Despite such hooliganism, which was legally an offence for disturbing the public order, the Bavarian police failed to change its view that the actions of the SA did not differ from the activities performed by other patriotic leagues. Although the police confiscated the large antisemitic posters that the Nazis publicly displayed to celebrate the stormtroopers’ first year of existence in Munich in August 1922 – posters apparently containing such strong antisemitic rhetoric that Jewish organizations referred to them as a veritable ‘call for a pogrom’78 – they usually described the National Socialist field exercises as ‘outings’ that expressed a continuation of the pre-war German youth movement, with its joint cooking, athletic, and gymnastic activities. If the authorities recognized a ‘military element’ to the NSDAP’s activities at all, official documents emphasized the ‘always unarmed’ nature of the units involved.79 Even if one takes into account the Bavarian police’s deliberate downplaying of the danger of the SA to the public order, there is no denying that the ‘fighting value’ of the Nazi militants was indeed limited. Ernst Röhm, who in the first half of the 1920s was an influential intermediary between the Reichswehr and several paramilitary leagues of the extreme right, in his memoirs from 1928 frankly wrote about the early SA: ‘Doubtless it had hundreds of well-trained men who would address the task with enthusiasm and with a will, and were loyal to Hitler’s person. Their training was naturally difficult, and they could not rise to the level of full military value. They would be no match in battle for trained troops.’80
The Crucial Year of 1923
In spite of their limited military power and often improvised public appearances, the stormtroopers – along with a few high-profile public speakers such as Hitler or the journalist Hermann Esser from the Völkischer Beobachter, who enjoyed Bavarian-wide publicity – progressively came to stand for the National Socialists in the eyes of the public, particularly as the NSDAP was not represented in either the Reichstag or any of the regional parliaments.81 At this time, the party did not take part in elections because Hitler argued that although ‘principled opposition’ from within the parliament was theoretically conceivable, it could not be undertaken in practice. Conceding that the Nazis lacked a forceful press, he claimed that the party thus could not expect to reach the wider electorate, making successful campaigning impossible. Furthermore, Hitler openly admitted that his party had only a handful of qualified public speakers at its disposal, with most cadres producing little more than ‘theoretic and fantastic reveries’ (theoretisch-phantastische Schwärmereien).82 Against this background the deployment of stormtroopers was a more reliable option for distributing the party’s antisemitic propaganda, particularly because in such circumstances orderly conduct and brute physical strength counted for more than rhetorical talent.
Between late 1922 and November 1923, the Weimar Republic’s second ‘year of crisis’ after its rocky start in 1919, the Nazi activists became involved in a growing number of clashes with political opponents that slowly but surely aroused the suspicion of the authorities. At the same time these incidents consolidated the Nazis’ reputation within the nationalist camp as an organization of particularly determined young men. Mussolini’s ‘March on Rome’, the successful Fascist takeover of power in Italy in late October 1922, further encouraged the National Socialists to come out into the open.83 As the early SA was still more of a traditional Wehrverband than a party army, plans to stage a paramilitary coup in Bavaria with the ultimate aim of overthrowing the government of the Reich became highly popular, both among the military leaders of the SA and the young men who increasingly filled the ranks of its Hundertschaften (groups of a hundred). The street violence that characterized the group’s activities in Bavaria prior to November 1923 therefore not only testifies to the early stormtroopers’ high level of aggression but also proves to have been of strategic use to the NSDAP in the sense that, by destabilizing the public order step by step, the party’s ultimate aim was to provoke a situation in which an attempt by the extreme nationalists to take power could be justified as a rescue of the fatherland.
