products were one of the most severe problems faced in many rural parts of the country, especially when they coincided with increases in taxes. As a consequence, Germany saw new waves of Landflucht, or ‘rural flight’, and a more radicalized peasantry, particularly among the young. In rural Brandenburg young peasants – notably those without the prospect of taking over their parents’ farm – constituted in many places the absolute majority of their respective Stürme.¹⁵⁵ In Schleswig-Holstein the rise in discontent led to the development of a significant protest movement by 1928, the so-called Landvolkbewegung. Although this movement was not officially bound to a particular programme or party, the National Socialists successfully exploited the high level of popular discontent it tapped into, taking up the peasants’ revolutionary slogans and presenting themselves as the alternative needed. The violent protests of the peasants’ revolts as well as their widespread anti-capitalist and antisemitic sentiments provided fertile ground for the agitation of both Communists and Nazis, and the latter soon exploited the uprisings in many rural regions throughout northern Germany. By contrast, the Nazis’ excessive nationalism appealed less to the established farmers, who were first and foremost concerned with their rather narrow Lebenswelt and its practical problems rather than abstract notions of fatherland and international politics.¹⁵⁶ Yet, with the economic situation deteriorating, they likewise became more susceptible to Nazi slogans and in particular to their highly symbolic actions. For example, in Western Pomerania in 1930, stormtroopers headed by the young and charismatic lawyer Wilhelm Karpenstein intervened at a compulsory auction of a county estate and gave the first bidder a stick, thus presenting themselves as defenders of the traditional local order against an alleged cold-blooded materialism.¹⁵⁷

The central figure for the growth of the SA in Schleswig-Holstein was the agricultural labourer and later shop owner Heinrich Schoene, who joined the NSDAP in August 1925. Initially the local party, SA, and HJ leader for the Nazi Ortsgruppe in Lockstedter Lager, Schoene was appointed leader of the SA-Gruppe Nordmark in June 1929.¹⁵⁸ A few weeks prior to this appointment, he had summarized his experiences as a Nazi agitator as follows: ‘The German peasant on his free soil is much more susceptible to National Socialism than the Marxist-infested townsman.’¹⁵⁹ The early Nazis’ agitation concentrated initially on those areas of western Schleswig-Holstein where the Landvolk movement was particularly strong. In May 1929, for example, Schoene ordered his stormtroopers to carry out propaganda Stürme on bicycles during the Pentecost holidays, focusing on areas where the NSDAP was still in its infancy.¹⁶⁰ By the time the Landvolk movement began to decline, in the early 1930s, the NSDAP had established itself as the leading rural party in the region, replacing the previously strong conservative parties as well as splinter parties like the Christlich-Nationale Bauern und Landvolkpartei, the ‘Christian National Peasants and Landvolk Party’, an offshoot of the German National People’s Party (DNVP).¹⁶¹ Here, as well as in several other Protestant-dominated rural areas of Germany such as East Prussia, Western Pomerania, or the predominantly agrarian parts of Württemberg or Northern Hesse, the NSDAP developed into a milieu party proper, with a position similar to the pre-eminence of the Centre Party in most Catholic provinces.¹⁶²

The Landvolk movement in Schleswig-Holstein had already radicalized the peasants to such an extent that they had engaged in civil disobedience, attacked courthouses, and even fired off bombs. Against this background, the methods of stormtrooper violence did not need special justification. Elsewhere, however, the situation differed markedly. A less antagonistic style of propaganda than was used in the big cities, one that positively emphasized the benefits the future Third Reich would have for the peasantry, often proved beneficial to the NSDAP.¹⁶³ In most parts of the countryside, life in the SA was dominated not by frequent physical clashes with competing paramilitary organizations, but by a constant campaign of penetration of the rural milieu, with its associations, loyalties, and habits.¹⁶⁴ In order to establish themselves, despite their limited personal and financial means, the Nazis tried to win over those powerbrokers who traditionally set the agenda in rural Germany – the primary-school teacher, the pastor, the big farmer, and, in the provinces east of the Elbe, the local aristocrat – and use them as ‘milieu openers’.¹⁶⁵ Consequently, the SA in these regions recruited less from the lower classes than among young farmers and artisans who were well-respected and well-integrated members of their communities.¹⁶⁶ The party presented itself as a ‘conservative peasants’ and middle-class party’¹⁶⁷ that stood for traditional German values but that was – due to the circumstances of the troubled Weimar years – required to take a tougher stance than the organizations that had hitherto dominated the rural regions.

