PART III

6

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE SA BETWEEN 1934 AND 1939

We are under the impression that within the SA one still finds the most upright Nazis and that many of them are heavily radicalized.

— Report of a Bavarian Social Democrat, 1935¹

The deadly crackdown on the SA leadership in the summer of 1934 shocked many of the organization’s rank and file, who up to then had believed the constant trumpeting of the SA’s central place in the Third Reich. All of a sudden the SA’s ‘achievements’ of the previous years, as well as its members’ far-reaching goals for the future, faced a serious challenge. A November 1934 letter from forty-one-year-old SA-Obersturmbannführer Wilhelm Blessing to his superior illustrates widespread fear and uncertainty among SA men in these troubled times. Although Blessing initially stated that he avoided thinking about the general aspects of the SA, as these thoughts bothered him to such an extent that they could not be dealt with in writing, several lines later he linked his personal material and emotional problems with a lack of respect for the SA and its achievements. Full of sarcasm and helpless anger, Blessing wrote:

Please do not believe that I have joined the camp of the materialists, only because I look at my future from that perspective. Nowadays, one is forced to act according to that viewpoint. And one certainly has family obligations that one can’t ignore. My first marriage broke down because I did not care enough for it – I am not inclined to let this happen again with my second marriage. That’s simply how it is: who nowadays is skilled at pushing to the fore or at licking the boots of one’s superior makes progress and is soon free of financial worries. Whoever doesn’t fit this mould will croak.

Whereas the majority of Germans had supposedly managed to obtain secure positions in the Third Reich, the SA leader, said Blessing, was ‘in limbo and doesn’t know what will become of him tomorrow. Nobody is mindful of the fact that it was us who participated in the takeover of power a little bit.’²

This statement reveals a contradictory tendency. On the one hand, Blessing’s grievance testifies to a Verbürgerlichung, or growing middle-class sentiment, within the SA. In contrast with the ‘time of struggle’, when stormtroopers took pride in the fact that they needed neither material nor social comfort, Blessing in the autumn of 1934 emphasized that his private life did indeed matter, both with regard to his new marriage and in view of his (still limited) ability to free himself from pressing financial worries (Plate 21). On the other hand, his complaint is couched in the language of a ‘Nazi morality’ which started from the premise that personal effort and dedication to the political cause rather than qualifications or professional networks should determine one’s success in the ‘people’s community’.³

The liquidation of several dozen SA leaders in the summer of 1934 cast serious doubt on such high expectations. Many militants reacted to the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ with initial disbelief and showed signs of apathy in the following months. According to Gestapo reports from the second half of 1934 and 1935, feelings of despair were widespread within the ranks. In the autumn of 1934 many stormtroopers stayed away from duty. Those who showed up declared that they were no ‘sports students’, but soldiers who required military training with real weapons.⁴ A report from May 1935 plainly stated that ‘the ordinary SA man does not know at all why he is taking part in SA activities’.⁵ And the Gestapo observed that a specifically designed programme of ‘SA employment therapy’, which consisted of frequent but mostly tame duties and sporting events like the SA Reich Sport Contest (Reichswettkampf der SA), kept the men busy but barely concealed the Brownshirts’ lack of perspective and ‘firm purpose’.⁶ Accordingly, the Social Democratic Party in exile came to the conclusion that the SA units more and more resembled a ‘container’ for ‘primitive forms of comradeship’. The SA’s ideology would be like dust on the surface of that container – unable to penetrate the minds and hearts of the stormtroopers.⁷

There was a degree of wishful thinking in such assessments, yet even so, all empirical evidence suggests that the SA’s mobilizing power declined sharply in the wake of the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ and that its members suffered from feelings of uncertainty and vulnerability. As late as April 1936, Alfred Rosenberg, on the occasion of a speech he had given in front of several thousand Brownshirts, noted in his diary that his listeners had been extremely thankful for his encouragement, an encouragement that was ‘unfortunately still needed’.⁸ A report on the future of the SA produced at the end of 1934 from the American Embassy in Berlin analysed the situation aptly by outlining two possible developments: ‘It remains to be seen whether the educational work set forth by Hitler can afford a satisfactory substitute for the excitements and hopes of the past. If the morale and prestige of the organisation cannot be maintained, it will either decline in importance or become a focus of growing discontent in the party.’⁹

Searching for New Tasks

In the three years following the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ the SA went through a period of decline, uncertainty, and reorientation. It lost its financial autonomy and came to be dependent on the NSDAP and its Reich Treasurer, Franz Xaver Schwarz.¹⁰ The regional SA-Gruppen were granted the authority to expel all rank-and-file stormtroopers whom they deemed unsuitable for ideological or personal reasons, and the SA leadership corps (defined as the rank of Sturmführer and above) was subjected to thorough investigation by a newly created SA court, the Sondergericht der Obersten SA-Führung.¹¹ It is not without irony that the fulfilment of Röhm’s aspiration to establish a special SA court did not lead to the protection of his men against criminal charges from the authorities, but to the impeachment and instigation of disciplinary actions against them. Between 1934 and 1939 more than 15 per cent of all high-ranking SA leaders – or 1,900 men – received disciplinary penalties, mainly for alcoholism, embezzlement of funds, or illegal violent acts.¹²

The high number of punishments handed out as well as the public humiliation of the SA that accompanied them combined to make it appear less a Nazi elite formation and more a bunch of conceited fools. This development provoked very different reactions among the organization’s men. As the declining membership numbers between the summer of 1934 and April 1938 indicate, one out of two stormtroopers during this period left the SA for good, with the majority departing voluntarily.¹³ Yet the decline in membership was actually surprisingly moderate, given the SA’s traditionally high turnover rates, falling unemployment in Germany from 1935 onward, and the mismatch between the rather bleak present and the official new narrative that extended the SA’s ‘mission’ of the Kampfzeit into the circumstances of the consolidated Third Reich. Whereas Viktor Lutze and the OSAF propaganda glorified the SA as the ‘birthplace of the German Volksgemeinschaft’ and the individual SA man as someone who had transformed from a pioneer of Nazism into a guardian of the new state, the stormtroopers’ everyday activities in the mid-1930s not only lacked a sense of purpose but were sometimes as ‘unheroic’ as the uprooting of trees in the local communal forest or the provision of help after a car accident.¹⁴ At a time when Communists with daggers drawn were no longer to be found in the smoky taverns of the German cities, the evils of nature, poverty, and self-righteous individualism were presented as the new adversaries. Getting up early to participate in an SA activity was sufficient grounds to be elevated into a model of sacrifice for the Volksgemeinschaft. Consequently, the contribution of Silesian stormtroopers building new settlement houses was praised as a ‘symbol of the comradeship of our times’. At least in propaganda, the militants’ duty of ensuring the cohesion of and solidarity among the ‘Aryan’ Germans now replaced their previous task of street-fighting against political rivals. The militarized language of this propaganda nevertheless remained the same. The SA’s fundraising efforts for Winter Aid were characterized as a ‘peaceful expedition’, and on the occasion of the annual Christmas celebrations the SA was to be found ‘at the very front’.¹⁵ Such formulations contribute to the unintentionally hilarious impression such texts have on today’s readers, and even at the time of their publication, in the late 1930s, they had only a limited popular appeal. Yet, despite all these shortcomings, the SA of 1938 was still three times as big as it had been in the worst period of economic depression in 1932.

Many longstanding stormtroopers remained in the humiliated and ‘cleansed’ SA because they lacked alternatives and feared the professional disadvantages that might result from leaving. Although high expectations for the SA’s central role in the new societal order of the Third Reich were clearly unrealistic after the summer of 1934, a relatively stable position in the organization proved for many their only advantage in competing for jobs and influence against their many more qualified, younger, better-born, or simply more ambitious rivals.¹⁶ Furthermore, those stormtroopers who had joined the ranks of the SA in the 1920s had been taking a radical step that had frequently caused ruptures with old friends and pre-existing social networks. In return, the new ‘SA family’ provided them with bonds and emotional shelter, but it also made them dependent on the organization. The writings of these men often reveal a fragile self-esteem; in the words of historian Peter Merkl, they even display a pattern of ‘psychological marginality’.¹⁷ This insecurity was barely concealed by rough manners and was reinforced by the uncertainty of the political situation and the persistent financial problems many activists continued to face. All of these factors produced a situation that discouraged members from making independent, let alone brave decisions.

There were also those who remained committed to the Nazi ideology and for precisely that reason remained loyal to the SA. One of them, the Austrian stormtrooper Herman Stühlinger, co-founder in 1930 of the National Socialist German Doctors’ League, claimed as late as July 1938: ‘There is only one formation that represents the people’s community, only one that passes on the idealism and the willingness to sacrifice, and that is precisely the SA!’¹⁸ Regardless of the degree of wishful thinking such a statement expressed, it should not be dismissed as unimportant, as it points to a striking continuity in the self-understanding of the SA, which persisted in seeing itself as the guardian of core Nazi values and as the organization that guaranteed social cohesion in the Third Reich. High-ranking SA generals assured each other as late as 1940 that ‘the SA not only possessed an educational mission on its own terms, but is rather responsible for the National Socialist political education per se’.¹⁹ If anything, well into the Second World War, Germany remained not an ‘SS State’, as Eugen Kogon famously put it in 1946, but an SA state.²⁰ During the war years, the SS dominated in the occupied territories and abroad, but within the Old Reich men in SA uniforms prevailed.

