In the first weeks of the Nazi takeover of power, most of the captives were brought to the illegal SA prisons that mushroomed in the larger German cities. Cellars of SA taverns, sports facilities, youth hostels, barracks, and deserted factory buildings were all used as provisional prisons. These locations often only existed for days or weeks before they were replaced by a string of larger concentration camps that were run either by the German states or by the SS and the SA.35 In Berlin alone the latest historical research has identified the existence of as many as 240 places where National Socialist torture was carried out and eleven early concentration camps. In 1933 these centres were located all over the city and were operated relatively autonomously by SA units from the neighbourhoods.36 The centralized location of many of these provisional prisons and torture chambers made this early SA terror a highly visible and at times also audible element of Nazi rule. Terrified Berliners who lived near such prisons could hear the screaming of inmates as they were heavily beaten by their guards. Doctors in the city’s hospitals were confronted with several cases of tortured and barely recognizable men, many of whom were in a state beyond help or already dead.37
The stormtrooper violence of this period was above all physical in nature, but it was often coupled with a strong symbolic dimension. Its ultimate goal was the humiliation and breakdown of its opponents, which at times resulted in the victims committing suicide during detainment or after release.38 In many cases those interned were subjected to a myriad of degrading practices. Severe beatings that often lasted for hours and threats of execution were common. In Berlin a member of the Reichsbanner was forced to polish the boots of his SA guards, to drink their urine, and even to lick one stormtrooper’s behind.39 In Erfurt inmates of an early camp were forced to shout antisemitic slogans while being beaten with iron rods, shoulder straps, and rubber truncheons.40 Prisoners of the early concentration camps were repeatedly required to carry out monotonous and degrading manual labour, like brushing off the ground with a toothbrush or cleaning the camp toilets with their bare hands. The so-called ‘sports exercises’ that the prisoners, enfeebled and often bruised, were forced to perform before the eyes of sneering SA guards, served a similar purpose (Plate 13).41 In an SA prison in Cologne-Porz the personnel gave inmates ‘swimming lessons’ by draping a rope around a prisoner’s neck and then lifting him up to a height at which the victim could barely stand on his toes and desperately started to flail about.42 Drastic methods of physical and psychological torture were combined in the case of Hermann Liebmann, the former SPD Minister of the Interior in Saxony. As a prisoner of the SA in the Hohnstein concentration camp, Liebmann was forced to repeat the political speeches he had delivered in the Saxon Landtag in the previous years before he was stabbed with knives. Liebmann lost one eye and died of the after-effects of his wounds in 1935.43
These practices of SA violence in 1933 clearly had a gendered dimension. This violence, carried out by men and directed overwhelmingly against other men, not only strengthened the hyper-masculine identity of those who were finally able to exert power over others after years of economic hardship and social marginalization, but also feminized or ‘demasculinized’ the male victims of SA violence.44 In Leipzig the SA arrested male Communists in plain daylight and forced them into ‘cleaning squads’ that were ordered to wash off anti-Nazi slogans.45 Furthermore, the sexualized dimension of many of the SA’s torture practices speaks volumes. This element of terror should not only be attributed to the personal shortfalls of the alleged SA sadists, but needs to be analysed in light of its political and social function. The Nazi terror of 1933 aimed at destroying the political organizations of the left, but it also attempted to ensure that its political activists would not dare return to politics. The forms of abuse therefore directly targeted their victims’ honour as men.46 Even after political prisoners were released from ‘protective custody’, they were effectively prevented from seeking justice, not only by the lack of state institutions willing to get involved, but also by the psychological barrier they would have to overcome to lodge a complaint. These barriers were high and therefore very effective, as can be seen from the fact that reports from former inmates circulated widely among German exiles but had only limited effect within Germany. To be morally in the right did not help many German men who saw their own powerlessness to defend themselves against abuse as a dishonouring stain on their masculinity.47
