Such forms of irony barely concealed the moral despair and political frustration that were widespread within the left-liberal intelligentsia of Germany in the early 1930s, particularly after the Reichstag elections of 14 September 1930 in which the NSDAP won 18.3 per cent of the votes (Plate 8). With a sixfold increase in support compared to 1928, it now represented the second strongest party in the new parliament. There was no denying that the Nazis had become a considerable political force, to the extent that just over one year later, in December 1931, a report from a secret meeting of KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands) propagandists in Berlin complained that the Communists had utterly underestimated the National Socialist danger: ‘By now everyone accepts that sooner or later Hitler will come to power and reconciles himself to the idea that our time will come after the Nazis’ failure [Abwirtschaft].’83 Whether National Socialism became attractive because of the brown-shirted activists so prone to violence is still a matter of debate.84 In addressing this question, one needs to take into account local varieties of the party as well as the general consequences of the fragmentation of the public sphere in Weimar Germany. As historian Stephan Malinowski has argued, an ‘increasing dichotomisation of awareness’ became a dominant feature of these years. He defined this ‘dichotomisation’ not only as the tendency to distinguish sharply between ‘us’ and ‘them’, but also as a basic operation that structured one’s perceptions even before reflection could set in.85 National Socialists and Communists were both successful in creating distinct public spheres that were tangible and compelling for their followers, but inaccessible to those who did not share their basic ideological assumptions. Both movements encouraged their adherents to block out unwelcome facts and worldviews, to the benefit of an idealized version of the party’s own, allegedly ‘proper’, understanding of social and political realities.86 The former SA-Brigade Leader, Franz Bock, summarized this attitude when interrogated at the International Military Tribunal in 1946: ‘Every desire for self-preservation demands a struggle. The realization of National Socialistic ideas, with the aim to assume power in the State, required political struggles and fighting. Our weapons, however, were spiritual ones – propaganda, the spoken word, and mass demonstrations.’87 While the latter part of this statement downplays the SA’s central use of physical violence for tactical reasons, it testifies to the fundamental perception in 1920s Germany that politics was above all a matter of antagonistic and mutually exclusive worldviews.
The political theorist and legal scholar Carl Schmitt, who in 1932 justified the Preußenschlag, the unlawful removal of the SPD-led Prussian government, and soon afterward became the Third Reich’s crown jurist, elevated this foe–friend distinction into a political philosophy. Within the SA, Schmitt’s sophisticated academic reasoning clearly was less relevant than more concrete arguments, won through fists and fights. However, a similar trend of overstating political differences as fundamental ideological confrontations of utmost importance characterized both ends of the intellectual spectrum. Nazi propaganda constantly reminded the rank-and-file stormtrooper that he was part of a bigger picture, an eyewitness to a crucial period in history that he could actually and personally shape. Such optimistic determination was by no means exclusive to Germany; it was a common feature of all Fascist movements in interwar Europe, as Roger Griffin in particular has forcefully argued: extreme nationalists unanimously believed ‘that Western history was itself at a turning point from which it could collapse into terminal barbarism and anarchy amidst social breakdown and war, or give birth to a new type of society beyond the current age of chaos and decadence’.88 A random survey of several editions of the capital’s two Nazi dailies, Goebbels’s Der Angriff and Strasser’s Berliner Arbeiterzeitung, confirm this ultimately eschatological view. In both papers, journalists aimed not at factual accuracy, but at creating an alternative public sphere in which extreme partisan views could find expression and their activists achieve recognition and salvation. For the uninitiated, the Nazi headlines at least provided ‘sensation’, a welcome stimulation for those Berliners who tolerated everything except boredom, speculated Goebbels, who was, as always, of two minds about the ‘city of the intelligence and the asphalt’.89 The public reaction to the stormtroopers’ presence and actions can thus not be evaluated from a higher, ‘objective’, outlook but must be embedded in a careful reconstruction of the different situational contexts without glossing over the strong partisan views expressed in the historical documents.