Particularly among the ‘Old Fighters’, widespread disappointment at the lukewarm ‘social revolution’ that had accompanied the Nazi takeover of power and the humiliation and trauma caused by the ‘Röhm purge’ prevailed and led to an intensification of their aggressive attitude. The first stanza of the song Achtung SA!, popular in northern Germany in 1935, is a particularly characteristic expression of this mood:

The Reds are defeated,

The whole bigwig pack is overcome.

And yet the cheeky fat bourgeois arises,

Who never bled and had no fighting done.

All you bourgeois and bigwigs, on guard we stand!

We are our old selves, even today.

We bled, fought and earthworks we manned,

For Germany, but never for you.

So forward, forward, clear the streets!

Bourgeois, beat it!

Bourgeois, beat it!

We’ll break all your bones like treats,

And smoke out your temples while at it!²¹

In light of such aggressive songs it is no surprise that for many Germans the brown shirt signalled danger, before and long after 1934. The German Jew and later historian Fritz Stern of Breslau remembered that he saw his first SA man at a North Sea resort in the summer of 1931, at the age of five. At the time, the young boy could not have been fully aware of the violence the SA was capable of performing, but in the historian’s recollection this seemingly unimportant detail is portrayed as the first direct contact with an organization that turned out to be a deadly enemy.²² Among the oldest memories of the political activist Reinhard Strecker is the noise of SA units on the evening of 9 November 1938 as they stormed the apartment house in Berlin-Charlottenburg where the then eight-year-old boy lived with his family. ‘The trampling of hobnailed boots, rushing up the stairways, is for me the sound of the Third Reich,’ Strecker remembered (Plate 22).²³ People throughout the 1930s knew that a stormtrooper propaganda march could easily turn into a violent brawl. For the young mother Helene Fußhoeller from Cologne, the characteristic sound of a group of SA men tramping through the streets was even more frightful than the howling of aerial mines during the Second World War.²⁴

These examples underline the extent to which the ‘brown army of millions’ characterized the outer appearance of the Third Reich to a considerable degree. This impression was no longer achieved by the provocative marches and brawls of the late Weimar years, but by the sheer presence of hundreds of thousands of SA men who were continuously encouraged to create and to defend the ‘people’s community’ even within the most remote corners of society. One of these remote corners was the little village of Weildorf located near the market town of Teisendorf in the Alpine foothills and not known as a stronghold of anti-Nazi activities. Yet in the winter of 1936–7 a violent incident occurred there that was in many ways typical of the problems and the agitation caused by the SA in traditional rural milieus. Although the origins of this incident remain obscure, Weildorf in 1936 was the site of a kind of local revolution after its honorary mayor, a local peasant named Johann Helminger, was forced to step down for political reasons. After some months of interim, he was finally succeeded in November of the same year by a farmer from neighbouring Hörfing, the twenty-five-year-old Johann Traxl. As one of his first actions in office, this young Nazi mayor launched a kind of ‘punitive expedition’ with the goal of strengthening his authority and disciplining the peasants. To this end, he ordered between thirty and forty stormtroopers to come to Weildorf on Sunday, 6 December 1936. Upon their arrival the SA men disturbed the regular Catholic afternoon mass by marching and singing around the church. Soon afterward they entered the local inn, where they mingled with the farmers and announced, among other things, that a showcase of Julius Streicher’s notorious antisemitic weekly Der Stürmer would be installed next to the local classrooms. These provocations of a devout Catholic population had an instant effect, as several of the peasants objected to the public display of Der Stürmer propaganda. Interestingly, one of them argued that he had once regularly read this publication and now thought it irresponsible to confront schoolchildren with such graphic detail of the ‘moral misdoings of the Jews’. Although this statement hardly indicated fundamental opposition to the Nazi regime, the SA leader present used such tame criticism as an opportunity to have the peasant arrested for several days. Another farmer from Weildorf explained that although he would in principle not object to participating in a paramilitary exercise he was ordered to attend, for the time being he was needed more at home to run his farm and take care of his large family. For this statement alone he was insulted, beaten severely, and finally taken into ‘protective custody’. The Brownshirts furthermore called several guests in the inn ‘bastards’ (Schweinehunde), ‘buggers’ (Misthackl), and ‘traitors of the fatherland’. An official report concluded that the peaceful, modest, and hardworking peasants of Weildorf had not deserved such treatment by the SA. ‘This is not the way to win someone over, but to make the well-meaning stubborn.’²⁵ Nevertheless, the young Nazi mayor responsible for the violence remained in office until the end of the Third Reich, a fact that points to the limits of local resistance – understood here as a more restrained form of discontent than outright political opposition.²⁶

As incidents like this one in Weildorf make obvious, the role of stormtroopers after 1934 cannot simply be reduced to that of ‘collecting box rattlers’ (Sammelbüchsenrassler), block leaders, or air-raid wardens.²⁷ They also served as a kind of semi-official party police that intimidated, molested, and often arrested those the regime deemed in need of punishment, be it for racial, political, or – as in Weildorf – religious and at times very personal reasons. Variations notwithstanding, the SA therefore remained a relevant and violent organization, particularly on the local and regional levels. On the national and international levels, stormtroopers were ordered to fulfil more directly political tasks that were closely related to the SA’s paramilitary origins. In what follows, I will analyse three fields of action that demonstrate to what extent the SA still heavily influenced the lives of millions of Germans in the years between 1934 and 1939. This influence was exerted, first, by its repeated antisemitic boycott actions, riots in the streets, and outright acts of unprovoked physical violence; second, by its successful takeover of the leadership of Germany’s shooting associations and riding clubs; and third, by its renaissance as a paramilitary strike force in the context of the Anschluss of Austria, the reintegration of the Memelland, and the destabilization and dismembering of Czechoslovakia in 1938–9.

Defining the Limits of Volksgemeinschaft: Antisemitic Violence

One of the fields of action for which the Brownshirts are best known was their antisemitic agitation against and physical attacks on Jews, which intensified with the NSDAP’s rise to power and culminated on 9 and 10 November 1938 in Kristallnacht, or the ‘Night of Broken Glass’. As historian Alan E. Steinweis noted, although this was ‘the single instance of large-scale, public, and organized physical violence against Jews inside Germany before the Second World War’, it built on a series of previous attacks on Jews that in many cases were carried out by stormtroopers.²⁸It was precisely the SA’s record of long years of antisemitic activity that – in conjunction with its ideology – made the outburst of 9 November possible. Furthermore, in order to understand the behaviour of ordinary Germans during this time who often not only took no action to stop the violence or plundering of Jewish property but in many cases joined in, an analysis of the appeal and reach of the SA’s anti-Jewish violence between 1933 and 1938 is key.²⁹ That physical assaults on Jews were a major factor in the establishment of the Nazi terror regime in 1933–4 has already been explained in chapter 4. Therefore, in what follows, the focus is on the period beginning in the second half of 1934 and lasting until the spring of 1939.

The ‘Röhm purge’ did not constitute a halt of the SA’s anti-Jewish attacks. On the contrary, precisely because the militants from 1934 onward often lacked the opportunity to engage in the physical violence that during the ‘years of struggle’ had so successfully served as a means of bonding for SA units, they welcomed opportunities to attack Jews. Engagement in interpersonal violence steadied the shaken confidence of those stormtroopers who participated in such actions, particularly as the SA man’s self-image was to a substantial degree based on his ability to impose himself on others physically. The widespread frustration among the SA rank and file after the executions of the summer of 1934 therefore more than once translated into attacks on Jews, the regime’s scapegoats; this violence both acted as a valve for the Brownshirts’ pent-up aggression and was a consequence of their ideological convictions.

