Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts

by Daniel Siemens

  Under the circumstances, the training offered by the SA could not meet high standards, even if the propaganda of the Nazi regime naturally asserted the opposite.195 Schepmann promised that the new Volkssturm units would be trained so effectively that they would be able to turn back any ‘urgent danger’ to the Reich territory. Many of the men now being drafted had been trained in the SA-Wehrmannschaften in previous years, he pointed out. Furthermore, the new training would be organized in a less formal way than had previously been seen. The main goal of the relatively short instructional courses would be ‘to awaken’ men’s ‘interest in shooting’ in order to ‘maximize firepower’.196 Over the course of the next few months, power and weapons were transferred from the disintegrating SA to the regional Volkssturm units.197 Despite organizational shortcomings, the SA continued to provide many of the fanatical ‘believers’ who attempted to defend the Third Reich and its social system until the last days of the regime (Plate 31).

  The OSAF’s instructions for the ‘total war’ effort, distributed by Schepmann to the SA leadership corps in early December 1944, allow some insight into the mentality and self-understanding of the late SA activists. The ultimate goal of this effort, Schepmann explained, was to ‘fanaticize’ the individual stormtrooper to a degree of ‘unconditional commitment’ to the Volksgemeinschaft and total resistance to the enemy. Therefore, SA men were encouraged to wear their uniform at the workplace and in the general public.198 Drawing an audacious historical parallel, Schepmann compared the Reich’s situation in late 1944 with the wars of liberation that had broken out across Europe in the early nineteenth century. As his predecessors more than 100 years prior had done, he regarded the racial and ideological unity of the nation as a prerequisite for Germany’s liberation.199 Schepmann declared that ‘international Jewry in its quest for world domination’ was responsible for the war. In a way his rhetoric echoed that employed in the early days of the NSDAP in Munich, with the addition of apocalyptic threats. The future of a defeated Reich was extremely bleak, if there was a future at all, Schepmann warned. Families would be torn apart and slave labour introduced. Millions would die of hunger. The Jewish Untermenschentum would destroy German culture and the German language.200 In short, the Reich would suffer from what it had done to its eastern neighbours in the previous years – a logical connection that Schepmann of course did not make explicit, but of which he and many others were certainly aware.201

  Such alarmist propaganda was not only a consequence of the current military situation. Ever since the Germans had launched ‘Operation Barbarossa’, the attack on the Soviet Union, in July 1941, extreme anti-Bolshevism and antisemitism – combined in the term ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ – again became vital elements of the SA’s ideology.202 SA magazines began to repeatedly publish extracts from soldiers’ letters that condemned the Soviet ‘workers’ paradise’ as the greatest of lies. What they had seen with their own eyes, such writers declared, was far worse than they had expected. While the German Volksgemeinschaft would accept social differences only as long as they were based on commitment to the community and individual talent, Soviet society according to such statements was one of extreme social difference resulting from a Jewish-Bolshevist conspiracy, which aimed to mercilessly dominate the Russian people. The common people of Russia reminded the soldiers of animals, without prospects or hope and exploited by the Jews: ‘Here, the Jew raged himself out. State and people rear his very own ugly head.’203

  With the course of the war turning, such rhetoric was used less as a call to change the European east for the better than as a way to mobilize the remaining Germans in the Reich. To prevent the worst-case scenario of the Red Army winning the war, the stormtroopers were ordered to be extremely vigilant in their attempts to keep the nation safe. Hidden enemies could be anywhere. In particular, the Brownshirts were urged to keep a sharp eye out for all ‘foreign races’ (Fremdvölkische). The final battle would bring ultimate empowerment, or so Schepmann argued. Unrestricted by legal or moral concerns, he declared, ‘the SA man has always to take a tough stance against all that can harm the spiritual warfare (rumours – defeatism). If necessary, he has to help himself as during the Kampfzeit. As at that time, we break resistance with our fists.’204

