PART IV
10
‘NOT GUILTY’
The Legacy of the SA in Germany after the Second World War
Many do not like to remember the Nazi past. A few others don’t like to be reminded of it: these are the ones who remember it with pleasure!
— Radio and TV journalist Hans Rosenthal, 19831
After the armistice of 8 May 1945 civilians only slowly returned to Berlin, now a city of ruins, its inhabitants beset by hunger and disease. From more than four million inhabitants in the early 1920s, the number of ‘Berliners’ had decreased to fewer than three million, many of them physically and morally wounded. One of the early returnees to the capital was the writer Rudolf Ditzen, better known under his pseudonym ‘Hans Fallada’. He had survived the war years in a kind of ‘inner exile’ in a rural area of northern Germany, removed from the centre of political power. However, in 1945, Fallada returned to Berlin and, in a kind of frenzy, wrote his last novel within a few weeks during the autumn of 1946. Shortly afterwards he died at the age of fifty-three.2
This last novel, Alone in Berlin (Jeder stirbt für sich allein), reprinted in recent years and nowadays popular with an international audience, provides a literary panorama of German society between 1941 and the end of the Third Reich. Engagingly written, it testifies to the author’s profound sadness and anger in response to the widespread destruction and despair, as he tells a gripping story based on fact that also charts the mentality of people in the immediate post-war period. It is by and large free of the distortions that would soon penetrate most accounts of life under National Socialism in the following decades.3 The book reveals the degree to which the party uniforms of the SA, SS, and Hitler Youth dominated the streets of the German capital during these years. Far from being mere ornamentation for the Nazi state, SA leaders are portrayed as powerful and dangerous arch-Nazis, capable of intimidating ‘ordinary’ German workers in a factory meeting, sending people to concentration camps, and putting the police under serious pressure. Fallada in his novel used the ‘signal effect’ of the Nazi uniform and simultaneously employed the then popular strategy of excuse, summarily referring to ‘Aryan’ and ‘non-Aryan’ Germans as the first victims of the Third Reich. In his portrait of Berlin in the early 1940s most Germans and German Jews in particular live in a form of prison, kept under guard and tortured by Nazi Party officials, from the SA and SS. In this respect Fallada’s interpretation is typical of the general tendency of people in post-war Germany to concentrate initially on their own suffering, emphasizing the character of the Nazi state as a ‘terror regime’, the German loss of lives during the war, and the expulsion of Germans between 1944 and 1948. In return, the fate of the Sinti and Roma, the non-German Jewry, the up to eight million forced labourers, and the millions of civilians murdered by Germans in Europe was by and large ignored, at least until the 1960s.4
In the years after Fallada’s death many Germans shared his view that the SA had been the ugly face of National Socialism. It came to represent the brutal violence, fervent antisemitism, and complete lack of compassion for ‘outsiders’ beyond the ‘people’s community’ that characterized National Socialism. However, many soon drew an important distinction that hinged on historical events. The SA, they claimed, had been a powerful and strong paramilitary group until the summer of 1934, but in the following years it became an organization strong in members but weak in political and social importance: a ‘totally subsidiary organization of the party’ or an ‘insignificant union of beer drinkers’ (unbedeutender Bierverein).5 Such an understanding also predominated within the academic scholarship on the SA in the following decades.6 To give one example: the four expert opinions written for the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial in 1964, intended to provide the judges with a trustworthy overview of the political and historical developments of the Nazis’ rise to power and the Third Reich, were published in 1967 and entitled Anatomie des SS-Staates – ‘Anatomy of the SS State’.7 In this work the SA is only mentioned in passing, and only with reference to its role in the terror campaigns prior to the Nazi takeover of power and the establishment of the Third Reich in 1933–4.8
In what follows, I will analyse how the image of the SA as a violent yet politically peripheral organization developed in post-1945 Germany. To begin with, I will argue not only that the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg in 1945–6 constitutes an exemplary test case for analysing the correlation between legal practices and historiography, but that its proceedings against the SA set the tone for subsequent assessments of the stormtroopers. I will then, in the second and third sections, discuss two exemplary case studies from the 1950s and 1960s that demonstrate how the diminution of the SA and its crimes allowed the post-war careers of the jurist and former SA-Standartenführer Hans Gmelin, from 1954 until 1975 mayor of Tübingen, and the historian and former Chief of the SA-Hochschulamt Heinrich Bennecke. In the fourth and final part I will explain how, beginning in the 1970s, the focus of both academic and non-academic research on Germany’s Nazi past shifted from the political to the social, with mixed effects for the history of the SA. Although many local and regional studies underlined the sometimes extreme violence carried out by mid- and low-ranking stormtroopers, particularly in 1933, the SA as a mass organization with political ambitions and clout slowly but surely disappeared from sight. In twenty-first-century Germany, ‘SA methods’ is still used as a term of political combat, but it has become unstuck from its original historical context.
