Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts

by Daniel Siemens

  Neumann, born in 1888, played a similar role in this region to that assumed by Konrad Henlein in the Sudetenland. A former Freikorps fighter in the Baltic area in 1919 and a veterinary surgeon by profession, Neumann had founded the Memelland Socialist People’s Party (SOVOG, Sozialistische Volksgemeinschaft des Memelgebietes e.V.) in 1933. It was the second National Socialist party to form in a region that had hosted a secret cell of the NSDAP as early as the late 1920s.136 These first National Socialist activists had formed the core of the Christian Socialist Party of Memelland (CSA, Christliche Sozialistische Arbeitsgemeinschaft des Memelgebiets e.V.), formally established in May 1933 under the leadership of a Protestant clergyman, the pastor Theodor Freiherr von Saß. However, the NSDAP in the Reich quickly came to the conclusion that a National Socialist alternative to the CSA was needed because of its members’ ‘pseudo-revolutionary’ manners and ‘overt dilettantism’.137 Therefore, the government in Berlin backed Neumann and his counter-organization, the SOVOG. In the following years Neumann became a ‘flame of hope for all who longed for an end of foreign rule’, as a German expellee magazine published in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1955 put it with patriotic zeal, echoing the rhetoric of the Memelland’s ‘time of struggle’.138 Such glorification built on the broad support that Neumann managed to attract among the Memel Germans in the 1930s, but it obscured other aspects of the story that proved less welcome after the war: both parties, the CSA as well as the SOVOG, were overtly antisemitic and had very close ties to the NSDAP in Germany.139 Both quickly formed paramilitary groups consisting of young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six, called Sturmkolonnen (SK) in the case of the CSA or Sturmabteilungen in the case of the SOVOG. The historian Martin Broszat characterized these groups as ‘something between the Hitler Youth and the SA’.140 According to the Lithuanian authorities, both paramilitary organizations were in close contact with the SA in Germany and particularly with SA units from the neighbouring East Prussia. The SA-Gruppe there, SA-Obergruppe I, or Ostland, was estimated to comprise no fewer than eight brigades with a total of 170,000 men by the end of 1934. These brigades were financed by the Reich and armed, among other weapons, with heavy machine guns, allegedly in preparation for a German military occupation of the Memelland in the near future.141 Based on these accusations, which were backed by a large number of police documents, the Lithuanian High Court Martial in Kowno convicted both Neumann and von Saß, together with more than 100 German nationalists, of high treason and sentenced them to lengthy prison terms in 1935.142 As part of the above-mentioned policy of détente, Neumann was pardoned in 1938 and immediately returned to his former political activities.

  Although Hitler had advised Neumann not to provoke any kind of diplomatic crisis, the latter once again started to build up SA units in late 1938. These units now officially carried the name of Sicherheitsabteilungen, or ‘security units’. In late January 1939 they allegedly comprised twelve units consisting of a total of 2,500 men.143 Other sources, however, claim they comprised only 500 individuals.144 Neumann expected every Memel German over eighteen years old to join these new formations, which he defined as ‘corps permeated by National Socialist spirit’ and made up of active fighters for Volk and homeland.145 In its final state, he proclaimed, the Memelland SA should comprise roughly 20,000 men aged between eighteen and fifty – a very high expectation, given that the region had fewer than 200,000 inhabitants.146

  The new SA complemented the existing Memel German Security Service (Ordnungsdienst) that Neumann had reorganized several weeks earlier to ‘protect’ the integrity of the December elections. Whereas the Security Service, which was at Neumann’s personal disposition, was intended as a kind of elite formation, consisting of men under thirty years of age and, according to a contemporary source, ‘strictly organized in a National Socialist way’, the Memel SA was apparently a less exclusive movement.147 In the first place, its members were charged with spreading the Nazi ideology in the region.148 Similar to the strategy adopted in 1933–4, both organizations were expected to be on hand to support Wehrmacht units in case of a military confrontation with the Lithuanian army. Erich Koch, the Gauleiter of East Prussia and a local rival of Neumann, even prepared to ‘liberate’ the Memelland with the help of these SA forces.149 Such fights did not take place, however. On 22 March 1939, Hitler incorporated the Memel area into the German Reich after reaching a formal agreement with Lithuania. In Article 4 of this agreement both states declared that they would neither attack each other nor support a third party that attacked one of them.150 Neumann and Koch oversaw the short transformation period before the laws of the Reich came into effect in the Memelland on 1 May 1939. At that time the former Sicherheitsabteilungen were immediately incorporated into the regular SA-Gruppe Ostland, while the SS took over the former Security Service.151

