Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts
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The extensive system of responsibilities and mutual trust that was established ultimately proved beneficial to both the superior and his men. On the one hand, those ordinary and often very young men who successfully commanded a group of like-minded followers could take pride in their own leadership qualities, while the rank-and-file stormtroopers at the same time benefited from the availability of a role model and a personal ‘go-to guy’. The development of close personal bonds between a charismatic leader and his men was also a way to mobilize mutual solidarity in the face of conflict,86 increasing the fighting strength of these SA groups and at the same time contributing to their secretiveness, both ideologically and with regard to their day-to-day activities. Many personal documents written by stormtroopers during the Weimar years testify that the SA indeed provided emotional shelter against an outer world perceived by many as cold and hostile. Particularly for young men out of work, and those without a wife, children, or close relatives, the SA Sturm could become an Ersatzfamilie, or surrogate family. ‘For the first time in my life I felt fully accepted as a human being,’ a former stormtrooper later remembered.87 When an SA man had to temporarily leave his ‘family’ due to his removal to a hospital or prison, his comrades were called to help him in every conceivable way: by paying him regular visits, by sending him ‘entertaining and edifying’ reading material, and by supporting his relatives emotionally and financially. Toward such ends, the Berlin NSDAP institutionalized an SA-Gefangenen- und Verwundetenhilfe, literally the ‘SA Help for the Prisoners and the Wounded’, in May 1930.88 Initially, this aid organization was not financed by headquarters in Munich, but depended exclusively on donations from party members. Six months later the Berlin police noted that this institution was still relatively ineffective. Only a few stormtroopers remanded in custody had received small donations in kind. However, the police rightly predicted that the importance of this aid centre would soon grow.89
After Walther Stennes, the former SA-Gruppenführer Ost, was expelled from the party in April 1931, responsibility for wounded or imprisoned stormtroopers was transferred to the NS-Notwehr and the NSDAP’s Hilfskasse in Munich.90 Under their leadership, mandatory fees to the SA insurance schemes replaced the previous voluntary contributions; in 1931 these fees amounted to 30 pfennig monthly. Nevertheless, local initiatives remained of high importance in aiding individual SA members, as a proclamation from the NSDAP’s Leipzig chapter (Ortsgruppe) makes plain. This order urged party members to provide fellow Nazis in need with all available material and moral support, including the procuration of legal and medical aid and the notification of close relatives and employers in cases of imprisonment. Furthermore, stormtroopers released from jail were to be given new employment and temporary accommodation in recreation homes run by the party or the SA.91 Stormtroopers were also taken into well-to-do private families until their health was restored.92 It was the ‘honorary duty of every SA leader’ to make sure that all incarcerated men were taken care of by their respective units in such a way that ‘they d[id] not even for one minute experience the feeling of being let down’, SA Chief of Staff Röhm solemnly declared, knowing well that immediate personal help was often more effective than payments from the Munich-based party insurance, with regard both to the needs of the individual stormtrooper and to the resulting propaganda effects.93
In sum, although the SA was a top-down paramilitary organization that relied on clear-cut hierarchies and the absolute power of its supreme leader, the secret of the Brownshirts’ success was precisely that they encouraged the emergence of charismatic bonds on the local and regional levels, building on already existing networks of neighbours, work colleagues, and school friendships.94 The SA paid its ordinary members not with financial compensation – in fact, its men had to spend a considerable amount of money on SA uniforms and other equipment – nor with jobs or social benefits, at least not in the short term. Instead, it rewarded its members with excitement, ‘empowerment’, and the feeling of being socially relevant and at the same time capable of forceful action within a political and social environment that most SA men perceived as hostile. Not only SA leaders experienced such feelings. Even the most modest individuals within the SA’s ‘community of action’ (Gemeinschaft der Tat) – a telling term repeatedly used in SA publications during the 1920s – benefited from this experienced confraternity of German men who not only regarded themselves as a powerful group of loyal national ‘fighters’ but even imagined themselves as the vanguard of the people’s community that the Nazi ideology proclaimed as its ultimate goal.
