Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts
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The previously described incident of SA violence in Bad Tölz illustrates this dual character of the police: whereas the constable’s report stressed that his behaviour had prevented the political violence from escalating into a severe physical confrontation, he was blind to the fact that the securing of a public space allowed the National Socialists at least two hours to disseminate their propaganda (first in the inn, then in the streets), not to mention the ability to capitalize, at low risk, on the ‘thrill’ of a symbolic confrontation with the police, contributing to the stormtroopers’ growing attraction for those young men prone to violence. Other examples even point to the police’s direct complicity: in the evening hours of 19 October 1921 several dozen members of the SA spontaneously decided to march to the Munich main railway station, determined to ‘batter every Jew who comes our way’. Despite the police’s presence, they beat up at least one man in the station hall until a constable escorted the victim of early Nazi violence out of the aggressors’ reach. The stormtroopers remained unmolested as they intimidated the public and shouted antisemitic songs like the following, a variation on the well-known Borkum song: ‘The Jew with his flat feet, and his crooked nose, and his frizzy hair, is not supposed to enjoy the German lands: throw him out! Throw him out!’111 The formerly mentioned example of Göppingen, however, points to the limits of the Nazi strategy. The NSDAP virtually required the police’s protection for its provocations to be successful. Without it, open violence could erupt that might go either way.
After the National Socialist mobilization for a government overthrow came to nothing in May 1923, the party and its SA suffered some loss of prestige, both within the wider milieu of Bavarian nationalists and within its own ranks. Angry stormtroopers requested the removal of unqualified personnel in the SA military leadership, lamented the damage done to weapons, complained about the henhouse (Weiberwirtschaft) in the party’s headquarters, and urged that proper bookkeeping be conducted.112 As undercover informers reported to the Bavarian authorities, the NSDAP and its SA also underwent a serious financial crisis in the early summer of 1923, caused partly by the split between Hitler and Ehrhardt, and partly by skyrocketing inflation. When party funds permitted, SA leaders at this time preferred to receive their salaries in foreign currency. According to Konrad Heiden, one of the first historians of the NSDAP, officers received respectable sums of eighty to ninety Swiss francs per month.113 The financial crisis of the party and its stormtroopers only came to a provisional halt after Hitler toured throughout Germany and received a considerable donation from former navy lieutenant and NSDAP party member Hellmuth von Mücke worth US$500, which in this time of hyperinflation amounted to roughly 400 million Papiermark.114
It was this climate of semi-clandestine cooperation between the political realm and the military that allowed for some of the most remarkable careers of 1920s Germany. Among them was that of Ernst Röhm, formerly a professional soldier in the Bavarian army who in the troubled days of 1919 first served in the Freikorps Epp and then from May onward was charged with the reorganization of Munich’s security forces. In this role he helped ‘cleanse’ the police of liberal and left-leaning officials and in turn allowed for a rapprochement of paramilitary leagues including the SA, the Reichswehr, and the police.115 Until the end of his life Röhm’s beliefs and ideas were not only shaped by National Socialist ideology but also remained deeply affected by his experiences as an officer in the First World War. His contemporary Konrad Heiden characterized him as ‘a passionate politician who as passionately fails to understand politics’.116
The often-glorified background of ‘wartime experience’ served as a common denominator for very different individuals, not only in Germany but in interwar Europe more generally. To give one example, the biographer Nigel Jones characterized Röhm’s contemporary, the British Fascist leader and well-to-do playboy Oswald Mosley, in a way that also fitted Röhm – regardless of the fundamental national, social, and educational differences between these two men. Both shared a ‘contempt for democracy and civilian life; impatience with muddle and delay; desire for action and efficiency at almost every price; enjoyment of violence and the military life’.117 Similar to other leading interwar figures of the European extreme right, like Miklós Horthy in Hungary or the charismatic leader of the Romanian Legionary movement Corneliu Codreanu, Röhm – and with him many of the early SA leaders – idealized and intended to create a militarized society in which unreserved loyalty to leaders and martyrdom for the nation ranked among the highest virtues. Historians usually portray Röhm as a ‘military desperado’, but in addition to being an uprooted professional soldier he remained a Bavarian nationalist with a profound nostalgia for the Wittelsbach monarchy (Plate 2).118
