This mental orientation, which has not yet received enough attention in the existing research on the SA,62 was indeed one of the most important ideological drivers that guaranteed the SA’s identity up to 1945. In particular, in light of the German expansionist policies since the mid-1930s that chronologically coincided with the profound crisis of the SA following the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ (30 June–2 July 1934), the self-image of the SA as an organization that promoted ‘Germanness’ – through paramilitary training, physical exercise, ideological education, and later active fighting in the Second World War – became key. Starting in the late 1930s, at the latest, this held true well beyond the boundaries of the Reich. The high numbers of ethnic Germans who joined the SA in the Sudetenland and the Memel region between 1937 and 1939 testifies to the SA’s lasting appeal, at least in regions that were to be integrated into the Reich.63
The history of the SA after the Nazi takeover of power in late January 1933 remained one of violence, hatred, and fighting. With regard to the Potempa case, already on 23 March, as the first political prisoners filled the newly erected concentration camps in Oranienburg, Dachau, and elsewhere, Hitler had the condemned SA murderers released from prison.64 These former inmates were now ‘acclaimed jubilantly’ by the Upper Silesian press, complained the Union of Poles in Upper Silesia in October 1933 in a petition to the League of Nations. Since murderers were now officially treated as heroes, the Union claimed, the Polish minority had lost all sense of security.65 The following years would confirm and even exceed its most pessimistic fears. Reflecting on the history of violence and bloodshed in Upper Silesia, the writer August Scholtis – an Upper Silesian native from the village of Bolatiz, today’s Czech Bolatice – wrote gloomily in his 1959 autobiography: ‘In this region, Middle Europe still seems to be in the Middle Ages. From generation to generation, the individual human being is torn apart between the Prussian and the Polish state borders here. People are interchangeably deprived of their free will by both sides; they are bullied, hunted down, looted or simply slaughtered along the roadsides.’66
The two decades following the Potempa murder of 1932 were no exception to this pattern. On the contrary, the Nazi takeover of power and the party’s policy of enforced conformity through coercion were carried out with an extreme level of violence, not least in Lower and Upper Silesia. Several years later, the German-Polish borderlands and the territories farther east became lands of mass murder and genocide, the ‘bloodlands’ of the Second World War.67 The SA, as will be demonstrated in this book, was among the organizations responsible for this radicalization of ethnic and political hatred. Taking up Ian Kershaw’s dictum that in Nazi Germany violence was ‘built into the system’,68 one might equally say that violence was built into the SA – not only as a means of actual behaviour, but also as a core element of its propaganda, the socialization of its members, and, finally, the establishment of a National Socialist identity.
Ruffians, Killers, Political Hooligans
Although excessive, the Potempa murder was just one of hundreds of politically motivated crimes that shocked Germany between 1927 and 1932, a foretaste of the systematic persecution of political opponents and other alleged enemies that would follow in the wake of the establishment of the Third Reich in 1933–4. Every one of these crimes helped unsettle the public’s faith in the capability of the Weimar Republic to fight successfully against the increasing wave of political terror. The Republic was a fragile democracy but by no means doomed to fail from its inception in 1919.69 Although the Nazi SA was not the only paramilitary organization to engage in violent clashes with opponents, its contribution to the rise of political violence was significant, both in quantitative and in qualitative terms.70 On the eve of the national elections of 31 July 1932, tensions escalated. In June and July 1932 alone, politically linked street riots, shootings, brawls, and assassinations in Germany caused the deaths of more than 300 people and injured more than 1,000.71 Within a political climate verging on civil war, the Potempa murder would probably not have made more than local headlines had it not been the first political felony to occur after President Hindenburg’s emergency decree on political terrorism came into effect.
The Potempa murder case contains many of the elements on which I will elaborate in the following chapters: the forms and motives of the SA’s political violence, the reaction of the democratic state vis-à-vis the increasing threat from the National Socialists, and their exploitation of border disputes between Germans and their neighbours that stretched back to the nineteenth century. After the National Socialists took power in 1933, the SA remained the party’s Praetorian Guard and, at least according to the official propaganda, the embodiment of its values, attitudes, and readiness for combat. The individual SA man was expected to represent the ‘most ideal National Socialist type’72 and as such was propagated as a role model for (male) German youth, building in part on the Freikorps myth but also incorporating newer trends commonly associated with muscular Christianity and the ‘conservative revolution’ in Germany around 1930.73 However, the murder of SA Chief of Staff Ernst Röhm and several dozen of his followers between 30 June and 2 July 1934 in the infamous ‘Night of the Long Knives’ considerably hampered the SA’s ambitions to shape the politics of the Third Reich. According to the historiographical consensus, these events reduced the stormtroopers to a ‘second-line propaganda group within the movement’ for the remaining eleven years of the Third Reich.74
Against this well-known background, a new study on the SA does not necessarily need justification, but certainly an explanation of its intention, scope, and methodological approach appears to be necessary. This book will demonstrate not only that the narrative of the SA’s rise and fall as outlined above is incomplete, but that it obscures the Brownshirts’ deep and long-term effect on large numbers of Germans living in the Third Reich, an effect that lasted even longer than Nazi rule. The SA was, in the words of American sociologist Lewis A. Coser, a ‘greedy institution’, an organization characterized by ‘omnivorous’ demands on its members yet based on voluntary compliance, loyalty, and commitment. Such organizations attempt to ‘encompass within their circle the whole personality’.75 The SA throughout the Third Reich remained an important organization for forming German men according to the regime’s needs and wishes, but it also allowed the rank-and-file stormtrooper to participate in the Nazi project.76 In this sense, the SA was highly relevant politically until 1945 – a contention that runs counter to the mainstream historiography on the SA, which emphasizes its fundamental loss of power and influence after the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ in 1934 and considers the SA in its later years an organization that was numerically still considerable, but politically irrelevant. To take up Hans Mommsen’s famous interpretation of the course of Nazi politics as a ‘cumulative radicalisation’, particularly regarding its attitude toward the extermination of the Jews,77 the existing literature of the later SA may be summarized as suggesting a cumulative banalization.
