Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts

by Daniel Siemens

  Only a [political] movement of immense inner strength is able to create such an organization as our SA. Unquestionably, it is first and foremost the SA that sets us apart from the ordinary parties in parliament. The SA will guarantee our victory once the parliamentary system and its ‘means’ collapse. I regard the SA as the crown of our organization and of our political efforts.145

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  STORMTROOPER STREET POLITICS

  Mobilization in Times of Crisis

  Propaganda is violence committed against the soul. Propaganda is not a substitute for violence, but one of its aspects. The two have the identical purposes of making men amenable to control from above.

  — Franz Neumann, Behemoth1

  The years 1925–6 marked the starting point of the ‘second SA’, which – unlike its predecessor analysed in the previous chapter – quickly transformed into a highly centralized, nationwide organization that ultimately challenged the state’s monopoly on violence. The SA groups that survived the failed 1923 putsch or were founded afterward in many parts of Germany in 1925 and 1926 – often operating under cover names as sports groups – initially enjoyed considerable regional autonomy.2 Like the Munich SA between 1921 and 1923, they frequently served as a kind of private militia, commanded by the NSDAP’s regional bosses, the Gauleiter, who used the SA’s strength to hold off potential party rivals. During this period, while in Landsberg Prison and in the year after his release, Hitler had only limited control over the SA. At this time the reorganization of the NSDAP throughout the Reich was his clear priority. Once this was achieved in the summer of 1926, however, he turned his attention to the stormtroopers, installing the Oberste SA-Führung, or ‘Supreme SA leadership office’, under the command of a ‘Supreme SA leader’ (OSAF), whose assignment took effect starting on 1 November 1926.3

  Early Reforms

  To head this centralized SA leadership office, Hitler chose Franz Pfeffer von Salomon, a former soldier who usually referred to himself as Franz von Pfeffer – omitting the Jewish-sounding ‘Salomon’.4 Born in 1888 as the oldest of seven children from a noble family of the Lower Rhine, Pfeffer von Salomon had studied law before opting for a career as a professional soldier. Promoted to the rank of captain during the First World War, after the armistice he became an active paramilitary, commanding his own Freikorps in the Baltic countries and in Upper Silesia between 1919 and 1921. He quickly gained a reputation for being an excellent organizer, a ruthless and violent leader, and an extremely self-conscious personality. During the French occupation of the Ruhr area that began in January 1923 and provoked strong passive resistance by the Germans, he committed acts of sabotage and was sentenced to death in absentia by the French authorities. In March 1925 Pfeffer von Salomon set himself up as the leader of the NSDAP’s Gau Westphalia and its SA group, becoming one of the regional bosses of the 1920s discussed in chapter 1.5 Hitler’s choice of Pfeffer von Salomon to be the first nationwide SA leader was aimed at strengthening his position in the important northwestern regions of the Reich while simultaneously containing the aspirations of ambitious party rivals like Gregor Strasser and Karl Kaufmann; at this time Kaufmann was the Gauleiter for Rheinland-Nord and was soon to become the Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter for Hamburg, positions that he held for many years.6 It was a clear signal that the SA was now to play a leading role in all parts of the Reich.

  Pfeffer von Salomon proved to be a decisive figure for the growth and success of the SA. In close cooperation with Hitler – who, as we have seen, published his ideas on the reorganization of the SA in the second volume of Mein Kampf in February 19277 – the ambitious Pfeffer von Salomon started his new job by issuing a series of orders that aimed both to consolidate his central role and to create a uniform and highly hierarchically structured SA force. With the goal of reducing the regional powers of the formerly quite independent party bosses who directly commanded ‘their’ own SAs, he introduced a top-down chain of command. Final authority over the stormtroopers was transferred to the OSAF in Munich, which was also given oversight of the Schutzstaffeln (SS) and the Hitler Youth (HJ), founded at a party rally held by the NSDAP in Weimar in July 1926.8 These arrangements made Pfeffer von Salomon a key figure among the National Socialist leadership until his resignation in August 1930. His reforms shaped the SA for years to come – even if many of his guidelines and orders were subject to revision by Ernst Röhm, who would succeed him as head of the SA on 1 January 1931, claiming the new title of Stabschef, or ‘Chief of Staff’. It needs to be emphasized that the subsequent independence and rise of the SS to become the Third Reich’s most notorious and paradigmatic terror organization should not overshadow the historical reality that until 1934 it was the SA that dominated the SS, and not the other way round. Characteristic of the uneven distribution of men and influence between these two sister organizations in their early years is the order of Röhm in early 1931 that SS membership should number only 10 per cent of that of the SA. In reality, by then the SS only comprised 4,000 men nationwide, in comparison with 88,000 stormtroopers. With regard to their activities, the second SA and the SS operated in a largely similar fashion during the Weimar years, although internal conflicts about strategy, competencies, and the distribution of manpower came to light early on.9