The SA at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg
Even if one does not agree with Robert Kempner’s early assessment that the IMT was ‘the greatest history seminar ever held’, historical research over the last few decades has confirmed that the trial ‘embraced a didactic purpose’, aiming to provide a moral lesson that would stand independent of the sentencing of individual defendants.9 The Nazi organizations that stood trial in Nuremberg were therefore of particular relevance, as the outcome of the IMT had the potential to profoundly affect the lives of the former members of those organizations, which in the case of the SA comprised several million men. As the IMT was the first legal authority to embrace an interpretation of the SA that distinguished sharply between its pre-1934 identity and that of later years, it set the course not only for subsequent criminal proceedings but also for the analysis of later historians. In this respect the Nuremberg judges indeed wrote history – with lasting effects.
Alongside leading politicians, military commanders, and business leaders of the Third Reich such as Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Karl Dönitz, and Hjalmar Schacht – to name just a few of the twenty-four defendants – some of the most important repressive and terror-exercising organizations of the Nazi state, such as the SS, the Gestapo, and the SA, also faced trial at Nuremberg. These groups were declared ‘criminal organizations’ if they (1) had provided a framework in which their members had committed ‘crimes against peace’, (2) were responsible for the commission of ‘war crimes’, or (3) had participated in ‘crimes against humanity’. Article 6 of the charter of the IMT defined ‘crimes against peace’ as the ‘planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing’. War crimes, the same article stated, included ‘murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity’. This list was not intended to be exclusive, but rather was meant to set the tone for the proceedings to follow. Finally, ‘crimes against humanity’, a legal category used for the first time by the IMT and highly contested on the basis of its technical applicability, incorporated the murder, extermination, enslavement, or deport
ation of and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, regardless of whether or not these acts were committed in violation of the ‘domestic law of the country where perpetrated’.10
The declaration of the SA as a ‘criminal organization’ would have had direct consequences for the judicial proceedings against Nazi criminals that would unfold in the years to come. In post-war Germany a finding by the IMT of membership in the SA would have constituted sufficient grounds for legal punishment, without the courts having to prove the individual guilt of a particular defendant. Understandably, such a verdict would have been a worst-case scenario for millions of former militants.11 Some 10,000 wrote affidavits for the Nuremberg SA defence team which at best acknowledged that some individual SA men had not always behaved properly but exempted the SA as an organization from all charges.12 This very high number not only demonstrates that the Nazi networks established during the Third Reich still operated effectively after the war, but also suggests that a broad condemnation of the SA would have provoked intense criticism from thousands of former stormtroopers and their families.
Characteristic of the usually apologetic tone of these documents is a detailed memorandum by SA-Obergruppenführer Max Jüttner, written while in American custody in Internment Camp 75 in Kornwestheim near Stuttgart in January 1946.13 Jüttner was one of the two surviving individuals who had temporarily led the SA between 2 May and 8 August 1943. According to his memo, he read about the Nuremberg trial in the newspapers available at the camp and ‘as the only SA representative within reach’ immediately contacted the IMT in October 1945. As the court did not pay much attention to his initial correspondence, he set out to write a justification of the SA and himself with the encouragement of the defence lawyer Robert Servatius in January 1946.14 Jüttner’s nearly 100-page vindication is at times almost comical, particularly with regard to the SA’s attitudes toward Jews and political adversaries. According to Jüttner, neither he nor Lutze had ever ordered the persecution of Jews. Only from the Allies had he learned about the torture and murder of members of these groups within the concentration camps. Any reasonable man who believed in justice would give the SA credit for its honourable motives, Jüttner wrote.15
The oral proceedings against the SA began on the afternoon of 18 December 1945, the twenty-second day of the trial. The main prosecutor of the SA was the American jurist Robert G. Storey, who, together with nine colleagues, coordinated the evidence and decided on the sequence of the proceedings.16 Storey began the prosecution’s accusations by defining the aim and scope of the SA, though not without difficulty. According to him, the SA
was an agency adapted to many designs and purposes, and its role in the conspiracy changed from time to time – always corresponding with the progression of the conspiracy through its various phases towards the final objective: abrogation of the Versailles Treaty and acquisition of the territory of other peoples and nations. If we might consider this conspiracy as a pattern, with its various parts fitting together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, we would find that the piece representing the SA constituted a link in the pattern vitally necessary to the presentation and development of the entire picture.
