7
The SA and the ‘Germanization’ of the European East
No domain is by nature better suited to turn into a stomping ground for romantic fantasies than the settlement.
— Report of the Social Democratic Party in exile, 19351
Important research on the Generalplan Ost, literally the ‘General Settlement Plan East’, has been undertaken in the last decades. Likewise, the German expansionist policies in central and eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as their academic and intellectual forerunners, have been analysed in detail.2 The stormtroopers, however, have seldom been examined in this context, although the SA in the years following the ‘Röhm purge’ not only helped stabilize the Nazi regime within the boundaries of the Reich but also contributed importantly to the furtherance of German expansionist policies from 1935 onward. During these years it was the general goal of the NSDAP to win over those Germans living abroad and, after the incorporation and annexation of the borderland territories they partly inhabited, to make them a genuine part of the nation. In this respect the semantic shift is telling. Whereas Germans abroad were until the early twentieth century called Auslandsdeutsche, literally ‘Germans living in foreign countries’, the Nazis during the 1930s began to refer to them as Volksdeutsche, or ‘ethnic Germans’.3 The SA felt called to actively engage in this process of ‘Germanization’, not least because it afforded an opportunity to regain lost power within the patchwork of competing National Socialist organizations. The stormtroopers thus put forward their own ideas for the ‘Germanization’ of the European east, including stimulating the settlement of SA men from the Old Reich in the newly occupied and annexed territories, particularly the Warthegau and the General Government, and establishing new SA units there that predominantly comprised ‘ethnic Germans’.
The following chapter is divided into four parts. In the first part, I will take a closer look at the SA’s contributions to the settlement movement of the 1930s, which was originally concerned with the construction of new villages and city districts for the party faithful and the transfer of the population of the German Reich within its existing borders to stimulate agriculture and the economy in disadvantaged regions, particularly those of the northern and eastern provinces.4 In the second part, I will concentrate on the work of the so-called Beauftragter des Stabschefs für Neubauernsiedlung und Volkstumsfragen, literally the ‘Commissioner of the (SA) Chief of Staff for the Placement of New Farmers and for Matters of Ethnicity’, between 1938 and 1943. The results of these efforts and the SA’s ultimate failure will be critically assessed in the third section. In the final part, I will discuss my findings with reference to the current state of research on the German settlement policies shortly before and during the Second World War. Although the SA’s initial ambitions for its ‘Germanization’ policies failed, largely because of the power of Himmler’s SS and the shortage of qualified SA men, it nevertheless contributed in important ways to the ideological and pragmatic formation of a Volksgemeinschaft at war.
Early Settlement Initiatives
It was no coincidence that the SA’s interest in the German settlement movement intensified in the mid-1930s, shortly after the ‘Night of the Long Knives’. In its attempts to open up new fields of action that would keep the stormtroopers busy and help its leadership corps claim important positions in the consolidated Third Reich, the SA started to get involved in the settlement movement. As early as June 1933 the Nazi government had declared resettlement a national priority in its ‘Law on the New Formation of German Peasantry’.5 Already in the late 1920s the NSDAP and its auxiliary organizations – most prominently the SA – had systematically reached out to the people of rural Germany in an attempt to exploit this population’s high level of discontent related to the ‘agrarian crisis’ that had increased migration to the cities. The NSDAP in many parts of Germany successfully exploited this high level of discontent and presented itself as the political party determined to preserve the habits and values of the German provinces, which they glorified as the ‘bloodspring of the German people’ (Blutquelle des deutschen Volkes).6
Initially, the involvement of the SA in the settlement movement was limited to attempts at population transfer within the German Reich. For example, it encouraged rank-and-file stormtroopers from Lower Saxony to move as so-called ‘West-East settlers’ to more thinly populated areas in Mecklenburg and Pomerania.7 However, it did not take long for the SA to expand the scope of its efforts and to develop settlement plans for the soon-to-be occupied and incorporated territories beyond the actual borders.8 Beginning in 1937 at least one large SA settlement project was initiated in every territory in which the organization was present. Financed in part by the so-called Dankopfer der Nation, an annual national collection organized by the SA on the occasion of Hitler’s birthday, such settlements were designed to help deserving SA men, disabled ex-servicemen, and large families live on their ‘own soil’.9 The Supreme SA Command (OSAF) supported these SA settlements with the relatively meagre amount of 225,000 reichsmark.
Widely varying in size, these settlements were located in Osterholz near Bremen, in the Pfalzdorf swamp, and in nearby Petkum, close to the East Frisian city of Aurich. Other SA settlements were built in the north of Braunschweig, in Wittstock/Neumark, in the Bavarian city of Rosenheim (Plate 26), in Jena in Thuringia, and in the Upper-Silesian Eichenkamp near Gleiwitz, today’s Gliwice.10 The latter settlement, later re-baptized the SA-Dankopfersiedlung Glaubenstatt, or ‘Place of Faith’, became the SA’s model settlement, built partly for the purpose of creating a ‘völkischdam’ to hold back the ‘Polish appetite for expansionism’, at least symbolically. Although the outbreak of the Second World War prevented the original plans from being fully realized, most buildings of this settlement, which was to provide a home for up to 2,000 people, could be completed.
