Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts

by Daniel Siemens

  Despite this multitude of tasks, many long-standing members of the SA complained about a lack of recognition for their contributions. For example, SA-Sturmführer Fritz Hancke, an employee of the SA archives in the Horst-Wessel-Haus and an ‘operating air-raid warden’ (Betriebsluftschutzleiter), expressed the belief that he, as a committed Nazi, was not being used in the right capacity: ‘At least our fellow Germans can now see that we old rowdies are still of use during the war. Unfortunately, we are no longer welcome at the front, although it is precisely us who should have a right to participate in the final march against the Bolshevists, we the active fighters of the first hours. But unfortunately, we have to stay here and keep house [einhüten]!!!’156 Similarly, Viktor Hölscher, a stormtrooper and the owner of the Munich-based H. Traut photography company, complained about his situation in an inflammatory six-page-long letter to the OSAF in June 1942. Many of the rank and file regarded active service in the SA during the war years as extremely unsatisfactory, Hölscher stated. The men under his command were mostly between twenty-eight and forty years of age, ideologically firm and experienced, and desperate to contribute actively to Germany’s final victory – but instead, they were condemned to a Stammtischgemeinschaft that did little more than regularly meet at an inn for perfunctory and largely social gatherings. ‘No activist can stand this week by week, month after month!’ Hölscher exclaimed. In his view the SA had come to resemble a veterans’ association more than a modern and strategically important party organization. Consequently, newcomers to the SA were now mostly candidates for the civil service (Beamtenanwärter), for whom membership in at least one party organization was required. Such people at best became formal ‘members’, but with no guarantee that they would be committed and activist-oriented ‘real SA men’. All in all, there was no denying that the SA was the only important party organization that did not fulfil a strategic task, Hölscher concluded.157

  Such criticism from committed SA activists struck a nerve within the organization. Still, it is important to distinguish between the SA’s activities in the Old Reich and its tasks in the newly acquired or occupied territories. Whereas the numerically reduced SA units in Germany’s heartlands in the first years of the war did indeed often lack purpose and motivation, this was less the case farther east and south, in those regions where SA units had only been established recently and early on became part of the German war effort. It is indicative of the SA’s continuing relevance that Himmler continued to supervise the group’s activities closely in these years and to monitor news about the efforts of Lutze and later Schepmann to enhance the stormtroopers’ importance. Yet as the war intensified and bombings of German cities and industries multiplied, the SA was assigned an increasing number of tasks in the Old Reich as well. With the majority of younger men fighting on the front lines, the ability of the SA to gather, discipline, and employ both older and extremely young German men, as well as to keep an ever more anxious civilian population in check, became a vital element of the nation’s war effort.

  These new responsibilities also had a gendered dimension, as an example from Munich illustrates. A secret report from September 1942 written by Hans Sponholz, a moderately successful novelist who served as an SA propagandist in the OSAF, stated that women were talking about a recent Allied airstrike on the city in ways that alarmed the authorities. Specifically, they were openly speculating that the German Reich had attacked the Allies first and that thus moral outrage about the raids – as voiced in the official propaganda – was not justified. What is more, some of them even interpreted the high number of civilians killed or made homeless by the bombings as a ‘judgement from above’ for the fact that Germany ‘had forced the Jews across the border and had engulfed them in misery’. In order to stop such discussion, Sponholz recommended sending some SA leaders in plainclothes into shops to ‘nail down some individual cases’.158 It might be a coincidence that he used in this instance a verb with sexual connotations in German, but even if it was, it is remarkable that he identified the problem as woman-related and suggested an explicitly male intervention as a solution. His message was clear: when women became weak in the face of terrifying airstrikes, strong-willed men had the right to punish them as an example to others.159 In a society at war, the SA, as moral police and ‘guardians of the people’s community’, not only targeted foreigners and those declared social outsiders, but also ordinary Volksgenossen in Nazi Germany.

