Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts

by Daniel Siemens

  Historians usually consider 11 August 1921 as the official founding date of the National Socialist SA.36 On this day, the party paper Der Völkische Beobachter published a proclamation urging the ‘German Youth’ to join the new Turn- und Sportabteilung for the necessary ‘heavy fight’ against the Jews. This ‘foreign race’, the Nazis claimed, would continue to prevent the German people from recognizing their bitter reality, shaped by national shame and foreign domination. The proclamation contained some of the ingredients that over the next years were to be relentlessly repeated in the Nazi propaganda. The goal of this new subdivision of the NSDAP was to ‘unite the younger party members’ in order to provide the party with a ‘battering ram’. With regard to its ideological function, the ambition was to create an organization that would keep alive the idea of national defence (Wehrgedanken) among the German people. Remarkably, the dual character of the SA as a party protection squad and an instrument for ideological-educational purposes, which throughout its existence confused friends and foes alike, was already ingrained in its first manifesto. The party rhetoric contrasted sharply with the very modest beginnings of these units, addressing the prospective stormtroopers directly as an elite group that had been called upon to shape Germany’s destiny: ‘Your services will be needed in the future!’37

  Two weeks prior to this public summons, on 29 July 1921, background talks had been held between Hitler and Captain Hermann Ehrhardt, a leading figure of post-war Germany’s extreme right who had just taken headquarters in Munich. Ehrhardt delegated the former marine lieutenant Julius Hans Ulrich Klintzsch – the twenty-two-year-old son of a Protestant senior pastor Johannes Paul Klintzsch and his wife Johanna Dorothea, from Lübbenau in Lower Lusatia, and a former member of the Freikorps Ehrhardt Brigade – to organize the NSDAP’s ‘self-protection’ forces.38 Previously an active participant in the Kapp Putsch, Klintzsch had moved to Munich in the early summer of 1921. A few weeks after his arrival, Ehrhardt entrusted him with the task of ‘infiltrating’ competing organizations of the extreme right. The NSDAP’s self-protection forces were Klintzsch’s first target in the Bavarian capital.39

  Those involved in the deal between Hitler and Ehrhardt perceived it as a win-win situation: Hitler would gain further access to the web of military and conservative political leaders in Bavaria, and his young self-defence units would benefit from the military expertise of individuals like Klintzsch. On the other side, Ehrhardt, nicknamed ‘the boss’ by friends and admirers, hoped to gain in Hitler a public voice and in the NSDAP a new party that would be at his disposal.40 Along with former Quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff, called by opponents the ‘big spider in the Swastika’ (große Hakenkreuzspinne) – so central was his role in the web of nationalist groups during the early 1920s41 – Ehrhardt was a key figure of the extreme right who enjoyed an almost mythical reputation among young activists of this persuasion throughout Germany. A resident of the Bavarian capital for political reasons, he developed close bonds with like-minded extreme nationalists and Fascists in Austria, Hungary, and Italy.42 He made use of well-trained soldiers-turned-terrorists by organizing them into a secret terror network, called the O. C. (Organisation Consul). Finally, he provided the early SA not only with logistical but also considerable financial support.43 In contrast, Hitler was at this time merely a promising and regionally well-known political orator who still remained dependent on the goodwill of those with better access to weapons and Bavarian high society.44

  Consequently, the early SA initially observed Ehrhardt’s military command (via Klintzsch) and was said to have been only at the ‘political disposal’ of Hitler.45 At this time the stormtroopers in the Bavarian capital consisted of at least 241 men and boys who were organized into twenty-one groups and, according to a membership list that made it into the hands of the authorities, predominantly aged between seventeen and twenty-four.46 The choice of the twenty-three-year-old Klintzsch as commander seems therefore logical. In addition to his credentials as a soldier, he was just about an adult man – the legal age was then twenty-one – and thereby embodied the claim that ‘youth is led by youth’, an important element of the German youth movement.47 Klintzsch’s command was cut short, however, as he was taken into custody on 14 September 1921, suspected of having been involved in the murder of the former Reich Finance Minister, Matthias Erzberger, during the previous month.48 Dietrich von Jagow supposedly represented Klintzsch in the following months until the latter was acquitted and released from detention in early December 1921 and returned to active duty as leader of the SA, a position he held until Hermann Göring superseded him in March 1923.49 This short list of early SA leaders already demonstrates a consistent feature of the stormtroopers in the years to come: whereas the majority of the rank and file were made up of young men without practical military experience, their leaders were selected from the much smaller band of National Socialists who had occupied leading positions in the German military during the First World War.50

