This short episode demonstrates not only how violent ‘politics of the streets’, criminal behaviour, and SA student activism were increasingly interrelated, but also that such acts were not restricted to young men with a wannabe ‘gangster’ attitude or to disadvantaged youth beyond party control. Instead, such incidents were a vital element of the officially sanctioned NSDAP street politics of the early 1930s. Those who ‘rule[d] the street’ would sooner or later also come to political power, as leading Nazis repeatedly argued.116 In turn, this political strategy meant that every kind of public violence could now be elevated to a political act and praised as a further contribution to the final goal of abolishing the Republic. A characteristic, if extreme, example is the so-called Kurfürstendamm riots of 12 September 1931. On this day – Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year holiday – hundreds of stormtroopers walked the famous Kurfürstendamm boulevard in Berlin,117 shouting antisemitic slogans and savagely beating passers-by whom they believed to be Jewish. What was meant to look like a spontaneous eruption of violence was in fact a well-prepared attack arranged by Goebbels and the Berlin SA leader Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorff. With the stormtroopers strategically dispersed in small groups, the police, who were caught by surprise, had a hard time establishing order. In the end, more than thirty attackers were identified, prosecuted, and sentenced to prison terms and monetary penalties.118 Many of the Nazi activists in Berlin felt betrayed by their party, which on the occasion of the trial denied that the SA had acted on previous orders. Thus, by the end of 1931 up to 400 discontented stormtroopers from the capital had formed the Comradeship Social Help group (Kameradschaft soziale Hilfe), a self-help group that advocated for a split from the Hitler movement and was – allegedly – even willing to support the Reichsbanner in case of an intensification of political violence in the capital.119 Despite this internal dissatisfaction and the comparatively harsh sentences handed down in the Kurfürstendamm trial, from the perspective of the NSDAP leadership the riots were a symbolic success: the SA had demonstrated that its antisemitism and anti-democratic hate were no longer confined to beer halls and other venues of limited respectability, but that the party was strong enough to ‘rule’ even the most respectable streets in the nation’s capital – if only for an hour. In the eyes of the party faithful, the stormtroopers had thus served the role dictated by propaganda of an ideologically driven attack force, always ready for action.
Unemployment and Social Unrest in the SA
However, it would be misleading to take the claims of party leaders at face value. In 1931 and 1932, when the number of unemployed in Germany rose to over six million, men joined the SA for practical reasons as much as for ideological commitment.120 In these years more than one out of two stormtroopers was temporarily or even permanently out of work, with unemployment figures in particular Stürme as high as 80 per cent. In Berlin between 60 and 80 per cent of all Nazi militants were underemployed in 1931.121 The situation was similar in Hamburg, where 2,600 of 4,500 SA men – or slightly more than 56 per cent – were without a job in 1932.122 With monthly membership turnover rates at times higher than 20 per cent, many who aligned themselves with the SA did not remain in it for more than a few weeks or months. What is more, hundreds of thousands of these newcomers only joined the SA, but not the Nazi Party, although membership in the party was officially compulsory starting in 1927.123 Financial considerations certainly played a role in these decisions, a view supported by the fact that even those who held membership cards did not necessarily pay their dues. Participation in the SA’s social life and paramilitary exercises, which now more than ever ‘provided [an] alternative full-time activity to work’ for German men, ultimately did not depend on such formalities, at least as long as the superiors deemed someone’s active service to the movement as satisfactory.124
Group dynamics, the prospect of professional advancement, or simply the need for subsistence in these years, often constituted a more persuasive inducement for joining the SA than did ideological affiliation. Case studies point in the same direction. In Osterode, a small industrial city on the verge of the Harz Mountains with 9,000 inhabitants, only forty-eight of the seventy-one men who had joined the SA prior to 1933 had also become members of the Nazi Party.125 And in one particular impoverished part of East Prussia there existed in 1931 a local SA Sturm of whose 118 men not one was a regular party member.126 It is therefore safe to generalize that, throughout Germany, many of those who joined the stormtroopers in the last two to three years of the Weimar Republic were workers who were looking for protection against looming job cuts or, if already unemployed, speculated that the growing Nazi network in the region might provide a possibility of re-entering the job market.127 In the meantime an increasing