Despite these close entanglements between the regular police forces and the NSDAP’s paramilitary wing, relations between them remained tense. In fact, throughout 1933 the SA operated largely outside the control of and often in competition with the police. For many ‘Old Fighters’ in the SA, police officers who had served under the Weimar governments before ‘converting’ to National Socialism remained enemies.83 Furthermore, SA leaders like the Nuremberg-based special commissioner and SA-Untergruppenführer Hanns Günther von Obernitz regarded the regular police, despite the forces’ overall willingness to obey the party, primarily as a nuisance. He preferred to settle the Nazis’ scores with their enemies with the help of his stormtroopers, who cared little about legal norms and restrictions. In a letter to the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior from 20 July 1933 von Obernitz noted that he was ‘fully aware’ that he had exceeded his legal bounds when he ordered the Franconian SA and SS units to search Jewish properties for allegedly incriminating anti-Nazi propaganda, passports, exit visas, and money.84 On this occasion stormtroopers detained about 100 Jews and brought them to a local sports field, where they were later handed over to the regular police forces in Nuremberg. In reaction, Dr Benno Martin, the chief of the Nuremberg police and later a general in the Waffen-SS,85 complained of the SA’s high-handedness in a letter to the Bavarian prime minister. Long-term initiatives of the Franconian police concerning Jews, he argued, had been made impossible by the SA’s arbitrary operation. Martin added that some SA men had even threatened to arrest the regular police officers should they dare to interfere.86
This was not an isolated incident. Stormtrooopers repeatedly used violence against police officers, particularly those who were known to have been loyal to the Republic.87 In Goslar, for example, the local SA Sturm in June 1933 sent a threatening letter to a policeman, informing him that they could no longer guarantee his ‘life and well-being’ if he continued to report for duty. Several weeks later, stormtroopers in the same city burst into an official interrogation of the former chief of the constabulary (uniformierte Polizei), the Social Democrat Friedrich Ostheeren. Although Ostheeren had been suspended from active duty on 8 April 1933, infuriated Nazi activists pushed him down the stairs of the town hall, punched him in the face, and kicked him severely. He died several months later. On 31 August 1934 the public prosecutor nevertheless closed proceedings that had been opened against the SA men in question, arguing that the crime had been committed by the perpetrators’ ‘over-eagerness in the fight for the National Socialist idea’ and therefore fell under the amnesty of 7 August (Gesetz über die Gewährung von Straffreiheit).88 In these years the citizens of Goslar privately referred to the core group of local stromtroopers as the ‘pirate gang’ – expressing both fascination for and moral indignation at such violent conduct outside of the law.89
The barely restricted SA violence of 1933 was so extreme that even the new regime which benefited from it finally felt obliged to interfere. In order to control marauding and undisciplined stormtroopers while at the same time protecting them from formal prosecution by the regular police forces and the judiciary, the SA-Feldpolizei, or field police, was established in Prussia by decree of Röhm in August 1933.90 Two months later, on 7 October 1933, this special police unit, which was led by SA-Standartenführer Walter Fritsch, was given the name of Feldjäger-Korps.91 Only the most reliable and imposing men were recruited for this new unit, which by the nature of its task would unavoidably encounter trouble. The roughly 200 men serving in the Feldjäger-Korps operated under the direct command of the OSAF. In this way Röhm aimed at a further centralization of power that at the same time would reduce the ambitions of local and regional SA leaders.92 In Bavaria a similar SA police unit, called Feldjägerkorps in Bayern, and placed under the command of SA-Obergruppenführer Johann Baptist Fuchs, was established on 27 February 1934.93 However, after the initial waves of heavy persecution of political opponents lessened considerably by that summer, the SA field police lost much of their former importance. In Hamburg in March 1935, for example, the field police were charged with such unimportant tasks as arresting drunken stormtroopers who stumbled home after midnight, the official curfew time.94
Only a few weeks later, on 1 April 1935, the Prussian Minister of the Interior officially dissolved the SA field police. Suitable officers from the SA were now to be integrated into the regular Prussian uniformed police, an institution that more and more came under the influence of Himmler and his SS. Yet, as the new Chief of Staff Viktor Lutze ordered in May 1935, the rank-and-file stormtroopers were still expected to engage in regular SA patrolling duty. Tellingly, Lutze justified the necessity for such service not on the basis of political instability, the justification used in 1933 and 1934, but by deeming such patrols vital for the ‘preservation of the inner service of the SA units (Aufrechterhaltung des inneren Dienstes der SA-Einheiten)’.95 This demonstrates that the mechanisms of SA sociability established during the years of the Weimar Republic did not change fundamentally in the Third Reich, despite the seizure of power by the NSDAP. The SA needed enemies that it could violently oppose, even if those enemies were fictitious. After the summer of 1934, SA violence – a fundamental element of the groups’ public appeal and internal cohesion – lacked political meaning and purpose. It was to a good degree autotelic. Between 1935 and 1938, when the Nazi ambition to create a Greater German Reich allowed for a partial comeback of the SA, the stormtroopers’ antisemitic assaults provided them with one of the rare opportunities available to experience power and create a genuine feeling of belonging among themselves.
