3
Fascism wants man to be active and to engage in action with all his energies.
— Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile, The Doctrine of Fascism (1932)1
The extent to which Hitler has young people on his side should not be underrated. We should not underestimate our opponent but realize what is a psychological force for so many and inspires them.’ The German-Jewish philosopher Ernst Bloch, as much a fierce critic of National Socialism as a careful observer of his times, published this warning in the highbrow weekly Das Tage-Buch as early as April 1924.2 Having witnessed the political and social turmoil in Munich after the First World War at close quarters, Bloch was familiar with the early Nazi Party, its propaganda, and its increasing appeal. This particular critical comment was an immediate reaction to the verdict in the so-called Hitler trial delivered on 1 April 1924, in which Bloch warned his readers not to regard the story of the local tribune of the Bavarian radical nationalists as over. Irony and disgust alone would not suffice to combat National Socialism, Bloch argued, as ‘separate from the hideous gawpers and accomplices, new youth glows at the core, a very vigorous generation. Seventeen-year-olds are burning to respond to Hitler. Beery students of old, dreary, revelling in the happiness of the crease in their trousers, are no longer recognizable, their hearts are pounding.’3
Bloch’s observations get to the heart of one of the fundamental problems with which every history of the early Nazi movement has to deal: the fundamental emotional attraction of a form of politics that used violence as a central element of community formation, establishing clear-cut boundaries between insiders and outsiders of the Nazis’ ‘people’s community’. As has already been demonstrated, the use of violence – physically as well as symbolically – was from the early 1920s onward a core element of aggressive Nazi politics, despite all the practical limitations on its deployment. In this chapter I will argue that a broad perspective which integrates some of the most recent findings of a theoretically informed history of violence can contribute to a fuller picture of this period of history. My perspective does not focus exclusively on the Nazi movement but takes into account the effects of what I call the SA ‘cult of youth and violence’ on the political culture of the interwar years.
The wartime experience – individually lived through, remembered by diverse war veterans’ associations, and culturally elevated in literature and film – shaped the outlook of two generations of European males.4 Besides those who had actually fought in the First World War, those who were slightly younger were also deeply affected by the fate and the stories of their older brothers and fathers. Germany was no different in this respect from Italy, where an increasing number of adolescents embraced Fascist squadrism in emulation of their elders. Their pressing ‘desire for action’ was ‘accompanied by a profound crisis of family bonds’ and of adult authority, particularly male authority.5 The increasing significance of the stormtroopers was as much a consequence as it was a prerequisite of the growing militarization of German politics. This process had several dimensions, many of which went beyond the reach of the Nazi Party and even transcended national boundaries.6 In other words, this chapter aims to elucidate the increasing appeal of the SA, a development that differed markedly from the destiny of the hundreds of competing paramilitary nationalist organizations that usually existed only for a few years and could claim only limited political influence. In addition to several well-established factors that contributed to the increasing popularity of National Socialism in Germany, I will argue that it was precisely the cult of youth and violence – not invented but successfully institutionalized by the stormtroopers – which contributed to the group’s success starting in the late 1920s.7 Between 1928 and 1932 the SA developed into an organization that shared the characteristics of a social movement. Next to its aesthetic attraction, these characteristics were a main element of its public appeal.8 Both elements contributed to the ‘youthful image’ of the Nazi movement as a whole. During these years the SA also grew into a possible partner for the Reichswehr in their joint efforts to overcome the limitations of the Versailles Treaty. The violent activism of the Brownshirts even provided role models for young Christians attempting to fight back against the ‘evils’ of the present times – identified with such catchwords as ‘individualism’, ‘consumerism’, ‘pacifism’, and ‘internationalism’.
Every biographer is supposed to be aware of the dangers of involuntarily taking his or her subject as the point of reference from which all other social phenomena are to be interpreted. The same risk applies to histories of collective bodies and is particularly apt in a case such as the stormtroopers, whose worldviews were extremely self-referential. Consequently, this chapter gives room to the Nazis’ internal perspectives but carefully aims to distinguish between ideas and emotions on the one hand and the party’s often relatively limited impact on the ‘factual’ political developments of the day on the other hand. Furthermore, wherever possible I integrate comparative perspectives, contrasting the Nazi militants with other paramilitary party organizations. Although it is well established that this ‘new activist style of politics’ so characteristic of but not limited to Fascist movements was a frequent phenomenon in interwar Europe,9 comparatively little research has investigated what made the German SA unique from a transnational perspective. The multifaceted approach chosen here will help to identify the reasons for the ‘success’ of the stormtroopers – a success that not only promoted a new political style which made the personal effort, the ‘deed’, a central element of political legitimacy, but also paved the way for the establishment of the Third Reich in 1933.
Militant Masculinity
Although from 1926 onward the highest leadership positions in the NSDAP’s army were given to former military officers – that is, veterans of the First World War and one-time professional soldiers of the German Army – the SA proved most attractive to young men who were too young to have fought in the war.10 This age bracket, often referred to as the ‘war youth generation’, was made up of young men born between 1900 and 1910. The term was originally popularized by the right-wing intellectual Ernst Günter Gründel in his 1932 book Die Sendung der jungen Generation(The Mission of the Young Generation) but was later converted from a political combat term into a category of historical analysis, although the problematic nature of this transfer and the gender bias it contains are rarely acknowledged.11 The men of this age group had been exposed to the ubiquitous and often ferocious German war propaganda as pupils and were deeply influenced by stories of German heroism and sacrifice on the battlefield.12 Only some of them later became activists of the SA. Yet, given the multitude of paramilitary and right-wing youth groups in Weimar Germany, it is safe to say that a considerable segment of male adolescents at the time regarded the diverse Freikorps units and nationalist leagues of the 1920s as a welcome opportunity to ‘live their violent fantasies of a romanticized warrior existence’ or simply to fulfil their duty to fight for the national cause.13 Many of these young hotheads believed that they were being called to take up where their fathers had left off in 1918, when they were allegedly ‘stabbed in the back’ by disloyal Germans on the home front and subsequently disarmed by the Allied forces. Determined to prevent further national humiliation or, even worse, a Communist takeover of power, these young nationalists formed ‘subcultures of ultra-militant masculinities’14 and fuelled the drive of the SA up to 1934.
The case of Munich is once again instructive: as demonstrated in chapter 2, the political instability of Bavaria during the years 1919–20 combined with severe economic problems created a situation in which nationalists as well as Bavarian particularists turned their anger and shame at the military defeat and the subsequent national ‘humiliation’ against perceived internal enemies. Deep-seated resentments against ‘Bolsheviks’, Prussians, Bavarian Social Democrats, and Jews formed the background against which the violent activism of young men could be interpreted as defence of the fatherland. This view was established as early as 1919, when the new Reichswehr in Bavaria declared Munich’s students indispensable to the task of upholding public order. So-called Studentenkompanien, military units formed of students that existed in Munich, Würzburg, and Erlangen, were regarded as being particularly loyal to the ideas and values of the lost empire. In the summer of 1919 such student battalions comprised approximately 50,000 men nationwide.15 In the eyes of the military, these youths were still free of the alleged ‘corrupting influence’ of civilian morality and yet had been disenchanted by the horrors and the suffering of real combat experiences. Their idealism could thus easily be turned against an internal enemy. This strategy seemed all the more promising after an assembly of Munich students greeted the news of the assassination of the Bavarian premier Kurt Eisner on 21 February 1919 with cheers of joy, demonstrating that even political murder was not perceived as downright illegitimate.16
Paramilitary activism was a key element of student life in Munich during the first years of the Republic, as it was in other major cities of central Europe, most notably in the Hungarian capital of Budapest.17 But even in the politically more stable Third Republic of France, the camelots du roi, the radical youth organization of the para-Fascist Action Française, recruited heavily among students in Paris’s Latin Quarter during the 1920s.18 The extreme nationalist propaganda of the First World War continued to reverberate among central European youths long after the armistice. Many of them perceived life, on an individual as well as a collective basis, to consist of a constant state of fighting. It posed risks, but it also contained the possibility of personal elevation and – eventually – fulfilment. In Germany public institutions supported this particular form of post-war youthful idealism. In Munich the University Directorate in May 1919 officially declared that service to one’s country was the first and most noble duty of every student. The studies proper ranked only second in importance. The opening of the summer term in 1919 was postponed out of respect for the military obligations of a considerable part of the student body. After consultations with the Reichswehr, the University Directorate agreed that classes would only be taught between Monday and Thursday morning, so that students could devote the following three and a half days to military training and exercises.19 Even those male students who had not received military training during the war years now acquired an intimate knowledge of the mental world of the military and learned basic fighting skills.
The universities thus proved fertile ground for the formation of the first National Socialist Sturmabteilungen in Munich between 1920 and 1923. For some of its earliest members, the activism of the first SA units was merely a prolongation of their paramilitary student experience of 1919. With the slow ‘normalization’ of social interactions in Germany and the absorption by the Bavarian home guard movement of important parts of the former paramilitary groups, such a militarized lifestyle soon survived only among the most extreme political parties like the DAP, soon to become the NSDAP.20 Of course, students remained a minority in the early SA, but they formed an important part of the SA membership whose influence exceeded their statistical proportion. An early SA register intercepted by the police included 144 names for which a professional affiliation was listed. Of these, eleven were registered as ‘students’ (born between 1897 and 1905) and several others as ‘pupils’.21 In Franconia it was Gustav Steinbeck, a twenty-four-year-old student and former petty officer (Fähnrich zur See), who led the first local SA units.22 The eleventh Hundertschaft of the Munich SA, until 1923 led by Rudolf Hess, who later was to become Hitler’s deputy, is said to have been entirely composed of students.23
However, a closer look urges caution in drawing conclusions from such examples. At least in the case of the intercepted list, ‘student’ seems to have been a self-imposed title that was more closely related to an individual’s social and educational background than his actual occupation.24Interrogated by the authorities in Baden in September 1921, just weeks after being appointed head of the SA, the ‘law student’ Klintzsch explained that after his resignation from active navy duty, ostensibly on 2 June 1921, he had spent the holidays on the East Frisian island of Borkum prior to beginning his studies. Situated in the extreme northwest of the German Reich, the island since the nineteenth century had taken pride in its reputation as an antisemitic beach resort25 – a fact Klintzsch knew well. What he did not tell the authorities, however, was that he, as a naval lieutenant, had previously attempted to prevent the raising of the revolutionary red flag over the officers’ mess on the very same island in November 1918, and that it was for this reason that he had not been accepted into the navy of the new Reichswehr later. In early 1919 he instead had returned to the Joachimsthalsches Gymnasium, a prestigious Protestant gymnasium in the city of Templin, north of Berlin. There, Klintzsch attended the so-called ‘warrior’s class’, which prepared former soldiers for the Notabitur, a school-leaving examination that could be completed in a less formal and strict way. Klintzsch continued his pattern of reactionary agitation in the school and was one of the driving forces for the organization of an unofficial ‘Kaiser’s birthday party’ that was celebrated there on 26 January 1919.26
According to his testimony from September 1921, Klintzsch had moved to Munich some months earlier with the aim of studying law and public policy (Staatswissenschaften). However, the new semester did not start until October. Over the summer months Klintzsch attended meetings of the NSDAP, an activity that he presented as a kind of alternative course of study: ‘The ideas championed there mesmerized me to an extent that I have virtually limited my studies to the learning of the matters covered there. I very much devoted myself to questions dealing with the Jews and the Freemasons.’27 Klintzsch enrolled at Munich’s Technical University only for the winter term of 1921/1922 and for the summer term of 1922; he left without graduating.28 His main activity in these years was working as a full-time instructor of the NSDAP’s youth and as a paramilitary conspirator.
