23. Photograph from the Reichswettkämpfe der SA, the ‘SA National Sports Competitions’, in the well-filled Olympiastadium Berlin on 17 July 1938. Pairs of SA men from the SA-Gruppe Nordsee are holding hands, balancing on the backs of their comrades. This exercise symbolized the aim of SA sports in general. It was not about individual record performances, but about collective efforts that could foster the bonds among the participants.
24. A group of SA men marching through the city of Eger, today’s Cheb, in the Sudetenland, greeted by the local population with the Hitler salute. This photograph from early October 1938 was taken at the ‘liberation festivities’ that occurred when German troops, including SA units, took occupation of the area. In the following months, young men from the local German population flocked to the newly established SA-Gruppe Sudeten in high numbers.
25. In preparation for future military confrontations, SA men in full gear and wearing gas masks run through a middle-class neighbourhood in Berlin on Sunday, 2 April 1939, accompanied by an SA man on his bicycle. A few passers-by in their Sunday best are watching the scene. The numbers fixed to the men’s trousers, referring to their respective SA unit, suggest that this was a kind of competition between different SA units in the capital.
26. The SA settlement scheme was limited in scale, yet rewarding for Nazi propaganda. This photograph, taken in Rosenheim-Kastenau in 1937 or 1938, depicts workers unloading a wagon of excavated soil onto a dump truck, instructed by a stormtrooper in uniform. A teenage boy is watching the scene. The banner translates as ‘This company is driving gratuitously for the SA settlement’.
27. This postcard, distributed around 1940 by the Hanover-based company Graphischer Kunstverlag H. Lukow, consists of nine photographs celebrating the Nazi settlement initiatives in the city of Bad Salzgitter near the Harz Mountains. With the founding of the Reichswerke AG für Erzbergbau und Eisenhütten ‘Hermann Göring’ in 1937, the area developed into a highly industrialized part of the German Reich. The streets in the ‘SA settlement’ were named after ‘martyrs’ of the Nazi movement (Dietrich Eckart, Horst Wessel), and streets in the nearby Fliegersiedlung carried the name of First World War fighter pilots, such as Ernst Udet and Oswald Boelke.
28. A photograph of recruits of the SA-Standarte ‘Feldherrnhalle’, sworn in on 3 May 1941 at an unknown location.
29. On the occasion of taking office as the new Germany envoy to Croatia, SA-Obergruppenführer Siegfried Kasche (right, in uniform) greets the Croatian general Ivan Perčević (left, in civilian clothes) on the airfield in Agram, today’s Zagreb, in April 1941.
30. During the Second World War, SA propaganda attempted to win over young men for its Feldherrnhalle division. The war transformed marching stormtroopers into a powerful tank crew, and boys into men – as suggested by this recruitment poster by Werner von Axter-Heudtlaß from October 1944.
31. Until the very end of the Second World War, the leaders of the SA not only issued morale-boosting slogans but also engaged in the practical training of the Volkssturm and the Hitler Youth. This photograph depicts the last Chief of Staff of the SA, Wilhelm Schepmann (far right), and the General Labour Leader, Wilhelm Decker (second from the left), inspecting an RAD (Reich Labour Service) training department for young volunteers who registered for the ‘Feldherrnhalle’.
32. The mayoral election poster of the former SA-Standartenführer and diplomat Hans Gmelin in his home town of Tübingen in 1954. While the official slogan translates as ‘Hans Gmelin the right man for Tübingen’, protesters have added the note: ‘When he’s finally mayor / Then he can properly flaunt / With the “steel helmet” on his head / Confront all storms! Tandarady!’ After a controversial yet ultimately successful campaign, Gmelin became the uncontested strongman in local politics, remaining in office for twenty years.