Despite a considerable literature on Röhm, in particular Eleanor Hancock’s detailed 2008 biography, his influence on the Nazi stormtroopers prior to the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 is difficult to assess. It is undisputed that he played an important role in Bavaria between 1919 and 1923 that was vital for the rapprochement of the middle classes and the extreme nationalist organizations that more and more became an unofficial element of what can be called the state of Bavaria’s joint anti-Marxist forces. However, Hancock’s view that Röhm was the ‘party’s patron’ and that he played a decisive role ‘in all important events of the National Socialist Party up to 1 May 1923’ seems exaggerated.119 Most of the information on Röhm provided in the secondary literature is taken from his autobiography, published in 1928 under the self-confident title Geschichte eines Hochverräters, the ‘History of a Traitor’.120 Its author, who shortly afterward left Germany to take up a job as a military advisor in Bolivia, would not have envisaged his rather surprising comeback in late 1930, which catapulted him into the leadership of the SA, but he clearly had no interest in making his debut as an investigative journalist either. In the years before his book came out, Röhm generally operated below the radar of the public’s attention and only rarely made it into the files of the authorities and into newspaper columns. He was certainly more of a powerbroker than a visible politicized military, who focused on using his proven organizational skills and good connections to Reichswehr and Freikorps personnel to traffick weapons to the paramilitary right (and hide them from both the Reich government and the Allies).
By 1923, Röhm, sometimes called the ‘machine-gun king of Bavaria’ because of his abilities to procure and hide weapons,121 had made himself into an important figure in Bavarian politics and the military. As the self-styled ‘father’ of the Patriotic Leagues, he was indeed one of the most important actors on the counter-revolutionary right in the weeks and months prior to the November Putsch.122 Other works have traced in detail the political developments of this period, driven by quickly rising inflation rates and an ever stronger political polarization.123 As has been analysed before, the stormtroopers were ready for action as early as April 1923, but they were too insignificant to directly influence the course of political change over the next months. When Hitler finally decided to attempt a putsch, he was encouraged to act by the public outcry that followed the collapse of the German resistance to the French in the occupied Ruhr district as well as by the development of similar plans by the Bavarian quasi-dictator Gustav von Kahr, who threatened to bypass him.124 Hitler at this time relied on the SA in two ways. First, they were supposed to act as his ‘Praetorian Guard’, enforcing his orders through physical power against his political rivals. Second, they were to act as a symbolic manifestation of the new leader’s might in the streets of Munich, similar to the role played there by the Freikorps units in May 1919. Whereas the stormtroopers succeeded in the first role, particularly when Hitler had the leaders of the Bavarian government arrested in the evening hours of 8 November 1923, they failed to secure a leading position in the state’s security forces. In the morning hours of 9 November it became clear that neither the Bavarian police nor Munich’s Reichswehr units had joined in the putsch. When the party activists undertook a rather desperate att
empt to save their ‘revolution’ by confronting the much better-armed and better-trained government troops in the streets of Munich, they were quickly defeated. After a short exchange of bullets within sight of the Feldherrnhalle, fourteen ‘insurgents’ lay dead, among them a waiter from a nearby café. Four policemen were also killed.125 Hitler, injured in one shoulder, escaped but was apprehended a few days later in nearby Uffing in the country house of a confidant, the businessman Ernst ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengel, put on trial for high treason, and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment on 1 April 1924 in Landsberg Prison.126