For other early SA leaders who matriculated at various universities, the seriousness of their studies can likewise be questioned. Dietrich von Jagow, who stepped in for Klintzsch as provisional head of the SA in the autumn of 1921, moved to Tübingen in late January 1922. Soon afterward he registered as a guest lecturer at Eberhard Karls University. By February 1922 von Jagow had also become a trainee at the city’s long-standing Osiander bookshop, which was now in the hands of two ex-marine officers who had likewise been former members of the Ehrhardt Brigade.29 Yet von Jagow’s main activities were political, not bibliophilic. Hitler had sent him to Tübingen as SA Chief of Staff for Württemberg (Inspekteur der SA für Württemberg) in order to help develop and at the same time monitor the nascent stormtrooper units in this region. In April 1923 the Nazis in Tübingen operated under the cover name ‘Wanderverein Schönbuch’, which suggested an apolitical hiking club.30
The traditional university town of Tübingen proved to be a favourable place for the growth of the Nazi movement in Württemberg. The Social Democrat Hermann Schützinger, an ex-soldier promoted to head of the police in Saxony and later a leading member of the Reichsbanner, remarked as early as 1926 that in Tübingen ‘stubborn small-town professors’ were training the sons of the German middle classes in völkisch nationalism. The windows of the local bookshops displayed the memoirs of Ludendorff and Hitler’s Mein Kampf ‘next to all kinds of antisemitic Germanic kitsch spat out by the metropolis’, Schützinger complained.31 It is indicative of the ascendant nationalist mentalities in Tübingen that as early as 1925 university students clashed with the Reichsbanner when the latter attempted to protect a meeting with the lecturer Emil Julius Gumbel, a well-known statistician studying Weimar’s political violence and a pacifist.32 A local cell of the National Socialist Student League was set up at Eberhard Karls University as early as 1926; a genuine SA student Sturm followed there in 1929.33
A considerable number of the NSDAP and SA leaders who belonged to the ‘war youth generation’ during the 1920s oscillated between party work and lecture halls.34 They not only contributed to the political radicalization of the student body in ever more German universities but also transferred the traditional student claim to leadership to their SA units, which comprised a broad spectrum of the German male population. Juvenile middle-class SA leaders such as Klintzsch as well as those with aristocratic backgrounds like von Jagow regarded themselves as forerunners of the people’s community to come. They considered themselves a true elite, who did not believe in parliamentary rule but in the leadership of the ‘most able men originating from the midst of the people’, and they claimed that they already enjoyed the support of the (still silent) majority of the populace.35 These beliefs legitimized their perceived role as educators of male German youth, whom they sought to keep away from ‘taverns, card games, drinking alcohol, the dangers of the street and the immorality of the new, un-German literature and art’.36 Although such programmatic statements contrasted sharply with the social realities of many SA Stürme, the SA ideology built on the positions of the pre-1914 youth movement. Both stressed ‘purity’ as a prerequisite for human and social progress, but pursued radically different goals: the German youth movement, in line with the ideal of the German Bildungsbürgertum, thought progress could be achieved by allowing young men and women to grow into physically and physiologically ‘healthy’ individuals.37 By contrast, the stormtroopers regarded such things first and foremost as prerequisites for the successful remilitarization of male German youth. The physical training of young men in boxing and jiu-jitsu; their schooling in military discipline, fighting techniques, and the handling of weapons; and the Nazis’ efforts to deepen their ‘feelings of love’ for Heimat and the German nature all served one central purpose: instilling revanchist ideas into the minds and hearts of a new generation of Germans.38 The Nazis hoped that one day in the not too distant future, a new generation under the leadership of the SA would take the national destiny into its own hands and ‘fight back’ against internal and external enemies, above all the ‘Marxists’ and the Jews, the French and the British.39
Both this self-proclaimed war youth generation and the pre-1914 youth movement furthermore shared the belief that the dislocations of modern capitalism had to be overcome by a new ‘spirit’, a new ‘idealism’. This idea, which was common among the radical right, resonated even with young Social Democrats.40 Around 1930 it became a cross-party belief among politicized youth that the time of political liberalism and parliamentary rule as pillars of democracy was over. ‘An epoch came to an end, and we have to liquidate it mentally as well,’ exclaimed emphatically the young SPD Reichstag deputy Carl[o] Mierendorff in 1932.41 Real democracy, a democracy that represented the true will of the people and not antagonistic class interests, was to be achieved by different means. The solution that Mierendorff and like-minded politicians and political writers proposed was a kind of ‘authoritarian democracy’ that received its legitimacy not from formal procedures but from the imagined organic bond between ‘genuine political leaders’ and their followers.42 ‘Today, nobody and certainly not the young are willing to climb the barricades for the parliamentary system,’ argued Mierendorff’s fellow party member August Rathmann, stressing somewhat paradoxically that democracy could only be saved ‘by a different system of representation and government’.43
Within the late Weimar Republic, the popular battle cry ‘Make Way, You Old Men!’ thus gained a new, strongly political connotation. The Nazis ‘exacerbated the existing generational tensions’ that had been prevalent in Germany since the turn of the century, modifying them to their own ends. They effectively transformed political longings for youthful revolt that were initially ideologically diverse first into a vehicle for party propaganda and then, beginning in 1933, into alleged signs of youth support for the Third Reich.44 A comprehensive booklet on the organization and values of the SA from late 1929 even claimed that it would be the SA leaders’ task to provide their men with a higher sense of life, based on the ideas of National Socialism.45 All those who subscribed to these ideas in practice were called to perceive themselves as members of a new German elite united by conviction and belonging, not by social homogeneity. Consequently, the SA leadership from its early days in Munich demanded that its stormtroopers ‘regard each other as brothers and true comrades, irrespective of one’s social status, profession, wealth or poverty’.46
Female Nazi Activism
To what extent such brotherly love should embrace women was very much a matter of debate among the stormtroopers. Andrew Wackerfuss has recently emphasized that women ‘played a large but overlooked role in the SA’, keeping the men ‘dressed and fed’ and comforting them when sick. Yet he also notes that women could only earn a ‘limited place’ within the movement, as they were prevented from experiencing ‘combat’ and thus could not request treatment equal to that received by their male counterparts.47 Although women were not formally excluded from the SA until the late 1920s, it was clearly an institution made by men and for men. The duties of the ‘SA woman’, defined in paragraph 6 of the statute of the NSDAP’s Sturmabteilung, which came into effect on 17 September 1926 and was slightly modified on 31 May 1927, limited female Nazi activists to practical aspects of support for the stormtroopers and to the maintenance of their social welfare more generally. Helping impoverished party members, catering to the needs of travelling fellow Nazis, and handing out presents at Christmas were listed as exemplary duties, next to the making of flags, shirts, hats, and party badges.48 In contrast to the nationalist Stahlhelm which in 1931 categorically stated that ‘our women shall not actively devote themselves to politics’,49 the National Socialists simply declared traditional forms of female tasks to be political. The NSDAP was aware that it had to reach out to women in order to maximize its support among the population, but its intellectual founders did not in the early days have a clue as to what proper female National Socialist activism might look like (Plate 3).50
The popular appeal to women of these ‘female’ tasks was limited, not only in comparison to the more active demands placed on their male counterparts, but also when contrasted with the party’s otherwise immoderate rhetoric. As some of the fervent National Socialist women’s autobiographies collected in 1934 by the sociologist Theodore Abel indicate, their writers actually shared similar values with their male counterparts and took pride in fulfilling tasks that resembled theirs.51 Nazi women did not object to what the party officially requested from them and willingly contributed to the ‘movement’ by engaging in welfare activities and providing logistical support to their male comrades, but it was their execution of ‘manly’ activities that they described with the strongest emotional zeal. A certain Hilde Boehm-Stoltz from Berlin, for example, described herself as a ‘fighter for the true and pure soul of the race’ (Kämpfer um die echte artreine Rassenseele). No longer did she have any spare time, Boehm-Stoltz claimed, yet she felt more than rewarded to be included among the ranks of the ‘soldiers’ of National Socialism, a political movement that, according to her, was ‘totally based on idealism’.52 The widowed Hertha von Reuß likewise emphasized the moments of happiness she experienced when she was ‘fighting’ as a member of early Nazi groups in the Bavarian provinces in the early 1920s. Writing some years later, she noted that she had grown lonely because of a ‘lack of understanding’ from her ‘politically right-wing family members’. Having moved to Berlin, von Reuß remembered with fondness her nights out in such illustrious Nazi hangouts as ‘Ameise’ (Ant), ‘Wespe’ (Wasp), and ‘Bärenhöhle’ (Bear’s Den). There, she had prepared and distributed propaganda leaflets to spread the Nazi gospel face to face.53 Finally, the much younger Marlene Heder, a girl from the village of Kleinenglis in Northern Hesse who came into contact with the Nazi movement in 1929 at the age of fifteen, described in similar terms the moments of ‘danger’ that had resulted from her Nazi activities. Despite lasting incomprehension from friends and family, she claimed to have not only remained faithful to the Nazi cause, but to have even attended a dangerous ‘red meeting’ in the city of Kassel (a meeting that was in fact organized by the Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft, the ‘German Society for Peace’!). As a well-known Nazi supporter, Heder boasted that she was ‘never safe’ in her village, a victim of nightly persecutions by opponents following her on bicycles. She also claimed that she had been at risk of being hit by logs of wood thrown at her from the neighbours’ windows.54