  It is hard to measure the effectiveness of such calls. Yet, even if by late 1944 the majority of the German population was weary of war and only partly susceptible to such propaganda, the acts committed by many stormtroopers in the last months of the conflict suggest that at least they took such calls to heart.205 As they had previously done in the General Government, local SA leaders now increasingly performed police service all over Germany. At times they even took the lead in spontaneous hate crimes, as in the industrial city of Rüsselsheim, where, after heavy Allied bombing, an angry mob of Germans tortured and killed several captured American airmen on 26 August 1944. After an initial wave of blows, Josef Hartgen, the local Nazi Party official and an SA leader, pulled out his revolver and shot at least four of the men. The next day Hartgen attended the funeral of the American soldiers dressed in his brown-shirted uniform, thus attempting to transform the mob violence and his own murderous actions into acts of legitimate self-defence.206 Following a similar logic, stormtroopers in rural Germany continued to uphold the racial boundaries established by the regime. As in the mid-1930s, when they publicly humiliated German-Jewish couples for alleged racial defilement, these men now severely punished sexual relations between Germans and slave labourers, particularly if the latter were of Slavonic descent. SA propaganda from the time characterized Poles and members of other eastern European nations as ‘cruel and insidious’ and in need of supervision, particularly in the countryside, where the danger of ‘blood mixing’ was said to be very high.207 Local SA searches for such couples regularly ended in beatings. In the most extreme cases it escalated into genuine acts of lynching, events that up to the present constitute some of the most vivid memories of those Germans old enough to have grown up in the countryside in the 1940s. In the rural district of the small city of Herford in Westphalia, for example, uniformed stormtroopers in cooperation with the SS hanged at least one male Polish slave labourer from a tree in a small grove. They also compelled several other forced labourers from the region to attend the execution, threatening them with a similar fate if they refused to obey.208

  What had previously been glorified as the ‘German fighting spirit’ in the last weeks of the regime vanished as the local hierarchies of power disintegrated. Those who still wore their Nazi uniforms now noticed an increasing hostility from the general public.209 Because of the heightened danger of Allied airstrikes, the SA headquarters in Munich were relocated to the training school run by the SA-Gruppe Hochland on the shores of the Schliersee in the Alpine upland, approximately fifty kilometres south of the Bavarian capital.210 Used from 1938 onward for the schooling of the SA’s regional leadership corps, the facilities from the spring of 1944 onward served as provisional SA headquarters.211 Yet it was not until 1945 that Chief of Staff Schepmann and his family arrived here.212 By that time there was effectively nothing left for him to do. Already in the weeks leading up to his arrival, the OSAF, in the absence of a functioning bureaucracy, proved incapable of effectively controlling the hundreds of thousands of SA men who still lived in Germany.

  Instead, provisional groups consisting of committed National Socialists who claimed leadership on the local and regional levels mushroomed. Some stormtroopers still felt empowered to defend the people’s community by violent means. Their activism was directed against Allied forces, Jewish concentration-camp prisoners, and German ‘defeatists’, but it predominantly harmed members of the two latter groups. According to the latest research by historian Patrick Wagner, fanatical National Socialists murdered several hundred German civilians during the last months of the war.213 The number of Jewish and eastern European slave labourers killed during the final months of the regime was as high as 250,000.214 Particularly well researched are the massacres of Hung
arian-Jewish slave labourers sent to Mauthausen concentration camp in March and April 1945. Local Volkssturm units in Styria were called upon to oversee these ‘death marches’, and a ‘police company’ from the city of Eisenerz that consisted of 150 ‘reliable’ SA men was ordered ‘to kill as many Jews as possible’. These stormtroopers shot between 150 and 200 people on 7 April 1945 alone.215 Some of the Nazi Freikorps units, hastily arranged in the last months of the war, proved more dangerous to German civilians than to Allied soldiers. A special ‘hit squad’ of the Freikorps Sauerland, headed by an SA man called Friedrich Jäger, hunted down deserters and dissenters and killed at least five people: two alleged deserters, a male civilian, a female civilian, and a mine manager who was held responsible for the flying of a white flag on the pithead of his mine in Weidenau near Siegen.216 In southwestern Germany another group called the Sturmabteilung Freikorps Adolf Hitler was sent to Munich to crush an anti-Nazi movement in April 1945. Still another SA task force that operated in Bavaria and was led by the SA-Brigadeführer Hans Zöberlein, a writer and fanatical National Socialist, killed ten civilians on 28 and 29 April 1945 in the small working-class town of Penzberg, some fifty kilometres south of Munich, where the local mayor had been forced to step down to enable a peaceful surrender to the Americans.217