Glaubenstatt had two centres: the stadium with a tower that was to serve as a youth hostel, and a market square that was surrounded by an assembly hall, a school building, and a home for the Hitler Youth. Yet there was also a shooting range and an air-raid shelter. A track-and-field arena for paramilitary sports was planned, but never completed.11 The conception of the Glaubenstatt complex exemplarily demonstrates that the SA’s ‘Germanization’ policies have to be seen in the context of its pre-military training of German males, to be carried out in close cooperation with the Wehrmacht and the Hitler Youth. This paramilitary education comprised both practical exercises with physical training and shooting lessons, but also ‘political education’ (politische Erziehungsarbeit).12 It did not only target men in the Old Reich, whom Nazi propaganda continuously exposed to the idea that racially homogeneous settlements had to be regarded as ‘prerequisite for the fulfilment of the regime’s economical, domestic and racial objectives’,13 but would later also reach out to ethnic Germans organized within the SA in the occupied territories.
Regional plans from 1937 aimed at the construction of no more than 2,500 settlement plots nationwide, most of which were intended to contain small single-family homes.14 Every house was expected to comprise three or four rooms, covering at least 60 square metres, to be complemented by a garden of 1,000–1,500 square metres intended mainly for the cultivation of vegetables and the breeding of small domestic animals. Unlike Glaubensstatt, which was built on former woodland, most of these modest settlements were so-called Stadtrandsiedlungen, or ‘suburban settlements’, located close to existing developments. Their parcels of land were much too small to allow for self-dependent agriculture.15
According to a regulation from 1934, only male candidates who were either married or engaged and possessed the ‘necessary good hereditary factors’ were to be considered for such settlement colonies. When the authorities realized that the comparatively small size of the houses did not correspond with the regime’s emphasis on sexual reproduction, it slightly increased the housing space so that families with many children could also be accommodated.16 Overall, the authorities imagined society in these settlements as competitive, racially pure, and devoted to the Nazi project. However, contrary to the loud rhetoric of ‘building a people’s community’, they deliberately fostered social inequalities, granting settlers different amounts of land. The rationale for this unequal treatment was that it would intensify the competition among the new settlers and would help develop political and economic leadership.17 The NSDAP pointed to its settlement projects as proof that the party kept its social promises. In reality, however, the number of 2,500 SA settlement holdings was small compared to the overall 22,000 holdings established between 1933 and 1939, and even more so compared to the 57,457 holdings created during the years of the Weimar Republic, of which 7,500 lay east of the River Elbe.18
Despite the limited extent of the Nazis’ ‘internal colonization’ efforts, they quickly became viewed as a preliminary stage for much more ambitious colonization projects abroad.19 In contrast to the social realities of life in the Third Reich, particularly the widening gap between the incomes of farmers and industrial workers and the subsequent decline in the popularity of agricultural labour,20 the official discourse on settlements was one of blood and soil. According to Nazi propaganda, it was the SA, together with the Reichsnährstand, the statutory corporation of farmers in the Third Reich, that would stop rural flight and preserve the peasantry. Because of their willingness, ideological training, and combat strength, the SA men were supposedly ideally suited to serve as ‘innovators of the German peasantry’. Already early in the Third Reich the regime regarded the population transfer of loyal party Activists as one tool to achieve a politically coherent national community. Even if this population transfer was initially limited to Germans in the Old Reich and only put into practice on a modest scale, it demonstrated that the ideology of creating and reorganizing existing Lebensraum, or ‘space to live’, long before the beginning of the Second World War, informed the course of Nazi politics. What Nazi propagandists usually did not openly address was that German agriculture suffered from severe lack of a workforce in the late 1930s. The often poorly qualified SA men were therefore talked into farming jobs also for purely practical reasons.21 Instead, high-ranking Nazi officials like the Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture, Richard Walther Darré, emphasized in a guest article for the magazine Der SA-Führer in 1938 that the peasantry and (political) soldiers were expected to join hands in the ‘Germanic-Teutonic people’s struggle for survival’.22
Such statements did not only constitute a remarkable departure from the common image of the SA man as urban street fighter, an image still omnipresent in the Nazi propaganda during these years. Whereas the quintessential stormtrooper of the Kampfzeit had been an aggressive and determined young man and ‘comrade’,23 disciplined at the party’s command but more than willing to react with his fists at all provocations when let loose, the ‘SA peasant’ was presented as a man in his prime, still physically strong, but in the first place a responsible family man and as such a defender of the German race. The former hotheads of the urban jungle had matured into hardworking and self-reliant individuals, exemplary German men who valued and cultivated the German soil, held firm to the regime’s values and ideas, and were at the same time actively involved in fighting what the Nazis perceived as white-collar effeminacy.
This new rhetoric also built on the idea that fascinated at least parts of the Supreme SA High Command from 1936: reintroducing the SA back into the political game by promoting the settlement of individual SA men as farmers and agricultural labourers in the European east, perceived as Lebensraum for battle-tested National Socialists. Historical research so far has stressed that the internal colonization movement in Nazi Germany lost its importance with the establishment of the Wehrmacht in 1935, which called not farmers but soldiers to protect the German borders.24However, I will demonstrate that these early National Socialist settlement plans remained politically important throughout the second half of the 1930s as a preliminary stage in the redevelopment of the soon-to-be captured Lebensraum. A closer look at the plans of the Commissioner of the SA Chief of Staff for the Placement of New Farmers and his successors between 1938 and 1943 will make this plain.