Despite the questionable accuracy of these statements, which were produced to provide exemplary accounts of National Socialist commitment and were therefore shot through with propaganda clichés,55 all of these autobiographies indicate that although female Nazi activists fulfilled the subaltern roles the party allotted to them, they emotionally responded most strongly to those activities and experiences they shared with their male counterparts, such as being exposed to physical harm, beatings, and spitting. This assessment does not contradict the dominant historiographical view that Nazi street politics was first and foremost a male affair and that women were confined to auxiliary roles. Yet it does modify long-held beliefs about the alleged passivity of women in street politics, a belief that has been successfully challenged with regard to the Communist Party, but less so for the National Socialists.56 Female Nazi activists aspired to take part in all aspects of the political fight, yet in ways that suited their identities as women.57 ‘We experience the “SA spirit” in our partnerships and for ourselves,’ asserted Lore Snyckers, wife of the stormtrooper propagandist Hans Snyckers, in 1940.58 In some cases the close bonds between ‘SA mothers’, a Nazi term of endearment for those usually mature women who particularly in the early 1930s cared for the much younger boys of the SA, and their charges were supposed to last beyond death. In Magdeburg a cenotaph erected in honour of the city’s ‘Old Fighters’ expressed the expectation that Bertha Weinhöbel, an ‘SA mother’ who in 1931 celebrated her 60th birthday, would be laid to eternal rest next to her ‘boys’.59
Regardless of their political preferences, women in the Weimar Republic, particularly those from the middle classes, overwhelmingly shared the view that the ‘hypocrite bourgeois morality’ of the nineteenth century that had confined women to the domestic sphere was not a realistic option for their future lives – at least not when they were forced into such a role. This does not mean that there were no longer any women who regarded a ‘return’ to the role of guardian of the family and motherhood as attractive. This holds true in particular for members of the lower middle classes, who were most strongly exposed to the effects of downward social mobility in the late Weimar years, when class affiliation determined the conception of female and male roles more than any other factor. Yet, by the early 1930s, such a ‘return’ had only become acceptable to women if they perceived it as a consequence of their own choices. The significant rise in the number of female students that occurred beginning in the late 1930s is just one indicator that the popular conception of the Third Reich as a regime that forced women back into the home is incomplete. Such a picture underestimates the Eigensinn, or ‘self-will’, of young women as well as the ambivalent character of the Nazi regime regarding gender in general.60
Satisfying Emotional Needs
Naturally, the remarkably bold self-perception of SA leaders provoked scorn and aversion from political opponents as well as the intelligentsia. The Nazi campaign of terror against all those they perceived as dissidents, Franz Schweyer wrote dryly in 1925, caused widespread disgust – all the more as the ‘enforcer[s] of the new guidelines of public sentiments for the most part were of an age that seems a priori not to be called for such a task’.61 It should be noted, however, that an excessive belief in the capacities of male youth to alter fundamentally the society in which they were living was by no means limited to Nazi ideologists. The aforementioned Social Democrat, Hermann Schützinger, likewise in 1925 emphatically described German youth as a ‘new race’, ‘formed by the World War in iron blocks, aglow with the spirit of revolution and moulded into men by the touch of our new state’. The idealism and energies of these individuals, as ‘shock troops’ in the fight for the new state, should not be left to the extreme nationalists but channelled into a democratic renewal, Schützinger insisted. He imagined this renewal as occurring not through reform, but through revolution and war, a belief he expressed in slogans that were at times hard to distinguish from the Nazi rhetoric: ‘Let us get ready for the fight of the state!’62
The stormtroopers during the 1920s were initially just one of the many groups that participated in this ‘fight’. They benefited from the fundamental opposition of the early Nazi movement to the Weimar Republic, as they did not need to compromise for tactical reasons, unlike many of the other political youth organizations of the time.63 The internal reforms of Pfeffer von Salomon and later Röhm had created a tightly disciplined paramilitary organization that gained from the exploitation of grassroots mobilization. Historians – particularly those concerned with the relatively recent research into a proper ‘history of emotions’64 – have pointed to ‘emotion’, ‘charisma’, and ‘confidence’ as key terms for the analysis of mass politics. Such analytical perspectives are indeed helpful for better understanding the motives behind the second SA’s attraction to a considerable number of young German males in the interwar years, in particular when coupled with a path of research that since the 1970s began to analyse Fascism in general and National Socialism in particular as social movements.65 Such studies argue that it was not ideology but participation and excitement that accounted for the attraction of interwar Fascism.
The twenty-four-year-old Richard F. Behrendt in 1932 was one of the first academics to advocate such views. After receiving his PhD from the University of Basel the year before, Behrendt returned to Berlin, where he had grown up and was now able to witness the last convulsions of Weimar democracy at close quarters.66 The result was an original book on the forms and causes of the era’s political activism, analysed from a sociological and psychological point of view.67 Influenced by thinkers as diverse as Robert Michels, Hermann Schmalenbach, and Sigmund Freud, Behrendt forcefully argued that the crisis of the modern (German) state was a result of the inability of its institutions to satisfy the emotional needs of its people. As a consequence, he claimed, the political realm had grown, and would continue to grow, in importance. In Freudian terms, politics would even come to serve as an ‘object of fixation’, Behrendt argued. Only engagement in politics would allow the otherwise transcendentally homeless individual to prevent the development of ‘acute neurosis’.68 Collective (political) action could absorb the individual’s ‘free-floating libido’ and thus satisfy him or her. As long as modern society did not allow the individual to establish bonds with a whole, or an imagined whole, particular groups defined and held together by collective activities would engage in mutually antagonistic struggles.69
Permitting such groups to carry out aggressive behaviour would allow for the ‘emotional fulfilment’ of their members, regardless of the ideology employed by their activists, Behrendt argued.70 He regarded the latter as hardly more than a strategic political justification or, on the individual level, as an ex post facto rationalization. The ideal framework to organize bonding through collective violence would be the Bund, or ‘league’, commanded by a charismatic leader. Such a Bund, however, could necessarily exist for only a limited amount of time: it would always be a transitional form between (intimate) community and (anonymous) society.71 For this reason, members of a Bund, who would inevitably perceive themselves as members of an ‘avant garde’ or ‘elite’, would set themselves apart from the existing social and political order, glorifying the establishment of a future order. They would necessarily long for conflicts, as personal success and fulfilment could only be achieved through action. However, Behrendt claimed that it would not be necessary for the political ‘deed’ to be translated into political ‘success’, as measured by traditional standards. In his view the political violence in Weimar Germany – the brawls and riots in the streets, taverns, and halls – was ultimately an end in itself. It was the field of politics that permitted the expression of the strongest emotions, similar to the ‘sport frenzy’ sparked by mass sporting events of the time. According to Behrendt, the military forces in the interwar years approached politics in a manner similar to hooligans who exploited the emotions of popular sporting competitions for their own personal ends: to test their physical strength as a means of excitement, empowerment, and ultimately self-elevation.72
It is instructive to analyse the activities of the Nazi stormtroopers in such a way, as long as one remains aware that this perspective sheds light on some, but not all, forms of SA sociability. Largely missing from Behrendt’s book is, for example, any reflection on how these forms of ‘political’ activism influenced and helped shape the political organizations of the time. The most important advantage of his methodological approach is that it relieves scholars from having to explain how the crude Nazi ideology around 1930 became highly attractive for hundreds of thousands of German men virtually overnight. Even the vigilant liberal Jewish weekly CV-Zeitung noted that the spectacular Nazi gains in the September 1930 elections should not be interpreted as widespread support for the party’s antisemitic creed, but as a sign of the ‘deepest despair’ of millions of voters.73Long-time National Socialist leaders certainly embraced the fundamental aspects of Nazi ideology, including its fervent antisemitism, but for many in the SA’s rank and file the role the ‘movement’ played in allowing for the formation of ‘emotional communities’ was more important. Such communities enabled the expression of emotions such as despair and hate and encouraged the use of violence.74 As the economic situation worsened, this form of community building became increasingly important for ‘ordinary’ German men and women, as already analysed in the previous chapter.
Behrendt’s book appeared in print in late 1932, only weeks before the Nazis came to power. It has been completely forgotten today. More recent studies that adopt a similar model of explanation stress that the SA during the late 1920s and early 1930s was transformed into a social movement proper; it thus serves as a paradigmatic example of this kind of grassroots activism. However, such categorization is problematic. The influential sociologist Joachim Raschke in the 1980s defined a ‘social movement’ as ‘a mobilizing collective actor which, based on high symbolic integration and only low role specification, pursues the goal of fundamental social change [. . .] by applying flexible forms of organization and action’.75 It is obvious that the SA, at least until 1934, meets the majority of these criteria. First, as an organization particularly between 1929 and 1934 it was very successful in mobilizing mass support for the Nazi movement. Second, notwithstanding constant internal restructuring and leadership changes as well as short periods of illegality, it operated continuously. Finally, the SA was clearly an organization that promoted fundamental societal change. The SA’s main goal was not only to destroy the democratic order of the Weimar Republic and to replace it with an authoritarian form of government that would supposedly cope better with the internal and external problems of Germany, but also to instigate social change that would lead to the development of a true, socially inclusive ‘people’s community’ which would blur existing class differences.