More important than the stormtroopers’ factual involvement in the treasonable activities of the November Putsch was their later veneration of those ‘martyrs’ shot dead on 9 November 1923, as well as those who died in the following days because of their injuries.127 The Nazis remembered these sixteen men every year in a central party ceremony in Munich, to be complemented from 1930 onwards with the idolization of Horst Wessel, a charismatic Berlin SA-Führer killed by a Communist squad. His veneration allowed for a more memorable personification.128 Beginning with the Party Congress that was held in Weimar in May 1926, Hitler swore in his followers in the presence of a new party relic, the so-called ‘Flag of Blood’ that had been carried past the Feldherrnhalle in 1923. The symbol of defeat was now turned into a banner of glory. The ‘holy sacrifice’ made by the SA in 1923 and on numerous other occasions in the following years served, in the eyes of the faithful, to legitimize their claims to national leadership and social participation.129
The Aftermath of the Putsch
When the Reich authorities on 23 November 1923 banned the NSDAP and other organizations that had taken part in that month’s putsch, the SA officially dissolved. Although many of its rank and file provisionally lost touch with the now rather static ‘movement’, the leading figures of the party never considered letting the organizational build-up of the previous years peter out. While still in Landsberg Prison, Hitler in April 1924 ‘entrusted’ Röhm with the ‘rebuilding’ of the SA, or so the latter claimed in his autobiography. Röhm likewise maintained that he held secret talks with Göring in his Innsbruck exile and with Gerhard Roßbach, the former Freikorps leader who had participated in the putsch and was now hiding from the German authorities in Salzburg. As a result, Göring is said to have ‘appointed’ Röhm – who, unlike him, could move freely on German soil – as his deputy with ‘unlimited authority’ over the SA.130
A first conference on the fate of the banned SA, held in Salzburg on 17 and 18 May 1924, brought together under Röhm’s auspices Nazis from the Reich and Austria, but apparently without Göring who was suffering from the after-effects of a bullet he had received on 9 November 1923 that might have prevented him from returning to the SA leadership. It showed ‘much disunity, discord, disagreement and uncertainty,’ Röhm later remembered.131 Although he might have drawn a deliberately negative picture of this situation in order to showcase his subsequent organizational work in more gleaming colours, the following months – until the first split between Röhm and Hitler in April 1925 – allowed only for a modest revival of the stormtroopers, who were slow to recover from the blow of November 1923. One factor that prevented a quick renaissance of the SA, at least in its prior form, was obvious: Hitler, the whip and tribune of the völkisch right in Bavaria, was not available – initially because of his confinement in Landsberg and then, after his release from prison shortly before the Christmas holidays in December 1924, because of a ban that prohibited him from giving public speeches. As we have already seen, as early as 1921 Hitler had risen to become a charismatic leader of the extreme right in Bavaria whose influence might not have yet reached the masses outside Munich, but whose regular beer-hall speeches in the capital worked as an instrument of bonding for the SA.
Röhm could not follow in these footsteps, and it is unlikely that he aspired to do so. Instead, he stuck to what he was more experienced in: organizing a new umbrella organization, the Frontbann, that would unite the remains of the Patriotic League, including the banned SA.132 Unlike the stormtroopers prior to the November Putsch, the Frontbann partly succeeded in operating on a nationwide level. Its original name, Völkischer Frontkampfbund Frontbann, testifies to the broad appeal to which this new organization aspired, in sharp contrast to the Bavarian state-sponsored Notbann, a short-lived attempt to unite and control the moderate Wehrverbände as a special police reserve force.133 Despite its ultimate failure, the Frontbann brought together northern and southern German political activists of the extreme right for the first time and thus proved an important stage in the establishment of a nationwide National Socialist network. Officially, this new organization, which comprised at most 30,000 men, was supposed to ‘prepare young men for military service through physical exercise and by accustoming them to obedience’, as Röhm explained to the Bavarian authorities in the summer of 1924.134 The latter, sceptical after their experience with such groups in the previous year, remained hesitant to officially recognize this new organization – regardless of the fact that Röhm had been elected a member of the Reichstag for the Nationalsozialistische Freiheitspartei, the ‘National Socialist Freedom Party’, on 4 May 1924. Even the strong support he enjoyed from Ludendorff, who was still a man of great renown in Germany, did not help him now.135 Yet more problematic for Röhm than the scepticism of the Bavarian government was Hitler’s lack of approval for his ambitious new organization. Both men met on several occasions in Landsberg Prison between May and the autumn of 1924 but could not reach an accord on a joint strategy.