Siegfried Kasche and the SA’s Intensified Settlement Plans
The man of central importance to the SA’s ‘Germanization’ plans during this period was SA-Obergruppenführer Siegfried Kasche.25 Born on 18 June 1903, he belonged to the so-called ‘war youth generation’, like so many committed Nazi activists. He received his training at the prestigious cadet school in Berlin-Lichterfelde during the First World War and while still a very young man fought with Freikorps units in Berlin and the Baltic region. In the early 1920s, Kasche joined a ‘Joint Work Service’ (Arbeitsgemeinschaftsdienst) in Pomerania and later also worked in the banking sector, the glass industry, and the textile trade. He became a member of the NSDAP in 1926 and began what was to be a stellar career in the SA. In 1928, at the age of only twenty-five, he was appointed to the position of deputy Gauleiter of the Ostmark, based in Frankfurt/Oder. Two years later he won a seat in the Reichstag. Kasche narrowly survived the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ in 1934 and was promoted to SA-Gruppenführer in Lower Saxony on 9 November 1936. One year later, SA Chief of Staff Victor Lutze appointed him leader of the SA-Gruppe Hansa, headquartered in Hamburg. Finally, as SA-Obergruppenführer, Kasche became the first German envoy to Agram/Zagreb in Croatia on 17 April 1941.26
According to his own account, Kasche and Darré began talks about possible farming settlements as early as 1936. Two years later, in September 1938, an agreement between the SA, the Reichsernährungsministerium, and the Reichsnährstand was reached,27 and Lutze officially appointed Kasche to the position of ‘Commissioner of the SA Chief of Staff for the Placement of New Farmers and for Matters of Ethnicity’. In this role Kasche replaced SA-Gruppenführer Georg Mappes, who as SA-Reichskassenverwalter, or SA Reich Treasurer, had been responsible for the organization’s settlement affairs.28 The new commissioner took his new task very seriously, as several lengthy and detailed guidelines and reports penned by Kasche make clear. The first of these important documents was the ‘Guidelines for the SA’s Participation in the New Formation of the German Peasantry’ from 8 September 1938. This document specified that farmers selected for the new settlements in the Third Reich, to be located largely in Silesia, Pomerania, and in the eastern parts of Prussia, should be chosen according to both their qualifications and their ‘hereditary value’ (blutsmäßigem Wert). It is important to emphasize, however, that these guidelines were still intended to apply exclusively to settlements within the existing borders of the Reich. The SA was expected to furnish up to 30 per cent of all new peasant settlers in order to guarantee the ‘political-ideological firmness’ of the new rural communities. Kasche requested that the sixteen existing SA groups in the Reich maintain close contact with the ‘settlement agencies’ (Siedlungsunternehmen) operating in their respective regions and identify potential settlers from within their ranks. The groups were asked to keep lists in special ‘red books’ of all those interested in the settlement project.29 However, only those SA men who possessed the Neubauernschein, a certificate from the Reichsnährstand attesting to the potential settler’s (and his family’s) racial, mental, and physiological qualities, could be considered for participation in the settlements. Only men who were at least twenty-five years of age, married, and of ‘Aryan descent’ were permitted to apply.30 Once these criteria had been met, the SA-Standarten in charge were ordered to provide a judgement on the applicant based on his service in the SA, his personal and professional circumstances, and his physical fitness, character, and intellectual capacities and accomplishments. In the end, an overall mark was attributed to each candidate, ranging from grade one (‘very well suited for placement’) to grade four (‘poorly qualified’).31 Surviving lists of applicants from the year 1941 show that only rarely was a very good mark given. Most applicants were ranked as group two (‘well suited’) or three (‘suited’). For the acquisition of a new farm, Kasche estimated that an SA settler would need about 9,000 reichsmark, with more than half of that money financed by the Dankopfer der Nation.32
In the tradition of the modern Prussian borderland settlements established since the beginning of the second half of the nineteenth century, such settlements were planned as German bulwarks against the neighbouring Slavic peoples, whom many German Grenzland ideologues perceived as being at a lower level of cultural development.33 Shortly before the German attack on Poland in 1939, SA-Oberführer Udo von Alvensleben, who dealt with settlement questions for the OSAF on Kasche’s behalf, claimed that a ‘peasantry on guard’ (wehrhaftes Bauerntum) had been responsible for securing German influence over eastern Europe ever since the military conquests of the Teutonic Knights in the Middle Ages. Accordingly, he concluded: ‘What we have won by the sword needs to be defended and secured by the plough.’34 Such arguments were by no means an invention of the National Socialists. As the historian Christoph Dieckmann has demonstrated, expansionist German plans developed during the First World War had called for the expulsion of the Polish, Russian, and Jewish populations from Lithuania and demanded the establishment of German Wehrbauern, groups of peasants who would serve as a defensive bulwark, throughout the Baltic states.35 For German experts in spatial planning, eastern Europe during the First World War served as an experimental arena in which they could test their increasingly radical settlement plans and colonial fantasies. Two decades later, National Socialist politicians and experts happily built on such exploratory work.36
However, the SA settlement plans from 1938 also contained a disciplinary component that was supposed to have an internal effect on the local populations in these new settlements. The high proportion of SA men among the new settlers was intended to ensure political homogeneity and guarantee the preeminence of the NSDAP and its ideology within these new settlements. The active recruitment of stormtroopers to settle in the border regions of the Reich began with a number of talks that Kasche and his contributors delivered to SA leaders in March 1939. These efforts culminated in a four-day-long work session in Berlin and Frankfurt/Oder and a field trip to the Upper Silesian village of Schlochau in early May. In addition to representatives of the SA High Command, participants included the regional representatives of the ‘peasantry settlements’ (Neubauernsiedlung) of every SA group.37