When the authorities ordered the SA to abstain from antisemitic ‘pillory actions’ (Prangeraktionen) in the city of Breslau in June 1935, the stormtroopers formally requested permission to continue such violence in plain clothes. Nazi mobs composed of young men and women, with many Brownshirts among them, assaulted Jewish and ‘Jewish-looking’ passers-by during the following weeks in the streets of the Lower Silesian capital. They hit, spat on, and insulted even children. A Jewish café was attacked with the purpose of ‘dragging out’ and beating up its guests. When police officers called to help arrived at the scene, they were greeted with insults such as Judenknechte! or ‘servants of the Jews’, and accused of defending the regime’s enemies.³⁰

Besides such barely disguised SA attacks were incidents that were indeed spontaneous, the outcome of a dangerous combination of ideology, personal frustration, and alcohol. Late on the night of 10 October 1935, for example, a drunken stormtrooper dressed in his uniform rang the bell of a Jewish Berliner, Alice Meyer, and threatened to invade her apartment and to ‘crush the small of her back’.³¹ The multitude of similar incidents that occurred throughout the Reich made it clear to the German population that, despite the regime’s repeated calls for moderation, the Brownshirts continued to pose a significant risk to whoever happened to come into their firing line. It is significant that the perpetrator of the above-mentioned attack in Berlin was released from police custody the same night, and that the victim did not press charges. As in Breslau, the capital’s uniformed police complained about repeated verbal and physical attacks on its officers, particularly on occasions when the latter attempted to stop ‘anti-Jewish demonstrations’ in the area of the Kurfürstendamm.³²

Such anti-Jewish attacks also had another, more political dimension. Whereas the Nazi regime from 1933 onward systematically marginalized Jews by legal means, stormtroopers made such racial exclusion highly visible (Plate 19). Their violence in the years 1933 to 1938 regularly took place in public, in front of the eyes of the local and regional communities. Insulting, spitting at, and beating Jews not only humiliated and terrified the victims of such assaults but also illustrated the new, highly unequal balance of power in German society. This was a ‘lesson’ that many non-Jewish as well as Jewish Germans learned quickly. They could either join in such actions or, in case of disagreement, at least they understood it was best not to oppose it. The Brownshirts’ belief in the SA as the educator of the German masses could thus be upheld. From this perspective SA anti-Jewish violence was a key strategy in the regime’s attempt to create a politically loyal ‘people’s community’. It not only served to intimidate those deemed ‘outsiders’ but also clarified the extent to which the criteria for processes of integration and exclusion were racially grounded.³³ By early 1936 this process had advanced to the point that SA Chief of Staff Lutze, in an official address to the diplomatic corps in the Reich’s capital, referred to the German Jews as ‘unwelcome guests’ who had committed ‘countless crimes against the German people’ and would now face the stormtroopers’ legitimate punishment.³⁴

Such official statements made it clear to the German Jews that in the years to follow they could not expect anything good from the SA. The territorial expansion of the Reich in the second half of the 1930s only made things worse. In particular, the Anschluss of Austria in March 1938 was a decisive watershed for the Jews, both in Austria and in the Old Reich.³⁵ Social relations in what now became the Reich’s Ostmark literally changed overnight. Even seventy-five years later the last remaining eyewitnesses of this time remember particular incidents that shed light on this transformation. According to the Jewish Viennese pensioner Vilma Neuwirth, the local SA became particularly insolent after this event. The daughter of a local hairdresser, aged ten in 1938, remembered a steady customer visiting her father on the day following the Anschluss. This man requested his regular haircut but now sported a tailored SA uniform and shining boots. From now on he would rule the roost, this long-time customer declared boldly. Instead of paying for the haircut, he simply walked away once it was done – but not before he had spat on the ground in front of the hairdresser to humiliate him and illustrate the new power relations in the city.³⁶ In the weeks and months to follow, many Austrian Jews had similar experiences. As a consequence, half of the 190,000 Jews living in Austria had left their home country by the spring of 1939 – including several thousand who were illegally deported by the SS and the SA.³⁷

In the Old Reich, the same situation could be seen, with the months following the Anschluss witnessing a dramatic rise in antisemitic violence everywhere in Germany. This violence aimed to exclude the Jews, factually and symbolically, from their local communities and force them to emigrate. Starting on 13 June 1938, police forces arrested thousands of male Jews on an order from the Reichskriminalpolizeiamt, signed by Heydrich. Every police headquarters had to take at least 200 male Jews who were ‘fit for work’ into ‘preventive custody’. On the same occasion all male Jews who had previously been sentenced to a prison term of at least one month’s length were to be arrested also.³⁸ In the following weeks, the authorities seized about 12,000 Jewish men and sent the vast majority of them to concentration camps.³⁹

Such raids and imprisonments were not only carried out by regular police forces. According to the authorities, local groups of SA and HJ jointly arrested about 1,000 Jews in the capital city of Berlin between 17 and 21 June 1938 alone.⁴⁰ In the predominantly middle-class neighbourhood of Berlin-Schöneberg nearly all Jewish shop windows were ‘decorated’ with antisemitic graffiti, French newspapers reported. In the eastern parts of town, which were generally more working class, SA troops went from shop to shop, bowing to ‘Aryan’ customers and abusing Jewish tradesmen.⁴¹Stormtroopers even cordoned off cinemas and arrested their Jewish viewers, ordering the cinema operators not to let any Jews watch movies in the future.⁴² The lawyer Hans Reichmann, a long-time board member of the liberal CV-Verein, remembered in his memoirs that in the days following these arrests, German Jews were frightened by persistent rumours that 100,000 militants had been ordered to seize all Jewish homes in Germany.⁴³ Even though these rumours turned out to be false, they strongly suggest that the German Jews had come to fear the stormtroopers no less than the political police or the SS.

On the occasion of this increase in what the Nazis referred to as Judenaktionen, or ‘Actions against Jews’, the acting Bavarian Minister of the Interior, Adolf Wagner, informed the five Bavarian Gauleiter – Fritz Wächtler, Julius Streicher, Otto Hellmuth, Karl Wahl, and Josef Bürckel – on 31 October 1938 that such attacks were harmful to the reputation of both the NSDAP and the state. However, his reasoning makes it clear that his criticism did not stem from any disagreement with the goals of these acts:

We no longer have to resort to violent acts in order to reach our objectives, in particular with regard to the Jews, as our state and its institutions are not only strong enough, but also absolutely determined to do everything that is necessary to reach our goals and to preserve public calm and order. Should it happen that a Jew commits a serious offence, that he is tedious or that his removal becomes necessary, then the police are at any moment in the position to operate properly and lawfully, to take the Jew into protective custody or to remove him in some other way. Not under any circumstances can we tolerate violent measures being taken.⁴⁴

This statement indicates the defencelessness of the Jews in Germany in 1938 – if not in the legal, then certainly in the political sense. The report was not worth the paper it was written on.

Only ten days later, on the night of 9–10 November 1938, thousands of Jewish citizens throughout the Reich were violently attacked, imprisoned, injured, or killed, their businesses destroyed, and their synagogues burnt down. Today’s estimates of the total number of Jewish men arrested on this night vary between 30,000 and 60,000. Whereas Nazi leaders on 12 November 1938 stated that the number of synagogues destroyed was slightly higher than 100, the Social Democratic Party in exile provided the more reasonable figure of 520. At least ninety-one Jews were killed.⁴⁵Contemporaries immediately understood the symbolic dimension of ‘Crystal Night’. The Nazi regime did not need to put its message into words: it was clear that it wanted centuries of Jewish life in Germany to come to a violent end, once and for all. The social composition of the mobs that participated in Kristallnacht differed from town to town, from region to region. Most perpetrators were adult men, but women and even children also took part, often to a considerable degree.⁴⁶ Despite variations, the large majority of accounts agree that the stormtroopers were the most active group carrying out the crimes, although not all eyewitnesses might have realized this immediately, as the SA men were officially prohibited from dressing in their uniforms during that night.

Few accounts explain the SA’s role in and overall character of this pogrom better than a report provided by the SA-Gruppe Nordmark in early December 1938, four weeks after the events had taken place. Written by the group’s leader, SA-Obergruppenführer Joachim Meyer-Quade, this four-page-long report reveals with rare clarity the chain of command and actions taken in the city of Kiel. On the evening of 9 November, Meyer-Quade had been in Munich at the Hotel Schottenhammel on the occasion of the annual NSDAP celebrations of the failed Hitler Putsch fifteen years previously. At about ten in the evening, Goebbels informed the party leaders present that in retaliation for the murder of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris by the Jew Herschel Grünspan, a concerted operation against German Jewry was necessary. Meyer-Quade immediately offered the services of his men to Hinrich Lohse, the Gauleiter of the Nordmark. At about twenty minutes past eleven, Meyer-Quade telephoned his Chief of Staff in Kiel and ordered the destruction of Jewish businesses and assembly rooms in the larger cities of the Gau. According to his report, he explicitly prohibited any mistreatment of Jews. Yet other orders he gave over the course of the night – ‘foreign Jews must not be touched’ and ‘in case of resistance weapons are to be used’ – reveal that physical violence, at least against German Jews, was not only tolerated but strongly encouraged.

By midnight the regional police president as well as the state police had been informed about the upcoming pogroms. Over the following three hours, the SA leaders of Kiel met with other leading representatives of the SS and the NSDAP in the Nordmark at the city’s ‘brown house’ to discuss the imminent operation. The Kiel police delivered to them lists of Jewish homes and businesses in the city, lists that were to provide the basis for the destruction carried out by the SA mobs. According to Meyer-Quade’s report, all Nazi leaders present agreed that the Jews of Kiel had to be taken into custody and should be transported to the city’s police headquarters. They likewise agreed that ‘blood should be paid by blood’, and that ‘at least two Jews’, chosen from a blacklist of the ‘politically most dangerous Jews’, were to be executed. The Nazis even arranged the organization of two veritable execution squads comprising a member of the SA and the SS and an officer from the state police.