The problematic element of the SA when measured against that definition is the criterion of ‘low role specificity’, or the existence of only vaguely defined roles within a social movement. In the SA, which was organized like the NSDAP according to the Führer principle, the different positions were anything but flexible. Obviously, some stormtroopers built considerable careers over short periods of time, whereas others dropped out after a few weeks. However, it was the SA as a hierarchical organization that defined the different roles available – with no discretion for the rank and file to modify these rules. Even mid-level SA leaders, who were supposed to act as exemplary role models for their men and certainly wielded authority within the SA when fulfilling this role, ultimately had very limited power to transform the SA’s hierarchy and organization. They had to lead and to obey at the same time, but they were explicitly not invited to engage in the process of shaping the SA as an organization. This is why Raschke struggled to decide whether the SA was a typical social movement or not. At times he described the SA as a ‘totalitarian movement’, which he regarded as a special kind of social movement in which the spontaneous activities of violent masses are embedded in a stable organizational framework.76
The historian Sven Reichardt later took up Raschke’s definition. He had no problem with defining the SA as a social movement and highlighted in particular four elements that social and Fascist movements share: first, a loosely formalized but still effective organizational structure; second, an intrinsic dynamic; third, a certain ‘closeness’ of the political community; and fourth, an aggressive stance toward the prevalent political system.77 Although Reichardt also informed his readers that not all parts of Raschke’s definition fit the case of the SA, he did not explicitly discuss this problem, nor did he provide a solution to it. Instead, he repeated Raschke’s claim that ‘social movements do not possess an ordinary membership structure nor do they provide institutional solutions in order to solve internal problems’, even though these two criteria did not fit the SA, as it had regular membership lists and arbitral jurisdiction.78 Certainly, the NSDAP and the higher SA command at times had difficulties in keeping their men in check, particularly in 1931 and 1932, but this does not allow us to disregard the decisive influence exerted by the OSAF, or ‘Supreme SA leader’, and the party headquarters in Munich.
It is at this point that a rereading of Behrendt’s 1932 book proves most beneficial, as he dealt extensively with the problem of leadership in social movements. Fusing his ideas with the findings of more recent sociological literature, I suggest defining the SA during the late Weimar years as a political organization that mobilized followers like a social movement but at the same time was hierarchically structured on a local and regional level as a Bund.79 The mass of these Bünde on a national level were tightly dovetailed into a top-down paramilitary command that ensured the party’s ultimate control but at the same time exploited the grassroots activism of the rank-and-file stormtrooper to its maximum degree.
The decisive figure ensuring the coherence of every Bund was its charismatic leader. Charisma as a concept has long been used to describe the influence and success of populist political leaders in the twentieth century, from Hitler and Mussolini on the right to Mao and Fidel Castro on the left.80However, charisma, understood as a ‘purely emotional bond’ between a leader and his followers, is by no means restricted to such iconic political leaders but encompasses the phenomenon of social movements that Behrendt defines as ‘coalitions of charismatic communities’.81Although we are accustomed to viewing charisma (and ‘charismatic rule’, to use the original term coined by Max Weber) in modern times as an effect of propaganda and its dissemination through mass media, it is first and foremost a phenomenon that is necessarily ‘rooted in the micro level of social interaction’.82 In its daily operations the SA was – as Behrendt assumed early on – an organization that recruited its followers not so much through abstract political programmes and particular military aesthetics, but through the charismatic relationships that formed between the regional and local SA leaders and the rank and file in the particular stormtrooper units.
The charismatic SA-Führer was one of the key personae in the National Socialist movement, in action as well as in theory. The role is described early and in some detail in a document entitled ‘Guidelines for the Formation of a Stormtrooper Unit’ from 16 May 1922. The appointment by a local party leader (Ortsgruppenvorsitzender) of a particular SA leader was to be exclusively based on the latter’s ‘prowess and his military skills’. Once appointed, however, even low-level SA leaders enjoyed considerable autonomy. They received general instructions and later also direct orders from the SA headquarters in Munich, but they were relatively free in putting these often quite technical rules into practical effect. Furthermore, according to the 1922 instructions, each SA leader was solely responsible for making sure that his men recognized his authority.83 In other words, the larger SA organization attempted to ensure that only those SA men who were able to claim charismatic authority were appointed as leaders. Several years later, in 1931, when the SA had grown into a mass organization with more than 100,000 men, Röhm’s Order no. 2 defined the Sturmführer as the most important role within the SA and explicitly held him responsible for the fate of his SA comrades, who, according to the new regulations, would number between 70 and 200. The Sturm leader was to be acquainted with the lives of all men under his command, sharing their daily sorrows and providing help if needed.84 Needless to say, the social realities of this relationship were often different. In the small town of Frose in Anhalt in 1932, for example, a Sturmführer is reported to have attacked some of the men under his command with his fists and a knife in order to impose his will on them.85
The extensive system of responsibilities and mutual trust that was established ultimately proved beneficial to both the superior and his men. On the one hand, those ordinary and often very young men who successfully commanded a group of like-minded followers could take pride in their own leadership qualities, while the rank-and-file stormtroopers at the same time benefited from the availability of a role model and a personal ‘go-to guy’. The development of close personal bonds between a charismatic leader and his men was also a way to mobilize mutual solidarity in the face of conflict,86 increasing the fighting strength of these SA groups and at the same time contributing to their secretiveness, both ideologically and with regard to their day-to-day activities. Many personal documents written by stormtroopers during the Weimar years testify that the SA indeed provided emotional shelter against an outer world perceived by many as cold and hostile. Particularly for young men out of work, and those without a wife, children, or close relatives, the SA Sturm could become an Ersatzfamilie, or surrogate family. ‘For the first time in my life I felt fully accepted as a human being,’ a former stormtrooper later remembered.87 When an SA man had to temporarily leave his ‘family’ due to his removal to a hospital or prison, his comrades were called to help him in every conceivable way: by paying him regular visits, by sending him ‘entertaining and edifying’ reading material, and by supporting his relatives emotionally and financially. Toward such ends, the Berlin NSDAP institutionalized an SA-Gefangenen- und Verwundetenhilfe, literally the ‘SA Help for the Prisoners and the Wounded’, in May 1930.88 Initially, this aid organization was not financed by headquarters in Munich, but depended exclusively on donations from party members. Six months later the Berlin police noted that this institution was still relatively ineffective. Only a few stormtroopers remanded in custody had received small donations in kind. However, the police rightly predicted that the importance of this aid centre would soon grow.89
After Walther Stennes, the former SA-Gruppenführer Ost, was expelled from the party in April 1931, responsibility for wounded or imprisoned stormtroopers was transferred to the NS-Notwehr and the NSDAP’s Hilfskasse in Munich.90 Under their leadership, mandatory fees to the SA insurance schemes replaced the previous voluntary contributions; in 1931 these fees amounted to 30 pfennig monthly. Nevertheless, local initiatives remained of high importance in aiding individual SA members, as a proclamation from the NSDAP’s Leipzig chapter (Ortsgruppe) makes plain. This order urged party members to provide fellow Nazis in need with all available material and moral support, including the procuration of legal and medical aid and the notification of close relatives and employers in cases of imprisonment. Furthermore, stormtroopers released from jail were to be given new employment and temporary accommodation in recreation homes run by the party or the SA.91 Stormtroopers were also taken into well-to-do private families until their health was restored.92 It was the ‘honorary duty of every SA leader’ to make sure that all incarcerated men were taken care of by their respective units in such a way that ‘they d[id] not even for one minute experience the feeling of being let down’, SA Chief of Staff Röhm solemnly declared, knowing well that immediate personal help was often more effective than payments from the Munich-based party insurance, with regard both to the needs of the individual stormtrooper and to the resulting propaganda effects.93
In sum, although the SA was a top-down paramilitary organization that relied on clear-cut hierarchies and the absolute power of its supreme leader, the secret of the Brownshirts’ success was precisely that they encouraged the emergence of charismatic bonds on the local and regional levels, building on already existing networks of neighbours, work colleagues, and school friendships.94 The SA paid its ordinary members not with financial compensation – in fact, its men had to spend a considerable amount of money on SA uniforms and other equipment – nor with jobs or social benefits, at least not in the short term. Instead, it rewarded its members with excitement, ‘empowerment’, and the feeling of being socially relevant and at the same time capable of forceful action within a political and social environment that most SA men perceived as hostile. Not only SA leaders experienced such feelings. Even the most modest individuals within the SA’s ‘community of action’ (Gemeinschaft der Tat) – a telling term repeatedly used in SA publications during the 1920s – benefited from this experienced confraternity of German men who not only regarded themselves as a powerful group of loyal national ‘fighters’ but even imagined themselves as the vanguard of the people’s community that the Nazi ideology proclaimed as its ultimate goal.
Critics of National Socialism acknowledged the force of this feeling of self-empowerment and correctly figured that the political consequences would be disastrous. Among them was the sociologist Theodor Geiger, who in 1932 prophetically warned that emotional excitement was no substitute for reason, noting: ‘It is a horrible self-delusion of the NSDAP’s best to believe that a new idealism is about to overcome the materialist spirit [Materialismen] of a corrupt era. On the contrary: a terrible and primitive naturalism based on the romanticism of the blood [Blutsromantik] has assaulted us and fundamentally threatens intellectual life as such.’95
Stormtrooper Merchandising
Being an SA man was more than a testament of political belief: it was also a lifestyle. As early as 1927 the leadership of the organization worked to generate additional income by building a veritable merchandising industry that soon not only provided party activists with the ‘original’ brown shirts, trousers, and caps, but also furnished them with propaganda books, all kinds of outdoor equipment, and cigarettes. To channel the money into the right coffers, the National Socialists founded a so-called Reichszeugmeisterei, a kind of centralized provider of Nazi goods that had been entirely transferred into the hands of the SA by late 1928.96 From now on, stormtroopers were officially required to buy not only the official SA shirt but also the complementary fine cord breeches, a brown windbreaker jacket, puttees, the SA body belt as well as the corresponding waist belt, and the party badge, all exclusively from one of the regional departments of this provider. From 1929 onward a proper SA membership badge that could be used without the uniform was produced. It showed the two letters ‘S’ and ‘A’ in the form of a lightning bolt, alluding to the energy the movement claimed to have, and allowed its wearer to demonstrate his political leanings on all occasions. Previously used brown shirts, either handcrafted or bought in local stores, were from now on only to be used for hiking or at work, the SA Leadership Office decreed.97
Such orders, however, were easier given than put into practice. Because many stormtroopers were young and short of money, particularly after 1930, when the effects of the Great Depression set in and were later aggravated by Reich Chancellor Brüning’s austerity policy, uniformity of the entire SA was almost impossible to achieve. In Danzig the local Hitler Youth deputy leader in the summer of 1929 even attempted to have his own brown shirts produced by a local factory – at least partly to avoid the heavy taxation, he claimed.98 At the same time, precisely because the official SA shirt was expensive and at times beyond the means of members, it became an object of desire – similar to the modern-day ‘official’ football shirts sold so successfully around the globe. Once acquired, stormtroopers often wore ‘their’ brown shirt with particular pride – all the more as the repeated interdiction of the SA, which prohibited the public display of the party uniform, added to its symbolic value.99 In line with the capitalist logic of the day, a mass article like the Nazi brown shirt became not only one of the NSDAP’s cash cows in the years prior to 1933 but also a symbol of the individual man’s affiliation and commitment, a commitment that no longer needed to be proven by individual action but could be bought.