The SA settlement initiatives enjoyed a new lease of life with the Wehrmacht’s military victory over Poland in the autumn of 1939, even if the recruitment of settlers suffered from the fact that many of the previous SA recruiters had been drafted into the military. Despite such practical difficulties, Kasche regarded the war as an opportunity to expand the SA settlement plans eastward. As early as 8 November 1938 he informed Lutze and SA leaders in a confidential letter that the placement of new SA farmers had gained greater importance because of the newly acquired territories. In defiance of the appointment of Heinrich Himmler as ‘Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of Germandom’ on 7 October 1939,38 Kasche insisted that an ‘extensive involvement’ by the SA in the ‘Germanization’ project continued to be highly desirable. Therefore, he urged his fellow SA leaders to identify even more potential farmers from the ranks of the SA with the aim of placing them in these new territories, despite ‘all possible inhibitions and ties to their homelands’.39
A circular from 8 December 1939 specified the next steps in the settlement initiative, indicating that the new SA settlements should initially be concentrated in those areas of Upper Silesia that had been integrated into the German Gau Silesia. In cooperation with the governor of Silesia and the Schlesische Landgesellschaft based in Breslau, farmland in the annexed parts of Upper Silesia was released for ‘immediate settlement’.40 Previously Polish-owned farms, usually about 20 acres in size, were to be expropriated. Several of these small Polish estates could then be merged to create between 3,000 and 4,000 larger farms of at least 80 acres. If these figures were correct, this means that the number of farms in the previously Polish parts of Upper Silesia that the Germans seized after their military victory was approximately 15,000. In contrast to the course taken in 1938, the SA leadership now informed potential settlers that personal capital was no longer needed for the move eastward: ‘The farms will be handed over with inventory.’ However, a two-year-long probationary period during which the new German peasant had to demonstrate his ability to run such a farm was to precede the final transfer of ownership.41 As the majority of stormtroopers had by this time been drafted into the Wehrmacht, the SA leadership repeatedly stressed that the men who had taken up arms would in no way suffer a disadvantage in the settlement process because of their inability to obtain a placement immediately. The Polish settlement area, they reminded the men, was large enough to host all aspirants, during and after the war.42
Despite such assurances, isolated farmers from the ranks of the SA at the beginning of the war began to contact the Reichsnährstand directly to be considered as administrators of former Polish estates. That these individuals initially bypassed the SA frustrated Kasche, and he warned his fellow storm-troopers that this had to be taken as proof of the SA’s organizational weakness.43 Nevertheless, such problems continued. Two years later, in 1941, Kasche claimed to have contacted the Hauptamt Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle, literally the ‘Main Welfare Office for Ethnic Germans’, to ensure that the approximately 700 SA men working for this organization were being cared for. In the previous two years the OSAF had no direct influence on these stormtroopers.44 Despite these shortcomings, the surviving archival documents demonstrate that the SA persistently tried to secure a decisive influence over settlement matters, not least to create a reliable power base for the organization’s future growth.45 This became all the more important as the build-up of regular SA units in the newly occupied territories beginning in the autumn of 1939 took place in a limited way. The new SA units were initially not incorporated into the Reich SA; furthermore, the OSAF did not supply those SA groups bordering these new regions, in other words the SA-Gruppen Ostmark, Ostland, Silesia, and Sudeten, with additional financial means in order to expand their areas of operation.46
In practical terms, the SA intended that at least 5,000 new SA settlers would be ready to move into the settlements at the end of the war. The candidates were to be selected according to political and racial criteria established by a joint effort of the SA with Darré’s Reichsnährstand, and they were to be educated in three specially designed SA settlement schools (Siedlerschulen) located on SA estates that were to be established within the ‘incorporated Eastern territories’.47 In 1941, Kasche claimed that he had met with Himmler and his representatives several times to discuss the necessary transfer of ownership of suitable estates. He also asserted that he had held talks with the office of the Generalverwalter für die öffentliche Landbewirtschaftung in den eingegliederten Ostgebieten, literally the ‘General Authority for Public Land Management within the Incorporated Eastern Territories’, located in Litzmannstadt (Łódź).48 The provisional outcome of these talks, Kasche noted, was an agreement that the SA would receive a fifteen-year lease on the ‘Estate Krośniewice’ at the end of the war. Gauleiter Arthur Greiser had made this decision by the summer of 1940 or even earlier, but he had informed the SA that the final transfer of property into the hands of the NSDAP could only happen after the war, allegedly for legal reasons.49 Located near the city of Kutno in the Reichsgau Wartheland, some 100 kilometres west of Warsaw, Krośniewice had previously been owned by a Polish noble family. With the transfer of the estate, the SA would also become the proprietor of Błonie Castle, built on its grounds.50 Kasche at this time also demonstrated considerable interest in the Gut Freihufen, a county estate of considerable size in the rural district of Rawitsch/Rawicz.51
Plans for the new SA training schools to be established stated that the SA was to offer two-week-long courses for new settlers and SA leaders that aimed to ‘prepare them for their particular ethnic tasks [volkspolitische Aufgaben]’: ‘To fight foreign and inferior influences, we have to inculcate every fellow German with the awareness of his hereditary value [stolzes Blutbewußtsein] [. . .] Even the individual man needs to know that this is not his private affair, but a matter that concerns the vital question of his people’s survival. The SA is requested to attach absolute importance to the observation of such issues.’ In this way the SA farmers in the new settlements were conceived not only as exemplary cultivators of land, but also as a kind of vice squad for the regime.52