  A Public Nuisance

  The Nazi activists in the earliest days mostly originated from the lower-middle and working classes, but soon former military leaders of noble descent also took up important positions.51 Those individual rank-and-file stormtroopers whose names have survived in press clippings and police files allow for a tentative picture of the early SA’s social composition, particularly in light of the nonexistence of more reliable statistics. Professions like baker, locksmith, and merchant frequently appear, but there were also students, a farmer, a lieutenant, a chimney-sweeper, and at least two police officers.52 These young men were not necessarily deeply politicized, but they had experienced the political instability and the social hardship of the post-war period as well as the excessive violence by revolutionaries and paramilitary forces alike from close range. Having grown up during the war years, with their glorification of German might and the idea of cultural superiority, these teenage boys and young men had not been ‘brutalized’ (as has been argued in parts of the historiography),53 but they certainly lacked any personal pre-war experience that might have guided them through the post-war turmoil.

  By all standards the initial months of these first SA units were very modest. Instead of fighting political enemies or parading the streets, the SA group leaders were above all busy organizing their groups, which usually comprised no more than ten men. On 26 August 1921, just two weeks after the publication of the call to join the SA, unit leaders noted a ‘lack of discipline’, and two months later they stressed that ‘punctuality’ should be considered a prime virtue and a basic prerequisite for joining the necessarily ‘tight organization’ – thus indicating the existence of fluctuations in commitment to the political cause among these first stormtroopers.54 As undercover police reports on the ‘control evenings’ that were held weekly by the SA in Munich 1921 and 1922 make plain, it was not rare for only 50 per cent of the men ordered to report for duty to show up, despite the fact that Hitler often attended these meetings. They initially took place in inns like the Sterneckerbräu, located close to the Isartor, which had previously also hosted the first NSDAP office, or the Högerbräu, just a stone’s throw away from the centrally located Marienplatz. The police described the atmosphere of such meetings as ‘lively’, ‘humorous’, and ‘cheerful’, with piano playing and much dancing, singing, and bouncing around.55 Hitler usually arrived late. His addresses, however, ‘energized’ the young Nazi followers. To judge from the police reports, the dullest and most routine get-together of stormtroopers could be transformed by Hitler’s speeches into a successful evening that usually ended with loud cheers and drunken young men stumbling home.

  Hitler’s talks lasted up to two and a half hours. At times he told autobiographic stories from his time in the List regiment during the First World War, but usually his speeches revolved around the ‘Jewish question’ and the future rise of the NSDAP.56 ‘We want to stir up hatred against everything and everyone,’ Hitler exclaimed in a meeting on 6 April 1922, referring, of all things, t
o the historic example of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. He argued that faith was the prerequisite of a people’s strong will, and that this would be the prerequisite of any deed. Just as Martin Luther had exploited the passions of his time to spur the Reformation, so the National Socialists should propagate and exploit the anti-Jewish sentiments of the day.57 If critics would denounce his party as a ‘coarse and brutal mob that would stop at nothing’, he would be more than delighted, Hitler exclaimed: harsh criticism of that sort could only benefit his party, making it both feared and more widely known.58