The rapid growth of the NSDAP and the SA beginning in the late 1920s, which went hand in hand with an increasing demand for uniforms, saved one regional clothing manufacturer that has since turned into an international fashion company: Hugo Boss. In 1924 the thirty-nine-year-old Hugo F. Boss from the small Swabian town of Metzingen had converted the cloth shop he had inherited from his parents several years before into a little clothing factory. The small business that had fewer than thirty employees throughout the 1920s produced, among other things, uniforms for different organizations. After the war Boss claimed he had not initially known that these uniforms, among them the SA brown shirts, were intended as ‘party uniforms’. The company came under serious economic pressure with the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929. Two years later, in 1931, it filed for bankruptcy but continued to operate. In this moment of existential crisis Boss joined the NSDAP100 and – at about the same time – started to receive substantial orders from the party. From that point on, and continuously until 1945, Boss produced several types of uniform for the SA, SS, and Hitler Youth, and later, during the Second World War, also for the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS.101 Other non-Jewish-owned German textile companies also profited from the rebounding of the economy in the mid-1930s, the increasing militarization of society that led to higher demand for uniforms, and the ‘Aryanization’ and shuttering of Jewish textile factories.102 However, although ‘Nazi Chic’ garments103 were produced in Metzingen, they were not designed there. Hugo Boss at that time only produced clothing and uniforms according to given patterns.
The example of Hugo Boss is typical insofar as it illustrates a more general tendency: after their takeover of power, the National Socialists gave preference to those companies that had supported them before 1933. In return, such companies exploited their close relationship with the party in their advertisements. Boss’s company, for example, proudly informed its customers that the company had worked for the National Socialists since 1924.104 Another example of this tendency was the leather company Breuninger in Schorndorf. Similar to Boss, Breuninger benefited from several big orders by the NSDAP and the Reichswehr in 1933. However, as the business historian Petra Bräutigam has demonstrated, it was not the quality of Breuninger’s products that was responsible for these orders in the first place, but the close cooperation between the company and the National Socialists in the preceding years. When the workers of all Württemberg leather factories went on strike in November 1931, the Breuninger company called on the SA for help and, after twenty-eight National Socialists successfully acted as strike breakers, employed these men instead of the strikers.105
Such examples indicate that the anti-capitalist attitude widespread within certain SA units should not be taken as a general characteristic of the stormtroopers. Whether the rank-and-file SA man was encouraged to engage in economic and often antisemitic boycott actions or whether he was ordered to violently break strike actions for the benefit of local businessmen, who in return for such ‘favours’ financially supported the Nazi Party and its organizations, depended very much on the regional and local circumstances, as well as the local networks of National Socialism.
Smoking Politics
The cigarette industry provides another example of how capitalist logic and political identity successfully interacted during these years. The smoking of cigarettes became a mass phenomenon during the First World War. No longer associated exclusively with oriental luxury and the well to do, smoking nevertheless retained its function of marking differences – in regional provenance, in social class, and, starting in the mid-1920s, in political orientation.106 In 1926 the cigarette pack, usually containing ten cigarettes, was successfully introduced in Germany. This innovation not only resulted in a boost in sales but also allowed for a new form of marketing, as the rectangular boxes proved to be ideal for graphic illustrations and thereby helped customers to identify specific cigarette brands.107 As cigarettes were increasingly produced by machines and no longer exclusively by largely female workers, and as a consequence came to look almost identical, cigarette producers in Germany began to market hundreds of different brands of cigarettes, usually employing particular images. Many successful brands relied heavily on their capacity to demonstrate social status and used oriental images traditionally associated with the import of tobacco. However, even the marketing of well-established brands like the Reemtsma cigarettes ‘Ova’ and ‘Ernte 23’ soon reacted to changes in the political, social, and economic situation.108 Between 1930 and 1932, as unemployment figures rose rapidly, advertisements for these two brands began using bold images of emergencies such as traffic accidents and shipwrecks. These images suggested that the smoker of these particular brands would react serenely and composedly in the face of such a situation – evoking the coolness desperately sought by millions of Germans confronted with personal economic ruin, often accompanied by family ruptures.109
The late 1920s were the ‘Kampfzeit of the cigarette market’ – a phrase that was not a direct allusion to Nazi terminology, but a contemporary wording used by marketers. Technological innovation and breakthroughs in modern marketing techniques in Weimar Germany forced the cigarette companies into fierce competition, leading to the creation of a diverse array of brands that allowed the individual smoker to express his ‘personality’ through the consumption of a mass product.110 It was precisely in this period, in 1929, that a certain Arthur Dressler approached the NSDAP and its SA with his plans for a new cigarette factory in Dresden, which since the late nineteenth century had been one of the German centres of the cigarette industry and the Eastern tobacco trade.111
It was a remarkable time for a start-up enterprise to enter this largely saturated industry, all the more as Dressler lacked the considerable means necessary for such an investment. But Dressler, an NSDAP member, had an interesting idea: he suggested that the party produce a house-brand SA cigarette. If the SA would be willing to pressure its men into consuming his new brand exclusively, he promised the militia a reward of about 15 to 20 pfennig for every 1,000 cigarettes sold.112 The SA leadership in Munich approved the plan.113 With the help of Jacques Bettenhausen, a successful Dresden businessman who lent the very considerable sum of 500,000 reichsmark to the project, the Cigarettenfabrik Dressler Kommanditgesellschaft, better known under the name of its major brand, ‘Sturm’, was established.114 No less a figure than Otto Wagener, who for several months in 1930 had acted as supreme SA leader, became a limited partner in the company in 1931.115 This connection not only points to the very close and cordial relations between the Sturm Company and the SA, but also reveals that – contrary to the constant rhetoric maintaining that the ‘poor’ SA was operating just above the absolute minimum level – at least some high-level SA leaders benefited financially from the rapid growth of the organization in the early 1930s (Plate 9).
There was indeed money to be made from the stormtroopers’ smoking habits. As early as 1930, Dressler was able to make monthly contributions to Röhm, the Dresden SA leaders Manfred von Killinger and Georg von Detten, and their Silesian counterpart, Edmund Heines.116 And the success story continued in the following years, as the findings of Thomas Grosche, a young historian from Dresden, reveal with striking clarity: according to the balance sheets for 1932, the Sturm Company generated a profit of more than 36 million reichsmark. Most of the money was reinvested for the acquisition of new buildings and factories, and a considerable sum (128,325 reichsmark) was spent for publicity in magazines and newspapers, by the company-owned loudspeaker van, and even for hiring aeroplanes trailing advertisements. However, the owners as well as the SA made a considerable profit from the venture in 1932 and an even greater one in 1933. In that year the company’s net profit peaked at 429,970 reichsmark. Of this, the SA enjoyed a handsome share. In 1932 the organization obtained 78,080 reichsmark from the Sturm Company, and the SA leadership was paid an additional 13,951 reichsmark. In the next year verified payments of about the same amount were made to the SA, with smaller sums for the SS and the NSKK (Nationalsozialistisches Kraftfahrkorps), the National Socialist Motor Corps. The fact that an additional reserve of 260,069 reichsmark was put aside to be paid later in the year to the SA and the SS clearly indicates that profits were much higher for 1933 than in the previous year.117
This financial success story was achieved not only because of a smart business model, but also – as was so often the case with the SA – due to violence, directed both against the regular SA men and business rivals. After the founding of the Sturm factory, not only did the Nazi media target stormtroopers with encouragements to buy only the new cigarettes, but SA leaders even formally forbade their men from buying different brands. To make sure their orders were obeyed, they engaged in bag searches and imposed fines for disobedience.118 The Sturm Company, in an advertisement run in the Völkischer Beobachter in 1932, tried to convince the SA rank and file to buy its product with the following argument, which paraphrased official party rhetoric but obviously was not aware of the unintentional hilarity of the chosen wording: ‘Only smoke your own brands. Do not spend money in other circles. To be a National Socialist means fighting and agitating until the last breath.’ For men more inclined to practicality, the company enclosed vouchers for SA equipment in Sturm cigarette packs.119 As several internal reports (Stimmungsberichte) from SA regional groups in the autumn of 1932 make clear, however, the ordinary SA man, that is, the consumer, could not even decide what to use these vouchers for. In Hesse, for example, SA men were ordered in September 1932 to turn in at least one voucher per day to the SA over a period of three weeks. The vouchers were to be used to finance an SA air show, intended as a major propaganda event in the region.
