Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts

by Daniel Siemens

  Crimes against the laws or customs of war are not charged to the SA. It is true that the Prosecution presented an affidavit saying that the SA also took part in guarding concentration camps and prisoner-of-war camps and in supervising forced labor; but, according to the presentation of the Prosecution, this did not occur until 1944 within the framework of the total war raging at that time, and it has not been charged that this activity of the SA involved any excesses or ill-treatment [. . .] The few offenses against humanity charged to the SA by the Prosecution and committed by individual members in the course of almost a quarter of a century can in no way be compared with the serious crimes against humanity of which we have heard here.35

  Löffler went so far as to try to impress the court by presenting figures no one could actually verify, claiming that at most 2 per cent of all SA men had participated in punishable individual actions, whereas 98 per cent had ‘kept their hands clean’. He even argued that the overwhelming majority of all former SA men would strongly deny that their leaders had ordered them to carry out criminal acts.36 Without being explicitly mentioned, the intense and often resentful public debate about German ‘collective guilt’ lingered beneath such reasoning.37

  The Nuremberg judges passed their verdict on 30 September 1946. Their findings distinguished between the SA that existed up to the summer of 1934 and the SA that existed thereafter. Regarding the SA of the first period, they determined that although the stormtroopers had committed crimes, these crimes were limited to German soil and did not meet the criteria for the categories of crime established by the tribunal. With regard to the SA of the latter period, the judges tried to reconcile the contradictory perspectives of the prosecution and the defence. ‘Isolated units of the SA,’ the judges ruled, had been ‘involved in the steps leading up to aggressive war and in the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity’, thus confirming the argument of the prosecution. As evidence, the judges explicitly cited the occupation of Austria, the SA’s contribution to the formation of the Sudeten German Free Corps, and the transport and guarding of prisoners of war by the SA-Gruppe Sudeten and SA units in Danzig, Poznań, Silesia, and the Baltic states.38 The judges also noted the SA’s active participation in the anti-Jewish pogroms of 9 November 1938 and the ‘ill treatment’ of Jews in the ghettos of Vilna and Kaunas.39

  In contrast, however, the court agreed with the defence inasmuch as it accepted the proposition that ‘the SA was reduced to the status of a group of unimportant Nazi hangers-on’ after the 1934 purge. It was this conclusion that finally brought the judges to a verdict of not guilty: ‘Although in specific instances some units of the SA were used for the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity, it cannot be said that its members generally participated in or even knew of the criminal acts. For these reasons the Tribunal does not declare the SA to be a criminal organization within the meaning of Article 9 of the Charter.’40 The same conclusion applied to the Reich Cabinet and the ‘General Staff and High Command’, whereas the SS, SD, Gestapo, and certain groups within the NSDAP leadership were found guilty. The silent majority of Germans, even if they contested the legitimacy of the court, approved of this verdict, not least because it fitted into the prevailing tendency of both small-scale and leading Nazis to downplay their (usually voluntary) participation in the Third Reich.41

  Klefisch attributed the relative leniency of the Nuremberg judges toward the stormtroopers largely to his own defence strategy, which had painted a portrait of the SA as a highly complex but ultimately toothless bureaucratic institution to which many Germans had only involuntarily belonged for a brief period.42 Shortly after the IMT’s verdict, in a letter from 5 November 1946, Klefisch claimed that the integration of the former Stahlhelmers into the SA had more or less saved the whole organization from punishment: ‘That the entire SA was not declared a criminal organization was to a good degree a consequence of the fact that it had incorporated a great deal of people from the Stahlhelm within its rank and file. The conduct of the latter had been proven to be without a flaw. It was simply not possible to label an entire organization as outright criminal if it contained such a great number of irreproachable members.’43