  In most places, however, the slogan ‘Fight until the last drop!’ was replaced by ‘Save yourself if you can!’ virtually overnight. When local media spread the news that Allied troops had reached the area, local Nazi authorities usually went into hiding, and the rank-and-file National Socialists disposed of their insignias, banners, and party badges. People from the Schliersee region raided the last remaining headquarters of the SA on 5 May 1945 and, according to the testimony of the town’s pastor, destroyed or stole up to 2,000 SA coats, several radios, clothes, and furniture, all ‘of the highest quality’, in a ‘barbaric frenzy’. In one room the looting mob even discovered the bodies of a ‘Nazi’ and a woman who had jointly committed suicide, but no one attempted to bury them.218 During this period Mein Kampf disappeared from the bookshelves in Germany and, together with other Nazi memorabilia, was hidden away until children and grandchildren cleared out the homes of their parents or grandparents, sometimes decades later. Highly visible signs of ideological commitment to the Nazis, such as the stormtroopers’ brown shirts, were usually not part of such belated ‘discoveries’. As one eyewitness from the city of Höxter remembered, dozens of SA uniforms could be seen floating in the nearby River Weser in April 1945.219 In many cases these castoffs represented more than a simple changing of clothes, as the Nazi identity of their former owners seems to have been washed off as well. As will be analysed in the last chapters of this book, the transformation of the hearts and minds of the former stormtroopers was actually a more complicated process – and one that was in many respects the most ambiguous and long lasting.

  Everyday Fanaticism

  Between 1939 and 1945 the character of the National Socialist project of the Volksgemeinschaft changed. Reflecting its initial military and political gains, the regime up to 1941 made sure that the needs of the war machine were met while at the same time carefully paying attention to the material well-being and morale of Germans on the ‘home front’. However, as the prospect of German hegemony over large parts of Europe became more and more obsolete, the regime’s repressive character increased dramatically. The people’s community was now imagined as a community fated to fight a heroic battle for survival on an unprecedented scale.220 In line with this general development the importance of the ‘greedy institution’ of the SA increased precisely in those regions where this battle was to be fought. Between 1939 and 1942 the focus of this battle was predominantly viewed as the annexed and occupied territories, where the formation of new SA units offered a low-threshold opportunity for Reichsdeutsche and ethnic Germans to prove their loyalty to the regime. From 1942 onward these SA units became part of the broader German effort to uphold public order in these increasingly unstable areas.

  As the front lines approached and ultimately crossed the borders of the Old Reich, the Nazi regime attempted to replicate these experiences from the occupied territories in the German heartlands. By then, however, the generation of German men who were in their late twenties and thirties – those who had previously so decisively contributed to the Nazis’ rise and consolidation of power – were already serving in the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS. The regime was forced to grasp at straws to organize civil defence and uphold its rule. Those local and regional leaders of the SA who had not been drafted, many of whom were ‘Old Fighters’, were the natural choice to organize the last defence – even if by 1944–5 the OSAF’s former capacity to mobilize and discipline its men had been severely curtailed. Nevertheless, the ideological fervour and militancy of the local SA leaders to a certain extent made up for the group’s organizational shortcomings in the last phase of the war. The disciplinary power of the individual stormtroopers in the villages and towns, and not the strength of the organization as a whole, turned out to be one key factor that prevented the regime from collapsing from within. In many places local activists still had the power to mobilize and intimidate a war-weary population. With their backs to the wall, the National Socialists resorted once again to extreme violence. ‘Local liquidating communities’ killed representatives of civil authorities who were willing to hand over power to the Allies and murdered former concentration-camp inmates on ‘death marches’.221 The training of the SA, ideologically as well as militarily, proved to have deadly repercussions.