  The Rise of the Periphery

  This chapter has demonstrated that the SA between 1934 and the beginning of the Second World War underwent a difficult and often painful process of internal reform and search for new meaning. As previous studies have rightly emphasized, more than 50 per cent of all members of the SA in early 1934 left its ranks in the following years. These decisions to drop out reflected the decline in status and importance of the SA that occurred once its political adversaries had been defeated, but they were also a consequence of the fall in unemployment figures and the improvement in young men’s chances to marry and have a family. Yet this development was only one side of the coin. Even at a time when the SA in the Old Reich was struggling to keep its men involved, more than one million German men remained loyal to the SA and its political programme. Throughout the 1930s antisemitic assaults were a regular field of SA activity. Such attacks allowed for community formation through jointly committed violence and as such continued a practice of association well established during the Kampfzeit. At the same time, the decreasing legal protections for the Jews in Germany and later also in the Greater German Reich allowed the storm-troopers to line their own pockets with pilfered spoils. In this respect the SA men were indeed forerunners, pioneering what during the deportations and murder of the European Jewry became a common practice in Germany and beyond.152

  By 1937–8 the internal disciplinary procedures came to an end and the SA’ s reorganization had largely been completed.153 It now successfully started to penetrate many realms of German civil life, as this chapter has demonstrated with regard to the German shooting associations and riding clubs. The party functionary who dressed in his brown shirt only one or two days a week while pursuing a regular profession and acting as a family man more and more replaced the activist Gewaltmensch devoid of competing group affiliations that was so characteristic of the rank and file of the SA until 1934. Yet even these more respectable stormtroopers remained men with Aktionsmacht, self-empowered guardians of Nazi values who temporarily exercised auxiliary police roles. By the late 1930s observers had perceived a new level of discipline and commitment within the SA.154 What boosted the OSAF’s morale most decisively was the success of its renewed paramilitary activities in the border regions of the Reich and, later, in the incorporated territories. In both the Sudetenland and the Memelland – regions with considerable German populations administered by Czechoslovakia and Lithuania, respectively – regional nationalist paramilitary organizations of ethnic Germans were successfully integrated into the SA once the political situation allowed. In contrast to the situation in the German heartlands, where the prestige and strike capacity of the SA had suffered after 1934, the new SA units proved attractive to many, not least because they provided a relatively uncomplicated way of proving one’s loyalty to the new state without giving up one’s integration into existing social networks. As in central Europe after the First World War more generally, the borderlands proved a fruitful recruiting ground for paramilitary organizations with a nationalist agenda. What is more, in these regions the regime valued the paramilitary tasks the SA was still able to perform.

  In the foll
owing years, the OSAF more and more capitalized on its experiences of 1938–9. It continued to establish new SA units in central and eastern Europe that recruited heavily from among the Volksdeutsche and that fulfilled ever more military and police functions. In addition, it also developed far-reaching plans for the time that German domination in Europe would be established and secured by military force. The leadership of the SA realized that not only the future of the Reich but also the future of the Brownshirts was to be decided in the east.

  7

  STREETFIGHTERS INTO FARMERS?

  The SA and the ‘Germanization’ of the European East

  No domain is by nature better suited to turn into a stomping ground for romantic fantasies than the settlement.

  — Report of the Social Democratic Party in exile, 19351

  Important research on the Generalplan Ost, literally the ‘General Settlement Plan East’, has been undertaken in the last decades. Likewise, the German expansionist policies in central and eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as their academic and intellectual forerunners, have been analysed in detail.2 The stormtroopers, however, have seldom been examined in this context, although the SA in the years following the ‘Röhm purge’ not only helped stabilize the Nazi regime within the boundaries of the Reich but also contributed importantly to the furtherance of German expansionist policies from 1935 onward. During these years it was the general goal of the NSDAP to win over those Germans living abroad and, after the incorporation and annexation of the borderland territories they partly inhabited, to make them a genuine part of the nation. In this respect the semantic shift is telling. Whereas Germans abroad were until the early twentieth century called Auslandsdeutsche, literally ‘Germans living in foreign countries’, the Nazis during the 1930s began to refer to them as Volksdeutsche, or ‘ethnic Germans’.3 The SA felt called to actively engage in this process of ‘Germanization’, not least because it afforded an opportunity to regain lost power within the patchwork of competing National Socialist organizations. The stormtroopers thus put forward their own ideas for the ‘Germanization’ of the European east, including stimulating the settlement of SA men from the Old Reich in the newly occupied and annexed territories, particularly the Warthegau and the General Government, and establishing new SA units there that predominantly comprised ‘ethnic Germans’.

  The following chapter is divided into four parts. In the first part, I will take a closer look at the SA’s contributions to the settlement movement of the 1930s, which was originally concerned with the construction of new villages and city districts for the party faithful and the transfer of the population of the German Reich within its existing borders to stimulate agriculture and the economy in disadvantaged regions, particularly those of the northern and eastern provinces.4 In the second part, I will concentrate on the work of the so-called Beauftragter des Stabschefs für Neubauernsiedlung und Volkstumsfragen, literally the ‘Commissioner of the (SA) Chief of Staff for the Placement of New Farmers and for Matters of Ethnicity’, between 1938 and 1943. The results of these efforts and the SA’s ultimate failure will be critically assessed in the third section. In the final part, I will discuss my findings with reference to the current state of research on the German settlement policies shortly before and during the Second World War. Although the SA’s initial ambitions for its ‘Germanization’ policies failed, largely because of the power of Himmler’s SS and the shortage of qualified SA men, it nevertheless contributed in important ways to the ideological and pragmatic formation of a Volksgemeinschaft at war.