The word ‘conspiracy’, as used here, referred to the Nazis’ attempt to overthrow the democratic state of Weimar and to replace it with a Fascist dictatorship that aimed to transform Germany into a European empire by attacking and occupying other countries. The most distinct feature of the SA, Storey stated, was its members’ ‘fanatical adherence to the philosophies and ideologies conceived by the Nazi conspirators’.17 This shared belief was easy to prove, but it was much harder to draw a link between such a vague assessment of the SA’s general character and particular crimes punishable by law.
Storey claimed that between 1934 and 1939 ‘the SA developed from scattered bands of street ruffians to a well-knit, cohesive unit organized on a military basis with military training and military functions and, above all, with an aggressive, militaristic, and warlike spirit and philosophy’.18 From 1934 onward, he added, up to 25,000 officers and non-commissioned officers were trained annually in the twenty-five SA troop schools and three SA Reichsführer schools.19 However, somewhat contradictorily, Storey also claimed that the SA ‘started a rapid decline in its importance’ after the murder of Ernst Röhm in 1934.20 Regardless of such inconsistencies, Storey’s accusations against the late SA appear well grounded. As evidence that the SA ‘had been used as a striking force in the first steps of the aggressive war’, Storey pointed to the group’s role in the Anschluss of Austria and the occupation of the Sudetenland.21 In both cases, he argued, the SA provided not only logistical help, but also thousands of fighters forming the ‘backbone’ both of the Sudeten German Free Corps and the Austrian Legion.22 In the last stages of the war, from 1944 onward, Storey noted, drawing on the testimony of SS-Brigadeführer Walter Schellenberg,23 the SA took over several ‘functions which had previously been entrusted only to the SS, the Sipo [Sicherheitspolizei], and Army’, including the guarding of concentration camps and prisoner-of-war camps and the supervision of forced labourers in Germany and the occupied areas.24 All this evidence proved, Storey concluded, that both individual members of the SA and the SA as an organization ‘were in fact co-conspirators and participants in a conspiracy which contemplated and involved Crimes against the Peace and Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes’.25
On the other side, the SA’s defence team in Nuremberg consisted of three parties: the lawyer Georg Boehm and his team as well as the two chosen barristers Dr Martin Löffler and Dr Theodor Klefisch.26 The personal papers of Klefisch, who since the late Weimar years had been a respectable though only regionally known criminal defence lawyer from Cologne, were made available for historical research only recently.27 These papers contain, among other things, documents related to his role as a lawyer before the IMT and allow a relatively detailed analysis of the strategy adopted by the defence team. Klefisch never spoke in court and only filed a single ‘speech in writing’ on 15 August 1946, a fact that was partly the result of tensions among the lawyers defending the SA.28
Klefisch’s work concentrated on those SA men who had formerly been members of the Stahlhelm, Bund der Frontsoldaten. As outlined previously, the relationship between the Stahlhelm and the SA had been strained in its early days, not least because of generational differences, and it had remained complicated ever since. In simplified terms the SA appealed to young men, the Stahlhelm to their fathers.29 In the final plea of the SA defence lawyers, delivered on 28 August 1946, Georg Boehm emphasized this divide, as well as the (alleged) strong ideological differences between the NSDAP and the Stahlhelm, concluding: ‘A large number of the members of the Stahlhelm represented a body within the SA, united by common ideals, who regarded the events of the time with the greatest distrust.’30 As this statement illustrates, the overall strategy of the defence team was to use to their own advantage the complexities of the SA’s internal structure and the fact that its form had changed considerably at least twice between 1921 and 1945, arguing that it would be highly unfair and legally unsound to declare such a massive organization, with its up to 4.5 million former members, an outright ‘criminal’ group.31 Löffler pointed out that such a declaration would further be incompatible with the denazification laws of the American Zone of Occupation, according to which all SA ranks up to the level of Sturmführer were not regarded as subject to automatic punishment. In fact, Löffler noted, some of the former members of this allegedly criminal organization had recently been elected community councillors.32
This defence strategy proved successful. On 28 February 1946 chief prosecutor Robert H. Jackson asked that all wearers of the SA sports badge who were not regular SA members, as well as members of the SA-controlled home guard units and the SA Reserve, be exempted from prosecution.33 He now requested that only the main body of the SA be considered for punishment. However, Löffler claimed in the following session on 1 March that criminal proceedings against the S
A still affected everyone ‘who ever belonged to the SA, even for a very short time, during the 24 years between its establishment in 1921 and its dissolution in 1945, that is to say, during a period of almost a quarter of a century’.34 Not surprisingly, Löffler downplayed the SA’s importance during the war years as best he could, stating:
Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts Page 45