Newspaper clippings from the time testify to the increasing SA violence in both Bavaria and neighbouring Austria, where SA units had existed at least since 1922, initially led by Hans Lechner. On 19 June 1922 there was a ‘big brawl’ in Vienna, where the National Socialist SA and up to 400 Communists clashed after a speech delivered by Hitler. Several people were injured, and fifteen participants were taken into custody.84 Whereas on this occasion the stormtroopers were at least provoked by Communist hecklers, incidents like the following clearly demonstrate that in most cases they actively laid the foundation of the violence. On 29 August 1922 the Munich shopkeeper David Heß and his nineteen-year-old son Ludwig were about to remove an antisemitic pamphlet from their shop window when they were attacked and severely beaten by a group of stormtroopers who had been waiting nearby for their victims to come out. Although the local police arrested several SA men on the spot, only one of them was later indicted and sentenced to the mild penalty of a one-week prison term.85 In September 1922, following a mass gathering prohibited by the authorities, the streets of Munich reverberated with shouts of ‘Down with the Jews!’ for the first time.86 Several weeks later, on 14 and 15 October 1922, the National Socialists took part in a völkisch ‘German day’ in the Franconian city of Coburg, located in the north of Bavaria. The majority of the stormtroopers present, approximately 500 men, had come from Munich by train. Beginning immediately on their arrival, they repeatedly clashed with their political opponents in the streets and beer halls of the city. However, they also attended prayers in the prestigious Protestant Ehrenburg Palace Church, a symbolic gesture that was well received among Coburg’s middle classes.87 In contrast to publications that drew on such actions to present SA men as religiously devoted national fighters, newspapers sympathetic to the political left reported ‘the barest street terror’ (nacktester Straßenterror) and the ‘most brutal tyranny’ (brutalste Gewaltherrschaft) in Coburg. It was clear to contemporaries that the violence in the streets had not broken out spontaneously but was prearranged, as many of the Nazi attacks started with the blast of a whistle, whereupon seconds later the stormtroopers would strike out at opponents and ordinary passers-by, who were often caught by surprise.88
Just days after their return from Coburg between thirty and forty Nazi militants raided the café of the German Theatre in the Bavarian capital, allegedly after a Jewish guest had arrived. They threw beer bottles and smashed at least ten windows, but they also encountered resistance, as guests in the café hit back and injured at least one of the attackers.89 And on 21 December 1922 ten stormtroopers armed with rubber truncheons entered a Jewish-operated communal kitchen in Munich’s Klenzestraße 4, where they addressed the waitresses with the words ‘Are you a Jewish wench [Judenmensch]?’, attempted to steal a collection box for the Jewish National Fund, and repeatedly shouted: ‘When do the Jewish gobblers arrive?’ (Wann kommen die Juden zum Fressen?) By the time the police arrived, the troublemakers had long left.90 In these weeks and months such SA provocations in front of shops, in cafés, and in restaurants, with the aim of prompting first verbal protests and then physical violence, became a regular, albeit unwelcome feature of Bavarian public life.91
This increase in antisemitic violence ran in parallel with the further expansion of the stormtroopers, who in the spring of 1923 acquired a leading role within the Bavarian Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Vaterländischen Kampfverbände, generally translated as the ‘Joined Forces of the Patriotic Leagues’ or the ‘Working Community of Patriotic Fighting Organizations’. These forces comprised about 30,000 men in the capital city of Munich alone. Internal leadership changes in the SA at this time reveal that the group was undergoing a shift in character from an aggressive but limited network of ‘defence units’ to a small paramilitary army, a genuine Wehrverband with considerable access to weapons and the aim of interfering in Bavarian state politics. As a consequence Hermann Göring in March 192