  9

  SA DIPLOMATS AND THE HOLOCAUST IN SOUTHEASTERN EUROPE

  Domination as service to those under our rule: is there a greater entitlement to our leadership claim imaginable than this attitude towards the fundamental questions of life between peoples and the German accomplishments tried at the forum of a thousand-year-long history?

  — An SA-Rottenführer, summarizing Germany’s ‘mission’ in eastern Europe, July 19411

  On the evening of 20 July 1941, SA-Obergruppenführer Adolf-Heinz Beckerle sat in his room in the prestigious Hotel Kaiserhof in the heart of Berlin and contemplated the events of the day.2 He had just arrived from his home town of Frankfurt am Main, where he had served as police president, and was now making a stopover on his way to Sofia. Three days before, Beckerle had been appointed the new German envoy to Bulgaria, where he would spend the next three years. Unlike some Wehrmacht soldiers on their way to the eastern front to whom Beckerle had listened for a while during the train’s stop at Magdeburg’s central station that afternoon, the thirty-nine-year-old was full of optimism about the war. He noted on the hotel stationery: ‘It is really annoying that most people are hardly aware of the importance of the times they are living in, as this is a time that guarantees the national future in such an astonishing and cheerful way.’ However, his personal feelings were mixed. He felt exhausted and in need of a change: ‘No fighter can cope with such high levels of intensity [Raubwirtschaft]!’3

  Beckerle was one of five SA generals who served as ambassadors of the German Reich in southeastern Europe from 1940 onward. In line with older German geopolitical planning, the Nazi regime perceived the region as an Ergänzungsraum, a ‘complementary space’, that would provide natural resources, food, and men for the Greater German Reich’s war effort. From the military point of view, a close alliance with the states of the region was advisable in order to avoid opening another front.4 Besides Beckerle, the other men chosen to represent German interests in this economically and politically close ‘informal empire’ were Manfred von Killinger, Hanns Elard Ludin, Siegfried Kasche, and Dietrich von Jagow. Ludin, who had previously served as the leader of the SA-Gruppe South-West, was assigned to Preßburg/Bratislava, Slovakia, in December 1940. At the same time von Killinger, who had previously been in charge of the recruitment department at the Foreign Office and had also served for a few months as Ludin’s predecessor in Bratislava, was sent to the Romanian capital of Bucharest. Bo
th men reported for duty in January 1941. Several months later, and after an eight-week ‘probationary period’, the former SA settlement expert Kasche was assigned as envoy to the new German Embassy in Agram/Zagreb in Croatia. Finally, Dietrich von Jagow, who had previously led the SA-Gruppe Berlin-Brandenburg, took over as German ambassador in Hungary’s capital of Budapest in July 1941, at about the same time that Beckerle assumed his new responsibilities in Bulgaria.5

  This chapter aims to explain why these five SA generals were appointed to serve as German envoys to southeastern Europe at this particular historical moment and to what extent they championed a particular SA style of diplomacy. Their involvement in the murder of European Jewry will come under particular scrutiny. Although considerable effort has been made to study the Holocaust in all five of the countries examined here, the role of those German diplomats with SA backgrounds in this effort has hardly been touched upon. The following analysis will demonstrate that each SA general-diplomat was actively involved in shaping German foreign policy toward the Third Reich’s allies in southeastern Europe. I will also discuss why the attempts of surviving family members to restore the public memory of these diplomats failed and explain why the SA diplomats retained a special status in the Erinnerungspolitik of the Foreign Office after 1945.6