  However self-congratulatory this statement may have been, it is hard to ignore that the Nuremberg acquittal set a precedent for the handling of trials of former stormtroopers over the following decades, at least in the Federal Republic of Germany. Convictions by West German courts of individual stormtroopers remained limited to those implicated in the SA’s crimes during 1933, 1934, and Kristallnacht. The ‘public’, highly visible nature of attacks by the Brownshirts now backfired, as it often allowed for detailed reconstruction of these acts, even fifteen to twenty years later.44 Unsurprisingly, in the Soviet Zone of Occupation, Soviet and later also East German authorities took a particularly vivid interest in the prosecution of SA crimes that had been directed against members of the Communist and Socialist parties.45 Yet even in the Soviet Zone judicial attempts to punish Nazi crimes, initially intended to help legitimize the new political order, decreased dramatically once the GDR was firmly established in the early 1950s, demonstrating a remarkable parallel to the West German process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or ‘overcoming history’.46 By the mid-1950s even the long prison sentences imposed on SA guards from the former Hohnstein concentration camp could be suspended if the former stormtrooper agreed to spy for the newly established Ministry of State Security.47 In 1950, after a visit to her homeland, Hannah Arendt remarked that many Germans had willingly sought refuge in the belief that they had been victims of the nation’s ‘culture of obedience’ (Gehorsamkeitskultur).48 Millions of former stormtroopers ceased to acknowledge their prior (usually voluntary) commitment to National Socialism as ‘little guardians of the people’s community’.49 Furthermore, the West German Straffreiheitsgesetz of 31 December 1949, which granted an amnesty to those offenders sentenced to prison terms of less than six months, meant in practice that the majority of SA criminals were spared incarceration.50

  From the mid-1950s onward even former high-ranking SA leaders were able to live unmolested, with a few notable, yet ultimately unsatisfactory exceptions, such as that of Adolf-Heinz Beckerle.51 Across the board, convictions from the early post-1945 period were often suspended, and prison terms considerably shortened. The case of Wilhelm Schepmann, the last SA Chief of Staff, is instructive in this respect. In 1950 a Dortmund jury court had sentenced Schepmann to a modest prison term of nine months – not for his leadership role in the SA, but because of his involvement as Dortmund’s police president in the violent Nazi takeover of power in 1933.52 However, Schepmann, who had been successfully ‘denazified’ by a German court in Lüneburg in 1952, appealed the decision and was ultimately acquitted in 1954.53 Two years later he was elected deputy mayor for the city of Gifhorn in Lower Saxony. He died in 1970.

  The posthumous denazification of the former SA-Obergruppenführer and Nazi diplomat Dietrich von Jagow as a ‘lesser offender’ further illustrates the general tendency of post-war proceedings. The Freiburg Spruchkammer, the local denazification court, ruled on 13 February 1950 that von Jagow had not been involved in the production of propaganda for the Nazi cause and had held his offices – as SA-Obergruppenführer, Prussian state councillor, ambassador, and member of the Reichstag – ‘in an idealistic and decent spirit’. Consequently, the court granted him extensive extenuating circumstances.54 With von Jagow’s wife and seven children living in cramped conditions, it appears that the judges’ ruling was intended more to create the legal conditions that would permit his widow to receive a pension than to give a realistic portrayal of the deceased.

  The continuing use of key terms from the Nazi regime’s vocabulary long after 1945 testifies to the lasting effect of the National Socialist ‘revolution’ in morals and manners. In the words of the historian Bernhard Gotto, during the years following the ultimate defeat of the Nazi regime, its former leaders on the local, regional, and national levels actively
and often successfully worked toward the ‘invention of a “decent National Socialism”’ – one purified of ‘aberrations’ such as the persecution of the Jews or the Third Reich’s racial and exterminatory character. Instead, its proponents now emphasized the regime’s social goals and achievements.55 The 1949 attempt by Otto Strasser to re-establish his ‘Black Front’ under the cover name of Liga für die Wiederauferstehung Deutschlands (literally, the League for the Resurrection of Germany) fitted this pattern.56 Other former Nazis clung to their aggressive rhetoric. Such was the case, for example, with Gustaf Deuchler, the former professor of pedagogy at Hamburg University and stormtrooper who had enjoyed giving lectures in his brown shirt and had glorified the stormtroopers’ services on the home front. In 1952 he became one of the leading figures in the Hamburg branch of the Verein der Entnazifizierungsgeschädigten – literally, the Association of the Victims of Denazification. Deuchler characterized the denazification process in Hamburg as an effort of ‘reckless brutality’ and ‘boundless hate’, fuelled by an ‘obsession with retaliation’ that would never be extinguished.57