In areas where local news was transmitted from mouth to mouth rather than through newspapers, a strong visual and physical presence on the ground was vital for any party or organization to succeed in winning followers. As historian Wolfram Pyta has convincingly demonstrated, in the small communities of rural Germany the Nazi promises of implementing a ‘people’s community’ mattered less than practical support or prospective personal gains. One way the party provided such support was to hire out groups of stormtroopers from the nearby cities as seasonal workers, usually paid in kind or with very small sums. Not surprisingly, farmers who were pleased with such mutually beneficial activism were more likely to react favourably to demands for food and other forms of party support (Plate 4). Their willingness to help impoverished Nazi militants was, however, severely put to the test as cases of SA leaders selling food they had received for free became more and more frequent. Farmers busy in their fields also wondered about the excursions of uniformed SA units on workdays, reflecting the widespread belief that active politics should be confined to weekends and not interfere in everyday community life.¹⁶⁸ Finally, in 1932, when unemployment figures for the Reich peaked, entire stormtrooper units swept over the countryside like a murder of crows, begging and stealing in such aggressive ways that even regional Nazi party leaders referred to their behaviour as ‘landsknecht manners’.¹⁶⁹

Because SA membership in many places was initially not strong, its activities in small communities were often confined to particular days and events. On these occasions it used cars, lorries, motorbikes, and bicycles to transport stormtroopers from one place to another, thus creating the impression that the regional SA units were much stronger than was actually the case (Plate 5). Two new organizations greatly aided this propaganda. Since the late 1920s, the SA had formed subsections that pooled militants who possessed motorcycles and private cars. Beginning on 1 April 1930, these subsections were referred to as the Motor-SA. Their main task was to transport SA leaders to party and election meetings, but their members were also called to assist in the training of stormtroopers to drive a car or ride a motorbike, thus allowing them to later pass the official driving tests without paying for expensive driving-school lessons. Besides the Motor-SA, there also existed the Nationalsozialistisches Automobil-Korps (NSAK), which in April 1931 was renamed the Nationalsozialistisches Kraftfahr-korps (NSKK), a reservoir of motorized party sympathizers who were willing to take on occasional jobs for the ‘movement’. Formal membership in the NSDAP and its sub-organizations was not required for membership in this group. Rather, as the Nazi propaganda rejoiced, it was the ‘SA spirit’ that ‘bound together men and motor to a vital unity and transformed the motor vehicle into a weapon for the political fight’.¹⁷⁰ The Motor-SA grew rapidly, in line with the general SA, expanding from 100 Sturm units in October 1931 to 680 in August 1932, with the latter comprising 26,105 individuals. Similarly, membership in the NSKK mushroomed to 10,000 men in December 1931, after only 300 at the end of the previous year. Both organizations not only fulfilled important logistical tasks for the party but also contributed decisively to the ‘modern’ image of the NSDAP in the early 1930s; furthermore, they allowed middle-class sympathizers to serve the SA without taking part in long marches or paramilitary exercises.¹⁷¹