Notorious places of SA terror in 1933 were the barracks of the SA Field Police in Berlin-Schöneberg and the Oranienburg concentration camp, located a short drive north of the capital in a former brewery building. Starting on 21 March 1933 the local SA-Standarte 208 here interned more than 2,000 prisoners over the next twelve months. Among the most prominent inmates of Oranienburg were Ernst Heilmann, the leader of the SPD parliamentary group in the Prussian Landtag; the well-known writers Kurt Hiller and Erich Mühsam; the Reichstag deputies Friedrich Ebert Jr. and Gerhart Seger; and the popular radio journalist Alfred Braun. Alongside many such high-profile politicians and intellectuals of the left, forty teenagers from a Jewish welfare home and training school in Wolzig in Brandenburg were also imprisoned in the camp. The youngest of them was only thirteen years of age. This mix of inmates, together with the particularly bad treatment of the Jewish detainees, underlines the firmly established conclusion of historical research that the Nazi terror from the beginning to the end was not only politically but also racially motivated.48
Seger managed to escape from Oranienburg in December 1933. He went into exile in Czechoslovakia and in 1934 published the first detailed report of the situation in the German concentration camps.49 Of particular interest to this study is a chapter in his report entitled ‘The SA in the Camp’. Here Seger provided the reader with a short analysis of the stormtroopers’ group mentality, which was, given his background and personal experience, surprisingly balanced. The large majority of the 80 to 100 men serving as SA guards in the camp at any given time, Seger noted, had only enjoyed a very moderate education, particularly compared to the overall level of education of the Socialist Youth movement. Contrary to what his readers in 1934 might have assumed, Seger emphasized that ‘it would be completely misleading to believe that the average SA man had even the slightest political understanding’. The guards would discuss the upcoming Reichstag elections on 12 November as if they were a Max Schmeling boxing fight or an important football match – a level of political ignorance that Seger found hard to believe: ‘Before they came in contact with us political prisoners, how many SA men had not the faintest idea that there existed other worlds than rifle 98, Army revolver 08, truncheon, cards, beer and sex!’50
Yet, despite their ignorance, not all SA guards actively engaged in sadist practices, Seger explained. Some of them not only stood aside during such instances but even showed generosity toward the prisoners when possible. Both the inmates and the SA guards were put under constant pressure, Seger realized.51 Similarly, the young Jew Peter Blachstein, a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party (SAP) who between early 1934 and August of that year was a prisoner in the Saxon SA concentration camp in Hohnstein Castle, remembered his captors exhibiting both extreme brutality and temporary restraint, with the latter occurring in particular when the SA guards realized that they could exploit the professional skills of the prisoners for their own ends (Plate 14).52 Yet both eyewitnesses set the proportions of this behaviour straight: ‘Among the stormtroopers, brutality is much more widespread than brotherliness.’53 At least sixteen of the 3,000 Oranienburg prisoners died; in Hohnstein the ratio of deaths was formally forty out of 5,600 prisoners, with an estimated number of unregistered deaths as high as 140.54 Compared with the number of inmates and the length of time these camps had existed, some of the short-lived early concentration camps had an even higher death rate than Oranienburg and Hohnstein. In the SA-run concentration camp in Börnicke near Berlin, which existed only between May and July 1933, ten prisoners are reported to have been murdered. Inmates of this camp were f
orced to carry pieces of railway track for days without sufficient rest. They had to sleep on the bare floor and were given only the most sparing food rations of poor quality.55
The terror campaign of the new regime served not only as a means of destroying opposing organizations, networks, and individuals, but also as a way of intimidating undecided bystanders. Extreme physical violence was just one method of achieving this. Naming and shaming fulfilled a similar purpose, as the following examples demonstrate. At the University of Heidelberg three students dressed in their SA uniforms interrupted a lecture being given by Georg Blessing, a professor of medicine, and led him away to the police. The stormtroopers claimed that Blessing, a member of the Catholic Centre Party, had embezzled money from the university clinic and approached female students in indecent ways.56 Similarly, in Rostock, a mob of SA students in May 1933 ‘escorted’ to the police station the former university rector Rudolf Helm, whom they accused of embezzlement of public funds and of having a Jewish wife. Helm remembered the circumstances of his detainment as more humiliating than the fact that he was taken into protective custody. The university not only did nothing to restore the honour of its former rector but abstained from any form of punishment of the students involved.57 Even more extreme were cases of ‘racial defilement’, such as one that occurred in Cuxhaven in July 1933. Here, members of the local Marine-SA forced a German-Jewish couple to run the gauntlet through the streets of the town. The male victim was forced to wear a defamatory banner saying ‘As a Jew-boy, I only take German girls up to my room!’, and the woman was forced to carry a sign bearing the slogan ‘I am the biggest swine in town and only go with Jews!’ A trumpeter who accompanied the procession through the streets drew additional attention to the spectacle. The regional newspaper Hamburger Tageblatt interpreted this event as a ‘return to a healthy völkisch sensitivity’.58 SA units repeatedly performed such acts over the following years.59
Yet not all violence in 1933 was carried out in concentration camps or in broad daylight in the German streets. Many incidents of violence took place in private or in the semi-private sphere and never made it into the public record, as the following example illustrates. Julie Braun-Vogelstein, a fifty-year-old highly educated German-Jewish woman and a widow, lived in a villa located in Klein-Machnow near Berlin. During the 1920s she had made a modest name for herself as editor of the writings of the Social Democratic activists Lily and Heinrich Braun as well as their son Otto. A number of servants took care of Braun-Vogelstein’s house and garden while she delved into her studies on the ancient Greeks and their arts. One long-time servant joined the stormtroopers in 1933 and started to blackmail his employer. After she refused to pay him protection money, hordes of men from the local SA repeatedly invaded the garden after twilight, destroying the flowers and intimidating her. Braun-Vogelstein left Germany in 1935 and ultimately emigrated to the United States two years later.60 It is ironic that in molesting Braun-Vogelstein, the Nazis were attacking a proponent of a heroic form of German nationalism who had invested considerable time and energy in glorifying Otto Braun, killed in 1918 on the western front at the age of twenty, as a national leader who was untimely eliminated.61 This example, however, illustrates the social dynamic of the Nazi takeover of power. Even if the stormtroopers’ ambitious desire to establish themselves as members of a new elite did not materialize, the political transformation in which they participated encouraged them to pull down traditional social hierarchies and to exploit the new political situation, often for personal benefit. In this particular example, class and race were both factors that the aggressors saw as justification for their actions.
In cases like these the German judiciary was not much help. Courageous German-Jewish lawyers, like Hans Litten in Berlin and Walter Kronheim, legal counsellor for the Reichsbanner and president of the community of synagogues in Wanne-Eickel in the Ruhr district, as well as, to a lesser extent, prosecutors and judges, soon became the target of National Socialist intimidation, physical attack, and incarceration.62 In early March 1933, just days after the Reichstag Fire Decree went into effect, setting off the Nazis’ hunt of their political opponents, SA troops began to invade German courthouses and ‘cleanse’ them of Jewish lawyers and judges. One of their victims was the German-Jewish lawyer Ludwig Foerder, who since the early 1920s had been a committed activist with the liberal Central Union of German Citizens of Jewish Faith (CV-Verein) and an outspoken critic of antisemitism within the German judiciary.63 Foerder later remembered that the SA’s attack in Breslau started with a ‘roaring, as if from wild animals’. A moment later two dozen SA men appeared, yelling ‘Jews, get out!’ When Foerder did not comply, one of them hit him on the head with a metal weapon.64 Similar incidents occurred in many other German cities. Although at times non-Jewish judges and lawyers protested against the SA’s attacks on their Jewish colleagues, by and large the protests were tame and in any case had no influence. In addition to the strong symbolic dimension of the Nazis’ nationwide boycott of Jewish shops and tradesmen in late March and early April 1933, the exclusion of Jewish jurists contributed to what the Nazis called the ‘Germanization’, or racial purification, of the German legal system.65