  Early Settlement Initiatives

  It was no coincidence that the SA’s interest in the German settlement movement intensified in the mid-1930s, shortly after the ‘Night of the Long Knives’. In its attempts to open up new fields of action that would keep the stormtroopers busy and help its leadership corps claim important positions in the consolidated Third Reich, the SA started to get involved in the settlement movement. As early as June 1933 the Nazi government had declared resettlement a national priority in its ‘Law on the New Formation of German Peasantry’.5 Already in the late 1920s the NSDAP and its auxiliary organizations – most prominently the SA – had systematically reached out to the people of rural Germany in an attempt to exploit this population’s high level of discontent related to the ‘agrarian crisis’ that had increased migration to the cities. The NSDAP in many parts of Germany successfully exploited this high level of discontent and presented itself as the political party determined to preserve the habits and values of the German provinces, which they glorified as the ‘bloodspring of the German people’ (Blutquelle des deutschen Volkes).6

  Initially, the involvement of the SA in the settlement movement was limited to attempts at population transfer within the German Reich. For example, it encouraged rank-and-file stormtroopers from Lower Saxony to move as so-called ‘West-East settlers’ to more thinly populated areas in Mecklenburg and Pomerania.7 However, it did not take long for the SA to expand the scope of its efforts and to develop settlement plans for the soon-to-be occupied and incorporated territories beyond the actual borders.8 Beginning in 1937 at least one large SA settlement project was initiated in every territory in which the organization was present. Financed in part by the so-called Dankopfer der Nation, an annual national collection organized by the SA on the occasion of Hitler’s birthday, such settlements were designed to help deserving SA men, disabled ex-servicemen, and large families live on their ‘own soil’.9 The Supreme SA Command (OSAF) supported these SA settlements with the relatively meagre amount of 225,000 reichsmark.

  Widely varying in size, these settlements were located in Osterholz near Bremen, in the Pfalzdorf swamp, and in nearby Petkum, close to the East Frisian city of Aurich. Other SA settlements were built in the north of Braunschweig, in Wittstock/Neumark, in the Bavarian city of Rosenheim (Plate 26), in Jena in Thuringia, and in the Upper-Silesian Eichenkamp near Gleiwitz, today’s Gliwice.10 The latter settlement, later re-baptized the SA-Dankopfersiedlung Glaubenstatt, or ‘Place of Faith’, became the SA’s model settlement, built partly for the purpose of creating a ‘völkisch dam’ to hold back the ‘Polish appetite for expansionism’, at least symbolically. Although the outbreak of the Second World War prevented the original plans from being fully realized, most buildings of this settlement, which was to provide a home for up to 2,000 people, could be completed.

  Glaubenstatt had two centres: the stadium with a tower that was to serve as a youth hostel, and a market square that was surrounded by an assembly hall, a school building, and a home for the Hitler Youth. Yet there was also a shooting range and an air-raid shelter. A track-and-field arena for paramilitary sports was planned, but never completed.11 The conception of the Glaubenstatt complex exemplarily demonstrates that the SA’s ‘Germanization’ policies have to be seen in the context of its pre-military training of German males, to be carried out in close cooperation with the Wehrmacht and the Hitler Youth. This paramilitary education comprised both practical exercises with physical training and shooting lessons, but also ‘political education’ (politische Erziehungsarbeit).12 It did not only target men in the Old Reich, whom Nazi propaganda continuously exposed to the idea that racially homogeneous settlements had to be regarded as ‘prerequisite for the fulfilment of the regime’s economical, domestic and racial objectives’,13 but would later also reach out to ethnic Germans organized within the SA in the occupied territories.

  Regional plans from 1937 aimed at the construction of no more than 2,500 settlement plots nationwide, most of which were intended to contain small single-family homes.14 Every house was expected to comprise three or four rooms, covering at least 60 square metres, to be complemented by a garden of 1,000–1,500 square metres intended mainly for the cultivation of vegetables and the breeding of small domestic animals. Unlike Glaubensstatt, which was built on former woodland, most of these modest settlements were so-called Stadtrandsiedlungen, or ‘suburban settlements’, locat
ed close to existing developments. Their parcels of land were much too small to allow for self-dependent agriculture.15

  According to a regulation from 1934, only male candidates who were either married or engaged and possessed the ‘necessary good hereditary factors’ were to be considered for such settlement colonies. When the authorities realized that the comparatively small size of the houses did not correspond with the regime’s emphasis on sexual reproduction, it slightly increased the housing space so that families with many children could also be accommodated.16 Overall, the authorities imagined society in these settlements as competitive, racially pure, and devoted to the Nazi project. However, contrary to the loud rhetoric of ‘building a people’s community’, they deliberately fostered social inequalities, granting settlers different amounts of land. The rationale for this unequal treatment was that it would intensify the competition among the new settlers and would help develop political and economic leadership.17 The NSDAP pointed to its settlement projects as proof that the party kept its social promises. In reality, however, the number of 2,500 SA settlement holdings was small compared to the overall 22,000 holdings established between 1933 and 1939, and even more so compared to the 57,457 holdings created during the years of the Weimar Republic, of which 7,500 lay east of the River Elbe.18