Between 1930 and 1932 the Nazi Party’s voter support multiplied, particularly in villages and rural communities with a predominantly Protestant population.¹⁷² As usually everyone knew everyone else’s political preferences in such places, the growing number of ballots cast for the NSDAP should be seen less as a mass phenomenon driven by individuals than as a process of ‘entire communities converting their loyalty’.¹⁷³ It was the result of a combined effort, one enhanced by the visual, yet infrequent, presence of SA and Motor-SA units touring the countryside who engaged in demonstrations that played on traditional feelings of national honour and relied on the influence of local leaders. It needs to be understood, however, that the Nazis’ intense electoral campaigns were not only directed outward, aiming to win over voters and impress or scare opponents. They were also directed inward, and in two ways. First, the intensified activities that characterized the pre-election weeks provided a range of efforts to which the individual SA man could personally contribute and thus prove himself a ‘political fighter’. Second, these campaigns also served as a means to control and discipline the rapidly growing number of stormtroopers who – as we have seen – were recruited in the early 1930s not only from those parts of the population committed to völkisch nationalism, but also from many German men suffering from economic hardship but lacking any firm political commitment.¹⁷⁴

The regulations on so-called ‘propaganda storms’ for the April 1932 election campaign in Upper Silesia, drafted under the command of the notorious SA group leader Edmund Heines, provide a good example of this two-edged strategy. The guidelines requested the formation of five units, each ninety men strong and equipped with bicycles and a marching band. Between 3 and 10 April 1932, the week prior to the elections, each of these propaganda units was ordered to travel between thirty and forty kilometres a day, visiting at least six villages. In every village they would stop, distribute propaganda leaflets, and give a little concert in which traditional patriotic songs were given preference over Nazi fighting songs. In between these songs a local Nazi functionary would deliver a short speech.

However, most of the regulations for this rural propaganda campaign dealt with matters of internal discipline. Prior to their deployment, each propaganda Sturm was to be schooled for four days ‘under the strictest control’ of the SA-Standartenführer Hanns Günther von Obernitz, who in 1933 became police president of Nuremberg-Fürth.¹⁷⁵ After the units were deployed every Sturm was to be reviewed at least once a day by von Obernitz and other SA-Standartenführer who were touring the country by car. Night quarters were to be established exclusively on the estates of Silesian noblemen who were sympathetic to the Nazis but these quarters were to be anything but luxurious: eight to ten men were expected to sleep on mulched floors in farmhouses and barns.¹⁷⁶ Overnight stops in local inns were explicitly prohibited, as was the consumption of alcohol. A curfew had already been set for 9 p.m., to ‘prevent the vagabonding of SA men with or without female company’. The regional SA leadership even prohibited the singing of ‘provocative songs’.¹⁷⁷

It seems unlikely that the actual behaviour of the propaganda Stürme would have followed such strict guidelines. However, the Prussian authorities were quick to ban these propaganda cycling tours, and when the Nazis started them nevertheless, the authorities stopped them immediately. In the following days at least 110 SA men from the propaganda Stürme were sentenced to fines and short prison terms following accelerated legal procedures.¹⁷⁸ Despite the actual failure of this Nazi propaganda effort, the plans as such make plain that the SA leadership subjected its rank and file to strict subordination and discipline. Concerns about the aesthetics and, in particular, the sounds made by the travelling SA men were prioritized over considerations around actual political discourse. As ordered by Pfeffer von Salomon and later Röhm, the young men were expected to impress the public by their discipline and determination, acting as Wiedergänger of a glorious past and at the same time as the embodiment of national regeneration, but they were urged to remain at a distance from the local population. The stormtroopers’ wives and children were prohibited from joining their husbands and fathers on marches, so that any form of intimacy or possible conflict over the men’s loyalties was restricted.¹⁷⁹ They were to be ‘party soldiers’ whose own biographies and views would become irrelevant once they dressed in the brown shirt. This worldview is mirrored in the highly conventional character of the Nazi autobiographies that have survived in the Abel collection at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California. As embodiments of the Nazi vision, as walking and cycling Nazi advertisement pillars, the rank-and-file stormtroopers had to put aside their individuality.¹⁸⁰