This assessment is misleading as it conveys the impression that the SA after 1934 was solely geared toward promoting a kind of nostalgic drinking companionship – an argument initially put forward by many SA activists after the war. Such a view ignores important activities that the SA performed in the pre-war years of the Third Reich, including its antisemitic violence, which peaked in the summer of 1935 and again in June and November 1938; its contributions to the Second World War; and its role in stabilizing the Nazi regime within Germany and the occupied territories well into the last weeks of Nazi rule. The following study therefore covers the entire period from 1921, when Nazi Sturmabteilungen were organized in Munich for the first time, until 1945, when they ceased to operate in the context of the ultimate collapse of the German war effort.78 Furthermore, the situation of transitional justice in the German zones of occupation, as well as within the jurisdiction of the two German states founded in 1949, will be explored inasmuch as it deals with the SA and its crimes. I will argue that th
e courts decisively influenced the way in which the history of the stormtroopers was written during the first decades after the Second World War. Finally, the SA’s importance within a comprehensive social history, or Gesellschaftsgeschichte, of National Socialism will be reassessed.
Given the myriad studies that exist on the history of National Socialism, the Third Reich, the Second World War, and the Holocaust – fields that no individual researcher can claim to know in all their detail any longer79 – the number of works that concentrate on the SA is surprisingly limited. With the exception of the controversy surrounding the SA’s social appeal and the composition of its membership – as predominantly working class or middle class – the existing studies are quite uniform when it comes to interpreting the organization.80 They overwhelmingly concentrate on the years from the mid-1920s to 1934, with a clear focus on the forms and consequences of SA activism.81 An early and characteristic if unusually lively example of historical judgement is Ernst Niekisch’s assessment of the stormtroopers in his book Reich of the Menial Demons (Das Reich der niederen Dämonen), published in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1953. As Niekisch wrote:
The SA was a counter-elite; it attracted all those characters who were rotten and frail from within. In the SA, all criminal inclinations were let loose. The SA barracks were dens of vice; there were work-shy individuals, drunkards, losers [Lebensbankrotteure], homosexuals, ruffians and killers who hatched their sinister attacks by which Germany should be ‘awakened’. The human quality of this brown heap, in which the sons of the German bourgeoisie were trained in gangland methods, illustrated the desolate human decline of the German middle classes.82
The former ‘National Bolshevik’ Niekisch, whom the Nazis had imprisoned in 1937, was later appointed a professor of sociology at East Berlin’s Humboldt University. His personal anger at and hatred of the Nazis coincided with contemporary political doctrines, at least with regard to the stormtroopers. Both the educated West Germans and the Socialist establishment in the east regarded the SA men’s violence and lack of morality as a cornerstone of Fascist rule, albeit for somewhat different reasons. In the Federal Republic, SA violence was often used to delegitimize National Socialism as a perverted political ideology and the ‘rule of the mob’. The undertone of this claim was clearly apologist, as this image contrasted negatively with the alleged attempts of the middle classes to ‘soften’ the Nazi excesses. One might say that the stormtroopers were portrayed as ‘fanatical Nazis’ against whom even supporters of the regime and regular party members could be compared positively. At best, the members of the latter group could now perceive themselves to be ‘tactical’ or ‘upright’ Nazis. In the Communist East, the situation was more ambivalent: in the immediate post-war years, SA violence that had been committed in the early 1930s was severely persecuted, at times in show trials, particularly when it had been directed against Communists. However, attempts to win over the mass of former Brownshirts for the benefit of the new socialist state prevailed, beginning in the early 1950s, and criminal persecution diminished accordingly. In both parts of Germany, disdain dominated, at least until the 1970s. For the influential journalist and author Joachim Fest, to quote a respected conservative intellectual in the West, the SA was a barely disguised criminal mob, a ‘racket with a political slant’ (Ringverein mit politischem Akzent).83 The historian Hans Buchheim in 1965 similarly regarded the ‘SA rowdies’ as the ‘most reprobated form of a perverted soldierly tradition’ (verkommenste Form einer abartigen soldatischen Tradition),84 and the American historian William L. Shirer even claimed that many of the SA leaders were ‘notorious homosexual perverts’.85
However, such damning assessments tell us more about the preferences of post-war historiography than about social realities in the SA. In sharp contrast to these judgements, a 1931 internal police memorandum ‘on the fighting principles of radical organisations’ emphasized that there was ‘undoubtedly a lot of valuable Menschmaterial’ among the stormtroopers, who were led by ‘highly qualified leaders’.86 Karl Otto Paetel, a ‘national revolutionary’ during the late Weimar years who survived the Third Reich in exile and later introduced the West Germans to American beatnik poets, formulated an intermediary position. He rightly emphasized as early as 1965 that the difficulty in writing about the stormtroopers would be to not content oneself with a reconstruction of the SA’s ‘administrative schemes’ and orders. Instead, Paetel thought it paramount to convincingly explain how, under such an ‘administrative heap’, two types of SA men could come into existence and coexist: the ‘idealists’ and those he described as possessing the ‘jungle mentality of sadist hooligans’.87 This is still a difficult task for the historian, particularly because in the SA ‘idealists’ and ‘sadists’ – to stick to Paetel’s terminology for the moment – were hard to distinguish and sometimes not identifiable at all.