The attacks were set to start at 3.45 a.m. Shortly before that time the stormtroopers met at the Adolf-Hitler-Platz at the heart of the city. Many had spent the evening hours in bars and pubs, celebrating the Hitler Putsch jubilee. Those who were still dressed in their brown shirts at this time received civilian clothing from the nearby town hall. From there, they then started their campaign of demolitions and arrests, accompanied by police officers who stood guard outside the places of destruction. Under their eyes the organized mob vandalized the local synagogue and at least eleven Jewish shops, as well as an unknown number of private homes. Fifty-eight Jews in Kiel were imprisoned. However, the ‘execution squads’ were only partly successful, as the two Jews targeted – the middle-class shop owners Paul Leven and Gustav Lask – were shot and severely wounded but survived the assaults and later emigrated to the United States.⁴⁷

Similar scenes occurred in many other German cities.⁴⁸ An eyewitness described the events that unfolded in the city of Bocholt on the Lower Rhine as follows: ‘SA men with torches. Völkisch songs. Roaring. Devastation of Jewish shops and flats. Men beaten and jeered at. Attack on the synagogue, the sexton and his wife.’⁴⁹ In Niedermarsberg, a small city in southern Westphalia, the SA Sturm that was most active during the pogroms consisted of men who were employed by the town’s psychiatric clinic as physicians and carers. Nursing personnel helped destroy the local synagogue, attacked Jewish citizens, and vandalized their homes.⁵⁰ In the spa town of Bad Harzburg, the Nazi mob arrested at least seven men and several women. They were brought to the local town hall, and the men were later transported to the state prison in nearby Wolfenbüttel. Two of the city’s Jews were so heavily beaten that they died shortly afterward. However, when the widow of one of them requested that the local Protestant church inter the urn of her deceased husband in its cemetery, the parish refused to do so – alarmed by the city mayor who claimed that he could not guarantee that the SA and the SS would not dig up the grave and have the remains removed.⁵¹ Viktor Lutze in his otherwise detailed personal records noted the events of the night in very terse fashion, without a word of remorse or a sign of empathy for the victims: ‘Retaliation for the murder of v. Rath in Paris – Jewish businesses shut down, synagogues put down.’⁵²

These examples, taken from one larger city and several provincial towns, not only testify to the preeminent role that SA units all over Germany played in these events but also make clear the extent to which the stormtroopers’ antisemitic violence had become official state policy. The SA provided the Nazi state with shock troops that were quick to mobilize and experienced in carrying out violence. Yet, unlike the SA of 1933–5, the SA in 1938 was a disciplined organization under the control of the NSDAP that respected the limits of its operations set by the regime. In turn, the Nazi leadership made sure that the activists’ longings for personal benefits were satisfied. The confiscation of Jewish properties in Vienna in the pogrom allowed 2,200 flats to be provided to party members, claimed the Gauleiter Odilo Globocnik. The NSDAP’s local Untere Donausstraßechapter in the Austrian capital used the opportunity to provide its party office with new furniture and typewriters, stolen from an allegedly Jewish stockbroker. In Upper Silesia schoolchildren in the days after the pogrom boasted of the new valuables their fathers had brought home from their raids. And in the small Franconian town of Markt Berolzheim near Weißenburg, a stormtrooper on the afternoon of 10 November 1938 even organized an auction of the private belongings of Jewish families and the Jewish community.⁵³

It would be wrong to assume, however, that the mass participation in these antisemitic attacks indicated unanimous agreement – in other words, that the ideology and practices of the SA had so deeply penetrated the minds and hearts of the majority of Germans that pogroms like Kristallnachtwere widely embraced. ‘Are we upright Germans or just a mob [Pöbelhaufen]?’ an exasperated German woman asked rhetorically in her diary.⁵⁴ And the historian Gerhard Ritter, writing to his mother two weeks after the events, expressed what many thought, but rarely said openly: ‘What we have experienced throughout Germany in the last two weeks are the most disgraceful and dreadful events to have happened for a long time. How did we come to this?! One of the many consequences is [. . . ], for the first time now, general shame and indignation.’⁵⁵ Yet the moral indignation expressed here – even if sincerely felt – makes one wonder how Ritter had interpreted the many acts of antisemitic violence that had taken place in the months and years before. From today’s perspective, it is obvious that Kristallnacht was the most excessive incident of its kind, yet in many ways not a singular event. Its scale and dimension were unique, but the perpetrators’ rationale and the forms of violence to which they resorted were not. In defence of Ritter and his fellow Germans, however, it should not be overlooked that even many SA men did not necessarily associate their organization with attacks on the Jews. Although the stormtroopers spread the regime’s obsessive antisemitic ideology and propaganda, not all of them translated that ideology into practical action, as personal notes and diaries of SA men from this period will demonstrate.

Penetrating German Society

One stormtrooper whose personal comments on the SA in the mid- and late 1930s have survived was Wilhelm Hosenfeld, a village teacher and later army officer who became known to the wider public in recent years as the man who helped the Polish-Jewish musician and composer Władysław Szpilman, immortalized in Roman Polanski’s 2002 film The Pianist. While Hosenfeld’s help for Jewish and Polish civilians in occupied Warsaw during his time with the Wehrmacht earned him the title of ‘Righteous among the Nations’ from Yad Vashem, in the context of this book his earlier remarks as an SA-Truppführer, a position comparable to a technical sergeant, are of particular interest.

Hosenfeld, an observant Catholic, joined the SA on 15 April 1933. Throughout the 1930s he lived in the small village of Thalau in Hesse, near the city of Fulda. This region was very pious, rural, and poor – a far cry from the big cities with their predominantly proletarian SA-Stürme that historians have often taken as representative of the whole organization. Hosenfeld – attracted by the SA’s comradeship and paramilitary sports culture, which reminded him of his youth in the Wandervogel movement – was soon promoted to lead the small SA-Sturm in Thalau.⁵⁶ ‘In the uniform of the SA man one is no longer a free agent. One represents the larger community,’ Hosenfeld noted enthusiastically on 19 January 1936.⁵⁷ According to his diary entries and notes from the time, he initially shared the national exhilaration that spread throughout Germany in the wake of the National Socialist ‘revolution’ and seemed to enjoy his activities as SA-Truppführer, at least until 1936, when more and more sceptical comments start to prevail in his diaries. The murder of Ernst Röhm and its impact on the SA do not appear in his writings – nor do the antisemitic activities of the SA, even in 1938.⁵⁸ Instead, what Hosenfeld mentions repeatedly are the stormtroopers’ athletic competitions,⁵⁹ propaganda marches in the region and on the occasion of the Reichsparteitage in Nuremberg – Hosenfeld participated in 1936 and 1938 – and social evenings with his comrades.⁶⁰

This selective choice of events is remarkable particularly because Hosenfeld otherwise appears an alert observer of the social transformations of the early years of the Third Reich. His comments demonstrate that one should be careful not to dismiss the sporting and social activities of the SA in these years as peripheral. For Hosenfeld, a happily married father of five, ‘SA community’ in the countryside was not based on bloody clashes with political opponents or attacks on Jews. Nor did he take an interest in the SA as a tool for professional advancement, using it like an ‘old boys’ network’, as Blessing did. Rather, the SA provided Hosenfeld with a new and welcome form of manly sociability, building on older ideas of a nation in arms as well as the rather modern idea of the necessity of physically training one’s body. In the same way that it had appealed to the Christian deacons who joined the SA in large numbers in the early 1930s,⁶¹ the SA proved attractive to the village teacher Hosenfeld for three reasons. It gave him the opportunity to exercise power and develop his leadership skills, it provided him with social recognition, and it allowed him to actively but safely participate in the Nazi project of a ‘German awakening’.

These attractions were not specific to Hosenfeld, as an analysis of the SA’s influence on the German associations, particularly those in small cities and villages, makes clear. Two fields of activity that were highly popular in small-town and rural Germany in the 1930s and increasingly fell under the control of the stormtroopers demonstrate this influence: shooting associations and riding clubs. Unlike the research on other European Fascist or para-Fascist regimes like in Spain, for which Dylan Riley has recently demonstrated the extent to which Fascist rule relied on its penetration of traditional associations, such a perspective has been largely absent from studies on the early years of the Third Reich.⁶² Yet it is highly instructive for a history of the SA. As has been demonstrated above, the SA’s ‘conquest’ of Germany’s rural areas had already been successful in the years prior to the Nazi takeover of power. Building on this strategy, the SA in the early years of the Third Reich continued and even intensified its attempts to establish itself as an indispensable organization that combined political ambitions with small-town sociability.