number of unemployed men spent their days and evenings in so-called Sturm taverns, bars that targeted a party-affiliated audience in the hope of economically surviving the sharp decrease in alcohol consumption that had begun in Germany in the late 1920s.128 At the peak of the economic crisis, the SA established its own job agencies, trying to persuade party members to employ fellow stormtroopers. The SA even created ‘work storms’ (Arbeitsstürme) in which otherwise jobless and penniless militants offered their labour on the private job market.129 The General Association of Christian Trade Unions in 1932 emphasized the close connection between the increasing political radicalism of German youth and the devastating economic situation: ‘A social and economic system that fails to provide the youth both with a task and any hope for earning a living pushes them into the role of adventurers who have nothing to lose but all to gain from an overthrow. The political elections of 1931 demonstrate with utmost clarity that all those who are uprooted [. . .] run after those whom they sense to be engaging in deliberate action, even if this action is purely negative and destructive.’130
In light of these economic and political problems, the SA became increasingly difficult to run, despite its broad appeal and social activities. Nevertheless, its membership increased in ever-growing figures between late 1930 and the summer of 1932 – from 77,000 in January 1931 to 221,000 in November of the same year and 445,000 in August 1932.131 As became characteristic within the Third Reich more generally several years later, networks and personal loyalties among leading National Socialists were often more important than instructions written on paper. Internal quarrels and personal rivalries, particularly among party functionaries and regional SA leaders who now commanded thousands or even tens of thousands of men, were common and at times even disgusted Nazi sympathizers. The former lieutenant and early NSDAP supporter Hellmuth von Mücke bluntly stated as early as August 1929: ‘The party is totally rotten and corrupt, both when it comes to organization as well as in the domains of strategy and ideology. The dominant aspect of the party is publicity [. . .] In short, it is a pigsty.’132
There were, however, not only personal, but also substantial ideological differences that threatened the cohesion of the SA as well as the National Socialists’ image as a unified and strong movement more generally. Particularly in the industrial centres of northern Germany, many stormtroopers became associated with the ‘socialist’ left wing of the NSDAP, which in the late 1920s was led by the brothers Otto and Gregor Strasser, Goebbels, and the Berlin SA-Führer Walther Stennes.133 These men regarded national renewal and a social revolution as two sides of the same coin, if only sometimes for tactical reasons, and aimed at winning over in particular the young proletariat and parts of the impoverished middle classes. Whereas the NSDAP usually encapsulated its social promises in popular slogans like ‘Breaking interest slavery’ or ‘Work and Bread’, the ‘Nazis of the Left’ asked for more sweeping changes, like the nationalization of the big banks, the ‘persecution of the profiteers’, the introduction of a capital tax, and, of course, an immediate end to reparation payments according to the Young Plan, which was finally adopted in May 1930.134 Although these demands were hardly more than a popular and left-leaning sampling of the völkisch repertory embellished with anti-ca
pitalist rhetoric that complemented the constant Nazi hammering of the Jews, some of these positions demonstrate a remarkable overlap with Communist views. Unlike the Hitler faction of the Nazis, the followers of Stennes advocated a close alliance with the Soviet Union (largely for tactical reasons that focused on opposing the Western Allies and in particular England) and championed the national independence movements in India and Egypt. They argued against German federalism (and for a strong centralized Germany), against the Catholic Church (using basically the same arguments that were put forward in the Kulturkampf of the late nineteenth century), and against the inviolability of private property.135
In this factional struggle ideological leanings and practical concerns were closely intertwined: with the SA growing into a veritable mass organization since 1930, its northern leaders impatiently requested greater financial contributions from the party for their institution, claiming that it was the SA, and not the party bureaucracy, that did most of the work in furthering the NSDAP’s aims. Furthermore, many of them still favoured a violent putsch over the current strategy of a legal takeover of power – a slow and uncertain tactic that attracted voters and new party members but otherwise did not change much. This basic conflict not only led to the resignation of Pfeffer von Salomon as OSAF on 29 August 1930, to be replaced by the reactivated Ernst Röhm in January 1931,136 but also lay at the heart of a series of violent clashes within the Nazi movement, most notably the two ‘Stennes revolts’ that occurred in late August 1930 and late March 1931.