  To the Last Man

  Ever since the economic crisis of the early 1930s, the SA had focused on finding jobs for its rank-and-file stormtroopers. Prior to 1933 the Nazis also attempted to penetrate the unions, which were then firmly in the hands of the SPD and the KPD, and even established their own kind of union, the Nationalsozialistische Betriebszellen-Organisation (NSBO). In practice, the relationship between the SA and the NSBO was not free of tensions, particularly when the NSBO had more success than the SA in providing jobs for its members.160 As explained above, the SA then started to organize so-called Hilfswerklager, or ‘welfare camps’, provisional work camps in which unemployed stormtroopers were housed in barracks. The men in these camps constituted a cheap labour pool at the disposal of the party and the state and were employed mostly for infrastructure work such as the building of new roads. At the same time these Hilfswerklager were an attempt to control the population and channel the persistently high level of discontent and violence among ordinary militants in a more productive direction.161

  As the economic situation recovered in the second half of the 1930s, most of these ‘welfare camps’ were closed down. Some of them, however, such as the camp in Lockstedter Lager, today’s Hohenlockstedt in Schleswig-Holstein, were transformed into so-called SA-Umschulungslager, or ‘occupational retraining camps’, later re-baptized SA-Berufsschule, or ‘SA professional schools’.162 Here, stormtroopers who struggled to find regular employment were trained for one or two years for regular jobs in industry. The aim of the camps was to qualify as many men as available ‘in the shortest time possible’ to become Facharbeiter, or ‘skilled labourers’, an officially recognized professional status that entitled its bearers to higher pay than unskilled workers. These camps produced locksmiths, mechanical engineers, ship builders, precision mechanics, coppersmiths, galvanized steel workers (Feinblechner), and welders.163 Local companies in return were asked to contribute the training equipment of the schools and help improve their facilities.164

  The SA professional school in Lockstedter Lager was initially quite popular, welcoming more than 1,000 trainees in 1938.165 At this time, one-quarter of all apprentices were aged thirty or above. In other words, as in the Hilfswerklager tradition, the ‘professional school’ was initially concerned with qualifying ‘Old Fighters’, but over the next years, it became more and more successful in attracting young German men who only knew of the ‘time of struggle’ by hearsay.166 The majority of these candidates increasingly came from impoverished border areas of the Reich. In 1938, Lockstedter Lager welcomed its first unemployed stormtroopers from the Sudetenland, and in 1939 it accepted several hundred men from Upper Silesia.167 During the war years it took in apprentices, at times as young as fifteen years old, from the previously Polish part of Upper Silesia, the Memelland, and occupied Lithuania.168

  Similar SA professional schools built on this successful model. By 1941 there were four different SA professional schools that carried the names of their respective regions: the above-mentioned Nordmark in Lockstedter Lager; Nordsee in Westerstede near Oldenburg; Ostland, later renamed Tannenberg, located in Contienen near the East Prussian capital of Königsberg, today’s Kaliningrad; and Weichsel in Schulitz, today’s Polish Solec Kujawski, a small town in the vicinity of Bromberg, or Bydgoszcz.169 During the war, the Marine High Command provided the financial support for the construction and development of these four schools.170 From July 1941 onward they were run by the SA leadership in Munich in close cooperation with the Consortium for the SA Professional Schools (Industriegemeinschaft
für die SA-Berufsschulen), a group of several northern and eastern German companies led by Heinrich Middendorff, a former submarine commander and chairman of the executive board of the Deutsche Werke Kiel AG.171 The companies Middendorff represented were active in the shipbuilding business, which, while benefiting from an increase in demand for war cruisers and submarines, lacked qualified workers due to conscription.172 Furthermore, the physically demanding shipbuilding business did not attract many workers with an educational background, so the industry targeted the extremely young as well as those ‘older German men who for whatever kind of misfortune had failed to learn a trade’. In the face of this shortage, the industry cooperated with the SA, which it had (rightly) identified as a lobbyist for men with relatively low social status and education. However, Middendorff officially insisted that the goal of the companies he represented would not be ‘to employ whatever people were available in the shortest time possible’, but to train the best men, defined as those who were ‘politically and personally qualified SA men’.173