What holds true for the SA is likewise relevant for the analysis of political violence in the late Weimar Republic more generally. Even those official – and by and large reliable – statistics at our disposal, which indicate a strong rise in political crimes between 1928 and 1932, do not tell us about the perspective of contemporaries.90 All organizations involved in this violence regarded their own men as ‘firefighters’ and those of the other groups as members of criminal ‘gangs’ – to revert for a moment to Hubert Knickerbocker’s colourful metaphors. Stormtroopers interpreted the risk of being personally attacked in the streets as just another indicator of this grave national danger. And this risk was indeed high, particularly in those working-class districts that the SA was determined to ‘conquer’. As Anthony McElligott has demonstrated for the city of Altona, which in 1938 became a part of Hamburg, not only were early Nazi activists prior to 1933 greeted in the streets with shouts of ‘Perish Nazi!’ (Nazi verrecke!) or ‘Heil Moskau!’, but several were forced to move home after their flats were broken into and ravaged. Communist and Reichsbanner men repeatedly attacked individual Nazis when the latter left well-known Nazi hangouts, were recognizable by their uniforms, or were personally known to their assailants. Such attacks at times resembled genuine hunts. They were often carried out by a large group of armed attackers against a single man or a very few victims, who were hit in the faces and on the heads with nailed fencing stakes, stabbed, beaten, or trampled until they were severely injured or dead.91 If one compares the actual acts of violence that occurred in the early 1930s, there were few practical differences between the street crimes of Nazi, Communist, Reichsbanner, and Stahlhelm perpetrators. Situational factors mattered more than ideological ones, which served above all as ex post-facto legitimization.
The Escalation of Violence
Official nationwide statistics for the year 1931 counted 8,248 people who had been injured or killed as a result of political violence. National Socialists represented the largest group of victims (4,699), followed by members of the Reichsbanner (1,696), Communists (1,228), and Stahlhelmers (625).92 Regional figures overall confirm this pattern: official statistics for the Hanover administrative district in 1931 note injuries to seventy-one Nazis, forty-seven members of the Reichsbanner, seven Communists, and six Stahlhelmers. In addition, one Reichsbanner man was killed in the region.93 In Saxony 683 people were injured and fourteen died as a consequence of political violence in the same year. Among the dead were six National Socialists, two Communists, and four ‘adherents of other parties’.94 In Leipzig, of the six people killed for political reasons between 1929 and March 1933, three were National Socialists, one was a Communist, and one was a Reichsbanner man.95 However, another statistic for the Reich, published by the left-liberal weekly Die Welt am Morgen, reported 155 deaths and 426 people injured as a result of political activities between 1929 and July 1931, with the majority of casualties belonging to the political left (108) and only thirty-one members of nationalist organizations being killed.96 According to the Nazis’ own data, 143 SA men were killed between 1930 and 1932 nationwide, with eighty-four deaths in 1932 alone.97 Judging from these statistics, National Socialists seem to have been the group that was most often attacked and injured, whereas Communist and Social Democratic activists, while exposed to a significant risk of being killed, were attacked less frequently. If one considers, furthermore, that between 1929 and 1931 the number of stormtroopers and Communist paramilitaries was significantly smaller than the number of Reichs
banner and Stahlhelm men, it is safe to deduce that the activists of the two former organizations behaved in a considerably more violent manner than those of the latter.