Since the 1970s, several important studies on the SA that took up this challenge have appeared in print. Whereas the aforementioned earlier literature usually emphasized the ‘criminal character’ of the SA – admittedly, an important task of popular pedagogy in Germany, given the fact that until the late 1950s many Germans still regarded National Socialism as a good idea that had unfortunately gone wrong88 – the authors of these new studies took a closer look at the social composition, mentalities, and political organization of the SA. Pioneering works – by Peter Merkl on the self-images of the stormtroopers, by Mathilde Jamin on the SA leadership corps and its problems after the so-called ‘Röhm purge’, and by Richard Bessel on the rise and the political violence of the SA in Silesia prior to 1933 – became cornerstones upon which recent research still builds. Peter Longerich’s seminal political history of the SA, published in 1989, marks the provisional end point of this renewed interest during the 1970s and 1980s.89
From the 1990s onward, three different types of research on the SA have emerged. First, there have been a range of works that combine social historical approaches with more recent attempts to write histories of violence, often from a praxeological and micro-historical perspective, and at times even with a deliberate comparative design. These investigations stress that the SA units constituted ‘communities of violence’ (Gewaltgemeinschaften) that preached a particular ‘way of life’ in which excess and discipline complemented each other.90 Sven Reichardt’s imposing dissertation from 2002 comparing the German SA with the Italian Squadristi stands out as a particularly influential work of this school of thought.91 Second, important aspects of the SA’s history have also been analysed in the many regional and local studies dealing with the Nazi takeover of power, as well as in historical studies on the German police, the judiciary, and the early concentration camps.92 In addition, books have appeared in which family members explore the past of those relatives with an ‘SA career’. Largely based on ego-documents, these books often contain relevant information about the motives that individuals had for their commitment to the stormtroopers – information that is rarely documented in state archives.93 Third, there have been increasing numbers of studies that are informed by the new cultural history. The authors of these studies take a vivid interest in the ‘body images’ of the men in the SA and SS, and analyse National Socialist rituals and symbols, particularly the death cult that has been so characteristic of Fascist ideologies.94 Others explore the gendered dimension of interwar paramilitarism, scrutinize the cliché of the ‘gay Nazi’, or re-examine the relations between Nazi activists and the various Churches.95
New Perspectives
Although the SA can hardly be characterized as an understudied subject, no comprehensive account of its history and development has been attempted so far. This book attempts to fill this lacuna, not only by weaving the numerous loose ends together, but also through its presentation of information drawn from archival research in more than a dozen state, regional, and local archives in several countries, producing a more multi-dimensional and balanced view than has hitherto been presented.96 This investigation aims to provi
de the first comprehensive history of the stormtroopers that combines extensive archival research with a thorough analysis of existing studies in order to reassess the SA’s importance in the history of the Third Reich and Western modernity more generally.
Several points underline the importance of this study. First, as mentioned above, the history of the SA has been thoroughly researched only for the period up to the summer of 1934. Despite Bruce Campbell’s pioneering article urging scholars not to overlook the later SA that was published more than twenty years ago, only a few historians have followed his call.97 This has had consequences. I will argue that the historians’ concentration on the SA’s violence in the second half of the Weimar Republic – the Systemzeit, as the Nazis derogatorily called it – helped obscure two issues: (1) the fact that the SA not only survived the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ but even managed to have a partial comeback in the late 1930s; and (2) the extent to which this organization helped the Nazis to permeate German society. In 1939 the SA still comprised more than 1.3 million men – roughly three times as many as in 1932.98 Violent mobilization and disciplinary integration into the SA were features of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft, or ‘people’s community’, until 1945. Over the past decade, historians of modern Germany have vigorously debated the appropriateness of this term and the nature of the society it designated, agreeing at least that the Volksgemeinschaft was a highly popular political promise, but never a social reality. However, the participants in this debate have not paid much attention to the stormtroopers. Against this background, the present study is not only an empirical contribution to this debate but also a critical comment on its mode of discussion and preliminary results.99
Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts Page 3