  How can we account for the phenomenon of hundreds of workers, students, and salesmen in Munich feeling uplifted by such political demagoguery? With no stable or adequate replacement for the old order, easy answers became increasingly popular in post-war Bavaria. ‘Bolshevism primarily means criminal tyranny, organized and led by the Jews,’ one defamatory pamphlet in Munich claimed as early as 1919.59 Such proclamations set the tone for the following years, in which the nationalist right, building on the sharp rise in antisemitism that had occurred during the war years, increasingly identified ‘Jews’ and ‘Bolsheviks’ as national traitors, blaming all kinds of shortcomings and economic and social problems on the alleged influence of a Judeo-Marxist conspiracy.60 Although the Nazis’ propaganda of hate repelled many adherents even of the radical right, its underlying rationale was widely embraced. The Bavarian consensus that emerged during the 1920s was to a considerable degree built on clear friend-foe distinctions (Bavaria versus the Reich, good patriotic Christian Germans versus internationally oriented Jews and Bolshevists). Whatever the Nazi stormtroopers did, they often benefited from the fact that many Germans in Bavaria attributed patriotic and therefore honourable motives to them.61 At a time when legal experts as well as the wider public regarded high rates of juvenile criminality as alarming signs of cultural change and social decline,62 the political activism of the young Nazis, excessive as it was, could be viewed as a vague promise for a better future that would be won by determined and fearless political fighters. Important parts of the judiciary, the police, and the influential upper-middle classes interpreted the stormtroopers’ radicalism and violence merely as defensive actions, a legitimate response to the alleged ‘crimes’ of the ‘November criminals’ and a consequence of the perceived social disorder. Considerable parts of the German public explained the rise to power of the Italian Fascists in 1922 in similar terms. The conservative Bayerische Staatszeitung commented: ‘First and last, the fascists soak up force and power from the disappointments that the post-war period caused to large segments of the population, instead of bringing them prosperity and happiness, as promised. Furthermore, they profit from the opposition between the völkisch and national consciousness on the one hand and the international flattening (Verflachung) and the community of fate (Schicksalsgemeinschaft) on the other.’63

  The first test of the National Socialist SA occurred on 4 November 1921, when Hitler spoke at a party rally held in Munich’s Hofbräuhaus. That night, in a fight that lasted up to twenty minutes, forty-six stormtroopers were supposedly able to beat out of the hall ‘nearly 400 soldiers of the Judeo-Marxist hit squad’ (Sprengsoldaten des Judenmarxismus, in Hitler’s words). In later accounts this number was increased to ‘800 Marxists’.64 These figures were certainly an overstatement, but the story became a powerful second founding myth that set the tone for the SA’s self-glorification in the following years: again and again, filigreed accounts of brave SA units successfully defeating a much stronger opposition appeared in Nazi papers and books, testifying to the supposed superiority of the party’s ideas, ideas that enabled their activists to demonstrate superhuman strength and extraordinary courage, which, in turn, legitimized the ideas.65

  What the Nazis exalted as the spearhead of the movement to liberate Germany from alleged Jewish ‘stock-exchange terror’ was in the eyes of the Social Democrats simply ‘mentally immature rowdiness [geistig unreifes Rowdytum]’.66 The political left early on identified the Nazis as an imminent political threat, not least because of the close relations among and between parts of the Bavarian police, the Reichswehr, and the SA. As became quickly known, the Reichswehr provided the stormtroopers with privileged access to weapons, and the police and public prosecutors frequently dealt sympathetically with the crimes committed by these militants.67 However, it would be misleading to regard this early SA as a regularly armed, highly disciplined, and hard-hitting organization. It possessed weapons, but these were basically the weapons of the street: truncheons (nicknamed ‘rubbers’), knuckledusters, knives, sticks, and whips. Some members owned small firearms (called ‘lighters’), but such weapons were rarely used.68 In Munich it was rumoured that the National Socialists had distributed hand grenades to individual stormtroopers on at least one occasion, but the truth of such statements is doubtful.69 In any case, real fighting by these early SA units was rare – and if such events did occur, they generally showed the usual characteristics of beer-hall brawls, with little more destruction than flying beer mugs and broken chair legs. Among the numerous patriotic Verbände in Bavaria, the comparatively young and inexperienced boys and young men from the SA were a local nuisance, but hardly a relevant political factor – at least not until the spring of 1923.