  In most cases the men who enrolled in these professional schools were sent there directly from the German job centres. Prior membership in the SA was not a formal requirement for enrolment, but every aspirant had to signal willingness to join the SA later on.174 Peasant labourers were explicitly prohibited from joining these schools for practical and ideological reasons.175 First, these men were needed in the agricultural sector, particularly during the war years; and second, the Nazis did not want to contribute to further rural flight, especially as they regarded practical work on ‘German soil’ as physically healthy and morally important. The SA in fact had a hard time defending ‘political education’ as a vital part of the school curriculum.176 It also struggled to fill the 5,500 places available in these schools, even though the education they offered was free of charge and the schools provided accommodation, work clothes, and a small salary.177 Further compounding these difficulties was the fact that many of those admitted did not stay long but were quickly sent home by the school administration. The SA justified these decisions by claiming that no company would have an interest in employing workers who suffered from tuberculosis, cardiac problems, or feeble-mindedness – a defence that threw a glaring spotlight on the social composition of the men in these professional schools during the war years. According to the OSAF, the job centres were to blame for this problem, as they only sent to the camps a dubious selection of those few men available in Germany at the time.178

  In the summer of 1942, the OSAF started to realize that Middendorff had only cooperated with the SA as long as the German industry was in dire need of workers. With the military campaign against the Soviet Union looking promising and new waves of Russian and Polish forced labourers becoming available, Middendorff’s enthusiasm for the inclusion of SA ideological education in the professional training of unskilled labourers lessened considerably. In July 1942 he strongly urged the SA leadership in Munich to accept Russian ‘civil workers’ (Zivilarbeiter) into the school at Lockstedter Lager to maximize the number of workers who could be brought into the shipyards.179 The SA, however, strongly opposed such plans, arguing that its activities were first and foremost meant to benefit German workers and the people’s community, not necessarily wealthy industrialists. If the Russians were to be accepted at all, their barracks had to be separated from the other quarters by a fence three and a half metres high.180 By now, Middendorff had proven an ‘extremely ruthless manager’ (Betriebsführer), complained SA-Brigadeführer Herbert Merker, the officer in charge of the school. When it came to matters of social concern, Middendorff was ‘as unaffected as a newborn child’. Such judgements not only attest to the bitterness of long-time SA activists once again confronted with the fact that industrial needs were deemed more important than ideological matters,181 but also reveal the survival of certain elements of the NSDAP’s ‘socialist’ ideology from the time prior to 1933. Most instructive in this regard is a statement from Siegfried Uiberreither, the Reichsstatthalter and Gauleiter of Styria. In a speech to the SA men of his region delivered in the spring of 1941, he declared that once the war was over, they should ‘grab again the banner of the revolution’ and transform Greater Germany into the ‘greatest welfare state on earth’.182

  As German stormtroopers in need of professional and ideological training became increasingly unavailable, Merker concluded that the existence of the SA professional schools (from November 1942 referred to as SA-Werklager, or ‘SA work camps’) could only be justified on the basis of the strategic necessities of a nation at war.183 Although the Werklager Nordmark operated until the end of the war, the raison d’être for these schools/camps was shifted into the near future, in the context of the peacetime that was to follow the German military victory. At present, Germany’s top priority was the formation of the ‘best Wehrmacht possible’, Merker admitted. However, after the war, the military soldier would be replaced by a new role model: the ‘workman soldier’ (Soldat der Arbeit). In Merker’s view, the SA was called to shape this new type of German skilled labourer by helping him obtain a higher level of technical skill and training him both ideologically and physically. Once qualified, the German worker would ultimately be able to serve as ‘defender of the newly acquired space’ (Verteidiger des neu erworbenen Raumes).184

  There are striking parallels between this conception and the idea of the SA Wehrbauern, or ‘defensive peasants’, from the new German east, as analysed in the previous chapter. While the activities of SA units in many regions of the Old Reich between 1940 and 1944 were severely diminished by a lack of available men and the absence of an overarching sense of purpose, the SA leadership compensated for its temporary unimportance by making ever more grandiose plans for the post-war period. In its imagination, the new German society would be one in which even traditional ‘civil’ professional activities, such as farming and industrial work, would be carried out with soldierly conviction. Peace, in its literal meaning of the absence of war and violent confrontation, was no longer viewed as feasible. Just as the individual stormtrooper had in the earliest days of the Nazi ‘movement’ been in need of violent conflicts to prove his determination and social worth, so the German Volksgemeinschaft post-Second World War was imagined as a community constantly threatened by enemies living outside its boundaries. Consequently, the German man throughout his adult life was to have two closely intertwined professional identities, a civil identity and a military one. Put bluntly, all German men were in the future expected to be ideologically firm stormtroopers or SA-Wehrmänner throughout their entire adult lives, ready to be mobilized for war at any given moment.