33. This 1957 caricature by Leo Haas, a cartoonist living in the GDR, depicts the Minister of the Interior of the Federal Republic of Germany, Gerhard Schröder, in SA uniform, ‘securing the election path for the CDU’, the conservative party of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. In 1933, Schröder – then a junior lawyer in Bonn – had applied for membership in the SA. In the caricature he secures a narrow path by placing signposts next to the abysses saying ‘Interdiction of democratic organizations’, ‘Interdiction of DFD [the East German Democratic Women’s League of Germany, prohibited in the Federal Republic in 1957]’, and ‘Interdiction of KPD [the Communist Party of Germany, banned in West Germany in 1956]’. The caricature illustrates the popular accusation of East Germany’s Socialist Unity Party (SED) that the democratic governments in the West were essentially former Nazis in disguise.
PART I
1
TURMOIL IN POST-WAR GERMANY AND THE ORIGINS OF THE NAZI SA
Guns and hand grenades are not allowed in the theatres.
— Order of Munich’s Municipal Command, 8 May 19191
The Nazi stormtroopers were a typical product of the ‘transnational zone of paramilitary violence’ that emerged in central Europe after the First World War, and it is therefore apt to start this study by analysing the milieu that gave birth to this and several other right-wing paramilitary leagues.2 The regional focus of this chapter is on Bavaria and, to a lesser degree, its neighbouring states Württemberg and Austria, as it was here that the SA was founded and operated until the mid-1920s. With regard to Fascism more generally, the impact of the Great War is hard to overestimate. The war contributed decisively to a new mentality that came to shape the political and social conflicts of the following two decades.3 Prussian military reformers had conceptualized the army as the school of the nation as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century. During the war years their view proved correct, but the military’s influence on society operated in a different, more comprehensive way: instead of instilling honourable virtues and soldierly discipline into the minds of the nation’s aristocratic youth, the Great War, with its mass-scale killings at the front lines and its severe food shortages within Germany, ultimately destroyed the old order upon which such virtues were based and contributed to the emancipation of all those previously excluded from politics and the military leadership, particularly working-class men and women in general.4 As historian Jörn Leonhard has recently pointed out, the First World War was also a ‘revolution of rising expectations’ that fundamentally shaped Europeans’ perceptions of politics and society. In the United Kingdom, France, and Germany alike, ordinary servicemen beginning in 1916 increasingly mocked the established political and military authorities, inventing a new antagonistic vocabulary and a new language of belonging and exclusion.5 What during the war was manifested as a particular form of (bitter) wartime irony, to be found in soldiers’ newspapers, letters, and diaries, was transformed after the armistice into a more violent and confrontational political language that contributed to the sharply antagonistic political climate of the interwar period.6
Fighting for Order
In the years following the revolution of November 1918, which resulted in the abdication of the Kaiser and paved the way for the transformation of the German Reich into a parliamentary democracy, a myriad of new paramilitary organizations came to play an important part in German politics, testifying not only to the erosion of the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force, but also to the fact that hundreds of thousands of ordinary men now felt called upon to take politics into their own hands. A provisional Reichswehr was established during the spring and summer of 1919, but because of the restrictions set by the Versailles peace treaty it remained limited to 100,000 men and 6,000 officers, at least officially.7 This meant that the majority of the soldiers who had fought in the Imperial army were now superfluous. Although many of them returned home, a relatively important minority joined new paramilitary groups that complemented the new Reichswehr units but were only partly loyal to the young democracy, despite being politically and financially dependent on it. By 1921 approximately 400,000 men had enrolled in paramilitary activities in Germany. Estimate
s of the number of Freikorps units and other semi-official ‘government forces’ existing at the time range from 70 up to 400.8 Whereas some of these units were recruited entirely from the Imperial army, others were short-lived hodgepodge militias comprising fewer than 500 men. These semi-legal troops initially helped to secure the borders of the Reich, particularly in the east and southeast. After their return to the German heartlands, however, they were to a considerable extent responsible for the growing level of political violence that marked the early years of the Republic.9 Yet they were not direct forerunners of the SA; according to new research on the German Freikorps, only between 1 and 5 per cent of these paramilitary members later joined the SA.10