  Pfeffer von Salomon’s new structure of the SA was modelled on the German army. The smallest group of an SA unit became the Gruppe, or ‘group’, comprising six to twelve men.10 Five to six groups formed a Trupp, or ‘troop’, in place of the former Kompagnie. Three to five Truppe made up a Sturm, literally ‘storm’, and three to five Stürme were united to form a Standarte, previously known as a Regiment. Finally, several Standarten from the same region formed a Gausturm. By late 1927 there existed eighteen Gaustürme, which in 1931 were rearranged into Gruppen and Untergruppen.11 Alluding to the German military tradition, SA Sturm units were often given the same numbers that had previously identified their respective region’s regiments in the Imperial army.12 To further increase the SA’s similarity with a regular military body like the Reichswehr, Pfeffer von Salomon also made gorget patches mandatory. The colours of each gorget patch indicated a stormtrooper’s regional affiliation, while its numbers offered information about his Standarte and Sturm. The rank of every trooper was indicated by braids, stars, and oak leaves, with the latter reserved for the highest ranks, beginning with Standartenführer, or colonel.13 In writing, leadership positions were often given in abbreviated form: apart from the OSAF (the supreme SA leadership), there were Gaustufs, Stafs, Stufs, Trufs, and Grufs – the abbreviations for Gaustumführer, Standartenführer, Sturmführer, Truppführer, and Gruppenführer, respectively.14 With Pfeffer von Salomon’s reforms, the SA also gained relative financial autonomy. For the first time it was now in a position to administer its own membership fees and thus was no longer entirely dependent on party contributions. However, money remained sparse throughout the next years, forcing the SA to explore other ways to increase funds, including such tactics as centralizing the sales of uniforms and equipment, introducing their own cigarette brand, and approaching sympathizers in German industry.15

  However, by late 1926, when Pfeffer von Salomon installed his supreme leadership command, these reforms were not so much a reaction to a rising number of stormtroopers, as one might assume in light of the SA’s rapid growth in the following years, as they were a statement of the growing professionalism of the SA. Pfeffer von Salomon did not want his organization to be regarded as just another Wehrverband, a controversial stepchild of the Reichswehr that ultimately depended on the goodwill of the authorities and their weapons. His aim was to create a people’s militia that would be firmly in the hands of the NSDAP and its charismatic leader and would be used first and foremost for propaganda, but would not seek out military confrontation with the legal forces. The new structure responded further to the extended geographical space in which the SA was meanwhile operating. Between 1925 and 1930 local and regional cells of the NSDAP and its SA emerged all over the Rei
ch to complement the party’s former strongholds in the south and west. Although party functionaries stressed that the reorganized SA would no longer engage in paramilitary violence, the introduction of SA insurance schemes, in which monthly contributions of 20 pfennig per person became mandatory for all stormtroopers in late 1928, tells another story. Leading National Socialists were fully aware that their policy of aggressively provoking public confrontations with their opponents would inevitably escalate into physical violence, causing injuries and, in extreme cases, death to party members. In the last three months of 1928 alone, the office overseeing SA insurance policies had to deal with 163 cases of Nazi activists injured ‘on duty’ and paid out more than 9,000 reichsmark16 – numbers that increased significantly in the following years, with 881 reports of such injuries in 1929; 2,506 in 1930; 6,307 in 1931; and 14,005 in 1932.17