  By the mid-1950s even prior convictions for active participation in pogroms against and deportation of Jews – actions often euphemistically labelled in official documents as Aussiedlung, or ‘resettlement’ – no longer prevented an individual from being fully integrated into German post-war society. Such formulations stood in remarkable continuity with the language of the Nazi regime a decade earlier and often betrayed the intention of their users, who urged the public to overcome the burdens of the past and close the prior chapter of German history. As the municipal council of the Bavarian city of Treuchtlingen in 1956 explained with rare clarity, a harsh stance toward former National Socialists could no longer be justified, as the former Nazis who had taken part in the ‘anti-Jewish pogroms’ (Judenpogrome) and had therefore lost their positions in the first years after the war had since, to a large degree, had their former rights reinstated.58

  Stormtroopers as Misguided Idealists

  A telling example of the general tendency to integrate previously committed National Socialists back into society was the remarkable post-war career of the jurist Hans Gmelin, who in 1954 was elected mayor of his home town of Tübingen in Württemberg. A former law student at Eberhard Karls University who descended from one of the city’s respectable middle-class families, the ambitious Gmelin joined the Stahlhelm on 12 December 1931 and then was integrated into the SA in the autumn of 1933. In the years following he occupied several leading positions in the Württemberg branch of this organization while at the same time pursuing his professional goals. According to his own account from 1939, Gmelin served as the leader of four different SA Stürme (13/216, 56/125, 2/180, and 1/119) and was promoted to SA-Sturmbannführer on 9 November 1938. Gmelin had joined the NSDAP on 1 May 1937, after the entrance ban was lifted, and in the following year assumed leadership of the ‘Hanns Ludin’ company of the Sudeten German Free Corps, which was active from 19 September to 15 October 1938. Having passed this military litmus test, Hanns Ludin, at that time the leader of the SA-Gruppe Süd-West, offered Gmelin the position of a full-time SA-Standartenführer. Initially, the gifted young jurist preferred to enter the ranks of the Reich Ministry of Justice, but thanks to a compromise between the state judiciary and the SA he was appointed to the rank of Landgerichtsrat for life in May 1939, with the Reich Minister of Justice granting him a two-year leave to continue his career in the SA.59 After serving in the Wehrmacht until the end of 1940, Gmelin followed his mentor and friend Ludin into the Foreign Office in January 1941. Both men arrived in Bratislava in April of the same year.60

  In the Slovakian capital Gmelin’s office was located next door to his boss and he was also a friend of Franz Karmasin, the infamous Volksgruppenführer. Gmelin’s initials on several official documents from the German Embassy in Slovakia confirm his intimate knowledge of the deportation of the Slovakian Jews.61 In a lecture delivered at a party leadership meeting in Vienna in January 1944, Gmelin freely acknowledged that the policy of ‘Aryanization’ had served the Reich’s interests well. Even the fact that some Jews remained in Slovakia would help the Germans, he added, because as long as the Slovaks could still rob the Jews, it was unlikely that they would turn their backs on their protecting power, despite the Red Army’s advance.62 Later the same year, however, in November 1944, Himmler requested a complete overhaul of the German Embassy in Slovakia including the removal of Gmelin. After four years in office there, Gmelin would be on the way to turning into ‘half a Slovak’, Himmler argued.63 The Reichsführer-SS feared that Ludin’s and Gmelin’s good relations with local Fascists had made them blind to the risks of the latter changing sides as the Red Army’s advance became increasingly unstoppable.

  After spending more than three years in American and French internment camps from 1945 to 1948, Gmelin was classified a ‘lesser offender’ (category III) in Tübingen in July 1948.64 The court sentenced him to the minimum penalty for this category: a two-year probation period during which he was forbidden from becoming politically active. Despite this verdict the denazification panel stated that Gmelin had an ‘impeccable, clean character’. He had been a committed National Socialist, the judges admitted, but ‘he was no fanatic’ and during the days of the Third Reich he had believed that by ‘positive work’ the NSDAP could return to ‘moderate and reasonable positions’.65 Six years later Gmelin attempted to demonstrate precisely that.