Despite Kasche’s repeated orders that the new SA peasants contribute to the historical task of ‘making the regained territories German again for all time’,53 the actual number of men willing to leave the German heartland for newly acquired territory in the European east was most disappointing. In contrast to the estimated number of 50,000 SA men from the rank and file who had the practical experience necessary for farming, only a mere 1,045 men had signed up for the settlement project by the deadline of 20 June 1940.54 Admittedly, this number had doubled to 2,150 by 30 April 1941, but this figure still remained far below the expectations of the SA leadership.55 Kasche, however, attributed this low number exclusively to practical, war-related problems. In 1941 he was still claiming that the SA would easily furnish the 45,000 men needed for settlement – without drawing on the repatriated ethnic Germans, who had been moving to Reich territory in large numbers since the beginning of the war.56 This remark was a swipe at Himmler, for whom Kasche had maintained a firm distaste ever since the ‘Night of the Long Knives’. Himmler likewise disliked his rival. The two men’s relationship remained poor even after Kasche was appointed German envoy to Croatia and left the field of ‘applied’ SA settlement policies.57
A closer examination of the geographical distribution of potential SA settlers, as determined from Kasche’s report and several monthly registers from the second half of 1941, indicates that the vast majority of those interested in such a transfer lived in the north and east of the German Reich, in borderland regions where the idea of a ‘defensive peasantry’ built on a tradition going back to the nineteenth century and even further. The Pomeranian and Silesian SA groups had the most success with recruiting, producing more than 300 candidates for relocation each, followed by the SA Gruppe Nordmark (from Schleswig-Holstein), with 240 candidates. The SA groups from Hesse, Bayerische Ostmark, and Alpenland, by contrast, produced only twelve, seven, and three candidates respectively.58 When faced with these numbers, it is hard not to qualify Kasche’s assertive remarks as a calculated optimism that was out of touch with the realities of German society at war.
Despite the practical problems of recruitment and Kasche’s over-emphasis on his own achievements, his reports demonstrate that the SA continued to pursue its own ‘Germanization’ policies. The SA Supreme Command intensified its settlement planning with the outbreak of the Second World War, despite Hitler’s appointment of Himmler as ‘Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of Germandom’ in October 1939. The Führer’s decree explicitly stated that the new Reich Commissioner would be responsible for the ‘configuration of new German settlement zones by relocation, in particular through the settlement of Germans and ethnic Germans returning home from abroad’.59 Theoretically, the responsibility for carrying out the ‘Germanization’ policies was thus divided. While the SS was responsible for the settlement of Germans ‘returning home’,60 the SA could claim that it was entitled to take care of the resettlement of German peasants originating from the Old Reich. As late as January 1941, Kasche insisted on this division of responsibilities between the SA and SS. He stated not only that stormtroopers would not be employed in settlements ‘where the SS is providing the National Socialist core’, but also pointed out that ‘it needs to be emphasized that the safeguarding of the German east depends on the German peasant taking roots with the soil by the work of his own hands. A German master class [Herrenschicht – here Kasche critically alludes to the tradition of the influential Prussian Junkers] overseeing soil-rooted masses of foreign peoples would not accomplish the task.’61 Such a distinction elucidates how in the SA older ideals of Werkstolz – the pride in work from one’s own hands – were closely related to new geopolitical concepts of racial and cultural superiority. The new German master class was to be a class of nationally conscious (male) workers, Kasche postulated, and it would be characterized, as Ernst Jünger had written as early as 1932, by voluntary discipline, the contempt for pleasure, and a war-minded spirit.62
However, Himmler, who while studying plans for the creation of a Greater Germany in 1936 had taken a deep interest in questions of ethnicity and race, became with his appointment in 1939 a direct rival of Kasche and Darré.63 The powers wielded by these men were extremely unevenly distributed. By 1939, Himmler, as Reichsführer-SS and chief of the German police forces, had ascended to one of the most powerful positions in the Third Reich. His standing among the Nazi leaders had been further increased by the myriad crimes his SS had committed in the wake of the German attack on Poland.64 Kasche, on the contrary, could only count on the considerably weaker SA, the Reichsnährstand, and a few supportive influential National Socialists like Reich Minister Alfred Rosenberg and Martin Luther of the Foreign Office.65 Kasche certainly lacked the power to challenge Himmler when it came to the implementation of their competing political ideas. For example, when Himmler advocated the creation of larger farms and country estates in the occupied east for German families of particular racial value – a plan directly opposed to Kasche’s more egalitarian vision – the only thing the SA-Obergruppenführer could do was to insist that some of these new large landowners be recruited from the ranks of the SA.66 This is just one example of Himmler’s successful marginalization of the SA in the field of ‘Germanization’ policies between late 1939 and early 1941. Besides the SA’s internal problems of recruitment, this diminished role was another important reason why its settlement plans drafted in 1938 and during the early months of the war could not be carried out. Instead, the SA’s planning concentrated more and more on the immediate post-war period, leaving questions about the actual distribution of powers open.67