The situation was most extreme in Bavaria, where the political turmoil of 1919 – which saw the establishment of the Munich Soviet Republic and its subsequent liquidation by a joint cooperative effort of Reichswehr forces and state-recognized paramilitary groups like the Ehrhardt Brigade,11 the Freikorps Epp,12 and the Freikorps Oberland13 – laid the ground for what became known as the Ordnungszelle Bayern, literally the ‘Bavarian Order Cell’ (Plate 1). This was a regional development that can be characterized by its very careful acceptance of the new democratic order in the Reich and its growing willingness to support all kinds of nationalist groups, both politically, legally, and financially.14 A key element of Bavarian politics in the early years of the Republic was the Einwohnerwehren, or ‘Civil Guards’: a patriotic self-defence organization headed by Georg Escherich. In the eyes of the authorities, the Einwohnerwehren were meant to back the government’s attempt to impose law and order, but they ultimately contributed to the radicalization of conservative politics and helped form a lasting alliance between moderately patriotic and ultra-nationalist circles. Although the Reich government established so-called Wehrkommissare, a network of Reichswehr army officers supposed to watch over the Einwohnerwehr movement, Escherich and his deputy Rudolph Kanzler, backed by the Bavarian government, insisted on their organizational autonomy and steered a political course that helped to transform Bavaria and its capital city Munich into the ‘headquarters of a massive counter-revolutionary conglomerate’.15
At the height of its influence, in the spring of 1920, the Einwohnerwehren comprised some 350,000 men. While many of their members were politically moderate in the sense that they intended to defend the heritage of the Bavarian monarchy, God, and fatherland against the ‘sins of the revolution’ and the political influence of the much-hated ‘Prussians’, the movement also provided a home for those soldiers and Freikorps members who had not been integrated into regular Reichswehr units. Under the protection of the Einwohnerwehren, extreme nationalist activists who ‘had nothing but contempt for the latter’s old fashioned parochialism’ and their ‘Lederhosen militarism’ often joined mobile brigades called Landfahnen or Reichfahnen, which could be up to 30,000 men strong. Here, the extreme nationalists formed lasting networks, established official and secret contacts with representatives of the Bavarian government and the military, received training and weapons, and – above all – earned public recognition for activities that increasingly did not help to stabilize the democratic order but were aimed at overcoming it when the next suitable moment arrived.16
These developments, tolerated and even fostered by the Bavarian governments led initially by Johannes Hoffmann from the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and later, starting in 1920, by Gustav Ritter von Kahr, the unaffiliated candidate of the conservative Bavarian People’s Party (BVP), soon aroused the suspicion of the Allies, who repeatedly demanded the dissolution of the German paramilitary units. However, it was not until June 1921 when von Kahr, meanwhile the ‘strongman’ of Bavaria, agreed despite personal reservations to disband the Bavarian Einwohnerwehren as well as their counterpart in the Reich, the Organisation Escherich – for short, the Orgesch.17 Although these steps had stabilizing effects on the regional level within Bavaria in the years 1919 to 1921, at the same time they contributed to a growing antagonism between Bavaria and the Reich, dominated by its largest state, Prussia, which itself remained firmly in the hands of the Social Democrats until 1932 and turned out to be an ‘unlikely rock of democracy’.18 Throughout the Reich, however, many Germans still contested the legitimacy of the new political order, and even those who over the course of the 1920s made their peace with it, remained open to alternatives.
The rise and fall of the Bavarian Einwohnerwehr movement constituted the background against which the establishment of the National Socialist stormtroopers has to be viewed, particularly with regard to three factors. First, the formation of the paramilitary wing of the newly established NSDAP (which until 24 February 1920 had been called the DAP, the ‘German Workers’ Party’) happened at a time when a political turn to the right was in full swing in Bavaria. Yet, at least initially, the Nazi movement was deemed insignificant by the Reich compared to the hundreds of thousands of men who organized in the Einwohnerwehr units and in several other patriotic Verbände, or groups. Second, with the Einwohnerwehr movement, clandestinely financed and armed paramilitary groups that did not shy away from political murder became a widely tolerated element of politics in Bavaria.19 Third, the Einwohnerwehren cultivated the idea that political participation in Germany following the First World War required personal commitment both as a man and as a soldier. Consequently, even the most radical groups – the Nazi SA soon among them – were able in public to pass for legitimate defenders of law and order.