In other words, marching Nazi militants were now first and foremost a ‘mass ornament’, identified by the sociologist and journalist Siegfried Kracauer as the primary characteristic of modern life in the capitalist societies of the interwar years. This trend was indeed common in interwar central Europe, as it was precisely the ‘masses as such – fluid, mobile, and mutable’ that ‘were the very media in which all central political questions were posed’.¹⁸¹ For Kracauer, these ‘mass ornaments’ were ultimately empty forms of the cult of rationality and as such testified to the extent to which the capitalist way of doing business had penetrated the realms of human interaction more generally. However, he claimed that human emancipation from this tight framework was possible, not by shaping one’s body to the detriment of individual expression, like his example of the Tiller girls, an internationally popular troupe of female revue dancers famous for their machine-like precision in moving their bodies simultaneously, but by the intellectual endeavour of realizing the correlation between such attempts at standardization and the demands of capitalism.¹⁸²

Kracauer’s original analysis did not include a discussion of the forms of political mass ornaments. Nevertheless, the similarities between his descriptions of the Tiller girls and the sight of Nazi stormtroopers parading in the German streets are obvious. The boots of the activists marching in step corresponded no less to the ‘hands in the factory’ than did the legs of the Tiller girls, at least from an aesthetic perspective. The ‘sexless bodies’ in uniform, to paraphrase Kracauer again, thus gained importance only inasmuch as they could form a mass ornament, becoming interchangeable and reduced in, if not devoid of, individuality.¹⁸³ Some fifty years later, Klaus Theweleit’s interpretations of the Fascist psyche came to a somewhat different conclusion. For him, the bodies of the marching SA men with their stern faces were not ‘sexless’ but rather were embodiments of a particular type of masculinity. Their Körperpanzer, or ‘body armour’, corresponded to violent male fantasies of domination, fighting, and the pleasure of sexual assault, Theweleit claimed.¹⁸⁴ Regardless of such differences, both authors suggest that Nazi body politics was based on the repression of both natural instincts and middle-class ideas of intimacy.¹⁸⁵

The SA internal educational material from 1929 supports this view: the stormtrooper, such materials claimed, was requested to live on a level above that inhabited by men who only sought sensual pleasure from women. Instead, he was called to respect and ‘honour’ German women and girls, their parents, and even the Churches. Individual attraction between the sexes was ultimately subordinated to formal criteria: ‘No SA man is allowed to socialize with a girl who wears un-German clothes’, one regulation noted, most likely referring to the urban chic of the 1920s ‘new woman’, who wore trousers and close-fitting dresses.¹⁸⁶ Such formal guidelines on interpersonal relations, of course, describe an ideal and not a social reality. They testify, however, to the SA leadership’s attempt to control all spheres of the lives of the rank and file, including their sex lives. Observations made by foreign observers like the journalist Ferdinand Tuohy, who travelled to the nascent Third Reich in 1933, indeed suggest that there was an element of restraint in the relations between stormtroopers and women, at least in public: ‘There seemed but one element missing, the feminine. Only one uniformed Nazi did I see with his girl and he looked betrothed many times over, judging by the stiff angle of his proffered arm. This movement is a very male one, please note, and pure to austerity at that.’¹⁸⁷

The tightly disciplined SA troop in formation, seemingly unaffected by or at least sufficiently isolated from female temptations along the way, was an ideal ‘mass ornament’ in the sense outlined above, but it would be premature to end the analysis here. As Kracauer noticed, sardonically ridiculing the popular life-reform movement more generally and rhythmic gymnastics in particular, many of his contemporaries were attempting to free themselves from the demands of modern life, giving up rationality in favour of a regained unity between nature and soul.¹⁸⁸ Individual stormtroopers likewise did not regard themselves as a mere decoration of Fascist politics. They certainly took pleasure and pride in the formations they jointly created in their marches and parades, but they did not see them as reducing human agency. From their perspective, it was Fascist mass mobilization that allowed the individual to participate in the collective national will. Only because of and through the nation, they believed, could modern individuality stand up against the demands of capitalist modernity, a modernity that stormtroopers came to associate with economic exploitation and social marginalization. Fascist aesthetics therefore not only attempted to take advantage of the new kinds of mass formation, but also claimed to provide a solution for the individual in an increasingly anonymous and competitive society. At a time when individuality was widely perceived to be at risk, National Socialism promised to reconcile the evanescent modern self with the allegedly ‘eternal’ nation that represented the human achievements of the past embodied in folk traditions and racial origin, as well as to provide a link from that past into a bright future. This was ultimately a romantic ideology that appealed to those who shared the perception of living in an interim period, but it was neither anti-modern nor technophobic. It was Goebbels who most clearly expressed this amalgam of romantic longing and belief in technological progress and social engineering, proclaiming in early 1939: ‘We live in an age that is both organic and steel-like, that has not lost its depth of feeling. On the contrary, it has discovered a new romanticism in the results of modern inventions and technology.’¹⁸⁹ As late as 1943 he held onto this idea and publicly assured his listeners that even the war years were a time of particular romanticism – a romanticism in the face of deprivation, harder and crueller than in previous periods, but one that ‘remains romantic. The steely romanticism of our time manifests itself in actions and deeds in service to a great national goal, in a feeling of duty raised to the level of an unbreachable principle. We are all more or less romantics in a new German mood.’¹⁹⁰

