The Danger of Stormtrooper Violence
However, all of these aspects of the SA – the propaganda marches in the cities and the acute agitation in the villages – do not fully explain the party’s overall success. National Socialism around 1930 appealed to a considerable proportion of Germans, but the Nazis could never have come to power without a substantial amount of people who, while not necessarily sharing their views, likewise failed to defend the Republic when it was on the brink of collapse. In fact, educated middle- and upper-class opposition to the NSDAP and its political style diminished considerably in the face of the rapidly degrading economic situation and a national parliament that had not yet been abolished but was constantly bypassed by Chancellor Brüning and his successors starting in 1930. In these days of existential crisis for millions, the popular German proverb Der Ton macht die Musik (‘It’s not what you say, but how you say it’) did not mean much. Politics was no longer a matter of taste and careful deliberation, but a matter of ‘street credibility’, boldness, and immediate effect. As a consequence, even the Nazis’ excessive antisemitism was now regularly downplayed.191 A telling example is the lecturer Margarete Adam, who held a doctorate in philosophy from Hamburg University and was a disciple of the renowned philosopher Ernst Cassirer. Adam, a self-declared ‘philosemite’, claimed in late 1930 that ‘the interests and hopes of 99 per cent of all those who had voted for the NSDAP on 14 September 1930’ – including herself – were not connected to the ‘party’s excessive antisemitic agenda’. She regarded the Nazis’ antisemitism as a natural consequence of the Weimar Republic’s failures but did not perceive any real danger emerging from it – not even for the Jews. Every party programme is more radical than can be practically implemented, and that of the NSDAP was no exception, Adam reasoned. Consequently, she thought that Jewish life and property would be safe even under a National Socialist government.192
Business leaders who had been initially sceptical of the NSDAP now came to regard the party with sympathy, particularly after its symbolic reunion with the conservative right in the so-called ‘Harzburg Front’, a joint rally of rightist groups held in the spa town of Bad Harzburg on 11 October 1931.193 The following extract from a private letter of Ernst Brandi, the chairman of Bergbau-Verein, an influential lobby group for the Ruhr’s mining industries, sheds light on the calculations typical of the leaders of German heavy industry. Writing to one of his sons living in New York in early March 1932, a few months after the Harzburg rally and a few days before the first round of the German presidential elections in which Hindenburg, Hitler, and the Communist leader Ernst Thälmann ran for office, Brandi characterized National Socialism as:
a movement of utmost importance. It is foremost the expression of a general and conscious dissatisfaction with the political development since the middle of the war, the war’s end and the revolution until the present day. It is a movement that is determined to bring to bear the good old qualities of the Germans, their proficiency, their sense of duty and their moral cleanliness, all this on a purely national basis, because they [the Nazis] rightly [. . .] see the category of the nation, of the fatherland, as the strongest moral driving force.194
By this time, Brandi and several of his colleagues were already supporting the NSDAP and its regional bosses, most importantly the Gauleiter of Essen, Josef Terboven, with considerable donations.195 Many of them hoped to gain in the SA a ‘protecting guard against the working-class parties’ that would free them from granting concessions to the left and would generally allow them to act independently of volatile parliamentary majorities.196 The Brownshirts in turn did not fail to demonstrate their determination and might. Just one week after the rally in Bad Harzburg, a large meeting of SA units from central Germany (mitteldeutsches SA-Treffen) took place in nearby Braunschweig, a residential city of slightly less than 150,000 inhabitants. On this occasion about 60,000 SA men literally occupied the town and – apart from holding a six-hour-long parade in the presence of Hitler – also engaged in violent ‘punitive raids’ in its working-class districts.197 For Brandi, the position of the NSDAP also fitted with his own elitist concept of the German economy. The National Socialist movement would not only ‘foster the feelings of German honour, but also the national militaristic traditions [Waffenehre],’ he explained to his son. ‘It is poised to destroy real Marxism root and branch and bent on replacing it with a system of the highest welfare for the whole of the people, based on private business, discipline and elite leadership selection [Führertum durch Auslese].’198