Regardless of such pressures, the Sturm cigarettes were popular in many parts of Germany in 1932. As regional SA leaders reported unanimously, SA men increasingly smoked the cigarette that ‘in terms of quality, could compete with its rivals’ and eagerly collected the vouchers and collector cards included in the packs. Every month the SA units received their share of the profits, which served, for example, to build regional SA leadership schools, pay for medical supplies, or benefit the SA stormtrooper units and their men directly.120 Several reports from the time indicate that these commissions financed local SA activities to an ‘important degree’, and that for some units they were the only reliable source of income.121 The Sturm Company was also popular among the National Socialists because it predominantly employed SA leaders as travelling salesmen, who in some cases could make a living from this activity.122 In East Prussia all thirteen SA-Standartenführer were ‘made mobile’ in such a way in 1932.123 The business model was so successful that it was quickly copied: the Kameradschaft Zigaretten-Speditionsgesellschaft mbH, literally the ‘Comradeship Cigarette and Transportation Company’, located in the city of Gera in Thuringia, soon also claimed to employ National Socialist party members exclusively and informed its distributors that its brands were to be marketed as ‘other Nazi cigarettes’.124 The SS and the National Socialist Factory Cell Organization (NSBO) allegedly supported this company.125
The only choice officially sanctioned by the SA, however, was among the different brands offered by the Sturm Company: the well-to-do stormtrooper could buy the relatively expensive ‘Neue Front’ (literally ‘New Front’) cigarettes for 6 pfennig each, or for 5 pfennig the cigarettes sold under the names of ‘Sturm’ or ‘Stephansdom’, the last named after Vienna’s St Stephen’s Cathedral. Most SA men, however, preferred the cheaper brands in the ‘consumer price range’ (Konsumpreisklasse): ‘Alarm’ and ‘Balilla’ for 4 pfennig, or ‘Trommler’ (literally ‘drummer’) for 3.5 pfennig. The latter brand was by far the most successful: in 1932, Trommler sales made up more than 80 per cent of the company’s volume of sales, and in the following year 95 per cent.126 These figures aptly parallel trends produced by the economic and social crisis in Germany.
Physical violence against competing companies and their distributors was another means employed by the Sturm Company. Dressler speculated that by agitating against his rivals, he would be able to drive down advertisement costs, which usually accounted for a large share of the cigarette industry’s budget.127 When the Nazis came to power in 1933, stormtroopers under the leadership of Alphons Michalke, an SA man and commercial director of the Sturm Company who in 1933 would become president of the Chamber of Commerce in Dresden,128 organized boycotts against the Dresden-based Bulgaria Compagny, another cigarette producer. This competitor was targeted as a ‘Jew firm’ because of its allegedly Jewish owner. On 31 March 1933 the SA blocked the entrances to the Bulgaria premises and carried out an illegal search of the house of Harry Carl Schnur, the director of the company. Schnur, however, had been warned beforehand by Philipp F. Reemstma, the head of Germany’s biggest cigarette corporation, located in Hamburg.129 Schnur was in fact Reemtsma’s employee, as the latter had bought the Bulgaria Company from Salomon Krentner, a Jew, in 1928. This deal, however, had not been made public. Even if this particular boycott was therefore not intended to strike Reemtsma, other SA ‘actions’ clearly were. Stormtroopers repeatedly attacked cigarette dealers who sold Reemtsma products, smashed their shop windows, and even physically attacked those who worked there, giving the term ‘Kampfzeit of the cigarette market’ an even more literal meaning.
However, such violence quickly backfired. Reemtsma, regardless of his personal liberal-conservative sympathies, was not willing to let the Brownshirts ruin his business.130 The fact that the Nazis had initiated proceedings against him because of alleged corruption furthermore demanded immediate action, although tensions lessened somehow after Reemtsma was granted a personal meeting with Hitler in 1932.131 Between August 1933 and January 1934, Reemtsma repeatedly discussed his and his company’s problems with Hermann Göring, who had been appointed Reich Minister for Aviation and, as Minister President of Prussia, was in an ideal situation to exercise power over the SA. Göring’s ‘goodwill’ was available, albeit at a price: Reemtsma had to donate the very high amount of 3 million reichsmark to the state, officially for the preservation of German forests and their wildlife, as well as for the state theatres. In return, Göring made sure that the criminal investigations against Reemtsma, the anti-Reemtsma publicity in the Nazi press, and the SA boycotts stopped.132
A final agreement with the SA, however, was not reached before its leaders were executed in the summer of 1934. Röhm’s successor, Viktor Lutze, struck a deal with Reemtsma that resembled the agreement with Göring: in exchange for protection, Reemtsma would pay an annual fee into the accounts of the SA, as well as a one-time ‘temporary allowance’ of 150,000 reichsmark. The latter was intended to cover the anticipated losses of the Sturm Company.133 According to other sources, the Reemtsma’s ‘storm obolus’, a one-time allowance, amounted to as much as 250,000 reichsmark. Even so, the money was well invested. After the OSAF’s order that stormtroopers buy only Sturm cigarettes was lifted in the summer of 1934, Dressler’s company quickly experienced financial problems and finally declared bankruptcy in 1935. In the following years Reemtsma continued to be the undisputed king of the cigarette industry in Nazi Germany. However, even after the end of the Dressler venture, references to National Socialism remained a common element of the cigarette industry, as demonstrated by brand names such as Braunhemden (Brownshirts) and Arbeitsdienst (Labour Service, probably referring to the National Socialist Reichsarbeitsdienst, the Reich Labour Service).134
Modern Crusaders
It might strike readers today as counterintuitive, but many early stormtroopers regarded their commitment to the Nazi cause as completely in line with their religious beliefs. Some of them even perceived themselves as Christian crusaders fighting against the ‘godless’ and pagan ‘Jew Republic’. Protestant National Socialists in particular advanced such views. From their perspective the Weimar Republic had abolished the formerly close bonds between throne and altar. According to the influential pro-Prussian school of historiography, this alliance had been one of the main pillars of Germany’s rise to become a world power in the nineteenth century, and consequently a revitalization of this bond was expected to lead to a national renewal. Not only did representatives of the Protestant Churches and National Socialist activists share a deep-seated contempt for democracy, but many of them also regarded a rapprochement between their two groups as promising – at least as long as the Nazi Party claimed to be interested in cooperation based on mutual respect. The upcoming ‘Third Reich’, such clergymen hoped, would be a powerful Christian empire, with the stormtroopers serving as the propagators of these ideals.135
A characteristic albeit extreme example of such beliefs was the case of Pastor Max Michalik from Altmark in the Stuhm district, which in the 1930s was part of the German province of East Prussia. According to the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, not only was this pastor the deputy party leader in the region, but he also ‘engaged in every possible way’ with the NSDAP. He is said to have regularly participated in SA evenings at the local inn, dressed in his brown shirt. He also commissioned an unemployed stormtrooper as a door-to-door salesman distributing propaganda books written by a fellow Nazi minister. Michalik offered accommodation to travelling Nazi speakers and took injured militants in as guests, transferring his parsonage into an SA recreational home. In 1930 the Altmark Brownshirts and their pastor celebrated the Holy Night under a Christmas tree decorated with swastika flags, singing National Socialist fighting songs.136 Michalik himself considered his activism as little more than a drop in the bucket. In his eyes the region he was living in was dominated by a working alliance between German and Polish Catholics who would in every way possible prevent Protestants from exercising influence. Among German voters, he complained, the conservative DNVP and the Catholic Centre Party would dominate, whereas the Nazis even in 1932 would remain a splinter party.137
Only a minority of Protestant clergymen joined in such radical political activism for the NSDAP, but it is important to observe that most pastors, and particularly those from the influential ‘national Protestant’ wing of their churches, did not perceive SA violence as either unpatriotic or ungodly.138 The stormtroopers’ violence was at best seen as a practical, but not a fundamental, problem. Whereas Protestant church leaders regularly dismissed individual acts of rowdiness and political fanaticism committed in the frenzy of emotion, they tended to justify the strategically employed Nazi violence as a legitimate means of self-defence against the supposedly ever-intensifying Bolshevist threat. At a time when some believers perceived the political situation to be nothing less than a ‘new religious war’, the temporary ban on the SA in the spring of 1932 was tellingly compared to the persecution of Christians in late antiquity. Even Protestant youth groups were now called upon to take up the sword and at times even met for military sports in Reichswehr training areas, assembling under slogans such as ‘Christianity means fire, holy drive [heiliger Drang], battle!’139
Consequently, many pastors were willing to tolerate the presence of uniformed stormtroopers during Sunday service or on the occasion of funerals, or they even deliberately invited them – in contrast to the majority of their Catholic counterparts.140 Heinrich Rendtorff, the regional bishop of Mecklenburg, stated that ‘today, many members of the Protestant Church devote their hearts and souls to the National Socialist movement’. He warned the Nazis not to elevate Volk and race to false gods, but praised their ideal of confraternity (Brudergedanken) and acknowledged their general will to promote a ‘positive Christianity’, as laid down in point 24 of the NSDAP’s 1920 platform. Although the bishop did not express agreement with all aspects of National Socialism, he thought it paramount to respect their ‘great effort’ (großes Wollen), which he hoped would lead the people along a Christian path.141 In the same year Theophil Wurm, the regional bishop of Württemberg, spoke of the obvious duty of a German Christian to at least morally support the ‘German fight for freedom’ – a deliberate use of Nazi vocabulary that contemporaries could not have failed to understand.142
Similar to Rendtorff and Wurm, a considerable portion of the Protestant clergy in the early 1930s saw the rise of the NSDAP as a chance for their churches to again come closer to the people, particularly in the big cities.143 Kurt Hutten, a young theologian who worked as the executive director of the Evangelischer Volksbund Württemberg in 1932, compared National Socialism to a ‘ploughed field waiting for the seed of the Gospel to be sowed’.144 In the same year Pastor Gerhard Meyer from Lübeck, a member of the NSADP and its SA since 1929, called the stormtroopers modern martyrs who would follow in the footsteps of Jesus.145 And the well-known Magdeburg Cathedral preacher Ernst Martin, who between 1924 and 1928 served as a Reichstag deputy for the DNVP, in October 1932 officiated at an exclusive church service for the local SA in the city’s imposing cathedral, a Protestant lieu de mémoire ever since the sack of Magdeburg in 1631. According to the Nazis, this church service was symbolically of higher value to the ‘movement’ than a speech delivered by Hitler in the city’s civic hall.146 Such events characteristically illustrate the erosion of civic values. Although Martin had held annual church services for the Stahlhelmers throughout the 1920s, in the 1930s the SA, for him as well as for many other believers, took the place of the former as the primary group defending the nation against the sins of materialist culture and the threat of Bolshevism. It did not come as a surprise that, in March 1933, Martin joined the NSDAP and became a strong supporter of the German Christians, the pro-Nazi wing of the Protestant churches. However, as early as 1934, he publicly objected to attacks on synagogues and Jewish shops and soon lost faith in the NSDAP’s willingness to make Christian values and the fear of God central elements of the Third Reich.147
Martin’s colleague, the popular Lutheran pastor Franz Tügel from Hamburg, embraced the Nazis more enthusiastically and for a longer time, calling them in 1932 a ‘genuine popular movement of divine providence’ (schicksalsmäßig heraufgeführte Volksbewegung) that was shaped by a ‘willingness to sacrifice, by manly discipline and by trust in imminent victory’ (Opferbereitschaft, Manneszucht und Siegesfreudigkeit).148 Tügel became the Hamburg SA’s ‘foremost spiritual advisor’ and, after the Nazi takeover of power, even dressed in the brown shirt himself. He publicly rationalized the stormtroopers’ street violence as a legitimate and necessary defence of the nation and of the Christian faith.149
In neighbouring Schleswig-Holstein, however, the administration of the Evangelical-Lutheran State Church was more sceptical toward the Nazi movement. In late 1931 it published detailed guidelines about the ‘political activities of pastors’, prohibiting them from holding special services in churches for political parties and groups, from consecrating such groups’ flags and banners, from actively participating in political rallies, and from publicly wearing badges of a political party.150 That the Church in ever more German regions felt it necessary to publish such guidelines indicates that pastors engaged in such activities frequently.151 All over Germany political leanings and the practice of religion increasingly became difficult to separate.