The Danger of Stormtrooper Violence

However, all of these aspects of the SA – the propaganda marches in the cities and the acute agitation in the villages – do not fully explain the party’s overall success. National Socialism around 1930 appealed to a considerable proportion of Germans, but the Nazis could never have come to power without a substantial amount of people who, while not necessarily sharing their views, likewise failed to defend the Republic when it was on the brink of collapse. In fact, educated middle- and upper-class opposition to the NSDAP and its political style diminished considerably in the face of the rapidly degrading economic situation and a national parliament that had not yet been abolished but was constantly bypassed by Chancellor Brüning and his successors starting in 1930. In these days of existential crisis for millions, the popular German proverb Der Ton macht die Musik (‘It’s not what you say, but how you say it’) did not mean much. Politics was no longer a matter of taste and careful deliberation, but a matter of ‘street credibility’, boldness, and immediate effect. As a consequence, even the Nazis’ excessive antisemitism was now regularly downplayed.¹⁹¹ A telling example is the lecturer Margarete Adam, who held a doctorate in philosophy from Hamburg University and was a disciple of the renowned philosopher Ernst Cassirer. Adam, a self-declared ‘philosemite’, claimed in late 1930 that ‘the interests and hopes of 99 per cent of all those who had voted for the NSDAP on 14 September 1930’ – including herself – were not connected to the ‘party’s excessive antisemitic agenda’. She regarded the Nazis’ antisemitism as a natural consequence of the Weimar Republic’s failures but did not perceive any real danger emerging from it – not even for the Jews. Every party programme is more radical than can be practically implemented, and that of the NSDAP was no exception, Adam reasoned. Consequently, she thought that Jewish life and property would be safe even under a National Socialist government.¹⁹²

Business leaders who had been initially sceptical of the NSDAP now came to regard the party with sympathy, particularly after its symbolic reunion with the conservative right in the so-called ‘Harzburg Front’, a joint rally of rightist groups held in the spa town of Bad Harzburg on 11 October 1931.¹⁹³ The following extract from a private letter of Ernst Brandi, the chairman of Bergbau-Verein, an influential lobby group for the Ruhr’s mining industries, sheds light on the calculations typical of the leaders of German heavy industry. Writing to one of his sons living in New York in early March 1932, a few months after the Harzburg rally and a few days before the first round of the German presidential elections in which Hindenburg, Hitler, and the Communist leader Ernst Thälmann ran for office, Brandi characterized National Socialism as:

a movement of utmost importance. It is foremost the expression of a general and conscious dissatisfaction with the political development since the middle of the war, the war’s end and the revolution until the present day. It is a movement that is determined to bring to bear the good old qualities of the Germans, their proficiency, their sense of duty and their moral cleanliness, all this on a purely national basis, because they [the Nazis] rightly [. . .] see the category of the nation, of the fatherland, as the strongest moral driving force.¹⁹⁴