Short-sighted as it was, this assessment of the political and economic situation in the spring of 1932 makes it clear that the temporary alliance between the NSDAP and considerable parts of German big business was more than tactical in nature.199 The Nazis were surprisingly successful at presenting themselves as a political alternative with an ambitious programme of moral and social renewal. Even in a private letter, which is unlikely to have been coloured by tactical considerations, Brandi did not have a critical word to say about the Nazis’ antisemitic propaganda. He seems to have accepted the Nazi violence in the streets as a legitimate, or at least welcome, means of weakening and ideally destroying the German Socialist and Communist parties. Obviously, this letter reflects Brandi’s personal views, but in the context of this study, they take on greater significance. With the constant threat of a political crisis, Brandi, Adam, and many other educated Germans gave up their initial reservations about the NSDAP and its SA. The stormtroopers’ ugly propaganda slogans and aggressive violence did not disappear from the streets, but the Germans got used to it. It is telling that, by 1932, Hamburg schoolchildren had invented a new game: re-enacting clashes between Communists and Nazi stormtroopers using sticks and stones. At least in one case a police intervention was the only way to stop a game that was at risk of running out of control.200 Many German elites regarded the high level of street violence as a deplorable feature of an antagonistic political climate, or even as an indicator of ‘political degeneracy’,201 but at the same time they also saw it as nothing more than hot air, a temporary symptom of the economic crisis that would have no lasting impact or simply a crude children’s game for demoralized grown-ups.
By contrast, NSDAP leaders described the stormtrooper activism of these years in genuine military terms. According to the SA intellectual Ernst Julek von Engelbrechten, the Herbstoffensive, or ‘fall campaign’, of 1929 pre-dated the Durchbruchsschlacht (‘breakthrough battle’) of 1930 that was in turn followed by the Vormarsch, or ‘advance’, in 1931.202 Despite such militaristic rhetoric, several scholars have warned against the conflation of political discourse and historical fact. Germany in 1932, they claim, was far from descending into chaos and civil war. The historian Friedrich Lenger, referring to earlier studies by Richard Bessel, Dirk Schumann, and Bernhard Fulda, recently summarized this view in his masterful book on European metropolises in modern times by relying on three arguments. First, he claims that even in 1932 the German states’ monopoly on violence was not seriously threatened. Second, he argues that the level of political violence was lower in the early 1930s than it was in the immediate post-war years – tacitly implying that, as the Republic did not succumb back then, there was no need for its ultimate failure in 1933 either. Third, he maintains that in comparison with other European cities, the level of violence in the German capital was not excessively high.203
However, on closer examination, none of these three points supports Lenger’s principal argument. On the first point, regional studies on the Weimar period, the police, the military, and the liberal German-Jewish milieu have convincingly demonstrated that the years 1930–2 were a period of erosion from within that rendered the state’s claims of a successful defence of its monopoly on violence to be shallow.204 The more one moves away from Prussia and its capital in the early 1930s, the more it becomes obvious that any move by the government to toughen its stance toward political extremists, particularly by crushing their demonstrations using poli
ce and military forces, was increasingly in danger of producing the opposite effect. This was one of the main reasons for the absence of any systematic democratic resistance, either to the unlawful Preußenschlag of 1932 or to the establishment of the Third Reich in the following year.205 With regard to Lenger’s second argument, the extent to which the political and economic context of the years 1930–2 fundamentally differed from that of 1919–23 needs to be emphasized. There is no absolute threshold of violence that determines the stability of a political system – rather, a given level of political and criminal violence is just one factor that needs to be analysed in conjunction with several others. At a time when the national government, relying on emergency decrees, seemed unable to cope with massive unemployment and unprecedented pauperization, riots in the streets and political attacks gained much stronger significance than they had had in the early 1920s – particularly as they came to be exploited by a massive, well-organized Nazi grassroots movement.206 Finally, with regard to Lenger’s third argument, a closer analysis that compares Berlin with other European capitals is certainly instructive but does not suffice to base claims on a national level. Goebbels’s ‘Fight for Berlin’ was symbolically of high importance for the National Socialists, but in real terms it was just one event in their nationwide takeover of power. The Republic did not collapse because of the capital, even if it was carried to its grave there.