  During his mayoral election address in Tübingen, printed verbatim in the regional newspaper Schwäbisches Tagblatt on 2 October 1954, Gmelin promised that he would deal openly with the Nazi past. In light of what the electorate in the city knew anyway, Gmelin opted for a kind of pre-emptive defence, addressing his time as SA--Führer and Nazi diplomat openly, but claiming that such functions within the Third Reich could not be taken as clear-cut indicators of one’s standpoint or actual behaviour at the time. When he was a young man, there had simply been no political alternative to the Nazis, Gmelin said. Later, ‘when the ship was sinking’ (i.e. when Germany was about to lose the war), he and the vast majority of his fellow Germans did not have the option of leaving the country – a thinly veiled jab against those who had left Germany for political reasons between 1933 and 1945.66 Gmelin asserted that he had suffered internal conflict during the war but insisted that, at a time when one could either obey orders or follow one’s conscience, he had always helped those who were dear to him (im eigenen Lebenskreis) and who had asked him for assistance. Tolerance had always been the guiding star of his personal and official conduct, he assured his listeners (Plate 32).67

  Even more characteristic of the zeitgeist of the mid-1950s was the controversy that followed Gmelin’s election. It started with the publication in Schwäbisches Tagblatt of an open letter of protest from Gerhard Ebeling, a professor of Protestant theology at Tübingen University. Ebeling lamented that the election of Gmelin indicated that the majority of voters did not care about the new mayor’s Nazi past – or, what was more likely, that they had voted for Gmelin precisely because of it. Calling the election an alarming sign of ‘re-Nazification’, Ebeling argued that even the end of the war had not produced a true victory over National Socialist ideology.68 In response, a storm of protest broke loose, filling the newspaper columns over the next few days. Most of the letters printed were written in favour of the new mayor. Several of them urged Christian clemency. Qualified men like Gmelin who had been successfully denazified should not be blamed for their youthful idealism until the end of their lives, these writers declared. A colleague of Ebeling, a certain Professor E. Hennig, even praised Gmelin’s personality as a true leader who had been admired by most of the rank-and-file stormtroopers. Hennig ascribed a ‘post-war psychosis’ to those criticizing Gmelin for his Nazi past and demanded an urgent end to the ‘collective verdicts of the Spruchkammern’.69 Many other writers complained about Professor Ebeling’s alleged arrogance, testifying to the endurance of the anti-intellectualism of
the Nazi years, even in an old university town.

  The SA repeatedly served as a point of reference in this debate. One writer noted that a speaker at a party rally had been prevented from continuing his speech after addressing the audience with the words ‘My dear comrades from the old SA’, while another writer assured Ebeling that ‘a brown shirt soaked in blood’ was no longer an item in demand in German society. According to this latter writer, he had dressed in such a shirt at the age of sixteen, but had since exchanged it for a prosthesis – an allusion to a war injury.70 Whereas most writers in defence of Gmelin signed their letters with their full names, those who sided with Ebeling more often remained anonymous. One female writer felt so threatened by the heated atmosphere in Tübingen that she explicitly asked to be identified by her initials only, declaring: ‘I have seen and heard the short-tempered and primitive supporters of Herr Gmelin!’71

  The highly popular Gmelin remained in office for twenty years after being re-elected as the only candidate in 1962, with a landslide victory of more than 94 per cent of the vote (on a 51.7 per cent turnout). He became a towering figure in local politics, committed in particular to the Franco-German reconciliation process.72 To his supporters, his post-war career symbolized West Germany’s successful transformation from Nazi dictatorship to Western democracy.73 According to his daughter, the SPD politician Herta Däubler-Gmelin (Germany’s Minister of Justice from 1998 to 2002), after the war Hans Gmelin devoted himself fully to the reconstruction of a democratic Germany in order to atone for his Nazi past, even as he continued to meet with ‘old comrades’ and actively helped them when possible. ‘This was one of the points that frequently led to heated arguments in our family,’ Däubler-Gmelin remembers, yet she also stresses that her father, after his initial reluctance, finally faced up to such criticism from within his own family.74 However, it is worth remembering that Hans Gmelin’s post-war career was only possible because of a combination of three factors: first, his trivialization of his SA activities in the 1930s as participation in a kind of sports club; second, his whitewashing of his time as a German diplomat in Slovakia; and third, a political environment in Württemberg that throughout the 1950s and 1960s continued to hold the National Socialist vision of a ‘people’s community’ in high esteem – perverted, or so it was argued, by the Nazi establishment once lured by the temptations of power.