By this time, Brandi and several of his colleagues were already supporting the NSDAP and its regional bosses, most importantly the Gauleiter of Essen, Josef Terboven, with considerable donations.¹⁹⁵ Many of them hoped to gain in the SA a ‘protecting guard against the working-class parties’ that would free them from granting concessions to the left and would generally allow them to act independently of volatile parliamentary majorities.¹⁹⁶ The Brownshirts in turn did not fail to demonstrate their determination and might. Just one week after the rally in Bad Harzburg, a large meeting of SA units from central Germany (mitteldeutsches SA-Treffen) took place in nearby Braunschweig, a residential city of slightly less than 150,000 inhabitants. On this occasion about 60,000 SA men literally occupied the town and – apart from holding a six-hour-long parade in the presence of Hitler – also engaged in violent ‘punitive raids’ in its working-class districts.¹⁹⁷ For Brandi, the position of the NSDAP also fitted with his own elitist concept of the German economy. The National Socialist movement would not only ‘foster the feelings of German honour, but also the national militaristic traditions [Waffenehre],’ he explained to his son. ‘It is poised to destroy real Marxism root and branch and bent on replacing it with a system of the highest welfare for the whole of the people, based on private business, discipline and elite leadership selection [Führertum durch Auslese].’¹⁹⁸

Short-sighted as it was, this assessment of the political and economic situation in the spring of 1932 makes it clear that the temporary alliance between the NSDAP and considerable parts of German big business was more than tactical in nature.¹⁹⁹ The Nazis were surprisingly successful at presenting themselves as a political alternative with an ambitious programme of moral and social renewal. Even in a private letter, which is unlikely to have been coloured by tactical considerations, Brandi did not have a critical word to say about the Nazis’ antisemitic propaganda. He seems to have accepted the Nazi violence in the streets as a legitimate, or at least welcome, means of weakening and ideally destroying the German Socialist and Communist parties. Obviously, this letter reflects Brandi’s personal views, but in the context of this study, they take on greater significance. With the constant threat of a political crisis, Brandi, Adam, and many other educated Germans gave up their initial reservations about the NSDAP and its SA. The stormtroopers’ ugly propaganda slogans and aggressive violence did not disappear from the streets, but the Germans got used to it. It is telling that, by 1932, Hamburg schoolchildren had invented a new game: re-enacting clashes between Communists and Nazi stormtroopers using sticks and stones. At least in one case a police intervention was the only way to stop a game that was at risk of running out of control.²⁰⁰ Many German elites regarded the high level of street violence as a deplorable feature of an antagonistic political climate, or even as an indicator of ‘political degeneracy’,²⁰¹ but at the same time they also saw it as nothing more than hot air, a temporary symptom of the economic crisis that would have no lasting impact or simply a crude children’s game for demoralized grown-ups.

By contrast, NSDAP leaders described the stormtrooper activism of these years in genuine military terms. According to the SA intellectual Ernst Julek von Engelbrechten, the Herbstoffensive, or ‘fall campaign’, of 1929 pre-dated the Durchbruchsschlacht (‘breakthrough battle’) of 1930 that was in turn followed by the Vormarsch, or ‘advance’, in 1931.²⁰² Despite such militaristic rhetoric, several scholars have warned against the conflation of political discourse and historical fact. Germany in 1932, they claim, was far from descending into chaos and civil war. The historian Friedrich Lenger, referring to earlier studies by Richard Bessel, Dirk Schumann, and Bernhard Fulda, recently summarized this view in his masterful book on European metropolises in modern times by relying on three arguments. First, he claims that even in 1932 the German states’ monopoly on violence was not seriously threatened. Second, he argues that the level of political violence was lower in the early 1930s than it was in the immediate post-war years – tacitly implying that, as the Republic did not succumb back then, there was no need for its ultimate failure in 1933 either. Third, he maintains that in comparison with other European cities, the level of violence in the German capital was not excessively high.²⁰³