Reactions
The intensity of the SA terror intimidated and shocked many Germans, but it did not provoke massive resistance. In early 1933 the Social Democrats did not call for a general strike, a political weapon that had proved successful against the extreme nationalists in the 1920 Kapp Putsch but was now perceived as unlikely to succeed. Communist calls for mass resistance also remained largely unanswered. There were many reasons for this passivity. First, from the perspective of many Germans, the established parties of the Weimar Republic had been discredited by their failure to resolve the problem of soaring unemployment. Second, these parties and their paramilitary organizations had proved too weak to prevent the National Socialists from coming to power. The inability of the parties of the left to defend their followers against the SA’s violent raids even in their own working-class strongholds was a symbolic humiliation of the first order and contributed massively to their loss of prestige.96 How likely were they to develop a successful defence strategy now? Third, Communist resentment of Social Democrats, and vice versa, effectively prevented the working-class parties from fully mobilizing their still considerable power. As Joachim Häberlen has demonstrated for Leipzig, the penetration of politics into everyday life beginning in the 1920s did not have the effect of uniting the different working-class movements, but on the contrary deepened the divisions among them. In 1933 mutual distrust and hate were common among party activists and their supporters alike. Such feelings did not provide a basis for cooperation and joint action.97 Fourth, the political left regarded the willing cooperation of large parts of the conservative establishment with the Nazis as the springboard for their own political comeback in a not too distant future. Convinced that the Hitler government would not be able to deliver on its promises, would the left not sooner or later emerge victorious?98 Similar thoughts had also inspired von Papen and his neo-conservative followers in their efforts to bring the Nazis to power. Like many non-Nazi members of the German middle classes, these groups did not approve of the extreme violence of the National Socialists, but they sympathized with the goal to once and for all destroy the ‘Bolshevik danger’ in Germany. Von Papen and his advisors even assumed that once the ‘plebeian’ Nazis had burned themselves out, the old elites would be the ultimate winners, called upon to build an authoritarian regime that would be firmly in the hands of the traditional establishment.99
Others did not share s
uch political daydreams but attempted to moderate the Nazi violence from within. A telling example is the case of Albrecht Böhme, who in 1933 was the chief of the criminal investigation office (Kriminalamtschef ) in Chemnitz, a working-class city of 350,000 inhabitants in Saxony where political passions had risen sharply in parallel to the increase in social problems since the 1920s.100 Böhme was a politically conservative jurist who had made a considerable career for himself during the years of the Republic. He nevertheless sympathized with the National Socialists and particularly with their crime-prevention programme, a field of applied politics that also interested Böhme from a scientific point of view.101 In the first half of 1933, however, Böhme became increasingly appalled and disgusted by the SA terror that unfolded in his city. On 18 February stormtroopers stabbed a Communist functionary to death. The next day a Reichsbanner man was slain. On 31 March a Jewish businessman allegedly committed suicide when the Chemnitz SA threatened to detain him. Finally, less than two weeks later, the corpse of the well-known Jewish lawyer Arthur Weiner was found in a sandpit on the outskirts of town.102 According to Böhme’s post-war testimony, Weiner had been executed on the orders of SA-Oberführer Kurt Lasch. His son Eberhard was said to have been one of the murderers.103 The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror, published in London in September 1933, recorded no fewer than ten instances of murder by the Nazis in Chemnitz and its immediate surrounding areas for the period 3 March to 1 August 1933.104
Investigating these and other crimes, Böhme described the extent of the stormtroopers’ brutality and sadism in detail. In a report to the Saxon Ministry of the Interior submitted on 16 July 1933, he advocated a ‘resolute crackdown’ on what he called illegal ‘single actions’ (Einzelaktionen) of party organizations. The original excitement over the National Socialists’ coming to power had quickly given way to an ‘extremely tense situation’ in Chemnitz, Böhme reported. The main culprits of this terror he identified as the local SA-Sturm 2/104, under the leadership of the electrician Max Schuldt, whom he accused of having established a ‘true terror regime’ in the town. In some cases the victims of the SA had been ‘tied up, undressed and beaten up until they passed out’. SA torturers had pricked their prisoners with red-hot iron sticks and forced some of them to spend a night rolled up in a box, ‘like a snake’. The maltreatment was at times so extreme that ‘no spots of unhurt skin could be found on the victims’ bodies’.105 These crimes were unacceptable, and those responsible for them had to be detained, Böhme argued, stressing that the ‘national rising’ (nationale Erhebung) must not be compromised: ‘The new time must not tolerate systematic, sadist atrocities of defenceless prisoners [. . .] it must not touch on the noble goal of the people’s community by covering up crimes, it must not allow for any exceptions from the Führer’s will.’106 It is hard to determine whether Böhme used such reasoning for tactical purposes or whether it reflects his honest convictions. In 1938 he was appointed police president of Munich, and on 1 December 1940 he was promoted to SS-Obersturmbannführer; nevertheless, he remained an officer with Eigensinn, strong opinions and stubbornness until the end of his life.107