To justify and at the same time further increase the hostilities, Nazi propaganda claimed that the collective national body and the individual stormtrooper’s body were intrinsically linked, and consequently the personal risk of and harm inflicted on the latter was thus to be regarded as a direct assault on the nation. The establishment of such parallels between individual experience and the nation’s fate – ultimately a grandiose gesture of self-empowerment – was a key element in the expansion of the Brownshirts’ appeal in these crucial years. Another element was the SA’s militancy. Although the group’s leaders repeated, mantra-like, in public speeches that stormtroopers were not allowed to carry arms and would resort to physical violence only for legitimate self-defence, it was an open secret that the truth was often quite different. Even if the many SA men serving in border protection units who had been officially trained by the Reichswehr by and large did not (yet) engage in violent confrontation, this claim certainly did not hold for the SA ‘gangs’ in the larger German cities, where the possession of a gun was tantamount to an elevation in status. Admittedly, the early days of the Munich SA, when whole units could walk into a Reichswehr barrack to pick out heavy artillery and machine guns for their paramilitary exercises, were over. But the sheer amount of smaller firearms circulating in Germany more than made up for the loss of access to military equipment, particularly as these arms were now used more frequently, for training purposes as well as for attacks. During these years the police regularly confiscated from members of the SA such weapons as knuckledusters and rubber truncheons, but increasingly also pistols, daggers, guns, and explosives.98 If one believes the memoirs of the former Prussian Minister of the Interior and Berlin police president Albert Grzesinski, the Berlin police in early 1932 even confiscated two ‘life-size effigies’ of the Prussian Minister of the Interior Carl Severing and himself, ‘the heads of which were neatly punctured by bullet holes’. Both men had ‘proven a convenient target for the young soldiers of the Third Reich,’ Grzesinski remarked dryly.99
Finally, in 1931 and 1932 the authorities uncovered National Socialist plans to overthrow the legitimate government by force and to establish a dictatorship. In the autumn of 1931 they published the ‘Boxheim documents’, which contained detailed plans for a Nazi takeover of power in reaction to a possible Communist putsch. Drafted most notably by the twenty-eight-year-old probationary judge Werner Best of Darmstadt in Hesse – who later became SS-Obergruppenführer, chief of Section l of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), head of the civil administration of German-occupied northern France, and finally, in 1942, Reich plenipotentiary in Denmark – this strategy paper described how a state of emergency would be put in place and then upheld by the SA and other right-wing paramilitary ‘defence’ groups. Everyone who attempted to interfere in the Fascist takeover of power was to be executed on the spot.100 Half a year later, in March 1932, the police in the Palatinate discovered that a series of bomb attacks that had started in the region the previous summer were perpetrated not by Communists, as had been assumed initially, but by the National Socialists. The leading figure behind these terror attacks was the regional SS leader Theodor Eicke, who in the summer of 1933 was to become commander of the Dachau concentration camp. In the early 1930s he had been in charge of plant security for I. G. Farben Ludwigsburg, a position in which he was well placed to procure explosives for approximately eighty bombs.101
In both cases Hitler and other leaders of the NSDAP hastened to persuade the authorities that such incidents had to be seen as excessive but ultimately legitimate reactions to the imminent Communist threat. Over-ambitious regional Nazi functionaries had drafted the plans and prepared the bombings against explicit orders from party headquarters, they claimed. At the same time the Nazi leadership exploited the mounting pressure on the government that resulted from such threats: public order in Germany, they argued, could now only be maintained with the help of the NSDAP and the SA, and not by turning against them. Reich Chancellor Heinrich Brüning personally requested the Oberreichsanwalt (attorney general) to handle the Boxheim scandal with care and to avoid drastic judicial action – not least in order to calm down the liberal and Socialist press that was determined to expose the Nazi doublespeak. It hardly came as a surprise that Best was acquitted of charges of high treason in October 1932.102