3 replaced Klintzsch as leader of the SA. The latter had increasingly struggled to organize the quickly growing numbers of stormtroopers, but the main reason for this leadership change was the growing estrangement between Hitler and Ehrhardt. Klintzsch from then on acted as Göring’s Chief of Staff, but resigned only two months later.92 By this time the SA in the Bavarian capital comprised three subdivisions, each of which was 300 men strong. Every subdivision was itself organized into three Hundertschaften, or ‘battalions’, that themselves contained four Sturmtrupps with up to twenty-five men.93 Senior Lieutenant in Reserve Wilhelm Brückner, who in the 1930s would be promoted to SA-Obergruppenführer and Hitler’s chief adjutant, from the beginning of 1923 oversaw three Sturmtrupp battalions in Munich, commanded respectively by Karl Beggel, Rudolf Hess, and Joseph Berchtold, the latter of whom was soon to be appointed leader of the newly formed Stoßtrupp Adolf Hitler, the nucleus of the later SS.94 Within Bavaria as a whole the number of stormtroopers now amounted to approximately 3,000, organized into forty Hundertschaften. About two-thirds of these Hundertschaften were situated in and around Munich, not only because of the SA’s rising recruitment figures, but also because entire formations like the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Roßbach and a certain Frontsoldatengruppe W had been converted to the NSDAP. In addition to this core SA, in early 1923 units also existed in the neighbouring states of Württemberg and Thuringia, as well as in Saxony, the Ruhr region, and the cities of Hamburg, Hanover, and Göttingen. Furthermore, there were several thousand SA men in Austria, ready to cross the border if need be.95
Public rallies, the recruitment of new party members, and the dissemination of propaganda were not always well received by the local population, as demonstrated by the so-called ‘Battle at the Whale Cellar’ in the Württemberg town of Göppingen on 11 December 1922. Here, the small local branch of the NSDAP had planned a public convention under the slogan ‘National Socialism, Germany’s future’, but the local authorities prohibited the meeting at short notice, referencing Nazi violence in the previous days in nearby Stuttgart and Geislingen. Nevertheless, in the evening hours of 11 December, sixty to ninety armed stormtroopers arrived in Göppingen from Munich by train, accompanied by the infamous ‘nurse Pia’ (Eleonore Baur) and led by Ernst von Westernhagen, a former lieutenant and fighter in the Freikorps Oberland.96 Hitler had personally instructed his Munich followers to make the meeting happen at any cost. However, from the time of their arrival, his men encountered severe resistance from local workers. As the Nazis sang their ‘patriotic’ songs in the streets of the town, several hundred workers intoned the ‘Worker’s Marseillaise’ and denounced their opponents as ‘Rathenau murderers’ – referring to the fatal attack on the German Reich’s Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, launched by right-wing terrorists on 24 June 1922. At some point the confrontation escalated. Dozens of shots were fired, injuring four or five people on each side. The local police finally managed to escort the Munich stormtroopers back to the train station, from which they departed. Later in the night, infuriated Göppingen workers severely injured about twenty students from Tübingen who had arrived late for the Nazi meeting.97
Despite this rather unsuccessful outing – which was nevertheless elevated to a party legend in Nazi propaganda – Bavaria remained the main field of activity for the SA. Consequently, it was there that on 1 May 1923, the traditional holiday of the working-class movement, the National Socialists made their first attempt to destabilize the public order to such a degree that the establishment of an authoritarian military dictatorship could be justified as a necessary act of self-defence. The SA furnished roughly half of the 2,000–2,500 men from the Patriotic Leagues, determined to disrupt the Socialist festival procession in the city under the guise of trying to save Bavaria from a Communist coup.98 Most of the stormtroopers were Munich locals, but some arrived from the nearby cities of Landshut, Freising, and Bad Tölz, ordered into action by a barely disguised telegram sent from the SA Command with the words ‘Send off all caps immediately!’ (Sämtliche Mützen sofort losschicken!)99 As the Munich police reported in a government communication on 3 May, in contrast to their public statements, which regularly stressed these forces’ importance for the paramilitary training of German youth and their role in preventing a Communist putsch, the leading figures of these forces were clearly driving their rank and file into the camp of ‘extreme right-wing nationalism’ (ausgesprochener Rechtsradikalismus).100 This had now become a political problem, the president of the Bavarian police admitted, as ‘for years, the police had cooperated closely with these groups in order to prevent riots from the political left’. Furthermore, the groups in question increasingly carried arms, including artillery guns and mortars, which had partly been obtained from sympathetic soldiers from nearby Reichswehr barracks.101 Despite the obvious risks of such cooperation, the police president was nevertheless convinced that any attempt to secure public order in the capital against the leagues of the extreme right would be impossible – an indirect confession that the authority’s course of tolerance toward and clandestine cooperation with the extreme right in the previous years had failed. It had not increased political stability, but undermined it.102