After Kasche took over the position of German envoy to the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) in April 1941, Lutze did not appoint a formal successor for nearly a year, indirectly admitting defeat in the trial of strength with Himmler. Finally, in February 1942, SA-ObergruppenführerMax Luyken was appointed Inspekteur für Neubauerntum und Volkstumspflege in der SA und den SA-Wehrmannschaften, literally the ‘Chief of Staff for New Peasant Settlements and for Matters of Ethnicity in the SA and the SA-Wehrmannschaften’. Unlike the young and energetic Kasche, Luyken, who was aged fifty-six in early 1942, was an SA bureaucrat who felt no need to confront Himmler.68 At this time the SA gave up any direct involvement in the settlement project besides keeping records of potential settlers from its ranks. In the spring of 1942, just weeks after Luyken’s appointment, a propaganda article published in the monthly SA in Feldgrau informed readers interested in participating in the settlement project of the necessary qualifications and application procedure for the Neubauernschein. The regulations governing qualifications implemented under Kasche in 1938 remained in place, but the only institution from now on directly involved in the application procedure was the Landesbauernschaft, the regional dependence of the Reichsnährstand, which handled the paperwork, organized medical examinations of an applicant and his wife, checked their pedigree papers, and obtained information on them from local party chapters and the police. The Landesbauernschaft was even urged to undertake an unannounced visit to the applicant’s home. The SA as an organization was not mentioned once in the outline of these procedures; its judgement on an applicant’s political suitability and commitment to the regime was apparently no longer needed.69
Nevertheless, the SA continued its settlement propaganda and the registration of potential SA farmers until early 1943, with the number of candidates rising from 1,196 on 1 April 1942 to 2,555 on 1 January 1943. In the remaining archival documents no explanation is given for why Luyken’s tenure started with slightly more than 1,000 enrollees, whereas Kasche had specified 2,150 as the overall number of applicants on 30 April 1941. It is likely that some of the original applicants were placed successfully in the interim, while others died on the battlefields between 1939 and 1942. Luyken’s new number comprised all possible settlers, both those who were interested in a transfer within the boundaries of the Old Reich and those who longed to be placed in the new ‘German east’. The latter group comprised 1,304 individuals, or 51 per cent of all those registered on 1 January 1943.70
These numbers, at least from Luyken’s perspective, reflected the intensified propaganda campaigns that the SA organized in close collaboration with the Reichsnährstand during 1942 and that were intended to whet the Germans’ appetite for farming and rural life. Informational events were organized around topics such as ‘SA settlers tell about their lives’, ‘SA comradeship in the settlements: help from the neighbours’, and, adopting the vocabulary of the life-reform movement, ‘The happiness of our children: breathing freely and growing up in close touch with nature.’71By this point a few settlers had already made their way from the ranks of the SA into an eastern European farmhouse. However, in August of the same year Lutze prohibited all future transfers of new farmers from the Old Reich into the ‘German east’. Only war veterans and ethnic Germans from abroad were to be settled there for the remainder of the war years.72
According to an internal statistic from January 1943, the SA had transferred only a total of 422 registered applicants to the settlements. It is not clear whether this number designated all stormtroopers sent between 1939 and late 1942 or only those resettled since Luyken took office, and whether it comprised internal migration settlements or only those in the new German territories. But even with no reliable statistics at hand, it seems likely that the total number of SA peasants settled in the east did not exceed a number of three digits. Finally, on 16 February 1943, two weeks after Germany’s defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad, Lutze eliminated Luyken’s post without providing a substitute.73
Peasants and Ideologues
Despite all ideological and practical difficulties, the SA’s relevance for the Nazi settlement policies was not peripheral, mainly for two reasons. First, even after Kasche had reported for duty as the envoy to Croatia, he was still Hitler’s first choice for the new position of ‘Reich Commissar for Moscovy’, a position that was expected to be created after the (allegedly imminent) German victory over the Soviet Union.74 Alfred Rosenberg, as Reich Minster for the Occupied Eastern Territories, requested an absolutely ‘ruthless personality’ for this job – and he recommended Kasche.75In this capacity Kasche’s main task would initially have been to sharply suppress all possible forms of Communist resistance. Provided that the Wehrmacht had successfully defeated and occupied the Soviet Union, Kasche as the SA’s expert on questions of settlements and ethnicity would then have played an active and influential role in carrying out the Reich’s ‘Germanization’ policies in eastern Europe, and maybe even beyond.76
Kasche’s ambitions, in any case, remained visionary. As late as June 1941 the Hamburg professor of education Gustaf Deuchler, a fanatical stormtrooper himself, produced at Kasche’s request a draft report on the ‘necessity and the tasks of an SA colonial storm, or ‘K-Sturm’.77 According to Deuchler, the SA ‘K-Sturm’ would bring together older Germans with colonial experience in Africa and a new generation of Brownshirts who aspired to ‘go into the colonies’. The older members of the K-Sturm would provide these younger men with the ‘spirit of German colonial policies’, a political attitude that, according to Deuchler, would be required for ‘proper judgement in colonial affairs’ and the development of ‘some basic skills in the treatment of the natives [Eingeborene]’.78 This draft never achieved any political significance, not least because of Kasche’s new position as German envoy to Croatia. Yet even as late as 1944, Kasche maintained that the SA was well prepared to furnish the necessary ‘human material’ (Menschmaterial) for the German settlements in the post-war period. He was convinced that the Third Reich’s social and political order and, within it, the SA as an organization that could mobilize millions of men, would then serve as role models in post-war Europe as a whole.