The first field of activity in which the SA’s strategy was most successful was the assimilation of the German shooting associations. For a long time the domain of the influential and the powerful, shooting clubs began to mushroom in the early days of the Weimar Republic, expanding to the middle and lower-middle classes. Small-scale calibre shooting, introduced in 1920, quickly achieved such popularity that only five years later, in 1925, it had become the third most popular sport in Germany, with about 500,000 participants organized in diverse clubs and leagues.⁶³ Even prior to the NSDAP’s rise to prominence and later power, participation in such shooting clubs was not an innocent hobby divorced from politics. As their members’ identity was based on a particular form of masculinity that regarded the ability to defend oneself, one’s family, and one’s homeland as a core value, shooting associations, in line with the even more popular Kriegervereine, or ‘veterans’ associations’, tended to favour national or even nationalist sentiments.⁶⁴ The organizers of marksmanship festivals in the German provinces openly espoused an intimate connection between the shooting skills to be acquired in the clubs and the larger national mission to enable the German people to break free from the ‘chains’ of Versailles and to overcome the national humiliation they had suffered. Many understood membership in shooting associations to be an alternative form of military service.⁶⁵

Such an ideological predisposition facilitated increasing collaboration between the German shooting associations and the SA from the mid-1930s onward, even if former Stahlhelmers, who had represented large portions of the membership of diverse middle-class associations since the 1920s, were anything but amused by any new attempt to drag them into a National Socialist organization. Yet, by and large, the new political situation in the Reich that followed the Nazi takeover intensified the ‘mutual rapprochement’ that already existed between the NSDAP and the millions of Germans who actively enjoyed the associations and clubs of middle-class sociability.⁶⁶ Unlike the German sports clubs, which since 1933 had lost a considerable portion of their six million members to National Socialist organizations like the SA, the SS, and the HJ, the shooting associations maintained a position of relative independence and strength until the second half of the 1930s.⁶⁷ In 1937, however, the Deutscher Schützenverband, the umbrella organization for the shooting associations, began to formally integrate into its membership representatives from the Reichskriegsministerium, or ‘Reich Ministry of War’, the OSAF, and the German Labour Front (DAF). In line with the broader militarization of (male) civil life in Germany, the publications issued by the shooting associations began increasingly to highlight their contributions to the ultimate goal of a general German Wehrhaftmachung, or the transformation of a civil society into one able to engage in (defensive) battles and military conflicts.⁶⁸ The rhetoric was basically identical to that used by the stormtroopers.

It should therefore come as no surprise that the SA, once its organizational power and reputation were sufficiently consolidated, made an attempt to impose itself on the dense web of German associations that shared its basic ideological values and engaged in similar practices. By 1938 the SA had achieved a monopoly over the ‘physical training and promotion of the Wehrkraft’. In contrast to the Deutscher Reichsbund für Leibesübungen, which was specifically concerned with first-class sports, the SA oversaw mass sports and organized events like the NS-Kampfspiele (first staged in 1937), the National Socialist Fighting Games (Plate 23). These occasions encouraged not top accomplishments by a very few elite sportsmen and sportswomen, but solid performances by teams engaging in sports and paramilitary exercises such as the throwing of hand grenades. The good general fitness of Germany’s male population and its versatility in the use of arms were the first priorities.⁶⁹ Consequently, beginning in 1938, the Deutscher Schützenverband was formally headed by SA-Obergruppenführer Max Jüttner, with the former president demoted to the position of deputy. As a kind of welcome gift, and in anticipation of criticism from the shooting associations, the OSAF stressed that it would devote considerable energy and money to the expansion of the shooting sports.⁷⁰ Over the following months, protests from dissatisfied club members remained rare; and critical remarks referring to the SA taking control of the clubs as an act of piracy date from the post-1945 period and are thus not reliable.⁷¹ Already at the end of 1938 the German shooting associations celebrated New Year’s Day with the motto ‘We fight and shoot for Adolf Hitler and his Greater Germany!’⁷²

Similar developments could be observed within the German riding clubs. Horse-riding had an even more elite status in German society than membership in shooting associations. Yet, even prior to the Nazi takeover of power, the SA had established regional SA-Reiterstürme, or ‘rider storms’, initially as an attempt to win over local dignitaries and influential peasants in rural Germany as well as parts of the urban establishment.⁷³ With the regime firmly in the saddle, however, the SA started to popularize horseback riding as a social activity that would help train German men for war. To quote a typical example of the SA rhetoric: ‘Riding is constant fighting, a constant affirmation of one’s militant desire for success’ (Plate 20).⁷⁴ As the historian Nele Fahnenbruck has recently demonstrated in a pioneering study, the SA expanded its ‘rider storms’ over the 1930s to such an extent that in 1938 there existed no fewer than 101 SA-Reiterstandarten in Germany. The stormtroopers praised riding as ‘perfect Wehrsport’, an ideal opportunity to train men’s physical abilities and character.⁷⁵

The SA’s attempt to win over a considerable portion of German riders competed with similar strategies employed by the SS and the Wehrmacht. Yet, the stormtroopers ultimately had the most wide-reaching appeal and organizational clout.⁷⁶ After the establishment of the Nationalsozialistisches Reiterkorps (NSRK), the equivalent of the Deutscher Schützenverband, in March 1936, the SA formally oversaw the training of all aspiring riders and – according to its own statements – ‘80 per cent of the entire German riding population’.⁷⁷ Similar to other sports, riding in the SA did not focus on excellent performances by a few elite riders, but was meant to show real ‘SA spirit’ at work. Consequently, team competitions were more highly valued than those for individual riders. The SA understood its riding competitions as a way of advertising itself by exploiting the interest of village youth in riding and at the same time serving as a symbol for a Volksgemeinschaft that overcame class boundaries through common effort, ideological firmness, and social awareness.⁷⁸

By late 1938 the cooperation between the SA and the shooting associations, riding clubs, and general sports clubs had been formally established. High-ranking SA generals controlled all three areas: the sports umbrella organization Reichsbund für Leibesübungen was headed by SA-Obergruppenführer Hans von Tschammer und Osten (who in the OSAF presided over the Hauptamt Kampfspiele); the NS-Reiterkorps was led by SA-Obergruppenführer Karl Litzmann (who in the OSAF was Chef des Hauptamtes Reit- und Fahrausbildung); and the German Shooting Association was presided over by SA-Obergruppenführer Max Jüttner (who in the OSAF was the Chef des Führungshauptamtes).⁷⁹ This overlap demonstrates that the SA had successfully integrated itself into those branches of German civil life that were related to its new task of overseeing the paramilitary training of German males. The process that led to this result was not a unilateral one of forced coordination but is more adequately described as the solidification of a mutual rapprochement between the NSDAP and the existing middle-class networks and associations. Without a considerable degree of self-mobilization, the process of political subordination could not have unfolded as smoothly as it did.⁸⁰

The SA’s political oversight and social infiltration of important branches of German middle-class social life had a lasting effect, even if, on the surface, the regional and local events of the German provinces continued to take place in a traditional way. The most obvious change was that some of the local dignitaries now dressed in Nazi uniforms, but they otherwise did not directly interfere in the proceedings, apart from delivering some welcoming speeches that were hardly ever popular. Yet such an assessment would underestimate the importance of the political shift that had taken place, as well as the lasting clout of NSDAP formations like the SA, whose members – in the blink of an eye – could turn from jovial club mates into watchdogs for the regime with considerable police powers.⁸¹ What is more, the SA’s quest for suzerainty would soon facilitate the use of the dense network of associations and clubs it had infiltrated for the prosecution of war.⁸²

However, not all stormtroopers approved of this new course of action. For many, the long-term rationale behind the SA’s new role was no substitute for the former activities that had powerfully combined political violence against ideological opponents with popular forms of male sociability. These men still wanted to be political activists, not self-satisfied Babbitts.⁸³ Correspondingly, in 1937 and 1938, Wilhelm Hosenfeld’s comments on the SA became less enthusiastic. ‘SA duty: again only few men participated. Most of them had sent excuses, but some others should have shown up. They lack the proper understanding of the SA’s significance, and that will only sink in when real tasks need to be solved,’ he noted in his diary on 15 April 1937.⁸⁴ Yet satisfying tasks remained few and far between. Instead, the local SA leaders met in September 1938 to discuss the exciting activity of ‘collection of scrap metal’.⁸⁵ Hosenfeld himself became increasingly unsure about the SA’s mission. In May 1938 he wrote disappointedly that he had just participated in an ‘SA sports day’ in the nearby city of Fulda, but that he had found it off-putting once again: ‘More and more I realize the pointlessness [of the SA].’⁸⁶ Yet Hosenfeld remained on active SA duty until he was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1939. For other soldiers with an SA background, active duty with the organization likewise became less important with the beginning of the war. The jurist Fritz Otto Böhmig on 6 June 1940 wrote to his wife how he imagined a weekend à deux: ‘Of course, there must not be SA duty on Sunday morning [. . .] I don’t want to experience how you would react if, on the first Sunday after my return, I got up at six in the morning and went to the SA!!’⁸⁷ Böhmig’s words imply that he regularly participated in SA duties on weekends prior to the war. In his letter he did not exclude that his wife thought he would continue this former habit once given the opportunity. More than a year later, on 24 August 1941, Böhmig indeed wrote to her that he was preparing a letter to be sent to his former SA-Sturm.⁸⁸ As the war continued, Hosenfeld and Böhmig both became increasingly estranged from the SA and its ideas. The few remarks Hosenfeld made on the stormtroopers in occupied Warsaw during the war years were mostly negative. For him, this organization was now ‘them’, not ‘us’. He also repeatedly commented on violent acts committed by SA men.⁸⁹ On the occasion of an ‘SA sports competition’ in Warsaw in September 1943, he informed his wife dryly: ‘A lot of mumbo-jumbo, but few accomplishments. Propaganda is the main thing. It rained the whole day.’⁹⁰