Starting in 1930, the boundaries between political criminality, ‘organized’ criminality, and petty criminality became more fluid than ever. In these times of widespread poverty and even starvation, a simple theft of food could be turned without further ado into a political act – justified, for example, as Communist self-help against capitalist exploitation.103 In Berlin the (officially banned) Communist Red Front Fighters as well as the National Socialist stormtroopers occasionally formed political gangs that developed close ties with the underworld.104 That many SA men combined their political and criminal activities was so obvious that, in the vernacular, Sturm 25, which operated in the working-class district of Berlin-Neukölln, was referred to as Ludensturm, the ‘storm of pimps’ – a characterization that the SA’s historiography several years later bragged about as a kind of honorary title.105 The notorious Sturm 33, based in the western city district of Berlin-Charlottenburg, was locally known as ‘murder storm’ because its members were repeatedly involved in fatal shootings.106 Such criminal activities not only shook public opinion of the SA, but at times also diminished its assets: in 1931 police reports stated that penniless stormtroopers had repeatedly staged political raids in order to claim SA insurance benefits, a topic that anti-Fascist publications eagerly exploited.107
Propaganda marches increasingly began to escalate into violence, with Berlin’s Blutmai, or ‘Blood May’, of 1929 and the Altona ‘Bloody Sunday’ of 1932 being the most fatal encounters. Most victims on these occasions were killed by police bullets, fired in an attempt to restore order. The Berlin Blutmai, provoked by the Communists, claimed thirty-one lives, while its Nazi-provoked Altona counterpart took seventeen lives. In both cases more than 100 people were injured.108 Apart from those spectacular incidents, party meetings that ended in fisticuffs, direct assaults, and shootings involving members of competing political organizations mushroomed in ever more German cities. The ‘pseudopacification’ of these urban ‘communities of violence’ that had characterized the previous years was over.109 Grzesinski described this change in retrospect: ‘Ordinary brawls had given way to numerous attacks. Knives, blackjacks and revolvers had replaced political argument. Terror was rampant.’110 Goebbels characterized the situation in similar terms as a ‘bloody conflict with chair legs and revolvers’ that, in his eyes, would be ‘ever more necessary’.111
Whereas this phenomenon of intensified violence was initially largely confined to disadvantaged working-class neighbourhoods, it soon burst through the unofficial social boundaries, as the following example from Cologne demonstrates: on the evening of Friday, 6 March 1931, the local chapter of the Catholic Centre Party in Cologne-Braunsfeld met for an evening of discussion on the fashionable topic of ‘Soviet Star and Swastika’. About seventy people were present in the room, among them a considerable number of uninvited local Nazis who had arrived on bicycles and motorbikes. They left the engines of the latter running, in case a quick exit would prove necessary. In the hall the Nazis initially listened quietly to the main speaker of the evening, a certain Dr Hertz, but soon began to heckle and insult him. Finally, Toni Winkelnkemper, a twenty-five-year-old student of law at the University of Cologne who had already risen to become NSDAP Gau office leader (Gauamtsleiter) for the Rhineland, and at least for this night was acting as the leader of the SA Sturm present, called the speaker a ‘coward’. This seems to have been a prearranged code word, as the Nazis immediately started to throw chairs in the direction of the table where the organizers sat. The prosecutor later described
the following minutes vividly:
The defendant Winkelnkemper tossed a heavy ashtray in the direction of the pastor Dr Frings [. . .] At the same time, another person, who could not be identified, struck at the speaker Dr Hertz. The participants of the meeting who belonged to the Centre Party confined themselves to protecting the women who were present and to parrying off those ashtrays and chair legs that were used as missiles. The whole process lasted about five minutes. During this period, 58 chairs were partly damaged, partly completely smashed; some other fittings of the room (glass door, lustre, panelling) were also spoiled. The damage amounts to 400 marks.112
Several men from the Centre Party were injured and needed medical care. The forehead wounds suffered by Pastor Frings – he would be elected Archbishop of Cologne in 1942 and elevated to the cardinalate after the Second World War – had to be stitched up.113 Winkelnkemper was initially sentenced to a prison term of six months, but was granted a reprieve on his appeal.114 Free to move in public, he continued to assault political opponents.115 After the Nazis came to power, Winkelnkemper carved out a remarkable career: in 1933 Goebbels appointed him regional director for the Rhineland (Landesstellenleiter Rheinland) in the newly established Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, and he also became a member of the Prussian parliament and of the (largely defunct) Reichstag. In 1937 the now Dr Winkelnkemper became director of the Reich radio station Cologne and later director of the Reichsradiogesellschaft. In 1939 he was promoted to SS-Standartenführer. His brother Peter became mayor of Cologne in 1941, occupying a position held some years earlier by Konrad Adenauer, the future first chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts Page 12