  From Splinter Group to Mass Movement

  In what follows I will analyse and discuss the reasons for the remarkable growth of the SA between 1925 and 1932. The internal structural changes outlined in the previous section facilitated this development, but they were just one factor among many others that a thorough historical analysis needs to take into account. To begin with I will concentrate on exemplary midsize and large cities where the SA, in joint cooperation with other paramilitary groups, contributed crucially to the militarization of public and private life, or, in other words, to the ‘politicization of the everyday’.18 The situation in Berlin and Hamburg, the two largest German cities, will be analysed in some detail, not only because there now exist a substantial amount of studies on the rise of National Socialism and the role of the SA on which I can rely, but also because these cities housed strong working-class movements.19 The stormtroopers regarded these big cities as dangerous and hostile zones of combat, and they described them using military jargon, transforming streets and neighbourhoods into trenches and battlefields.20 Consequently, the Nazis attempted to showcase in these cities what they could achieve in a modern metropolis where large parts of the town were (allegedly) in the hands of the political left.21 Alongside an outline of this spatial expansion, the forms of stormtrooper activism and their daily practices will be scrutinized in detail. What made life in the SA of the early 1930s so attractive that more than 300,000 men not only joined its ranks but also displayed unusual forms of commitment to and activism within it? Rising recruitment figures notwithstanding, the SA throughout these years remained a highly volatile organization, repeatedly shaken by scandals and leadership struggles that all too often contradicted the party rhetoric of unity and moral superiority, and negatively influenced the stormtroopers’ public image. By September 1930, when the NSDAP celebrated a massive victory in the nationwide elections, the educated public widely perceived the SA as the embodiment of party-sponsored hooliganism and violence, and an indicator of an increasingly ‘brutalized’ society.22 However, despite their more than ambivalent reputation, the Brownshirts not only experienced exceptional growth in urban milieus but also penetrated large parts of Germany’s rural areas. This ‘Nazification’ of the countryside happened later, but more rapidly and more completely than in the big cities, where the population proved more resistant, if not to the extent that the historiography previously claimed. This Nazi success in the provinces was all the more important because nearly three-quarters of the German electorate resided in cities with fewer than 100,000 inhabitants, the majority of them living in villages and small towns that housed fewer than 10,000 people. ‘Small and middle-sized communities were crucial to Nazi success,’ noted the historian Rudy Koshar, aptly summarizing the results of historical psephology for Weimar Germany.23 Given the extensive body of regional studies meanwhile available on this subject, the aim of this chapter is not to add even more details to an already vast field, but to synthesize its findings with regard to the SA and to provide some material for future consideration.24

  So, to begin with, what did the SA’s situation between 1925 and 1930 look like from a national perspective? Thanks to the moderate success of the völkisch bloc in the two Reichstag elections of 1924, the National Socialists did not totally vanish from sight after the November Putsch, but for the time being their brown-shirted activists remained a marginal phenomenon. Apart from their stronghold of Munich, the stormtroopers’ membership numbers for local branches did not exceed low three-digit numbers, even in Berlin and Hamburg.25 And even in the Bavarian capital, membership stagnated in the middle of the 1920s and, as in the autumn of 1927, even temporarily decreased in response to local party crises.26 In many smaller cities early Nazi sympathizers until the mid-1920s did little more than meet in local taverns, where they organized various kinds of political reading clubs.27 Overall, SA membership statistics for the whole of Germany are not available for the years prior to 1930 – but given the fact that only 6,000 stormtroopers participated in the NSDAP’s party rally in Weimar in July 1926, we can estimate that their number in 1928–9 was certainly less than 30,000.28 In any case, it did not exceed 60,000 before the end of 1930, when the spectacular gains of the NSDAP in the previous months increased interest and membership in the party considerably.29

  Some examples illustrate that the marginal presence of the SA in many regions and towns until the late 1920s significantly restricted its activist potential to openly confront its rivals: according to an early party activist, the number of Brownshirts in the free Imperial city of Frankfurt am Main, with its roughly half a million inhabitants, amounted to fifty men in 1925. Two years later that figure had only increased three- or fourfold, and the authorities reported that the Frankfurt stormtroopers were in part composed of ‘the most disreputable mob’.30 Despite all propaganda maintaining otherwise, not before 1929 could they dare to confront their rivals in ‘open battle’.31 Similarly, in the entire territory of the Saar Basin, which had a population of more than 750,000, the total number of SA militants in 1929 amounted to a mere thirty men.32 At the same time there existed only a few hundred stormtroopers for the whole of the densely populated Ruhr area and around 600 such men in Württemberg.33 Finally, in several small cities and administrative districts of the Reich, local SA units were either absent or remained limited to only a handful of activists who did hardly more than organize regular informal gatherings prior to the Nazi takeover of power in 1933.34 Even where the SA was present, its parades and other forms of activism suggest ‘a limited use of violence, since massive use would have proved counterproductive to the image the organization sought to present as well as to its legal survival’.35

  Although it is impossible to outline a general pattern of the SA’s expansion, there is no denying that on the whole the SA grew slowly but steadily between 1925 and 1929, not least because it was able to integrate substantial numbers of members from competing paramilitary organizations like Ehrhardt’s Bund Wiking and Röhm’s Frontbann.36 In Hamburg the SA more than doubled its size after a splinter group from the Wehrverband Hindenburg, a former Freikorps, joined in 1927, but as late as April 1929 it still had fewer than 300 members.37 In Berlin many of the SA activists who joined the organization in these years had previously belonged to the paramilitary völkisch sports club Olympia e.V., which after the First World War became a reservoir for the recruitment of right-wing extremists and was outlawed by the Prussian authorities on 12 May 1926.38

  In the German capital, where Joseph Goebbels was appointed the new district party leader, violent clashes involving National Socialists became a common feature of the city’s street politics as early as November 1926. Goebbels advocated an aggressive strategy that would prove highly successful and was adopted by the entire party in the 1930s. This approach acknowledged the SA’s initial weakness but speculated that precisely because of it the stormtroopers must seek a confrontation with their rivals, ideally on the latter’s own territory.39 Clashes should happen in the streets of the capital in plain daylight, mainly for three reasons: first, pure and simple, the National Socialists had to increase their visibility in a modern metrop
olis of more than four million inhabitants where time was limited and Hitler, the tribune of the Bavarian plebs, was a distant and somehow obscure figure. Against this background, a public march that could potentially escalate into violence was a reliable and cheap means to attract attention, a way to provoke a ‘sensation’ in the neighbourhood.40 ‘Disturbance is the main thing – never mind how it arises,’ noted the Kreisleiter of the city of Hameln in 1931, testifying to the successful expansion of the Berlin SA’s tactic.41 Second, Goebbels cleverly exploited the necessary presence of police forces on such occasions. Against their will, the police, who by law had to prevent street violence from getting out of control, was thereby transformed into a protecting power for National Socialists during their propaganda marches.42 Third, such seemingly audacious acts of provocation which – it is important to repeat the point – in reality took place precisely because the risk of escalation was contained, elated those who participated in them and thereby attracted new followers. Just two weeks after his move to Berlin, Goebbels’s diary entries go into raptures over the SA ‘community spirit’ built on the foundation of violence: ‘Today I attended the general mustering of the SA. All in shape. We can set ourselves to the great work now. Assault is followed by assault. Blood pours. Binder for the new community! I think revolution.’43 The Berlin stormtroopers, who at this time were overwhelmingly young men in their late teens and early twenties, venerated Goebbels precisely because of his focus on violence. The twenty-one-year-old Sturmführer Horst Wessel, who after his death in 1930 was elevated to the position of a Nazi icon, noted enthusiastically in his autobiography from the summer of 1929: ‘Never did he hold back, but always allowed the entirety of our accumulated energy to discharge explosively. The SA was indebted to him for this, in particular.’44 In similar terms Nazi militants in Hamburg emphasized the existence of a ‘generational gap’, claiming that after having lost confidence in their fathers they now understood the need to take their fate into their own hands. ‘Fighting had become our life purpose and goal,’ one of them boasted.45