Critics of National Socialism acknowledged the force of this feeling of self-empowerment and correctly figured that the political consequences would be disastrous. Among them was the sociologist Theodor Geiger, who in 1932 prophetically warned that emotional excitement was no substitute for reason, noting: ‘It is a horrible self-delusion of the NSDAP’s best to believe that a new idealism is about to overcome the materialist spirit [Materialismen] of a corrupt era. On the contrary: a terrible and primitive naturalism based on the romanticism of the blood [Blutsromantik] has assaulted us and fundamentally threatens intellectual life as such.’95
Stormtrooper Merchandising
Being an SA man was more than a testament of political belief: it was also a lifestyle. As early as 1927 the leadership of the organization worked to generate additional income by building a veritable merchandising industry that soon not only provided party activists with the ‘original’ brown shirts, trousers, and caps, but also furnished them with propaganda books, all kinds of outdoor equipment, and cigarettes. To channel the money into the right coffers, the National Socialists founded a so-called Reichszeugmeisterei, a kind of centralized provider of Nazi goods that had been entirely transferred into the hands of the SA by late 1928.96 From now on, stormtroopers were officially required to buy not only the official SA shirt but also the complementary fine cord breeches, a brown windbreaker jacket, puttees, the SA body belt as well as the corresponding waist belt, and the party badge, all exclusively from one of the regional departments of this provider. From 1929 onward a proper SA membership badge that could be used without the uniform was produced. It showed the two letters ‘S’ and ‘A’ in the form of a lightning bolt, alluding to the energy the movement claimed to have, and allowed its wearer to demonstrate his political leanings on all occasions. Previously used brown shirts, either handcrafted or bought in local stores, were from now on only to be used for hiking or at work, the SA Leadership Office decreed.97
Such orders, however, were easier given than put into practice. Because many stormtroopers were young and short of money, particularly after 1930, when the effects of the Great Depression set in and were later aggravated by Reich Chancellor Brüning’s austerity policy, uniformity of the entire SA was almost impossible to achieve. In Danzig the local Hitler Youth deputy leader in the summer of 1929 even attempted to have his own brown shirts produced by a local factory – at least partly to avoid the heavy taxation, he claimed.98 At the same time, precisely because the official SA shirt was expensive and at times beyond the means of members, it became an object of desire – similar to the modern-day ‘official’ football shirts sold so successfully around the globe. Once acquired, stormtroopers often wore ‘their’ brown shirt with particular pride – all the more as the repeated interdiction of the SA, which prohibited the public display of the party uniform, added to its symbolic value.99 In line with the capitalist logic of the day, a mass article like the Nazi brown shirt became not only one of the NSDAP’s cash cows in the years prior to 1933 but also a symbol of the individual man’s affiliation and commitment, a commitment that no longer needed to be proven by individual action but could be bought.
The rapid growth of the NSDAP and the SA beginning in the late 1920s, which went hand in hand with an increasing demand for uniforms, saved one regional clothing manufacturer that has since turned into an international fashion company: Hugo Boss. In 1924 the thirty-nine-year-old Hugo F. Boss from
the small Swabian town of Metzingen had converted the cloth shop he had inherited from his parents several years before into a little clothing factory. The small business that had fewer than thirty employees throughout the 1920s produced, among other things, uniforms for different organizations. After the war Boss claimed he had not initially known that these uniforms, among them the SA brown shirts, were intended as ‘party uniforms’. The company came under serious economic pressure with the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929. Two years later, in 1931, it filed for bankruptcy but continued to operate. In this moment of existential crisis Boss joined the NSDAP100 and – at about the same time – started to receive substantial orders from the party. From that point on, and continuously until 1945, Boss produced several types of uniform for the SA, SS, and Hitler Youth, and later, during the Second World War, also for the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS.101 Other non-Jewish-owned German textile companies also profited from the rebounding of the economy in the mid-1930s, the increasing militarization of society that led to higher demand for uniforms, and the ‘Aryanization’ and shuttering of Jewish textile factories.102 However, although ‘Nazi Chic’ garments103 were produced in Metzingen, they were not designed there. Hugo Boss at that time only produced clothing and uniforms according to given patterns.
The example of Hugo Boss is typical insofar as it illustrates a more general tendency: after their takeover of power, the National Socialists gave preference to those companies that had supported them before 1933. In return, such companies exploited their close relationship with the party in their advertisements. Boss’s company, for example, proudly informed its customers that the company had worked for the National Socialists since 1924.104 Another example of this tendency was the leather company Breuninger in Schorndorf. Similar to Boss, Breuninger benefited from several big orders by the NSDAP and the Reichswehr in 1933. However, as the business historian Petra Bräutigam has demonstrated, it was not the quality of Breuninger’s products that was responsible for these orders in the first place, but the close cooperation between the company and the National Socialists in the preceding years. When the workers of all Württemberg leather factories went on strike in November 1931, the Breuninger company called on the SA for help and, after twenty-eight National Socialists successfully acted as strike breakers, employed these men instead of the strikers.105
Such examples indicate that the anti-capitalist attitude widespread within certain SA units should not be taken as a general characteristic of the stormtroopers. Whether the rank-and-file SA man was encouraged to engage in economic and often antisemitic boycott actions or whether he was ordered to violently break strike actions for the benefit of local businessmen, who in return for such ‘favours’ financially supported the Nazi Party and its organizations, depended very much on the regional and local circumstances, as well as the local networks of National Socialism.