Weimar Germany’s leftists and liberals, highly aware of the risks present in the immediate post-war period just a few years back, understood the dangers of even such highly symbolic threats as those made by the SA in the early 1930s much better than did some later historians. The latter – in hindsight – have wondered at the alleged ‘massive media panic, a press-induced over-reaction with politically disastrous effects’ that occurred, blaming in particular the ‘excessive partisan press coverage’ that created a false impression of ‘uncontrollable violence’, and thus implicitly suggesting that a more restrained handling of the political violence in these years could have prevented events from escalating.207 To a certain extent such views carry on the tradition of blaming the social and political elites of the Weimar Republic for its ultimate failure, a line of argument prevalent in the first decades of post-war historiography.208 However, it seems worth remembering that the increasingly strident warnings of contemporaries ranging from the revolutionary right to the Communist left were not proven wrong by the course of history, and many of those who perceived the political situation between 1930 and 1933 as a latent or incipient civil war were soon incarcerated, tortured, forced into exile, or murdered.
The stormtroopers’ self-declared fight against the much-hated Republic came to an end on 30 January 1933, when Hindenburg appointed Hitler the new Reich chancellor. The Nazi Party had survived its serious internal crisis of the preceding months, but it had lost some of its most sworn supporters along the way. The party leaders knew that they were now under serious pressure to deliver, and they did not wait a single day to use the capital’s splendid Unter den Linden boulevard – the formal parade ground for the Kaiser and his royal household – to stage a demonstration of their political ambitions. In the evening hours of 30 January up to 15,000 Brownshirts marched through the Brandenburg Gate, saluting Hitler, who greeted them from a window of the nearby Reich Chancellery.209 As this parade had to be organized on the spur of the moment on a grey and cold winter day, the surviving images of this event were less spectacular than expected – which prompted the Nazis to repeat the parade several weeks later. Genuine supporters undoubtedly cheered the appearance of the new chancellor, but an attentive Berliner also witnessed stormtroopers forcing curious city dwellers with a thump on the back to give the Hitler salute.210 Listeners on the radio, however, had no chance to perceive the ambivalent character of the original Nazi victory parade, as a surviving spoken text from Reich Radio Station Cologne’s broadcast of the evening of 30 January 1933 makes plain. The voice of the radio reporter, who sounded like an activist of the first hour himself, intoned: ‘A procession of 100,000 torches was brandished from Wilhelmstraße . . . They have marched through the Brandenburg Gate, the brown columns of the SA – victors in a long, loss-making battle. Their banners blaze in blood red, with the swastika on white background – symbol of the rising sun! A marvellous, a glorious sight!’211 The official tone for the upcoming months was set.
3
THE BROWN CULT OF YOUTH AND VIOLENCE IN THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC
Fascism wants man to be active and to engage in action with all his energies.
— Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile, The Doctrine of Fascism (1932)1
The extent to which Hitler has young people on his side should not be underrated. We should not underestimate our opponent but realize what is a psychological force for so many and inspires them.’ The German-Jewish philosopher Ernst Bloch, as much a fierce critic of National Socialism as a careful observer of his times, published this warning in the highbrow weekly Das Tage-Buch as early as April 1924.2 Having witnessed the political and social turmoil in Munich after the First World War at close quarters, Bloch was familiar with the early Nazi Party, its propaganda, and its increasing appeal. This particular critical comment was an immediate reaction to the verdict in the so-called Hitler trial delivered on 1 April 1924, in which Bloch warned his readers not to regard the story of the local tribune of the Bavarian radical nationalists as over. Irony and disgust alone would not suffice to combat National Socialism, Bloch argued, as ‘separate from the hideous gawpers and accomplices, new youth glows at the core, a very vigorous generation. Seventeen-year-olds are burning to respond to Hitler. Beery students of old, dreary, revelling in the happiness of the crease in their trousers, are no longer recognizable, their hearts are pounding.’3
Bloch’s observations get to the heart of one of the fundamental problems with which every history of the early Nazi movement has to deal: the fundamental emotional attraction of a form of politics that used violence as a central element of community formation, establishing clear-cut boundaries between insiders and outsiders of the Nazis’ ‘people’s community’. As has already been demonstrated, the use of violence – physically as well as symbolically – was from the early 1920s onward a core element of aggressive Nazi politics, despite all the practical limitations on its deployment. In this chapter I will argue that a broad perspective which integrates some of the most recent findings of a theoretically informed history of violence can contribute to a fuller picture of this period of history. My perspective does not focus exclusively on the Nazi movement but takes into account the effects of what I call the SA ‘cult of youth and violence’ on the political culture of the interwar years.
The wartime experience – individually lived through, remembered by diverse war veterans’ associations, and culturally elevated in literature and film – shaped the outlook of two generations of European males.4 Besides those who had actually fought in the First World War, those who were slightly younger were also deeply affected by the fate and the stories of their older brothers and fathers. Germany was no different in this respect from Italy, where an increasing number of adolescents embraced Fascist squadrism in emulation of their elders. Their pressing ‘desire for action’ was ‘accompanied by a profound crisis of family bonds’ and of adult authority, particularly male authority.5 The increasing significance of the stormtroopers was as much a consequence as it was a prerequisite of the growing militarization of German politics. This process had several dimensions, many of which went beyond the reach of the Nazi Party and even transcended national boundaries.6 In other words, this chapter aims to elucidate the increasing appeal of the SA, a development that differed markedly from the destiny of the hundreds of competing paramilitary nationalist organizations that usually existed only for a few years and could claim only limited political influence. In addition to several well-established factors that contributed to the increasing popularity of National Socialism in Germany, I will argue that it was precisely the cult of
youth and violence – not invented but successfully institutionalized by the stormtroopers – which contributed to the group’s success starting in the late 1920s.7 Between 1928 and 1932 the SA developed into an organization that shared the characteristics of a social movement. Next to its aesthetic attraction, these characteristics were a main element of its public appeal.8 Both elements contributed to the ‘youthful image’ of the Nazi movement as a whole. During these years the SA also grew into a possible partner for the Reichswehr in their joint efforts to overcome the limitations of the Versailles Treaty. The violent activism of the Brownshirts even provided role models for young Christians attempting to fight back against the ‘evils’ of the present times – identified with such catchwords as ‘individualism’, ‘consumerism’, ‘pacifism’, and ‘internationalism’.
Every biographer is supposed to be aware of the dangers of involuntarily taking his or her subject as the point of reference from which all other social phenomena are to be interpreted. The same risk applies to histories of collective bodies and is particularly apt in a case such as the stormtroopers, whose worldviews were extremely self-referential. Consequently, this chapter gives room to the Nazis’ internal perspectives but carefully aims to distinguish between ideas and emotions on the one hand and the party’s often relatively limited impact on the ‘factual’ political developments of the day on the other hand. Furthermore, wherever possible I integrate comparative perspectives, contrasting the Nazi militants with other paramilitary party organizations. Although it is well established that this ‘new activist style of politics’ so characteristic of but not limited to Fascist movements was a frequent phenomenon in interwar Europe,9 comparatively little research has investigated what made the German SA unique from a transnational perspective. The multifaceted approach chosen here will help to identify the reasons for the ‘success’ of the stormtroopers – a success that not only promoted a new political style which made the personal effort, the ‘deed’, a central element of political legitimacy, but also paved the way for the establishment of the Third Reich in 1933.
Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts Page 15