The relationship between the stormtroopers and the Catholic Church was more complicated, due to the traditional support of the clergy for the Centre Party and their mental and programmatic reservations about National Socialism. Yet the increasing popularity of the NSDAP among Catholic voters by 1929–30 posed a serious problem in the upper levels of the Catholic clergy. How could they keep their distance from such a popular movement without alienating a considerable part of the loyal and devout churchgoers attracted to it?152 In February 1931 the bishops attempted to clarify the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Nazis, publishing a statement that condemned ‘leading representatives of National Socialism’ for placing race over religion and formally prohibited the clergy from taking part in the Nazi movement, but they remained silent on the movement’s antisemitism and its open hostility toward the Weimar Republic.153 The most pressing question – whether or not a devout Catholic layman was allowed to participate in the NSDAP and its organizations – was left to the local priests to decide. In the years that followed, the majority of the Catholic clergy remained rather cold and distant toward the NSDAP. Nevertheless, party propaganda claiming that without the SA’s defence ‘church-murdering’ Bolshevism would have swamped Germany long ago did not fail to impress many devout Catholics.154 In addition, a small but active group of Catholic clergymen publicly voiced their support for the NSDAP in the late 1920s and early 1930s. They advocated for a ‘revival of Catholic support for the NSDAP’, building on the temporary rapprochement of the two that had occurred in the early 1920s.155
Public perception of the ‘Christian respectability’ of the Nazis was certainly helped by the presence of their uniformed stormtroopers at carefully selected Sunday services, a relatively frequent sight in Protestant parts of Germany starting in the late 1920s. In Catholic areas such practices became more common only in the early 1930s. On one highly symbolic occasion about 400 Brownshirts equipped with flags and banners attended high mass in the cathedral of Regensburg in May 1930, despite the uncertain relationship between the Catholic Church and the NSDAP.156 Three years later such spectacles had been transformed from the extraordinary to the everyday. After a uniformed Munich SA unit formed a guard of honour in a ‘ceremonious and well-attended’ mass on Friday, 28 April 1933 in the Frauenkirche, celebrated by Munich Archbishop Michael von Faulhaber, men dressed in SA uniform became a familiar if still somewhat peculiar sight at Catholic masses in Bavaria.157 Regulations outlined in the Pflichtenlehre des Sturm-Abteilungsmannes (SA-Katechismus), a small brochure of SA tenets modelled after Luther’s Small Catechism and edited by SA-Obergruppenführer Hans Georg Hofmann in 1934, explicitly stated that the Nazi movement was pledged to protect the two Christian confessions of faith, Protestants and Catholics.158 A similar booklet, entitled Der kleine Katechismus Dr. Martin Luthers für den braunen Mann, edited by the Deutsche Evangelische Männerwerk in the same year, exclusively targeted Protestant stormtroopers. It claimed that ‘we need men who are prepared to fight for their faith’. This fight was to be inspired by the ‘greatest role model of a fighter and comrade’: Jesus, the exceptional man (but not Christ).159
Against this background it seems more than a coincidence that some of the earliest and most active SA leaders had close links to the churches: Hans Ulrich Klintzsch in Munich and Horst Wessel in Berlin, for example, were both sons of Protestant pastors. Their fathers had died by the time the sons became heavily involved in the early Nazi movement.160 After the Second World War, Klintzsch is said to have aspired to become a pastor himself. From 1949 to 1952 he worked as a catechist in Schorndorf near Stuttgart, introducing schoolchildren to the doctrines of the Protestant faith.161 Even the watchmaker Emil Maurice – usually portrayed as a simple and violence-prone footman to Hitler – kept ties with the pastor of his hometown in Schleswig-Holstein. In a personal letter from 1924, Maurice offered a justification of himself and the high level of Nazi violence to this pastor, apparently longing for the approval of a man of God.162 To understand men like Klintzsch, Maurice, and Wessel, it is necessary to grasp that they perceived the political struggle of the 1920s as an eschatological battle, and themselves as modern crusaders fighting for the nation, the German race, and – ultimately – God.163 Hitler supported such views early on. At the NSDAP’s Christmas party on 17 December 1922, held in a packed Bürgerbräukeller in Munich, he praised Jesus Christ – of all people – as an exemplary model for the National Socialists. Of modest birth, Jesus was a man of high ideals who despised worldly goods and fame, and it was precisely because of this that the Jews later crucified him, Hitler claimed.164 Implicitly, he modelled his own autobiography according to his version of the Jesus story – with himself as the new ‘idealist’ and his followers as the disciples, threatened by the Jews and by the foreign occupying powers, who assumed the role of the new Romans. The police agent present at this Nazi gathering did not mention this flagrant case of blasphemy in his report but noted enthusiastically that the occasion was, ‘in a word, a pleasant and august celebration’.165 Several years later, when the SA was on the brink of becoming a mass social movement, its activists still referred to their political mission in religiously tinged language. For example, Joseph Berchtold, the first leader of the SS who in 1928 returned to the SA, prophesied the upcoming victory of the National Socialist movement by claiming that the Brownshirts were ‘the heralds of the German spring, of resurrection’.166
It is conceivable, however, that this was mere rhetoric which only superficially resonated with the rank and file. Consequently, we need to take a second look at how and to what extent a religious upbringing and exposure to Christian values and ideas actually influenced the behaviour of members of the SA. As recent historical research has convincingly demonstrated, at least some of the young stormtroopers understood their commitment to the Nazi movement as being in line with their religious identity. In a time when liberals and socialists seemed to dominate the political arena in many parts of Germany and its largest state, Prussia, these men felt called to raise the Christian banner. The swastika was a cross, after all. This general assertion, however, needs further refinement. The SA (as well as the NSDAP) proved highly attractive to young men in predominantly Protestant areas of Germany in particular, and it was in these areas that a phenomenon which might be called ‘Christian National Socialism’ flourished.167 Hitler himself is said to have been acutely aware of denominational differences among his followers, although his understanding of such differences was rather crude. In a 1930 conversation with Franz Pfeffer von Salomon and his Chief of Staff Otto Wagener, Hitler explained the uneven recruitment figures for the SA and the SS in the Reich with reference to a long-established cultural border, the limes Germanicus. This was the former frontier line, fortified in the second century AD, between the Roman Empire and the lands of the Teutonic tribes, which in the modern Reich divided Germany into a larger northern and a smaller southern part. North of this former border, Hitler stated, the majority of people were Protestants and were more inclined to join the SA, whereas in the predominantly Catholic German south, young men largely favoured the SS. For Hitler this difference was not a coincidence: ‘The SA attracts the militant natures among the German breed, the men who think democratically, unified only by a common allegiance. Those who throng to the SS are men inclined to the authoritarian state, who wish to serve and obey, who respond less to an idea than to a man.’168
The historian Richard Steigmann-Gall interprets Hitler’s differentiation as one between the ‘ideological substance’ of National Socialism that proved attractive to many SA men and the ‘authoritarian style’ favoured by the SS.169 Hitler’s peculiar historical explanation echoes an uncritical veneration of the ‘manly’ and strong-willed Germanic tribes, in contrast with the allegedly ‘effeminate’ and degenerate Romans – a popular historical myth since the nineteenth century that found expression in buildings like the gigantic Hermann Monument in the Teutoburg Forest, inaugurated in 1875 by Kaiser Wilhelm I.170 Hitler’s statement nevertheless contains elements that are worth exploring further, particularly regarding the question of the degree to which National Socialist ideology shared basic ideas with particular strands of evangelical Protestantism known as ‘muscular Christianity’. The analysis provided here barely touches the surface of such interrelationships, which can only be explored fully through further detailed empirical investigations.171
That many leading stormtroopers imagined themselves as Christian warriors is less surprising if one compares and contrasts the SA with other Fascist movements in interwar Europe.172 The close relationship between the Spanish and French Fascists and the Catholic Church has long been known.173 Yet in southeastern Europe, most notably in Romania, Slovakia, and Croatia, regional ultra-nationalist or Fascist militias also understood their political activism as a crusade. The Romanian Iron Guard, the Slovakian Hlinka Guards, and the Croatian UstaŠa were ‘deeply mystical movements’ that resorted to excessive violence not despite, but because of, their religious currents. As Rory Yeomans points out with regard to Croatia, ‘Many Ustasha leaders had been educated at seminaries, and, since its establishment, the Movement had been especially influential amongst theological students and the lower clergy.’174 For Corneliu Codreanu, the charismatic leader of the Romanian Fascists, it was the ‘spiritual patrimony’ that constituted the main element of his extreme nationalism, ‘because it alone bears the seal of eternity’. His idea of Fascism was a transfiguration of Christian doctrine into the realm of politics. Codreanu believed in a resurrection not only of individual human beings but also of nations and claimed that his politics ultimately followed the will of God, who had provided the Romanians with their ‘historical destiny’.175From a trans-national perspective the sometimes close relationship between early SA activism and ideas of Christian renewal is therefore less surprising than previously thought. Without a transcendental Überbau, or superstructure, National Socialism would not have been able to unleash its ultimately deadly energies. The regulations of the SA-Katechismus put this correlation in simple terms: ‘Not only is the National Socialist movement not an enemy of the religions, but on the contrary we believe that the nation as well as the individual imperatively requires religions in order to hold command over the spiritual forces necessary to prevail in the struggle of life [. . .] We are also convinced that our entire German culture for more than one thousand years has been linked to Christianity and that it cannot be imagined without it.’176
Two years later, in 1936, however, the relationship between the NSDAP and the churches had significantly deteriorated, to the extent that the party now prohibited the wearing of party uniforms at church services.177 Nevertheless, a series of woodcut images by the artist Richard Schwarzkopf, a member of the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf, continued to give artistic expression to the fusion of National Socialism and Christianity.178 Schwarzkopf’s woodcuts show highly stylized scenes of Nazi street fighting against Bolshevist Untermenschen; in them, the Communists appear determined to kill and are stirred up by the figure of a skeleton riding a horse, a personification of Death. By contrast, the stormtroopers are depicted as quintessential husbands and fathers, defending the German soil and mourning a ‘fallen’ comrade in a scene modelled after the Lady of Pity.179The series was showcased in 1937 at the Great German Art Exhibition in Munich and used widely in SA propaganda. From an artistic point of view, it was among the best of ‘SA art’ on offer (Plates 10 and 11).