Second, the SA’s settlement plans and activities under Kasche also merit recognition because a comparison with the later SS settlement policies reveals some important continuities. Although the number of German settlements required increased substantially with the Nazis’ territorial gains between 1939 and 1942, the SS’s deliberations on the transfer of Germans from the Old Reich closely resembled the previous statements of the SA. Furthermore, the SS suffered from the same problems. In its preliminary work on the Generalplan Ost in the spring of 1941, the Reichsführer-SS’s Main Planning Office in Berlin noted that roughly 200,000 families would be needed for the formation of a German peasantry in the newly occupied and annexed territories of eastern Europe.79 In order to accomplish the goal of 35 per cent of the population in these areas working in agriculture, the planners calculated that a total of 1.46 million agricultural workers of German origin would be needed.80 The new farmers were expected to provide ‘the foundation of the entire ethnic German build-up’ (Volksaufbau). Unlike many farmers of the Old Reich, whom the SS characterized as politically conservative and narrow-minded, these new farmers were supposed to represent a new kind of peasantry, one that was fully conscious of its national and racial tasks. The SS claimed that the German farmer in the newly conquered eastern territories had to regard himself as a true political fighter ‘on the attack’.81
Such formulations did not reflect the realities of the German occupation, which was initially characterized by the largely uncoordinated settlement of ethnic Germans from Galicia, Volhynia, Bessarabia, and the Baltic region.82 Germans who were living within the borders of the German Reich of 1937, however, did not show much enthusiasm for a permanent migration eastward. Himmler acknowledged that by June 1942 the SS had only received 4,500 settler applications from the German heartlands. Two-thirds of those applications had been submitted in the previous year, after the German attack on the Soviet Union that summer.83 The attempt to increase the number of ‘Germanic’ Wehrbauern by tapping into the pool of farmers from the Netherlands, who had been targeted by German and Dutch propaganda since 1941 and whom Himmler had praised as ‘racially incredibly valuable’ (blutsmäßig unerhört wertvoll), was likewise at best an ephemeral success. Many of the 5,000 settlers from the Netherlands who moved to the ‘German East’ between 1941 and 1944 only remained there for a short while. A report from the Dutch Commissie tot Uitzending van Landbouwers naar Oost-Europa, literally the ‘Commission for the Secondment of Farmers to Eastern Europe’, in February 1942 lamented the regularly very low level of education of the Dutch peasants in the east and contemptuously called them a ‘bunch of adventurers’ with very little professional knowledge and insufficient leadership skills.84
Such numbers and remarks put the aforementioned failure of the SA’s recruitment attempts within their own rank and file in perspective. It was apparently not only the SA’s inadequate organization but a much more deeply rooted problem that was to blame for the relatively low numbers of applicants. Despite intense Nazi propaganda prior to and during the Second World War, only a few Germans living in the Old Reich warmed to the idea of leaving their home towns and villages for good in order to build a new existence as ‘defensive peasants’ in eastern Europe. As everyone with a grain of historical and political knowledge knew, control over these areas had been fervently contested by numerous national groups, and in the 1940s these regions were characterized by excessive violence. One might say that the relative failure of earlier ‘internal colonization’ attempts repeated itself in these areas on a larger scale. Theory and practice did not converge.
Undoubtedly, millions of German men and women, as soldiers, policemen, officials, teachers, nurses, and auxiliaries, participated in the racially motivated quest to conquer large parts of eastern Europe. They looted, robbed, and murdered.85 However, this did not imply that they were committed to implementing the National Socialist vision of a post-war ‘German East’ with a will of their own and presumably far-reaching personal consequences. This holds true in particular for peasants, who were usually closely attached to their family’s soil. Whereas many of those who actually moved east were young and unmarried, thus relatively open for change and excitement, the SA men targeted in the National Socialist propaganda were middle-aged husbands and family fathers, a group whose members in many cases had already decided on where to live, with whom, and how to sustain a living. For these men, the economic risk of possible failure loomed large, especially as many lacked the necessary financial and social capital to recover quickly in the event of losing their income and home.