Hosenfeld’s attitude was typical for many of those who had initially welcomed the SA’s propaganda only to become frustrated with its development in the years after 1934. Yet there were also others for whom the SA did not decline but increased in importance in the second half of the 1930s. The stormtroopers of the latter category were often those born outside the German Reich’s borders. For them, membership in the SA provided both financial and political advantages that would be realized once the German expansionist policy was implemented. In what follows I will take a closer look at the men in the so-called Austrian Legion and then turn to the newly arranged SA formations in the Sudetenland and the Memelland.

The Austrian Legion

Since the formation of the NSDAP and its SA in the early 1920s, close connections between German and Austrian National Socialists had been established and maintained.⁹¹ Whereas in the 1920s it had usually been the stormtroopers from the Reich who had benefited from the assistance of their Austrian brothers in ideology and arms – especially after the failed Hitler Putsch of 1923, when many high-ranking National Socialists found cover and shelter in Austria – ten years later this relationship had been reversed. Now it was the SA in the German Reich that was in a position to help its Austrian comrades, particularly after the authorities in Vienna banned all National Socialist organizations, including the SA, on 19 June 1933. The Austro-Fascist regime under Engelbert Dollfuß and his successor Kurt Schuschnigg actively persecuted those National Socialists who sought an end to the Austrian nation state and a union of Austria with the Third Reich, particularly after the Austrian Hitlerists attempted to violently overthrow the national government in July 1934.⁹² Despite the Austrian SA’s considerable organizational weaknesses, the teacher Hermann Reschny, since 1926 the leader of the Austrian SA (Hitlerbewegung), made plans to march on Vienna with stormtroopers from Styria and the Reich. In June 1934 the SA leadership in Austria even decided on two hitmen for the assassination of Dollfuß, yet it was the SS man Otto Planetta who in the end carried out the actual murder.⁹³

Ever since the National Socialists had taken control in Germany, the authorities in Austria had feared an SA-led military invasion by the Third Reich.⁹⁴ Concern focused in particular on the more than 14,000 Austrian political refugees in the Reich who referred to themselves as ‘legionaries’ or members of the Austrian Legion, which was officially part of SA-Obergruppe VIII (Austria).⁹⁵ According to the Austrian government, the legion possessed 1,500 motorcars and was thus able to reach the German-Austrian border within 24 hours.⁹⁶ These Austrian stormtroopers in German exile were initially concentrated in several barracks located in different places in Bavaria (Lechfeld, Bad Aibling, Reichersbeuern, Egmating, Wöllershof, and others). Later, operating under the cover name Hilfswerk Nordwest, they were transferred to several locations further north (among them Bocholt, Dorsten, and Lippstadt), far from the German-Austrian border. These men carried out construction work and received paramilitary training from the Reich’s SA as well as from the Bavarian police and the Reichswehr. They also organized the smuggling of arms, explosives, and propaganda material into Austria, contributing to the destabilization of the political order there. As long as the SA in the Reich under Röhm continued to fight for its status as a people’s militia, the Austrian Legion constituted a serious threat to Austria’s sovereignty.⁹⁷

From the perspective of the Third Reich, its considerable financial and political support for the Austrian Legion, which amounted to approximately 24 million reichsmark in 1935, had mixed success.⁹⁸ The legionaries more than once attracted negative attention from the German population because of their lack of discipline and education. In particular, their brutal anti-Catholic agitation in areas where the German population was traditionally deeply religious provoked a strong dislike. In Bad Aibling in August 1935, for example, Austrian legionaries drove through the streets of the town in lorries displaying a poster that depicted a Jesuit priest and the biblical verse ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me!’ The poster also contained the phrase ‘§ 175’ in yellow type, alluding to the cliché of the homosexual child abuser in the robe of a man of God.⁹⁹ On the diplomatic level, the well-known financial support of the Reich for what was internationally perceived as state-sponsored terrorism provoked tensions with both Austria and Mussolini’s Italy. Yet despite its organizational and military shortcomings, the Austrian Legion remained a political weapon for the Nazi regime up to 1938.¹⁰⁰

After the SA’s loss of influence following the ‘Night of the Long Knives’, the legionaries were ordered to deliver their weapons – more than 10,300 rifles and 340 machine guns – to the Reichswehr.¹⁰¹ In Austria concern lessened to the extent that the authorities became more willing to interpret the flight of thousands of Austrian stormtroopers to the Reich not as conscious terrorist acts, but as ‘pardonable sins of their youth’. From intercepted letters and other confiscated documents, the Schuschnigg administration knew only too well that the Austrian legionaries were less dangerous than initially feared, and that their military fighting power was limited at best. The authorities furthermore interpreted the substantial numbers of Nazi militants returning to Austria (more than 2,500 between July 1936 and November 1937) as a sign that many had left the country not only for reasons of political ‘entrapment’ (Verhetzung), but also out of ‘youthful ignorance and a thirst for adventure’.¹⁰² Although the Austrian Nazis increasingly benefited from sympathizers within the ranks of the Austrian bureaucracy, a certain degree of conspiracy remained necessary to organize its illegal political activities. One of the measures the stormtroopers took was to encode all phone calls that dealt with party affairs. This code relied on a simple language that named SA units according to male family roles: ‘Son’ was the code word for an SA-Schar, an ‘uncle’ designated an SA-Sturm, and ‘father’ meant an SA-Standarte. The numbers of the SA units were replaced with the names of their respective city districts. If the Nazis spoke about a ‘father from Hietzing’, for example, they were actually referring to the Standarte 4 of the SA-Gruppe Vienna. The SA as a whole was, interestingly, referred to as female and called ‘sister’.¹⁰³

However, when the Anschluss, the incorporation of Austria into the German Reich, actually took place in March 1938, the Austrian Legion did not play an important role. The decisive steps had been taken in negotiations and through diplomacy behind closed doors. The German military invasion of more than 50,000 soldiers and policemen on 12 March 1938 confirmed on the ground what had previously been achieved at the table. When the Austrian legionaries finally returned home between 30 March and 2 April 1938, they did not come as triumphant liberators but as uninvited conquerors. Their popularity in Austria in the following months was fairly limited, to say the least. Many Austrian state institutions and even bodies of the NSDAP only very reluctantly accepted the former ‘legionaries’ into their ranks, as the latter quickly earned a reputation for being lazy and arrogant.¹⁰⁴ Even the Austrian Nazis early on feared that the presence of up to 9,000 legionaries in the country would become problematic, as they might freely vent the rage they had built up over the preceding years.¹⁰⁵ Many of them did indeed take part in antisemitic assaults. Furthermore, ever since 1933, promises of future professional advancement, particularly in the Austrian bureaucracy, had motivated the legionaries to remain loyal to the party cause.¹⁰⁶ Now, in 1938, they asked and received ‘compensation’ to a remarkable extent, benefiting from the many ‘Aryanizations’ that occurred in the Ostmark and successfully pressuring leaders for employment. Among the tangible benefits recouped were a middle-class car (a Steyr XII), a set of furniture, and even a complete dental practice.¹⁰⁷ The aid rendered to former legionaries in the Austrian SA in 1938 and 1939 was so extreme that even long-time members were repelled by the ubiquitous Freunderlwirtschaft, the Austrian term for cronyism. Just weeks after the Anschluss, these members started to romanticize their previous years of illegality, with their allegedly genuine comradeship, in a process similar to that described for the Reich in 1933.¹⁰⁸

The Austrian Legion officially ceased to exist on 31 October 1938, half a year after the Anschluss. By then, most of its former members had benefited extensively from the political sea change. Others whose demands for ‘compensation’ and professional advancement were not met in the following year made new attempts to capitalize on the ‘Aryanization’ of Jewish firms and property or to go on the prowl in the protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia.¹⁰⁹ Yet, in at least one respect these ‘Old Fighters’ ultimately had to concede defeat. In 1941 the Nazi authorities definitively refused to accept former duties in the Austrian Legion between 1933 and 1938 as an alternative form of military service.¹¹⁰ The Austrian Legion had served its purpose in the days before the Anschluss, but the active role of the SA in the German expansion into central and eastern Europe was just about to begin.