Establishing the Stormtroopers
The historiography of the National Socialists claimed that the party’s Turn- und Sportabteilung (literally the ‘Gymnastics and Sports Unit’), as the SA was originally called, had been founded under the leadership of the watchmaker Emil Maurice on 12 November of 1920.20 On this day, a group of National Socialist stewards defended a party reunion being held in the Munich Hofbräuhaus against protesters from the Republikanischer Schutzbund, the ‘Republican Self-Protection League’.21 However, although this somewhat randomly selected date provides a powerful founding myth, it condenses a longer process. In reality, the organization of the SA was a gradual development that, beginning in 1919–20 and parallel to the political formation of the NSDAP/DAP and the growing Einwohnerwehr movement, ultimately culminated with the solidification of clearly defined units of political-paramilitary character in 1921–2.22 Technically speaking, the SA and its mother party, the NSDAP, were a registered society bearing the name of Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Arbeiterverein e. V. With the one exception of the period after the Hitler Putsch in November 1923, when both the NSDAP and the SA were outlawed, this legal status remained valid until 1935, when the Nazi Party finally became a public body.23
The practice of supporting party work by creating specialized protection forces was not unique to the völkisch right, however. The National Socialists could not even claim originality for the name and later ‘brand’ of the SA, as already in 1919 the Bavarian Social Democrat Erhard Auer had started to form protection forces for himself and Social Democratic meetings and party rallies, forces that were initially known as the ‘Auer Guard’ or ‘Pitzer Guard’, after its first commander Franz Xaver Pitzer.24 The formation of these guards was a direct reaction to the assassination on 21 February 1919 of Kurt Eisner, the leader of the Independent Social Democrats (USPD) in post-war Bavaria and its premier until his death, by the extreme nationalist Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley.25 From 10 November 1920 onward, the Bavarian SPD also officially organized Saalschutz guards, or stewards. In the following months these units were often referred to as ‘SA’, understood as Sturmabteilung or Saalschutzabteilung. Lieutenant in Reserve Wilhelm Buisson26 led the socialist SA headquartered in Munich that, according to the police, comprised between 2,000 and 5,000 men, including those in units in the nearby cities of Freising, Ingolstadt, and Rosenheim.27 Several months after the Bavarian authorities banned Socialist paramilitary organizations in October 1923, the leftist Sturmabteilung was integrated into the new Reichsbanner Schwarz-R
ot-Gold, Bund Deutscher Kriegsteilnehmer und Republikaner, the nationwide paramilitary defence organization of the Social Democrats founded in Magdeburg on 22 February 1924.28
The initial Nazi SA, which analogous to the Auer Guard was known as the ‘Hitler Guard’,29 was therefore – strictly speaking – if not a copy, then at least deeply influenced by the Social Democratic attempts to create party-controlled self-protection forces. It did not take long, however, before important differences between these two organizations began to emerge. Whereas the Social Democratic SA justified its existence on the basis of the state’s reluctance to adequately protect SPD meetings and the authorities’ proven inability to guarantee the physical integrity of leading politicians on the left, the NSDAP’s Gymnastics and Sports Unit could hardly claim a purely defensive character. As early as 1920, the Nazis had formed Stoßtrupps, or shock troops, which insulted and injured political opponents in the streets of Bavarian cities without having been previously attacked.30 Party mobs also interrupted religious meetings, shouted antisemitic slogans, and attacked audience members at a theatre performance based on the murdered Kurt Eisner.31 They also molested representatives of the Entente Commissions in their Munich hotels and invaded the restaurant in the Munich House of Artists, insulting those present as ‘debauchees’ (Schlemmer).32 The self-proclaimed goal of the stormtroopers was to ‘blow up’ all political meetings in which Jews were allowed to address the crowd.33 Among the authorities, there were severe differences of opinion on how to react to this challenge. Whereas the Bavarian Minister of the Interior expressed his ‘serious disapproval’ (ernstliche Mißbilligung) of the Bavarian police’s lenient stance towards the National Socialists in an urgent letter to the police president as early as February 1921,34 the latter regarded the Nazi stormtroopers as a minor problem compared to their Socialist counterparts, at least until the year 1923.35
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