This observation qualifies the assumption that the Nazi regime attempted to satisfy the expectations and demands of German peasants by the acquisition of new ‘living space’ and new settlements there.86 The actual implementation of the far-reaching SS settlement plans that, in 1942, provided for the migration of up to 220,000 peasant families from the Old Reich, would have required massive state force.87 Yet social and political protests on the ‘home front’, a persistent fear for First World War veterans like Hitler, were to be avoided at all costs. The contemporary catchword Ostrausch, meaning ‘a frenzy for the east’, thus described a phenomenon that was largely confined to a small number of people, particularly planning experts and young unmarried ‘adventurers’ who wished to contribute to the ‘German mission’ in the east. Peasants from the Old Reich, by contrast, who were wearied by the Erzeugungsschlacht, the ‘battle of agricultural production’, and suffered from a shortage of available labour, reacted far less enthusiastically. Against this backdrop the regular assurances of SA and SS leaders that ‘no German soldier fighting at the front’ would return too late to benefit from the new settlement projects had little significance in practice.88
Contributing to the Formation of a ‘People’s Community’ in Eastern Europe
Farming in the occupied east proved attractive only to a minority of Germans. In consequence, resettlement experts like SS brigade leader Herbert Backe acknowledged as early as July 1942 that the ‘new formation of German peasantry in occupied Europe’ should be seen as a long-term project that would probably not be completed until after the war.89 This outlook was consistent with SA propaganda, which continued to assert that after the war the stormtroopers, as ‘exemplary fighters’ for the Greater German Reich, would also become peacemakers in the ‘greatest and most durable settlement initiative of all time’.90
The SA’s ‘Germanization’ policies were far more than an obscure footnote in the history of National Socialism for three reasons. First, the SA’s plans constituted – temporally as well as in terms of content – the connecting link between the Reichsnährstand ’s earlier ‘internal colonization’ projects and the later, more radical, ‘Germanization’ projects of the SS. The plans and steps taken to implement them thus contributed to the ‘racial mobilization’91 of the Third Reich by increasing the individual SA man’s ‘racial consciousness’ (Blutsbewusstsein) and by strengthening his (imagined) ‘bonds to the soil’ (Bodenverbundenheit).92 In this way, they merged the traditional discourse of the German ‘defensive settlements’ (Wehrsiedlungen) with the National Socialists’ new racial categories.
Second, the SA’s ‘Germanization’ plans remained important for the organization’s activities in the final years of the war. Despite the fact that the original plans were never put to a broad practical test, their principles continued to have an effect on the SA’s conception of itself. The settlement plans therefore serve as a paradigmatic example of the construction of the late SA’s initiatives and activities around the two poles of discipline and integration with the aim of contributing to the formation of the Volksgemeinschaft along racial lines. Consequently, Kasche ranked the bringing into line and the ‘steering’ (Führung) of his fellow Germans as among the most important aspects of the SA’s settlement initiative.93 The concrete plans for the resettlement of SA men in conquered eastern Europe, developed as early as 1938, were an important element of the larger process of transforming the Erwartungsraum, or ‘space of expectations’, for a racially and politically homogeneous ‘people’s community’ into an Erfahrungsraum, or ‘space of experience’, in the near future.94 That the SA possessed barely any practical experience in ethnic settlement issues (Volkstumsarbeit), as Kasche himself freely acknowledged in 1941,95 paradoxically contributed to the ability of the organization to maintain its expectations for the future, despite being, to all intents and purposes, ousted by Himmler and the SS.
Third, the SA’s ‘Germanization’ policies have to be seen in the context of the pre-military training of the German people, carried out in close cooperation with the Wehrmacht and the Hitler Youth. The SA’s paramilitary education comprised both practical exercises, such as physical training and shooting lessons, and politische Erziehungsarbeit, or ‘political education’.96 This multifaceted programme not only targeted stormtroopers living in the Old Reich, insisting that racially based settlements were a ‘prerequisite for the fulfilment of the regime’s economic, domestic and racial objectives’,97 but also represented an important contribution to the German colonization attempts in eastern Europe.98 In this context more research is needed to determine the importance of Volksdeutsche within the SA, and in the General Government in particular. The following chapter will analyse more fully the SA formations of the General Government that were created from April 1942 onward, partly by incorporating the previously established ‘defensive border guards’ (Wehrschützenbereitschaften).99 Within the history of the stormtroopers, one can therefore draw a line from the 1920s to the 1940s. Already in the early years after the First World War, the idea that the nascent SA, in line with other Wehrverbände, had been called to defend the legitimate interests of the German people living in the borderlands of the German Reich was prevalent.100Ten years later, this idea became more radical with the rise of the German settlement movement, which attempted to intensify the existing German ‘internal colonization’ project along racial and political lines. By the 1940s, the emphasis had shifted from internal to external colonization, looking toward the conquest of new German territories in the European east. The Volksgemeinschaft came to be understood as a Wehrgemeinschaft, with the implementation of the settlement initiatives postponed until peacetime.101 Nevertheless, the idea of racial superiority and the SA’s alleged settlement mission continued to inspire its ‘defensive activities’ against increasing ‘partisan attacks’ until the last phase of the Second World War. Although the actual settlement of stormtroopers in eastern Europe failed, the movement’s concepts of race, discipline, and self-defence contributed to the radicalization of the people’s community in the occupied territories.