Böhme’s determined effort to stop the SA’s excesses in 1933 and 1934 ‘from within’ the bureaucracy remained an exception to the rule. Most members of the German educated middle classes in private condemned the excesses of Nazi violence but made no public commitment to stop it. More common was a deliberate averting of the eyes and an attempt to not personally cross into the firing line. Yet widespread fear was only one element that allowed Nazi terror to continue its reign. There was also an element of approval for such violence among the public – the view that Nazi violence was an excessive yet necessary transition period in overcoming the problems of the previous years. Characteristic of such reasoning is a statement made by Pastor Friedrich von Bodelschwingh Jr., who since 1910 had served as president of the Protestant Bethel Charitable Foundations in Bielefeld, which enjoyed an international reputation for its work with disabled patients. In a private letter to a Jewish physician who had enquired about a job with the foundation, von Bodelschwingh defended the Nazi violence of the spring of 1933 by blaming the victims, particularly the Jews: ‘Judging from the amount of dirt, degradation and mendacity originating from a degenerated Jewish spirit that have polluted public life over the last twenty years, in particular in the big cities, one surely understands that a strong and tough reaction against it was historically unavoidable. And in revolutionary times, riots can never be fully repressed.’108
Bodelschwingh’s comment was in line with the common reaction of German Protestants to the Nazi ‘revolution’.109 In official publications the churches praised the ‘iron energy’ and ‘determined will’ of the new government as necessary instruments for the political restructuring that they glorified as the product of the ‘robust heroic times’. Easter cards from the spring of 1933 that compared Hitler’s appointment to the chancellorship with Jesus’s resurrection were certainly extreme expressions of such feelings.110 Yet there is no denying that many Protestant spokespeople downplayed the excesses of violence as ‘labour pains of a new era’ and justified the Nazis’ antisemitic brutishness as ‘drastic cures against the Jews’.111 The majority of Germans in 1933 were impressed by the determination and skilful symbolic policymaking of the new government, even if they worried about the extremely violent settling of scores, enforced political conformity, and abolition of civil rights by the Enabling Act, passed by the Reichstag on 23 March 1933.112
Foreign observers likewise often approvingly commented on what they perceived as the ‘dynamic force and will-power of the movement’.113 Yet some were also alarmed by the rapid growth in might of the SA and SS in 1933. In September the military attaché to the British Embassy in Berlin, Colonel Andrew Thorne, reported that these ‘semi-military associations’ were clearly attempting to be ‘part and parcel of the German defence forces’. Even if their actual military training lagged behind their ambitions, Thorne insisted that in ‘keenness and discipline’ these units were already superior to the British Territorial Army.114 Several British officers in the summer of 1933 toured Germany to study the development of the SA and the Stahlhelm, taking note of troops engaging in military exercises.115 At this time SA units armed with shoulder rifles and machine guns were a common sight in southern Bavaria.116
Nazi officials starting in the summer of 1933 became noticeably less enthusiastic about the SA’s capacities and military skills. Commenting on the possible integration of former Communist functionaries into the SA, a functionary of the SA-Gruppe Berlin-Brandenburg in October 1933 declared that the former KPD activists would be ‘exemplary able political soldiers’ who would stand head and shoulders above the average stormtrooper when it came to political skills and ideological firmness. Nevertheless, he declared, even when former Communists came with the best intentions, ‘demoralizing elements who are unfortunately common in the SA’ would not allow for a successful integration.117 From an organizational perspective the SA’s massive expansion and the terror that its members could provoke represented at once an opportunity and a burden. Röhm’s ambition to expand the SA at any cost in order to further consolidate its preeminent importance in the nascent Third Reich threatened the organization’s already fragile ideological coherence as well as its controllability from above.