  Confronting Defeat

  In contrast to such high-flying expectations, the situation of the SA between 1943 and 1945 was anything but promising. Its intensified activities did not make up for its overall lack of reputation, resources, and prospects. By the autumn of 1943 even the notoriously optimistic SA Chief of Staff Wilhelm Schepmann had to concede that the situation of the organization was critical. In a long speech at a meeting of the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter in Posen on 6 October 1943, he explained that his organization should be judged not by its immediate results (or lack thereof), but by its long-term impact. The general tone of his speech was defensive.185 Schepmann repeatedly emphasized that the role of the SA was as an instrument of the party and of Hitler.186 Consequently, he was eager to improve its relationship with other party organizations, particularly the Hitler Youth and the SS. In direct talks with Himmler, Schepmann seems to have unconditionally accepted the preeminent role of the SS and the Waffen-SS, at least during wartime. He explicitly stated that he would not pursue plans for a Waffen-SA, which would comprise exclusively SA men, even as he claimed that Himmler had previously agreed to establish such a group. Modelled along the lines of the Standarte Feldherrnhalle, but under the command of the Wehrmacht, the projected SA combat unit to complement the Waffen-SS was never established. It is highly unlikely that Himmler ever intended to form such a unit. He most
likely made the promise merely to demonstrate goodwill toward the new SA Chief of Staff and ensure his obedience. An agreement between the SA and SS from the year 1944, allowing stormtroopers to volunteer for the 18th SS volunteer Panzergrenadier Division ‘Horst Wessel’, served the same purpose.187

  Yet the dramatically deteriorating military situation from 1943 onward increased the relative importance of the SA against all odds. Until the end of the Third Reich, paramilitary activism became once again a regular feature of stormtrooper practice. As the front lines rapidly approached and then penetrated the territory of the German Reich, the remaining Brownshirts – about 500,000 in 1944188 – were mobilized to organize and coordinate the national defence effort ‘from within’. The enemies of the Volksgemeinschaft would now be confronted by the SA’s ‘revolutionary drive’, the organization’s propaganda exulted: ‘We live again in the Kampfzeit.’189 Consequently, the SA – alongside other National Socialist organizations like the Hitler Youth – resorted once more to street parades in 1944, aiming to publicly display an allegedly undaunted Volksgemeinschaft. One critical observer commented in his diary that such processions were understandably ‘highly popular at this particular time’, as they could ‘provide a feeling of security when dreadful things announce themselves from out front [wenn draußen Schreckliches sich ankündigt]’.190

  In 1944 and early 1945 the Nazi leadership ordered the stormtroopers to fight against both the military enemy and the rapidly deteriorating German morale, not only with rhetoric and demonstrations, but also with force. On 26 September 1944, SA Chief of Staff Schepmann was appointed Chief of Staff for the German Volkssturm’s Shooting Training (Inspekteur der Schießausbildung im Deutschen Volkssturm).191 The unequal distribution of power between Himmler and Schepmann continued. Whereas Himmler, as Commander of the Reserve Army (Befehlshaber des Ersatzheeres), determined the Volkssturm’s operational missions, Schepmann was given responsibility only for the training and equipping of those considered too old or too young to fight in the regular Wehrmacht.192 In addition to SA leaders serving as Volkssturm instructors or commanders, rank-and-file stormtroopers came to provide the nucleus of many Volkssturm units.193 For example, the leader of the Austrian SA-Brigade 94 Oberdonau was given command of the formation of fighting units, which were to be recruited from the Gauwehrmannschaften, the Austrian civil-defence formation. The Nazi militants were ordered to organize and supervise this ‘last draft’ and were expected to provide these men ‘with clear political attitude’, ‘soldierly expertise’, and a grasp of military necessities.194