Activities in the Sudeten and Memel Territories

The successful Anschluss of Austria sounded the bell for the annexation of those territories bordering the Reich where a considerable ethnic German population lived. After the internal consolidation of the Third Reich in the first years of the regime was achieved, the NSDAP attempted to fulfil a central ambition of German nationalism that went back to the mid-nineteenth century: to enlarge the Reich until all Germans living in cohesive settlements in neighbouring states could enjoy the benefits of German citizenship. Yet, unlike the vision of the nationalists of the 1848–9 revolutions, in which a democratic Germany would be so attractive that many people in central and eastern Europe would voluntarily opt to become Germans, by the mid-1930s it had become clear that such attempts would provoke fierce opposition in the neighbouring states, particularly as many of them were newcomers on the political scene that had been established in the wake of the First World War. As the decades progressed, German nationalists more and more shared the view that the Volkstumskampf in these regions would have to be carried out by arms more than by promises and persuasion.¹¹¹

The Sudetenland was historically a part of Bohemia and Moravia that after the dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy in 1918 became the heartland of the newly created Czechoslovak Republic. Here, the National Socialist movement was initially closely intertwined with the diverse leagues and organizations of the German youth movement.¹¹² In both rhetoric and action the NSDAP paid particular attention to this densely populated border region of the Reich. From neighbouring Saxony its functionaries attempted to establish SA cells in Czechoslovakia as early as the late 1920s. German Nazi activists in the Sudetenland initially understood the HJ and the SA to be National Socialist youth organizations and compared their political activities in the region to the bündisch youth’s Grenzlandfahrten, which during the years of the Weimar Republic had been organized with the aim of raising the consciousness of the Reich’s youth regarding the alleged German civilizational mission in central and eastern Europe. Because Germany after the First World War was confined to ‘narrow borders’, these activists argued, it was the proper time to instil the nation’s best with a deeply rooted feeling of obligation for the fate of ethnic German minorities in eastern Europe and to prepare them for a leading role in the pending Volkstumskampf.¹¹³ A key figure in such attempts was Rudolf Schmidt, the leader of the HJ’s Grenzlandamt, or ‘Borderland Office’, who frequently organized politische Bildungsreisen, that is, politicized educational trips, for the Sudeten German youth. The participants on such trips, which extended as far as Poland, the Baltic States, Hungary, Austria, and Romania, regularly dressed in the Nazi brown shirt or at least carried Nazi gear in their rucksacks.¹¹⁴

With the Nazi takeover of power in the Reich, the relationship between Czechs and Germans in the region became even more complicated. Despite official restraint, Nazi propaganda as well as the Reich’s clandestine financial support for nationalist German organizations like Konrad Henlein’s Sudetendeutscher Heimatbund, the predecessor of the Sudeten German Party, promoted the public expression of patriotic sentiments on both sides.¹¹⁵ In 1933 and 1934 German stormtroopers from neighbouring Saxony more than once felt called upon to arrange illegal border patrol units that regularly advanced into Czechoslovakian territory, claiming that the local authorities there were trying to suppress the German ‘liberation movement’. In turn, German men dressed in SA or SS uniforms increasingly ran the risk of being arrested by the Czechoslovakian police in the border regions.¹¹⁶ Yet, despite passions running high on both sides, the official German policy toward the German minority in Czechoslovakia in the first years of the Third Reich was marked by prudence and restraint – at times in sharp contrast to the regional German nationalism promoted in particular by the increasingly chauvinist Deutscher Turnverband (German Gymnastics Association) and, from May 1938 onward, the Sudeten German Freiwilliger Schutzdienst (FS; literally Voluntary Protective Service), a kind of unofficial SA that was 15,000 men strong.¹¹⁷

After the successful Anschluss of Austria, the German nationalist community in the Sudetenland actively expected and prepared for an analogous development. The Reich’s public calls for moderation contradicted its actual policies, which aimed at aggravating the ethnic conflicts in the region to the extent that a German military intervention could finally be justified. In early September 1938, German nationalists in the region engaged in a series of assaults and bomb attacks.¹¹⁸ The Czechoslovakian authorities responded using the police and the judiciary. After the successful suppression of a violent Sudeten German putsch in the first half of September, tens of thousands of German nationalists fled across the border into the Reich.¹¹⁹ In the Free State of Saxony alone, there existed at least nineteen different camps for Sudeten German political refugees.

On 18 September, in direct reaction to these developments, the Sudeten German Party published a proclamation that requested the formation of a Sudeten German Free Corps (Sudetendeutsches Freikorps), or SFK.¹²⁰ At about the same time the Saxon SA immediately launched a recruitment programme among the refugees that offered them ideological and paramilitary training in the hope of subsequently integrating them into the regular SA. On 19 September an internal report from the Saxon SA claimed that it had already registered about 5,000 Sudeten German refugees and provided them with swastika armbands and badges, insignias of the NSDAP that many men in the camps wore with ‘nothing less than a touching pride’. A few days later the total number of Sudeten Germans won over to the SA had doubled. These men were to form the core of the future Sudeten SA and were divided according to their regional provenance. Yet the report warned that they were not to be used for an immediate military operation, as their equipment and weapons were ‘totally insufficient’.¹²¹ The Munich agreement of 29–30 September 1938 at least temporarily exchanged peace for land and provided the Reich with the long sought-after Sudetenland. In its wake the previously illegal paramilitary activities of the German nationalists now became state-sponsored politics. In the four weeks of its existence the Sudeten German Free Corps, with a total strength of 40,000 men, killed more than 110 people, deported about 2,000 Czechoslovakian citizens to Reich territory, and caused about 200,000 Czechs, Germans, and Jews to leave the region.¹²²

After the German occupation of the Sudetenland in the first days of October 1938, regular SA formations were quickly established in the region, building on the preparatory work of the previous months (Plate 24). Many members of the FS and the Sudeten German Free Corps, which were officially dissolved on 9 October, were eager to join National Socialist organizations like the SA and the SS, to such an extent that the new SA-Standarte Aussig as early as December 1938 had to impose a temporary ban on new members ‘for organizational reasons’.¹²³ To cope with the demand the OSAF sent no fewer than 600 SA leaders from the Old Reich into the region. These individuals mostly occupied central administrative positions, whereas the leadership of the SA-Stürme and Standarten was placed in the hands of stormtroopers from the Sudetenland.¹²⁴ The latter were in many cases identical to the former leaders of the Deutscher Turnverband.¹²⁵ During the pogrom of 9 November the newly formed SA units in the Sudetenland played roles similar to those assumed by their counterparts in other parts of the Reich, with the exception that here not only local Jews but also non-Jewish Czechoslovakians and ethnic Germans critical of the Nazis were attacked. ‘First the Jews and then the Czechs!’ was the SA’s battle cry in the region.¹²⁶

The leader of the Sudeten SA was the charismatic Franz May, a Catholic peasant from Warnsdorf, a rural district near to the Czechoslovakian-Saxon border. When he was appointed SA-Gruppenführer on 15 October 1938, May could look back at several years of political activities in support of the German ‘liberation’. He had also been the leader of Group 4 of the Sudeten German Free Corps in the weeks prior to his official appointment in the SA.¹²⁷ ‘May is familiar with the questions of the borderland struggle [Grenzlandkampf], he knows how to adequately confront upcoming dangers with his well-known energy and his clear ambitions,’ Henlein stated. May would be ‘one of the most reliable and genuinely popular’ German leaders in his Gau, Henlein added in a letter to SA Chief of Staff Lutze, attempting to secure a deferment from military service for his former campaigner in November 1941.¹²⁸

The SA’s practice of imposing itself on established, traditional structures worked well in the context of Germany’s territorial expansion. The continued support of the SA for nationalist Sudeten Germans over the previous years made the organization genuinely popular among the German population of the former Czechoslovakia at a time when the SA in the Old Reich was still struggling to define its future role. In January 1940 the SA-Gruppe Sudeten comprised slightly fewer than 129,000 men. This amounted to 4.4 per cent of the overall population of the Gau Sudetenland, compared to the roughly 1 per cent of the Reich population who at the same time served in the SA. This made the Sudeten SA the strongest of all SA-Gruppen of the time.¹²⁹