After frustrated Berlin stormtroopers led by Stennes attacked the capital’s local NSDAP headquarters on 30 August 1930, Hitler intervened and personally rushed to the capital, where he agreed ‘in tears’ to several of the SA’s demands, promising the left wing of the party better pay and more influence. With the important Reichstag election only two weeks away on 14 September, internal quarrels had to be avoided at all costs.137 However, Hitler and the NSDAP party leaders in Munich from this point on became determined to curb the influence of Stennes and his followers, whose constant agitation for revolutionary action threatened to derail the party’s ‘legal’ course. The opportunity to strike came on 28 March 1931 when the Reich president passed an emergency decree to prevent political riots and requested that the NSDAP control its stormtroopers tightly or else run the risk of being outlawed. In reaction, Hitler deposed Stennes and his right-hand man, the Stabsleiter Walter Jahn, from office. Technically, this dismissal was achieved through a decree from the new SA Chief of Staff Röhm on 31 March 1931.138 In return, Stennes and his followers opted to begin a new mutiny and on the next day once again occupied the Berlin party headquarters and the editorial offices of Goebbels’s 80,000-circulation Der Angriff.139 This time they found their internal party adversaries well prepared, however. To take the wind out of the opposition’s sails, Röhm promised that as of 1 May 1931 all SA-Gruppen would be allocated fixed budgets. Most Berlin stormtroopers quickly pledged allegiance to the Führer, ensnared and partly also directly bought by Hitler who in the capital could rely on Kurt Daluege, Göring, and Goebbels. The agile Gauleiter not for the last time in his life had switched sides just in time. The fate of Stennes was sealed.140
Nevertheless, about 500 stormtroopers – roughly one-third of all Berlin’s SA men at the time – went along with Stennes, creating the Kampfgruppe Revolutionärer Nationalsozialisten, or ‘Fighting Group of Revolutionary National Socialists’, which on 3 June 1931 merged with the Nationalsozialistische Kampfbewegung Deutschlands, the ‘National Socialist Fighting Movement of Germany’, founded in the summer of the previous year.141 In contrast to the regular SA men, who – according to their critics – received basic paramilitary training but remained politically uneducated, ‘fobbed off with catchphrases’, these dissidents regarded themselves as true ‘revolutionary fighters’. They claimed to represent National Socialism in its ‘original form’, as a Kampfbewegung – in contrast to the ‘bourgeois’ character of the current iteration of the party, dominated by ‘office hunters’, ‘philistines’, and ordinary party functionaries.142 The new revolutionary fighters still referred to each other as ‘SA men’, with Stennes even claiming the title of Oberster SA-Führer, or the ‘anti-Hitler’, and his former adjutant Walter Jahn referring to himself as Chief of Staff, copying the position held by Röhm.143 These alternative stormtroopers no longer dressed in brown, but in black shirts and blue caps – often after having redyed their original SA uniforms.144
Stennes initially claimed to have considerable support for his ‘Black Front’ and his alternative SA (also referred to as ‘Black Guards’) from dissatisfied Nazi activists throughout the Reich. Besides his strongholds in northeastern Germany, there were also dissident groups in Leipzig, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Hanover, and several other cities. However, the vigour of this left wing of the Nazi movement quickly grew weak. As early as September 1931 the leaders of this alternative SA met with Hermann Ehrhardt in Berlin to explore the option of a potential alliance. This looked like a rather desperate attempt, given Ehrhardt’s bad reputation among the stormtroopers after he had joined the Stahlhelm in the spring of 1926.145 In the remaining months prior to Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, the Stennes-led alternative SA, soon renamed as the ‘revolutionary fighter movement’ and in 1932 as the Kampf-Staffel, or ‘Fighting Team’, remained marginal. After the Hitler-led Nazis took power in January 1933, the leaders of the Nationalsozialistische Kampfgemeinschaft found their lives in danger. Gregor Strasser was murdered in the course of the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ in 1934; his brother Otto as well as Walther Stennes fled into exile. The latter subsequently served as a military advisor to the Kuomintang nationalists and as chief of Chiang Kai-shek’s bodyguards in China where he remained until 1949.146