Despite Hitler’s lasting opposition, Röhm pursued his plans until early 1925, assuming that Hitler could be won over once the Frontbann had risen to become a powerful organization in the hands of the National Socialists. The dissent between the two men persisted, however, because they had mutually exclusive ideas about the future of the National Socialist movement: whereas Röhm’s plans were basically a more sophisticated way to unite the paramilitary forces on the extreme right with the ultimate aim of overthrowing the Weimar Republic through violent means, Hitler had come to the conclusion that every umbrella organization of this kind was hard to bring into line, as each group usually insisted on its autonomy. The fact that competing organizations such as the Bund Wiking, the Bund Bayern und Reich, and the Blücherbund had all attempted to lure stormtroopers into their own ranks after the failed November 1923 putsch, did not increase Hitler’s confidence in these organizations.136 Furthermore, he had learned the lesson of the failed putsch: that a genuine paramilitary coup was unlikely to succeed as long as Reichswehr and police forces remained loyal to the legitimate government, regardless of the sympathies many of their members quite openly expressed for the goals of the extreme nationalists.137
After Hitler was released from Landsberg Prison on 20 December 1924, as part of a general amnesty for political prisoners, he gave up all short-term attempts to gain power through an immediate act of violence against the state and instead proclaimed a strictly legal course. Observers from the beginning suspected this approach was purely tactical – particularly after Hitler on 26 February 1925 publicly called for a refounding of not only the NSDAP but also the SA.138 This new SA, he now claimed, should no longer carry weapons, but should operate on strictly legal terms, serving as a propaganda tool for the NSDAP and as a training school for the party youth.139 Its members should wear uniforms in public in order to be recognizable to everyone in the streets. The Storm Detachment must not be allowed to sink to the level of a mere defence organization (Wehrverband), or secret society, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, not least because ‘real soldiers cannot be made by training of one or two hours per week’.140 There were also strategic reasons behind his decision, as it would be impossible to carry out a programme of voluntary military training for large masses of men unless one could be assured of absolute power of command.141 Competing paramilitary leaders would have made Hitler’s ‘absolute power of command’ impossible, or so he believed.
; Initially, even National Socialists had a hard time understanding the new tasks and character of this reconditioned SA, as Hitler conceived it. To many of his followers, it was counterintuitive to refuse to strike with physical force at a time when their political opponents seemed to be organizing themselves along similar lines. In early 1924 the Reichsbanner – closely associated with the SPD – had been founded in Magdeburg, followed by the Communist Red Front Fighters League a few months later.142 Hitler finally gave up trying to persuade all of his followers and, on 28 September 1926, simply forbade the ‘entire National Socialist press’ from reporting on the reason for the SA’s existence and its tasks, basic principles, and subdivision.143 A rather desperate move, this was more a sign of temporary frustration than a clever strategy to keep the prerogative of interpretation within the National Socialist camp. In any case, Hitler’s order went largely unheard – particularly as newspapers and magazines on the political right became increasingly busy defending the SA against investigative reporting by their Socialist and liberal opponents.
The general public regarded the stormtroopers in the mid-1920s predominantly as a remnant of Germany’s troubled post-war years, but hardly as an organization powerful enough to challenge the public order. In contrast to this view, however, the designated Supreme SA Leader Franz Pfeffer von Salomon in October 1926 praised the group, who at that time were still a fractured web of local National Socialist militias with not more than 40,000 members throughout the Reich, as the backbone of National Socialism. Even if it was common for Fascist leaders to boisterously stress the historic mission of their ‘movement’, directly or indirectly referring to it as a kind of religious crusade,144 Pfeffer’s predictions of the SA’s future role are worth quoting in full as they set the tone for the self-perception of many stormtroopers in the future: