Despite such martial rhetoric, it is important to keep in mind that SA activism between 1925 and 1929 was not yet a mass phenomenon. In all of the larger cities the stormtroopers remained a tiny minority compared to the much larger Wehrverbände of the right as well as the paramilitary organizations of the left. Consequently, the SA was in the first place concerned with defending its own limited territory, which often did not exceed several bars, the local party headquarters, and their immediate surroundings.46 To make those bars that served as Nazi hangouts identifiable, innkeepers could buy 11 inch by 11 inch enamel signs bearing the SA insignia from the SA--Reichszeugmeisterei. It is telling that the Nazis as late as 1930 emphasized the relatively neutral design of these signs, claiming that they were only recognizable to insiders and that their destruction by political opponents was not to be expected – a promise that, of course, could not be upheld.47 Once their strongholds were secured, the SA could then venture to explore and temporarily occupy other parts of the city, calling attention to the NSDAP and its paramilitary wing. This strategy of infiltration and expansion had important effects on the mentality of the stormtroopers: as they perceived their surroundings as hostile, confidence in each other became a vital prerequisite for their motivation to endure and achieve success in political terms. At the same time, differences in class and fortune were of limited use in the SA’s semi-legal activities and thus did not matter much. The heart of the SA’s ‘German socialism’ in fact lay in the necessity of closing ranks and operating jointly, rather than in any programmatic statement of Hitler or other party leaders concerning the party’s economic policies, even if the internal schooling of Nazi activists increased considerably from 1927 onward and over the next years contributed to the transformation of the NSDAP into a ‘truly modern activist party’.48
Against this background, it is significant that Pfeffer von Salomon’s reforms maintained a central element from the earliest days of the SA: the organization of the group into ‘cells’ that comprised only a handful of activists. The men within such small SA groups knew each other personally and over time developed close bonds, united by a shared ideology and the joint experience of party service. Goebbels freely acknowledged that the Nazis copied this system of small ‘cells’ composed of political activists from their Communist rivals, but this organizational feature of the SA can be traced back to its earliest days in Munich. It is therefore plausible to assume that both the National Socialists and the Communists were ultimately inspired by military units that fought in the Great War and, in particular, by the ‘comradeship’ that existed within the platoons of the post-war Freikorps. The radical left could also build on the long socialist tradition of organized and at times violent industrial action going back to the nineteenth century.49 In any case, the National Socialists were successful in adapting this cell framework to the new realities of the SA, with these small groups forming ‘local communities of violence’ – communities that, particularly in larger cities, often acted as gangs, claiming contested territories for themselves.50
This approach proved increasingly beneficial for the SA, particularly during the years of economic misery. Many SA Stürme in larger cities now operated like street gangs – understand here less as a violent and often criminal youth organization, than as a ‘specific form of social arrangements’ that provided its members with basic needs including a network of more or less reliable comrades, food and shelter, and a sense of belonging.51 As is made plain by the young Ernst Haffner’s ‘reality novel’ Jugend auf der Landstraße Berlin, which became a literary sensation in Germany in 1932, the increasing phenomenon of violent youth gangs in the late Weimar Republic was a direct consequence of the miserable living conditions that prevailed in the working-class districts of German cities. Unable to find even badly paid jobs as day labourers, and often originating from dysfunctional families that did not possess the means to support them, such youths organized themselves into ‘cliques’, forms of solidarity communities. These groups were usually structured hierarchically (headed by the Cliquenbullen, or ‘clique bull’) and served as surrogate families for their members.52 The SA stormtrooper units, ideally organized around a charismatic local SA leader, resembled such local gangs not only in their organizational layout, but they also fulfilled – or at least promised to fulfil – similar tasks. With the sociological jargon of the 1970s, the SA increasingly functioned as a ‘spontaneous mass organization’: in its basic structure hierarchically organized and applying a strict leadership principle, but built on small units that operated surprisingly autonomously.53
The Nazi Uniform and the Authorities
Regardless of the moderate numbers of these local groups of stormtroopers in those early years, their uniforms alone indicated to the public that they belonged to a larger body of some relevance. The brown shirts were introduced nationwide in 1926 and soon became the most notorious National Socialist symbol of recognition after the swastika. Plainly visible to friends and foes alike and easily identifiable by the police, they demonstrated the courage and determination of those who dared to wear them, particularly during times when the uniform was officially prohibited. Although the psychological effects of military uniforms had been publicized roughly twenty years earlier by Wilhelm Voigt, better known as the ‘Captain of Köpenick’, and some years later were brilliantly ridiculed in Heinrich’s Mann best-selling novel Der Untertan, published in English for the first time in 1921 as The Patrioteer, uniforms remained highly popular in interwar Germany.54 Prior to 1914 a symbol that represented above all the authority of the state, over the 1920s uniforms were ‘democratized’ as more and more groups introduced their own versions. Such clothing now became the expression of a voluntary decision and demonstrated not only belonging and conviction, but also an individual’s willingness to submit to certain restrictions of individual freedom. In the case of the SA, the uniform was thus also a tool in the service of what I defined earlier as disciplinary integration. Furthermore, it became a deliberate means of provocation, not least because the law-and-order image usually associated with the police and the military was so often and so openly contradicted by the stormtroopers’ public presence. The uniform, finally, also acted as an element of community formation, empowering the individual wearer by reassuring him that he was part of a larger movement and introducing clear-cut boundaries between insiders and outsiders. Ultimately, it provided the SA men with a sense of agency.55
A stormtrooper is on duty every time he puts his uniform on, Hitler claimed in a letter to Pfeffer von Salomon in late 1926, and he requested that neither the consumption of alcohol nor smoking be permitted on these occasions. In public, the marching SA was prohibited from cheering and booing, and even the distribution of party pamphlets was disallowed. ‘Politics is exclusively made by the party,’ Hitler insisted, reducing individual militants to silent recipients of his orders and stripping them of all creative power.56 After Röhm was appointed SA Chief of Staff in January 1931, these rules were further tightened. From now on, all SA men, including their leaders – with the exception of members of the Reichstag and those fulfilling special party functions – were prohibited from taking part in public discussions, talking to journalists, or publishing on political questions.57 The Brownshirts were expected to make a lasting visual impression in the German streets, but not to explain party politics. This strategy proved beneficial in two ways: it spared the ordinary trooper from defending his political views – a task with which many would not have coped well, as even many Nazis admitted – and it also provided surplus meaning to the utterances of the few chosen Nazi leaders permitted to speak publicly.
The Nazis were by no means the only political party or association to clothe their faithful activists in uniforms, and consequently this alone would not have set them apart at the time. Members of the veterans’ association Der Stahlhelm, Bund der Frontsoldaten, literally ‘Steel Helmet, League of Frontline Soldiers’, which comprised more than 250,000 members in 1925 and thus far surpasse
d the SA, dressed in grey uniforms, the colour of the official army.58 The republican Reichsbanner marched in green shirts and blue caps, and even the Communist Der Rote Frontkämpferbund, or ‘Red Front Fighters League’, wore a kind of proletarian uniform that combined the traditional workman’s cap with military insignias.59 These four paramilitary ‘armies’, however, did not fight a civil war.60 They marched in the streets and held mass meetings with increasing frequency, but they rarely clashed with other groups or people directly, largely because of the presence of the police. Their public demonstrations nevertheless provided opportunities for violent attacks, which usually occurred before or after the political events proper. These incidents were in fact a vital element of Weimar Germany’s paramilitarism, and at least the Nazis and the Communists factored such violence into their strategies. ‘Beat the Fascists, wherever you find them!’ the Communist functionary Heinz Neumann wrote in the party organ Die Rote Fahne in early 1930, and the Nazis for their part called for nothing less than the complete annihilation of the ‘Communist-Bolshevik Untermenschen’.61 In contrast to such calls for direct and potentially murderous action, the Reichsbanner and the Stahlhelm largely contented themselves with acting within the symbolic dimension of public marches and rallies.62 However, over time, these two organizations likewise radicalized, if more in speech than in action, so that the American journalist Hubert R. Knickerbocker compared Germany in 1931–2 to a ‘town with four fire departments, each ready at the gong to leap down the brass pole and race for the goal. It is a village with four gangs, each ready at the drop of the hat to sally forth and slaughter the others.’ Similarly, the young French author Jacques Decour, who worked as a temporary teacher for a Magdeburg gymnasium in the autumn of 1930, noticed ‘revolts of ideas [Ideenaufstände] on every corner. These are the heroic times of the Republic. Everywhere faith, fanaticism.’63
Not surprisingly, the German authorities attempted to contain the escalation of violence in the streets. The strategies they adopted differed from region to region as well as in timing, intensity, and intention. Whereas Bavaria by and large remained an area of retreat for the National Socialists, the Prussian government in the hands of the Social Democrats repeatedly pushed for action against the party, particularly after the murder of Reich Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau on 24 June 1922 and the November 1923 putsch. Contrary to what has often been stated, they were not unsuccessful, as the following example demonstrates. In 1928 the Berlin police president forbade the holding of a funeral parade for the SA man Hans-Georg Kütemeyer. Official reports stated that Kütemeyer, whose body was found in the Landwehrkanal, the city canal, on the morning of 17 November 1928, had been involved in a brawl with construction workers the night before and had fallen and drowned in the canal in a state of acute intoxication.64 The Nazis, by contrast, claimed that political opponents had murdered him, elevating Kütemeyer to one of the earliest Blutzeugen, or ‘blood witnesses’, of their movement in Berlin and Brandenburg.65 As would soon become a regular habit, the National Socialists intended to honour an alleged party martyr with a lavish funeral parade. Such funerals were not only political demonstrations but also testified to the all-encompassing ambitions of the Nazi ideology, which provided, or at least heavily contributed to, fundamental services like marriage and death rites. The Prussian police clearly understood the political character of the upcoming procession. They claimed that the Nazi Party had irresponsibly enhanced the level of political emotions among its followers and therefore they feared for public security if these emotions were set free during the parade. The police also declared that they would not respond to Goebbels’s official letter of protest ‘because of its insolent and indecent form’ – and that they would refuse to do so in the future as well.66 Such details indicate that the authorities were all but helpless against early Nazi attempts to decide the ‘rules of the game’ – if there was strong political will to fight them and a basic understanding of how symbolic politics worked in an age of mass media and antagonistic ideological worldviews.
The authorities banned the second SA several times. In Prussia it was prohibited twice, first in the capital city of Berlin from 6 April 1927 to 5 April 1928.67 This ban certainly made Nazi recruitment in the largest German state more difficult and thus contributed to the slow growth of the stormtroopers in this area between 1925 and 1928. However, this ban had no effect on other parts of the Reich and certainly did not strike at the heart of the SA in Munich.68 A few years later, in 1932, the SA was prohibited again, this time on a nationwide level. The ban came into effect on 13 April, but the new chancellor, Franz von Papen, lifted it as early as 14 June. A Bavarian initiative to extend the ban at least in its own territory failed two weeks later.69 Overall, the effects of these temporary interdictions on the SA remained limited. When the Nazis were not allowed to wear their brown uniforms, they simply turned up to events in civilian clothing. A marching and singing SA troop operating under a fantastic cover name and with members dressed in white shirts or other surrogate ‘uniforms’ still remained highly recognizable. At times these events boasted up to 1,000 participants, even in midsize cities.70 The Nazis’ cat-and-mouse game with the authorities during these ‘white shirt times’ (Weißhemden-Zeit)71 in the end more than contributed to the atmosphere of excitement and fun surrounding the SA than prevented men from joining the stormtroopers, not to mention the fact that it further undermined the authority of the legitimate governments. Instructive in this respect is the verdict from 13 March 1931 of the Kammergericht in Berlin entitled ‘On the Prohibition of the Public Display of NSDAP Party Uniforms’, which also applied to the well-known ‘substitute’ uniforms. The judges declared this prohibition invalid because, among other things, members of the public could not be expected to understand the Nazi dress code and therefore ran the risk of coming into the firing line of the police.72
Over the years the German states’ pressure on the NSDAP and the SA was furthermore hampered by the growing sympathies for the Nazi movement among parts of the judiciary and the police. Both groups felt closer to right-wing nationalists, who claimed to fight for law, order, and the nation, than to their counterparts on the radical left, who favoured revolution, a profound change in the social and public order.73 A closer look at the different political strategies of the extremist parties is instructive: whereas Nazi propaganda positively reached out to police officers by highlighting their unique grievances – their alleged abuse at the hands of the government, which forced them to clean up the mess the democratic parties were said to be responsible for – the Communists vituperated against the officers as henchmen of the ‘system’, dupes of the capitalist establishment, and traitors to their own class.74 In the Free State of Saxony, where the NSDAP was present with ever more local groups since the mid-1920s and was particularly successful in those industrial regions with high unemployment,75 the Nazis claimed to have infiltrated the regular police forces to the extent that, by their own statistics, 40 per cent of all officers were members of the NSDAP in 1932. In the working-class city of Chemnitz the number of ‘Nazi policemen’ amounted to more than 90 per cent, boasted a Nazi deputy in the Saxon Landtag, the regional parliament.76 Such figures were certainly overstated, but are still indicative of the trend that even in those states and regions where the authorities promoted tough police action against SA violence, police officials did not necessarily share this view.77 Social Democrats in Saxony repeatedly complained that the police were too lenient: they neither sufficiently engaged in the prevention of political criminality nor demonstrated zeal and commitment in redressing concrete crimes. As a result, workers in cities like Chemnitz found themselves no longer safe against the ‘terror of Fascist mobs, not even in their own flats’.78
Laughing at the Stormtroopers
By 1930 the SA had become a regular and highly visible, but also very controversial, element in the German streets. When local communities showed a determination to prevent the Nazis from gaining a foothold – as was the case in the
small city of Michelstadt in the Forest of Odes – several hundred stormtroopers from the region ‘retaliated’. On 6 April 1930 they drove into the city, where they indiscriminately threw stones through windows and at local pedestrians, injuring many adults and at least one child.79 Yet not only did the SA provoke the strong emotions of fear, admiration, and repudiation, but it also became the target of satire and ridicule. In December 1930 the weekly Ulk, a supplement of the highly respected liberal Berliner Tageblatt, ironically informed its readers of the unlikely event that ‘recently three SA men had caused a stir at [Berlin’s centrally located] Leipziger Straße by walking along silently and lost in thought’.80 Describing the normal operation of Fascist mobs in singing and marching in the streets and committing acts of violence by the wayside, the journalist and writer Siegfried Kracauer laconically stated that events ‘went the National Socialist way’ (nationalistisch zugegangen) – thereby downplaying the political danger posed by the quickly growing number of such incidents.81 The SA was also mocked in Erich Kästner’s 1931 novel Fabian: The Story of a Moralist, albeit alongside his Communist counterpart. In one chapter Kästner describes a fictional shooting between a Nazi and a Communist that results in mutual injuries. When both of them arrive at the local hospital, the doctor on duty comments on the scene:
‘You’ve brought me two politicians?’ he said, with a smile. ‘Altogether, we’ve had nine cases brought in tonight, one with a serious bullet wound in the stomach. All workmen and clerks. Have you ever noticed that these fellows come from the suburbs, and generally know each other? These political brawls are indistinguishable from the dance-hall scraps. In both cases they represent a perversion of German social life. It looks as if they are trying to reduce the unemployment figures by potting each other off. A queer kind of self-help.’82
Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts Page 11