However, on closer examination, none of these three points supports Lenger’s principal argument. On the first point, regional studies on the Weimar period, the police, the military, and the liberal German-Jewish milieu have convincingly demonstrated that the years 1930–2 were a period of erosion from within that rendered the state’s claims of a successful defence of its monopoly on violence to be shallow.²⁰⁴ The more one moves away from Prussia and its capital in the early 1930s, the more it becomes obvious that any move by the government to toughen its stance toward political extremists, particularly by crushing their demonstrations using police and military forces, was increasingly in danger of producing the opposite effect. This was one of the main reasons for the absence of any systematic democratic resistance, either to the unlawful Preußenschlag of 1932 or to the establishment of the Third Reich in the following year.²⁰⁵ With regard to Lenger’s second argument, the extent to which the political and economic context of the years 1930–2 fundamentally differed from that of 1919–23 needs to be emphasized. There is no absolute threshold of violence that determines the stability of a political system – rather, a given level of political and criminal violence is just one factor that needs to be analysed in conjunction with several others. At a time when the national government, relying on emergency decrees, seemed unable to cope with massive unemployment and unprecedented pauperization, riots in the streets and political attacks gained much stronger significance than they had had in the early 1920s – particularly as they came to be exploited by a massive, well-organized Nazi grassroots movement.²⁰⁶ Finally, with regard to Lenger’s third argument, a closer analysis that compares Berlin with other European capitals is certainly instructive but does not suffice to base claims on a national level. Goebbels’s ‘Fight for Berlin’ was symbolically of high importance for the National Socialists, but in real terms it was just one event in their nationwide takeover of power. The Republic did not collapse because of the capital, even if it was carried to its grave there.

Weimar Germany’s leftists and liberals, highly aware of the risks present in the immediate post-war period just a few years back, understood the dangers of even such highly symbolic threats as those made by the SA in the early 1930s much better than did some later historians. The latter – in hindsight – have wondered at the alleged ‘massive media panic, a press-induced over-reaction with politically disastrous effects’ that occurred, blaming in particular the ‘excessive partisan press coverage’ that created a false impression of ‘uncontrollable violence’, and thus implicitly suggesting that a more restrained handling of the political violence in these years could have prevented events from escalating.²⁰⁷ To a certain extent such views carry on the tradition of blaming the social and political elites of the Weimar Republic for its ultimate failure, a line of argument prevalent in the first decades of post-war historiography.²⁰⁸ However, it seems worth remembering that the increasingly strident warnings of contemporaries ranging from the revolutionary right to the Communist left were not proven wrong by the course of history, and many of those who perceived the political situation between 1930 and 1933 as a latent or incipient civil war were soon incarcerated, tortured, forced into exile, or murdered.

The stormtroopers’ self-declared fight against the much-hated Republic came to an end on 30 January 1933, when Hindenburg appointed Hitler the new Reich chancellor. The Nazi Party had survived its serious internal crisis of the preceding months, but it had lost some of its most sworn supporters along the way. The party leaders knew that they were now under serious pressure to deliver, and they did not wait a single day to use the capital’s splendid Unter den Linden boulevard – the formal parade ground for the Kaiser and his royal household – to stage a demonstration of their political ambitions. In the evening hours of 30 January up to 15,000 Brownshirts marched through the Brandenburg Gate, saluting Hitler, who greeted them from a window of the nearby Reich Chancellery.²⁰⁹ As this parade had to be organized on the spur of the moment on a grey and cold winter day, the surviving images of this event were less spectacular than expected – which prompted the Nazis to repeat the parade several weeks later. Genuine supporters undoubtedly cheered the appearance of the new chancellor, but an attentive Berliner also witnessed stormtroopers forcing curious city dwellers with a thump on the back to give the Hitler salute.²¹⁰ Listeners on the radio, however, had no chance to perceive the ambivalent character of the original Nazi victory parade, as a surviving spoken text from Reich Radio Station Cologne’s broadcast of the evening of 30 January 1933 makes plain. The voice of the radio reporter, who sounded like an activist of the first hour himself, intoned: ‘A procession of 100,000 torches was brandished from Wilhelmstraße . . . They have marched through the Brandenburg Gate, the brown columns of the SA – victors in a long, loss-making battle. Their banners blaze in blood red, with the swastika on white background – symbol of the rising sun! A marvellous, a glorious sight!’²¹¹ The official tone for the upcoming months was set.