Smoking Politics
The cigarette industry provides another example of how capitalist logic and political identity successfully interacted during these years. The smoking of cigarettes became a mass phenomenon during the First World War. No longer associated exclusively with oriental luxury and the well to do, smoking nevertheless retained its function of marking differences – in regional provenance, in social class, and, starting in the mid-1920s, in political orientation.106 In 1926 the cigarette pack, usually containing ten cigarettes, was successfully introduced in Germany. This innovation not only resulted in a boost in sales but also allowed for a new form of marketing, as the rectangular boxes proved to be ideal for graphic illustrations and thereby helped customers to identify specific cigarette brands.107 As cigarettes were increasingly produced by machines and no longer exclusively by largely female workers, and as a consequence came to look almost identical, cigarette producers in Germany began to market hundreds of different brands of cigarettes, usually employing particular images. Many successful brands relied heavily on their capacity to demonstrate social status and used oriental images traditionally associated with the import of tobacco. However, even the marketing of well-established brands like the Reemtsma cigarettes ‘Ova’ and ‘Ernte 23’ soon reacted to changes in the political, social, and economic situation.108 Between 1930 and 1932, as unemployment figures rose rapidly, advertisements for these two brands began using bold images of emergencies such as traffic accidents and shipwrecks. These images suggested that the smoker of these particular brands would react serenely and composedly in the face of such a situation – evoking the coolness desperately sought by millions of Germans confronted with personal economic ruin, often accompanied by family ruptures.109
The late 1920s were the ‘Kampfzeit of the cigarette market’ – a phrase that was not a direct allusion to Nazi terminology, but a contemporary wording used by marketers. Technological innovation and breakthroughs in modern marketing techniques in Weimar Germany forced the cigarette companies into fierce competition, leading to the creation of a diverse array of brands that allowed the individual smoker to express his ‘personality’ through the consumption of a mass product.110 It was precisely in this period, in 1929, that a certain Arthur Dressler approached the NSDAP and its SA with his plans for a new cigarette factory in Dresden, which since the late nineteenth century had been one of the German centres of the cigarette industry and the Eastern tobacco trade.111
It was a remarkable time for a start-up enterprise to enter this largely saturated industry, all the more as Dressler lacked the considerable means necessary for such an investment. But Dressler, an NSDAP member, had an interesting idea: he suggested that the party produce a house-brand SA cigarette. If the SA would be willing to pressure its men into consuming his new brand exclusively, he promised the militia a reward of about 15 to 20 pfennig for every 1,000 cigarettes sold.112 The SA leadership in Munich approved the plan.113 With the help of Jacques Bettenhausen, a successful Dresden businessman who lent the very considerable sum of 500,000 reichsmark to the project, the Cigarettenfabrik Dressler Kommanditgesellschaft, better known under the name of its major brand, ‘Sturm’, was established.114 No less a figure than Otto Wagener, who for several months in 1930 had acted as supreme SA leader, became a limited partner in the company in 1931.115 This connection not only points to the very close and cordial relations between the Sturm Company and the SA, but also reveals that – contrary to the constant rhetoric maintaining that the ‘poor’ SA was operating just above the absolute minimum level – at least some high-level SA leaders benefited financially from the rapid growth of the organization in the early 1930s (Plate 9).
There was indeed money to be made from the stormtroopers’ smoking habits. As early as 1930, Dressler was able to make monthly contributions to Röhm, the Dresden SA leaders Manfred von Killinger and Georg von Detten, and their Silesian counterpart, Edmund Heines.116 And the success story continued in the following years, as the findings of Thomas Grosche, a young historian from Dresden, reveal with striking clarity: according to the balance sheets for 1932, the Sturm Company generated a profit of more than 36 million reichsmark. Most of the money was reinvested for the acquisition of new buildings and factories, and a considerable sum (128,325 reichsmark) was spent for publicity in magazines and newspapers, by the company-owned loudspeaker van, and even for hiring aeroplanes trailing advertisements. However, the owners as well as the SA made a considerable profit from the venture in 1932 and an even greater one in 1933. In that year the company’s net profit peaked at 429,970 reichsmark. Of this, the SA enjoyed a handsome share. In 1932 the organization obtained 78,080 reichsmark from the Sturm Company, and the SA leadership was paid an additional 13,951 reichsmark. In the next year verified payments of about the same amount were made to the SA, with smaller sums for the SS and the NSKK (Nationalsozialistisches Kraftfahrkorps), the National Socialist Motor Corps. The fact that an additional reserve of 260,069 reichsmark was put aside to be paid later in the year to the SA and the SS clearly indicates that profits were much higher for 1933 than in the previous year.117