  Furthermore, its first units did not impress the public as possessing a coherent character or determination. They even lacked a proper uniform, as the brown shirt was not introduced until 1924 and was not made mandatory until late 1926.70 Initially, the stormtroopers attended their meetings in casual clothes, marked only by red armbands emblazoned with the swastika. In November 1922 the NSDAP introduced the group’s first uniform, consisting of grey riding trousers, windbreakers with the red armbands, and ski caps.71 Slightly earlier, in July or August of the same year, the party had organized an ‘SA bicycle troop’ (Radfahrerabteilung),72 the first step toward what ten years later had been transformed into a highly complex web of SA sub-groups; among them the Motor-SA (in 1934 transferred to the NSKK, the Nationalsozialistisches Kraftfahrkorps), the Marine-SA, the Reiter-SA (‘Equestrian-SA’), and the Pioneer- and Messenger-SA were some of the most important.73 In the early years, however, most of these sub-units existed only on paper. As late as the summer of 1923, the NSDAP possessed no more than two motorcars and two lorries suitable for the transport of men, and their drivers (among them Emil Maurice) regularly failed to report for duty.74

  A police report on an outing of the SA bicycle troop to Bad Tölz, a spa town some fifty kilometres south of the Bavarian capital, sheds light on the character of the early SA’s activities. Around noon on Sunday, 15 August 1922, a group of eighteen members of the NSDAP, all in their twenties and led by Klintzsch, arrived in Bad Tölz. The cyclists stopped at the Zum Oswaldbräu inn located in the city centre and symbolically occupied it by hanging a red banner with a large swastika on the front of the tavern. This provocation caused the local constable to be called to the scene. Anticipating violence, he warned the stormtroopers not to molest anyone but did not interfere otherwise. At about 1 p.m., and presumably after some pints of beer, the SA bicycle troop lined up behind the Nazi flag and started parading through the streets of the city singing ‘national songs’. They marched across the Isar River and ended at the upscale Park Hotel, located near the city’s spa park. This hotel was owned by Julius Hellmann, one of the few Jewish residents of Bad Tölz and a popular figure among upper-middle-class Jewry – a fact also known to the Nazis. As they paraded in front of the hotel, the young men sang the notorious Ehrhardt song that ended with the refrain ‘Out with the Jews!’ As was intended, some of the Jewish hotel guests came out and confronted the molesters, calling them ‘rascals’ and hitting them with the then popular walking sticks. At this point the local police intervened and had most of the Nazis identify themselves. Their leader, Klintzsch, requested that those guests who had violently confronted the stormtroopers also be identified, but – according to the police – that attempt failed when both the hotel gu
ests and its owner refused to betray their compatriots. Finally, the local police sent the Nazis home and handed over the dossier on the incident to their colleagues in Munich. It is not known whether the attackers were punished for their actions in any way. Regardless, they did not fear punishment. Klintzsch in his interrogation even dared to threaten the policemen: ‘We’ll be back, you will see, things will change. We have been frequently at the police, we are not afraid of it [punishment]. It will not better us; instead, we will become ever more fanatical.’75

  According to Klintzsch, the SA bicycle troop in the summer of 1922 undertook such trips nearly every Sunday and on public holidays, travelling to different places in the vicinity of Munich. We can therefore assume that the incident at Bad Tölz was somewhat typical, and not only with regard to the strong antisemitism that was voiced.76 The SA’s actions in Bad Tölz also contain several characteristics of what sociological research calls the ‘expressive acting of violence’ (expressives Gewalthandeln), defined as violence that is seen as an end in itself. For sure, the politics of the extreme nationalist right was not totally absent on this occasion, but it served largely as a means to provoke violent confrontation. The day trip started with several hours of physical exercise (such as cycling), continued with the symbolic occupation of a central public place in the city (the inn) and the performance of rites of male sociability there, and reached its climax with the successful provocation of the hotel’s affluent Jewish guests. The trip thereby provided key benefits popular among male youth: an intensified appreciation of the body and its physical strength, the opportunity to feel manly by the demonstration of power and energy, and, last but not least, a means to enjoy collectively experienced ‘fun’.77