Similar but less prominent conflicts also broke out in many industrial cities of northern Germany between 1930 and 1932. In the blue-collar town of Bremerhaven, for example, the local SA in August 1931 interrupted a meeting convened by the NSDAP Gauleiter for the Weser-Ems district. After the instigators were expelled from the ranks of the party and the SA, they published an open letter to Hitler in which they accused him of exploiting for his personal and strategic ends the political ‘sacrifices’ made by the rank-and-file stormtroopers in recent years; they claimed that he had built ‘a million-mark palace in Munich’ (a reference to the new party headquarters, the Brown House), precisely at a time when unemployment among the SA had reached a catastrophic peak. Furthermore, they wrote, the party leadership was concerned only with its own political ambitions and repeatedly let the stormtroopers down. These Nazi dissidents concluded that ‘only through revolutionary action’ (meaning the SA) and not through a ‘parliamentary party’ could Germany be saved.147
Such reproaches were usually couched in a populist rhetoric that demanded a thorough clean-up of the current mess and an end to corruption and social injustices.148 The divergences between the different factions in these conflicts were not so much about political goals as they were about the method of achieving them, laying bare fundamental differences between theory and practice, agitation and negotiation, boisterousness and deliberation.149 The prevailing tensions in fact continued to strain the relation between the NSDAP and parts of its semi-independent SA until the violent submission of the latter following the murderous ‘Night of the Long Knives’. Even if attempts to establish competing factions ultimately failed, discontent within the SA remained high. As the NSDAP successfully moved toward a legal takeover of power by making compromises with Heinrich Brüning and other leaders of the conservative right and by establishing close bonds with parts of German industry, many activists in the SA – particularly those affected by the economic misery – slowly but surely lost faith in the party and its promises. As we have already seen in the case of the Potempa murder, this situation became particularly problematic in the summer and autumn of 1932, when large parts of the SA were suffering from ‘[economic] depression’, as Goebbels realized.150 The Munich police in
a detailed report from 20 October 1932 likewise noticed a ‘massive despondency’ in the SA and predicted a substantial exodus of stormtroopers if the party did not find a way to at least participate in the next government.151 For the first time in years membership in the SA dropped.152 By and large, however, Hitler not only managed to contain the popular unrest in the SA, but also succeeded in channelling his followers’ dissatisfaction into aggressive and increasingly violent attacks on his political adversaries.
Brownshirts in the Countryside
Most of the examples provided in this chapter so far have been concerned with the growth of the SA and its activities in the German cities. Although this reflects the prevailing focus of most studies, it would be severely misleading to regard the stormtroopers as an exclusively urban phenomenon. At least as important for explaining the spectacular gains of the NSDAP at the polls starting in the late 1920s, and for a comprehensive analysis of SA activism, was the group’s appearance in rural Germany. Surviving membership lists from several German provinces suggest that beginning in 1930 the SA recruited members more successfully in the countryside than in the cities. According to exemplary studies by Detlef Mühlberger, nearly 70 per cent of all stormtroopers in the early 1930s lived in small communities with no more than 5,000 inhabitants, whereas only 17.6 per cent came from cities with a population larger than 100,000.153 In contrast to the big cities, where the official eight-hour day allowed young men, particularly those without family obligations, to reconcile work and party duties, recruitment for the SA in the countryside was more difficult. Here, people were generally more involved in family life, and traditional authority had not eroded as quickly as in urban areas.154
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