In sharp contrast to the police’s view, the Social Democratic newspaper Münchener Post described the events of 1 May 1923 as revealing the true character of the National Socialist SA as a ‘purely military fighting league’ (rein militärische Kampftruppe). According to this usually well-informed source, the ‘SA officers’ had expressed a determined fighting spirit and repeatedly stated that in the case of a major clash with the left, the Reichswehr would fight on their side. The paper also provided graphic details of the SA’s armaments:
Every single man of the Sturmtrupps had a modern infantry rifle as well as a bullet pouch and a woven belt. The hand-grenade detachments disposed of entire boxes of their murder weapons; every man carried three grenades on his belt and was furthermore armed with a Browning pistol [. . .] A battery of lightweight 12cm field guns was stationed behind a cluster of trees, pointing in the direction of the workers on Theresienfeld [. . .] Captain Gehring [sic] who swaggered around showing his ‘Pour le Mérite’ [medal] was in military command.103
The Reichswehr commander in Munich, General Otto von Lossow, who was noticeably sympathetic to the NSDAP,104 later denied that the Reichswehr had provided cannons to the SA, but confirmed the distribution of smaller weapons. However, he insisted that the Patriotic Leagues had returned all of these weapons on the afternoon of 1 May and furthermore complained that sensational press reports on the subject would only help the French authorities to locate hidden arms depots.105
Among the rank-and-file stormtroopers who gathered on the Oberwiesenfeld parade ground on 1 May were many youths. Rumours spread that even pupils from higher secondary-education schools in Munich had participated, which is less surprising if one notes that since the revolutionary year of 1919, university and high-school students had frequently joined the regular armed forces as ‘temporary volunteers’.106 Playing civil war was more interesting than learning from books in school, or so it seems. This development testifies to the increasingly popular perception that politics not only mattered to one’s life, but required one’s own physical commitment. Such views were by no means restricted to Germany. A leader of the Avanguardie studentesche fasciste, the Italian ‘Fascist Student Avant-Guarde’, explained this pragmatic logic with unusual clarity: ‘The fist is a synthesis of many things [. . .] Since it interacts directly upon the body of the adversary in a manner which is short and sharp, it cannot be ignored.’107 Similarly, a German boxing magazine in 1923 coined a rhyming motto for this particular attitude: ‘You can’t defend yourself with thoughts, you have to grab the boxing glove.’108
In reality, most stormtroopers seemed to rely more on weapons than on their fists, and they usually attacked single opponents from within a larger group. As Franz Schweyer, the conservative but Nazi-critical Bavarian Minister of the Interior from the Bavarian Peop
le’s Party (BVP), said in the Bavarian Landtag on 8 June 1923, it was a well-known National Socialist tactic to provoke attacks from the political left by sending two to three uniformed men, followed by fifty or sixty comrades in civilian clothes, through the working-class districts of Munich. If the few uniformed stormtroopers were attacked, their comrades would then ‘retaliate’. Those involved in such incidents were overwhelmingly ‘immature striplings’ (halbwüchsige Bürschchen), the minister stated, assuring the public that the police had already taken effective measures against the growing violence among the capital’s youth.109
Schweyer’s observation is in tune with the more recent findings of the sociologist Randall Collins, who, in his widely acknowledged theories on the micro-sociology of violence, has emphasized that even those people we imagine as particularly violent – the early stormtroopers being the case at hand – react violently only in specific situations that allow for particular ‘emotional dynamics’.110 The task of the SA’s leaders was to create these situations, which were so vital for the bonding between individual SA men and the political movement, in a way that at the same time prevented the actual violence from escalating. Against this background, Schweyer’s optimistic claim of the forces’ immaturity was only superficially correct. He rightly stressed that the boys and young men of the SA posed no substantial threat to the state as long as the armed forces were loyal to the government, but he did not grasp the dual role of the police as an instrument of the state and as a force that guaranteed shielded spaces in which repeated acts of highly ceremonial SA violence could occur in a controlled manner.
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