The pressure exerted by the SA on the German judiciary not only disturbed the course of justice but directly benefited the stormtroopers, who for political, financial, or personal reasons committed thousands of crimes during the years 1933 and 1934. To make things worse, the top positions in the German police forces were reorganized and filled with either National Socialists or conservatives willing to execute the will of the new strongmen. In Hamburg an ‘Old Fighter’, the SA-Standartenführer Alfred Richter, was appointed to the position of Senator of the Interior and chief of the Hamburg police forces in early March 1933.66 Over the following weeks Richter systematically ‘cleansed’ the local administration of Social Democrats, Communists, Jews, unionists, and all those whom the Nazis deemed undesirable for ‘racial reasons’.67 A similar situation could be found in many other German cities and states. In Munich, Heinrich Himmler became commissarial police president on 9 March 1933, and in the Thuringian capital of Erfurt, SA-Gruppenführer Werner von Fichte was installed as deputy police president a few weeks later.68 In Prussia in February 1933, Göring, as Minister of the Interior, discharged fourteen police chiefs in major towns and replaced them predominantly with conservative candidates of the nationalist right.69
Such tactical moves barely disguised the National Socialists’ real aims in the spring of 1933, and in some areas they made no attempt to cloak their ambitions. In Schleswig-Holstein, Bavaria, Hesse, and Württemberg, for example, the NSDAP promoted long-standing and loyal party members, particularly SA leaders who had already proven their ‘readiness for action’, to key positions in the local and regional administrations. Such Nazi Führungspersönlichkeiten (leadership personalities) often lacked the formal qualifications that up until then had been considered necessary for these positions. In Neumünster, a midsized town located halfway between Hamburg and Kiel, a former sales agent and unemployed chemist named Friedrich-Georg Brinkmann, who served as SA-Standartenführer for the area, took control of the police forces on 1 April 1933.70 His counterpart in Wuppertal was SA-Oberführer Willi Veller, a notorious ruffian with no fewer than fourteen previous convictions.71 And in Potsdam the bankrupt aristocrat Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorff, who had played a leading role in the infamous 1931 ‘Kurfürstendamm riots’, was appointed police president in March 1933, largely as a result of Göring’s influence. On 18 July 1935 Helldorff was chosen for the same position in nearby Berlin, where he became one of the driving forces in the antisemitic assaults of 1938.72
These weeks saw not only the redistribution of leadership positions in the police forces, but also the establishment of a new category of officers. In Prussia, Göring recruited and armed 50,000 men from the SA, SS, and Stahlhelm as ‘auxiliary police’.73 In doing so, he followed in the footsteps of the National Socialist minister president Carl Röver, who
in the Freistaat Oldenburg in the summer of 1932 had enlisted between 230 and 250 storm-troopers to cope with the rise of political violence in a way that was favourable to the Nazis.74 What had in 1932 been a disturbing sign of regional importance became official Nazi policy one year later, with far-reaching consequences. Now, the German police forces comprised both long-term officers and local gangsters, who patrolled side by side. Göring made it clear that the Prussian state would treat the excessive use of force by these police officers with the utmost benevolence. In order to quash the political left, all means were ostensibly justified – ‘if necessary by resort to the unconditional use of weapons’.75
Auxiliary police from the ranks of the SA, SS, and Stahlhelm were also recruited in many other states and soon made up between 40 and 100 per cent of the regular police forces, effectively doubling their power. In the larger cities of the Ruhr, such as Dortmund and Bochum, this meant that the local auxiliary police forces, which were armed with regular police weapons, quickly comprised more than 1,000 men.76 Wherever possible, the comradeships established within the SA units were kept intact. Whole SA Stürme were thus transformed into police units.77 In the spring and early summer of 1933 these new police forces were involved in the detention of those the Nazis considered political enemies; in May 1933 in particular, regular SA and auxiliary police helped smash the independent unions by occupying their buildings, confiscating their assets, shutting down their presses, and seizing their functionaries.78 Local business leaders in return sponsored the auxiliary police.79 The State of Bavaria, according to a calculation by its Ministry of Finance, in 1933 spent at least 1 million reichsmark on the auxiliary police and ‘protective custody’ costs, which were largely related to the concentration camp in Dachau.80 By the late summer of 1933, however, the auxiliary police were becoming less necessary. The organizations and parties of the left had been dissolved, and their possible reconstruction prohibited by law. Potential new opponents had been effectively intimidated. Thus, beginning in August 1933, the German states began to disband their auxiliary police forces, a process that lasted for months.81 The last German state to abolish its SA auxiliary police was Bavaria, which passed the measure on 21 December 1933. However, throughout Germany, newly recruited police forces could be seen dressed in SA uniforms as late as the autumn of 1934.82
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