A similar development on a much smaller scale took place in the Memelland (in Lithuanian, the Klaipėdos kraštas, or Klaipėda region), a small strip of land north of the German province of East Prussia. Inhabited by predominantly ethnic Germans, this province had been separated from the Reich in 1919 as part of the post-war rearrangements of central and eastern Europe.¹³⁰ In the immediate post-war years administered by the French on an interim basis, Memelland became an autonomous region of Lithuania in 1923. In the following years local political initiatives and media that advocated close cooperation with Germany were regularly suppressed.¹³¹ With the increasingly aggressive German foreign policy between 1935 and 1938, the fate of the ethnic Germans in this border region became again an ever more pressing item on the political agenda. The Lithuanian government carefully observed the growing ambitions of the Third Reich and the intensification of calls for a ‘return’ of the Memelland. They feared that their region might follow the example set by the Saar region, which had been incorporated into the Reich after a referendum was held on 13 January 1935.¹³² Caught between much larger and more powerful states and in particular confronted with both German and Polish territorial claims, the Lithuanian government finally agreed to backdoor negotiations with Berlin. With the Munich agreement signed and the subsequent German annexation of the Sudetenland, the Lithuanian government put one and one together and introduced their own appeasement policy in order to avoid a similar fate. On 1 November 1938, Lithuania lifted the state of emergency in the Memelland and thereby allowed German nationalist organizations to again operate legally in the region.¹³³ Just over a month later, on 11 December, a Unified German list of candidates (Memeldeutsche Liste) won the provincial elections with a landslide victory of 87 per cent of the votes.¹³⁴ Six days later Hitler secretly told the leader of the German nationalists in the Memelland, Ernst Neumann, that he intended to annex the territory in the spring of 1939.¹³⁵

Neumann, born in 1888, played a similar role in this region to that assumed by Konrad Henlein in the Sudetenland. A former Freikorps fighter in the Baltic area in 1919 and a veterinary surgeon by profession, Neumann had founded the Memelland Socialist People’s Party (SOVOG, Sozialistische Volksgemeinschaft des Memelgebietes e.V.) in 1933. It was the second National Socialist party to form in a region that had hosted a secret cell of the NSDAP as early as the late 1920s.¹³⁶ These first National Socialist activists had formed the core of the Christian Socialist Party of Memelland (CSA, Christliche Sozialistische Arbeitsgemeinschaft des Memelgebiets e.V.), formally established in May 1933 under the leadership of a Protestant clergyman, the pastor Theodor Freiherr von Saß. However, the NSDAP in the Reich quickly came to the conclusion that a National Socialist alternative to the CSA was needed because of its members’ ‘pseudo-revolutionary’ manners and ‘overt dilettantism’.¹³⁷ Therefore, the government in Berlin backed Neumann and his counter-organization, the SOVOG. In the following years Neumann became a ‘flame of hope for all who longed for an end of foreign rule’, as a German expellee magazine published in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1955 put it with patriotic zeal, echoing the rhetoric of the Memelland’s ‘time of struggle’.¹³⁸ Such glorification built on the broad support that Neumann managed to attract among the Memel Germans in the 1930s, but it obscured other aspects of the story that proved less welcome after the war: both parties, the CSA as well as the SOVOG, were overtly antisemitic and had very close ties to the NSDAP in Germany.¹³⁹ Both quickly formed paramilitary groups consisting of young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six, called Sturmkolonnen (SK) in the case of the CSA or Sturmabteilungen in the case of the SOVOG. The historian Martin Broszat characterized these groups as ‘something between the Hitler Youth and the SA’.¹⁴⁰ According to the Lithuanian authorities, both paramilitary organizations were in close contact with the SA in Germany and particularly with SA units from the neighbouring East Prussia. The SA-Gruppe there, SA-Obergruppe I, or Ostland, was estimated to comprise no fewer than eight brigades with a total of 170,000 men by the end of 1934. These brigades were financed by the Reich and armed, among other weapons, with heavy machine guns, allegedly in preparation for a German military occupation of the Memelland in the near future.¹⁴¹ Based on these accusations, which were backed by a large number of police documents, the Lithuanian High Court Martial in Kowno convicted both Neumann and von Saß, together with more than 100 German nationalists, of high treason and sentenced them to lengthy prison terms in 1935.¹⁴² As part of the above-mentioned policy of détente, Neumann was pardoned in 1938 and immediately returned to his former political activities.

Although Hitler had advised Neumann not to provoke any kind of diplomatic crisis, the latter once again started to build up SA units in late 1938. These units now officially carried the name of Sicherheitsabteilungen, or ‘security units’. In late January 1939 they allegedly comprised twelve units consisting of a total of 2,500 men.¹⁴³ Other sources, however, claim they comprised only 500 individuals.¹⁴⁴ Neumann expected every Memel German over eighteen years old to join these new formations, which he defined as ‘corps permeated by National Socialist spirit’ and made up of active fighters for Volk and homeland.¹⁴⁵ In its final state, he proclaimed, the Memelland SA should comprise roughly 20,000 men aged between eighteen and fifty – a very high expectation, given that the region had fewer than 200,000 inhabitants.¹⁴⁶

The new SA complemented the existing Memel German Security Service (Ordnungsdienst) that Neumann had reorganized several weeks earlier to ‘protect’ the integrity of the December elections. Whereas the Security Service, which was at Neumann’s personal disposition, was intended as a kind of elite formation, consisting of men under thirty years of age and, according to a contemporary source, ‘strictly organized in a National Socialist way’, the Memel SA was apparently a less exclusive movement.¹⁴⁷ In the first place, its members were charged with spreading the Nazi ideology in the region.¹⁴⁸ Similar to the strategy adopted in 1933–4, both organizations were expected to be on hand to support Wehrmacht units in case of a military confrontation with the Lithuanian army. Erich Koch, the Gauleiter of East Prussia and a local rival of Neumann, even prepared to ‘liberate’ the Memelland with the help of these SA forces.¹⁴⁹ Such fights did not take place, however. On 22 March 1939, Hitler incorporated the Memel area into the German Reich after reaching a formal agreement with Lithuania. In Article 4 of this agreement both states declared that they would neither attack each other nor support a third party that attacked one of them.¹⁵⁰ Neumann and Koch oversaw the short transformation period before the laws of the Reich came into effect in the Memelland on 1 May 1939. At that time the former Sicherheitsabteilungen were immediately incorporated into the regular SA-Gruppe Ostland, while the SS took over the former Security Service.¹⁵¹

The Rise of the Periphery

This chapter has demonstrated that the SA between 1934 and the beginning of the Second World War underwent a difficult and often painful process of internal reform and search for new meaning. As previous studies have rightly emphasized, more than 50 per cent of all members of the SA in early 1934 left its ranks in the following years. These decisions to drop out reflected the decline in status and importance of the SA that occurred once its political adversaries had been defeated, but they were also a consequence of the fall in unemployment figures and the improvement in young men’s chances to marry and have a family. Yet this development was only one side of the coin. Even at a time when the SA in the Old Reich was struggling to keep its men involved, more than one million German men remained loyal to the SA and its political programme. Throughout the 1930s antisemitic assaults were a regular field of SA activity. Such attacks allowed for community formation through jointly committed violence and as such continued a practice of association well established during the Kampfzeit. At the same time, the decreasing legal protections for the Jews in Germany and later also in the Greater German Reich allowed the storm-troopers to line their own pockets with pilfered spoils. In this respect the SA men were indeed forerunners, pioneering what during the deportations and murder of the European Jewry became a common practice in Germany and beyond.¹⁵²

By 1937–8 the internal disciplinary procedures came to an end and the SA’ s reorganization had largely been completed.¹⁵³ It now successfully started to penetrate many realms of German civil life, as this chapter has demonstrated with regard to the German shooting associations and riding clubs. The party functionary who dressed in his brown shirt only one or two days a week while pursuing a regular profession and acting as a family man more and more replaced the activist Gewaltmensch devoid of competing group affiliations that was so characteristic of the rank and file of the SA until 1934. Yet even these more respectable stormtroopers remained men with Aktionsmacht, self-empowered guardians of Nazi values who temporarily exercised auxiliary police roles. By the late 1930s observers had perceived a new level of discipline and commitment within the SA.¹⁵⁴ What boosted the OSAF’s morale most decisively was the success of its renewed paramilitary activities in the border regions of the Reich and, later, in the incorporated territories. In both the Sudetenland and the Memelland – regions with considerable German populations administered by Czechoslovakia and Lithuania, respectively – regional nationalist paramilitary organizations of ethnic Germans were successfully integrated into the SA once the political situation allowed. In contrast to the situation in the German heartlands, where the prestige and strike capacity of the SA had suffered after 1934, the new SA units proved attractive to many, not least because they provided a relatively uncomplicated way of proving one’s loyalty to the new state without giving up one’s integration into existing social networks. As in central Europe after the First World War more generally, the borderlands proved a fruitful recruiting ground for paramilitary organizations with a nationalist agenda. What is more, in these regions the regime valued the paramilitary tasks the SA was still able to perform.

In the following years, the OSAF more and more capitalized on its experiences of 1938–9. It continued to establish new SA units in central and eastern Europe that recruited heavily from among the Volksdeutsche and that fulfilled ever more military and police functions. In addition, it also developed far-reaching plans for the time that German domination in Europe would be established and secured by military force. The leadership of the SA realized that not only the future of the Reich but also the future of the Brownshirts was to be decided in the east.