Schwarzkopf’s six woodcuts were influenced by the long tradition of the danse macabre, an allegory of the all-conquering universal power of Death whose earliest pictorial representations date from the fifteenth century. His direct model was a cycle of six woodcuts made by the Romantic painter Alfred Rethel, who in early 1849 had depicted the social revolutionaries of his days as inveigled by a political ideology that would only bring death and destruction to the people.180 Rethel’s cycle was extremely successful after it appeared in print in May 1849, not least because conservative associations bought the prints and distributed them for free in schools and barracks. For decades to come, his woodcuts remained popular among the middle and upper classes.181 Schwarzkopf transformed Rethel’s revolutionaries of 1848 into supporters of interwar Communism, but at the same time presented a possible saviour: brown-shirted stormtroopers, the new knights in shining armour. For the first time in the history of German arts, the press in 1937 rejoiced, an artist had created a danse macabre in which not Death but Life remained victorious – an outcome heralded as a consequence of the allegedly fundamental shift toward the ‘life-affirming worldview of our times’.182 The SA’s struggle was thus elevated to an eternal fight between good and evil, between an organic nation willing to defend itself and the barren and ultimately deadly doctrine of Bolshevism. German Passion, the title of the series, directly evokes Christ and his suffering.183 The parallel to the Christian message is obvious: as Jesus Christ gave his life for the salvation of his believers, so the Nazi stormtroopers sacrificed their lives for the nation. Their ‘victory of faith’, as the title of the last woodcut proclaimed, ultimately prevailed.
Relations with the Reichswehr
The stark contrast between the self-images of these young ‘crusaders’ and the dismal realities of their actions have long inspired critical observers to dismiss the Nazi self-image as the fantasy of an initially small group of misguided men who were unfit for modern life. The German scholar Joachim C. Fest was among the first to speak of the National Socialists as a ‘veritable lost generation’. In his view its members were lastingly shaped by their experiences in the Freikorps and other nationalistic paramilitary formations in which they ‘expressed their inability to live in a civilized way’ by practising a ‘radically tempered adventurism’ and committing outright criminal acts that were barely concealed behind a facade of patriotism.184 Consequently, Fest identified the ‘nihilism in rank and file’ (Nihilismus in Reih und Glied) as one of the central features of the Nazi stormtrooper units. The profoundly disturbing personal and cultural experiences of the first modern war on European soil had nourished such nihilism, Fest argued. The SA had to be understood as a product of the dynamism of the war youth generation coupled with a ‘purposeful revolutionary will’ that made it ‘almost irresistible’, he admitted, and devoid of any sympathy for the SA.185
However, such statements easily overshadow the fact that by the late 1920s the ‘adventurers’ of the SA were increasingly attracting the interest of the regular armed forces. In particular, younger Reichswehr officers came to see the NSDAP’s paramilitaries less as dangerous rivals than as potential allies. Against the background of rising tensions in Germany and the ever more apparent weakness of its democratic regime, the Reichswehr from 1929 onward began to explore political alternatives. As is well known, the alliance between the army and the SPD, being the strongest democratic party after the war, was from the start no permanent love match but a temporary liaison. Although the Social Democrats more than once relied on the Reichswehr to put down Communist uprisings, the army only proved willing to support democratic politics as long as this system was seen as the only viable one among worse outcomes – be they a foreign invasion or a successful Communist takeover of power. After the November revolution of 1918 the German military repeatedly complained about the erosion of authority that ‘came with the defeat and collapse of the monarchy’.186 The following statement by Horst von Metzsch, in the 1920s one of the most prolific military writers in all of Germany, was characteristic. He wrote that for generations the great military heroes of Germany’s past had provided ‘far better prophets, more selfless friends, and more visionary pedagogues for the German people’ than had the democratic politicians of the day, whom he defamed as ‘demagogues [. . .] of the masses’.187
It was precisely this perception of visionary pedagogy that led some young Reichswehr officers to make contact with the rising NSDAP in the late 1920s.188 Although the relations between the Reichswehr leadership and the Nazis remained officially strained, the two groups were increasingly connected by their shared goal of intensifying the military education of German youth despite existing Allied restrictions. On 15 March 1929, Hitler in a public speech proposed transforming the existing Reichswehr into a proper people’s army (Volksheer), an idea that was followed by similar statements in the months to come.189 At about the same time Richard Scheringer, Hans Friedrich Wendt, and Hanns Elard Ludin, three young lieutenants from the Fifth Artillery Regiment based in Ulm, started to discuss possible solutions for what they perceived as the most urgent problem of the Reichswehr and a major moral conflict: the challenge of remaining loyal to a ‘pacifist’ government that prevented the necessary restoration of the Reichswehr to its former greatness and thereby threatened the security of the nation. Although many young career officers had already developed sympathies for the NSDAP, the three lieutenants were among the first to officially engage in talks with the SA, a move that legally qualified as high treason. All three were taken into custody in March 1930, indicted, and sentenced on 4 October by the Reichsgericht in Leipzig to one and a half years of detention.190
Today, the so-called ‘Ulm Reichswehr Trial’ is best remembered because it was on this occasion that Hitler, called to the witness box, publicly asserted that his party would attempt to gain power only by legal means and no longer through a violent overthrow of the government. The trial was, however, also an important event that contributed to a further rapprochement between revolutionary-minded officers and the Nazi movement precisely because those officers who sympathized with the National Socialists felt humiliated by the trial’s outcome and the fact that they stood trial at all. The violent conduct of the SA did not deter this growing connection, as ‘the military ethos’ of the time likewise ‘believed that the failure or the betrayal of politics could be repaired by the virtues of violence’.191
The trial ultimately radicalized its key figures, albeit in different ways. Richard Scheringer converted to Communism during this time, while Hanns Ludin after his release joined the NSDAP. Ludin, the son of a gymnasium headmaster in Freiburg, represented the party in the Reichstag from July 1932 onward and was appointed leader of the SA--Gruppe Südwest on 1 April 1933.192 Both men, who remained friends for the rest of their lives despite their different political leanings, regarded themselves as members of an ‘activist generation through and through’. They wanted to be seen as idealists who, faced with the difficult task of reconciling their oath as professional soldiers with the duties of a German patriot, had opted for the latter.193 Ludin at the time appeared a well-mannered and aesthetically inclined young man who only later adapted to the rough manners of the SA, Ernst Niekisch remembered, basing his judgement on a personal meeting in 1932 and later rumours.194 By contrast, the young radical historian Eckart Kehr in 1930 sharply but prophetically criticized the younger Reichswehr officers for their lack of courage: ‘The Reichswehr officer corps always looks for the Führer, the great man; they desire to be ordered about as the Praetorian Guard, yet they don’t want to inquire as to the reason for this command.’195
The public notoriety of lieutenants like Ludin added to the growing respectability of the SA among the middle and upper classes in Germany in the early 1930s and the public perception of them as figureheads for the successful merger of German military tradition, Bildung, patriotic pride, and the fighting spirit. Even members of the aristocracy, who certainly had no interest in levelling social differences, had complex views of the SA in the early 1930s, particularly when they were young.196 The later leader of the German military resistance effort against Hitler, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, born in 1907 and therefore – like Ludin and Scheringer – a member of the war youth generation, as a Reichswehr lieutenant during the last years of the Weimar Republic moved freely within the esoteric and highly elitist circle of young men who gathered around the famous poet Stefan George and met nightly in illegal training courses that Stauffenberg organized for the SA.197 As his sympathetic biographer Peter Hoffmann notes, the idea of a militia-based army, included in paragraph 22 of the Nazi Party platform of 1920 and strongly advocated throughout the early 1930s by SA Chief of Staff Ernst Röhm in particular, enjoyed widespread sympathy among aspiring military leaders like Stauffenberg.198 The Reichswehr in the early 1930s offered training courses for the SA in ‘nearly all garrison towns’, one former instructor later remembered.199 The army hoped to win over and transform the SA into a kind of Notpolizei, or ‘auxiliary police’, which could be called on in times of domestic upheaval or foreign attack.200 In turn, Röhm restructured the SA according to military needs in February 1931.201
From the perspective of many nationalist Germans, a political movement that could win over men like Stauffenberg and mobilize their fellow Germans across social classes was worth serious consideration. Regardless of the fact that the SA’s practices were at least as violent and aggressive as those of its competitors, many contemporary observers from the middle and upper classes framed them differently. Whereas these groups perceived the political violence of the left as a serious threat to law and order, they excused Nazi violence as a regretful but necessary and therefore ultimately legitimate means of national self-defence. By early 1932 the NSDAP estimated that nine out of ten Reichswehr members were sympathetic or loyal to the party.202 Although this figure seems excessively optimistic, it sheds light on the exuberant confidence felt among the National Socialist leadership corps. And, regardless of the questionable factual accuracy of these estimates, the following years would undoubtedly prove that the party was right in its assumption that no sustained resistance against the implementation of Nazi policies could be expected from the German military.