Above the Law
Nothing more forcefully illustrates that the SA in 1933 perceived itself as an extra-legal institution that was no longer bound by the German penal code than Ernst Röhm’s secret ‘disciplinary decree’ of 31 July 1933. For every stormtrooper killed by political opponents, Röhm authorized the regional SA leader in charge to execute up to twelve members of the enemy organization that had carried out the attack.118 This order reveals the degree to which the logic of civil war determined the thinking of the SA leadership, and that the notorious Feme tradition of the immediate post-First World War years was still alive. Several of the political murders committed by the regime betwe
en January 1933 and June 1934 targeted National Socialist ‘traitors’ who had allegedly disclosed internal secrets or simply happened to have powerful and ruthless enemies within the Nazi camp. According to Röhm’s decree of 31 July, such executions were justified as a kind of ‘atonement’ as long as a proper SA jurisdiction (SA-Gerichtsbarkeit) had not yet been established.119
Without a doubt the pending uncertainties about the legal handling of the crimes committed by members of the Nazi organizations, which lasted well into 1934, further encouraged the stormtroopers to commit such acts. Sentences for most crimes that they had committed prior to the Nazi takeover of power had already been suspended due to the amnesty of 20 December 1932, with the exception of prison terms longer than five years.120 Röhm and the OSAF in Munich insisted that incidents involving SA men be handled in special SA disciplinary courts, not the regular courts. In order to achieve this aim the SA pushed for a ‘disciplinary law’ that would provide the statutory basis for what would have amounted to a nearly complete exemption of SA and SS members from punishment by the regular criminal courts.121 Röhm regarded the establishment of an SA ‘military justice system’ as an important step in his ambition to transform the SA into a people’s militia. Despite the fact that the NSDAP, its member organizations, the ministries of justice, and the civil authorities were never able to agree on the terms of such a ‘disciplinary law’, regional SA leaders until June 1934 repeatedly threatened public prosecutors who dared to open proceedings against individual stormtroopers. One of these regional leaders was Heinrich Schoene, the SA-Führer in the ‘Nordmark’.122 Over the summer months of 1933 he fought an intense battle with the civil and legal authorities in Schleswig-Holstein over whether some SA men from the region who had organized so-called Prangerfahrten, or ‘pillory processions’, had to stand trial for breaching the peace, assault (Nötigung), and unlawful detention.123 After a meeting with the Schleswig-Holstein district president ended in disagreement, Schoene wrote two letters on 10 July: one to the president of the Oberlandesgericht in Kiel, and the other to Hanns Kerrl, the Prussian Minister of Justice. As long as the new disciplinary law was not passed, he would simply prohibit the SA men under his command from appearing in court, Schoene stated. He would not accept any kind of penalty for his men, as ‘even if the courts are formally in the right, it was ultimately the SA who had successfully achieved the national revolution and even if misdoings had been committed during and after this period, such acts needed to be pardoned’.124 In the letter to Kerrl he even stated: ‘If we proceed according to the letter of the law, then this will lead to a sentimental humanitarianism [Humanitätsduselei] that might have the gravest consequences.’ In Schoene’s view, any legal restrictions on the stormtroopers would ultimately be frail and therefore dispensable: ‘A swine [Schweinehund] or a rascal is best served and educated by a sound flogging.’125
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