Mutilated Stories
During the 1950s historians also started to contribute to the narrative of the SA’s relative political impotence. Particularly relevant in this respect was Dr Heinrich Bennecke, leader of the SA University Offices in 1933–4.75 This formerly high-ranking SA leader started to work in the late 1950s as an associate researcher with the prestigious Institute for Contem-porary Research in Munich (IfZ), established in 1949 as the Deutsches Institut für Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Zeit, literally the ‘German Institute for the History of the National Socialist Time’.76 The surviving correspondence between the IfZ and Bennecke begins in 1958 and ends in the late 1960s. Both parties benefited from their collaboration, exchanging documents, expertise, and money. Bennecke prepared notes and short exposés on the history of the SA for the institute’s internal use, commented on manuscripts and books, and interviewed former National Socialist leaders, most often using a set of questions provided by the IfZ.77 From time to time the institute paid him modest sums: initially, he received a kind of honorarium of between 50 and 200 marks,78 but ultimately a contract was drawn up that guaranteed Bennecke a total of 3,600 marks for interviews to be held with former Nazis between 1 July and 31 December 1963.79
Bennecke’s attempts to be employed by the IfZ on a regular basis failed.80 Nevertheless, his collaboration with the institute not only provided him with the financial means to conduct interviews with fellow high-ranking Nazis, but also helped him become a respectable scholar on the SA in the 1960s. Based on his inside knowledge from twenty years as a leading stormtrooper, combined with his unique access to unpublished documents provided by the IfZ, Bennecke completed two monographs: Hitler und die SA (1962) and Die Reichswehr und der ‘Röhm-Putsch’ (1964).81 Both books concentrated on the SA’s history between the mid-1920s and the ‘Röhm purge’ and remained standard German-language books in the field until the 1980s. In early 1963 he also prepared a manuscript on the history of the SA between 1918 and 1923 that was bought by the IfZ but never appeared in print.82 Another of his manuscripts, commissioned by the German Federal Archives, was published only in 2012.83 Bennecke knew very well that these books only dealt with the middle period of the SA’s existence, completely leaving out the post-1934 period.84 Nevertheless, based on his reputation as a researcher, Bennecke was invited to teach various courses on the political history of the Weimar Republic at the Hochschule für Politische Wissenschaften in Munich (today’s Hochschule für Politik) between 1967 and 1972.85
In his works, Bennecke took a traditional political history approach that focused on a close circle of Nazi leaders and belittled the level of violence exercised before and after 30 January 1933. Although his publisher claimed that the first book on the SA was not written ‘with the intent of justification’ but had been inspired by the author’s ‘love of truth’, a critical reading demonstrates that Bennecke made every effort to distinguish between Hitler and the SA. Writing about the organization’s early days in Munich, he described the SA as a Wehrverband by the grace of Ehrhardt and Röhm, diminishing the role played by the NSDAP and Hitler in its formation.86 In this respect the title of the book should be translated as ‘Hitler and the SA’, not ‘Hitler’s SA’. Bennecke consistently downplayed the stormtroopers’ notorious antisemitism and the Nazi terror campaign that unfolded in the summer of 1932, which for him was only a reaction to ‘pre-election terror from the left’.87 Discussing the Nazi leadership’s strong support for the Potempa murders, which peaked with Hitler’s telegram promising ‘unreserved loyalty’ to the perpetrators, Bennecke emphasized that these actions were above all intended as a declaration of war to von Papen. He even claimed that not only Hitler, but ‘probably also many of the newspaper readers back then’, had thought it embarrassing that the National Socialists involved in the Potempa murders had received much harsher sentences than had those members of the Reichsbanner who were standing trial at the same time in another Silesian city, Brieg, for their involvement in a political clash that had taken place in Ohlau on 10 July 1932. What Bennecke did not say was that the lighter punishments in the Ohlau case were partly attributable to the fact that the crimes had been committed in the weeks before the emergency decree against political terror came into effect.88 The late Weimar logic of setting one crime in opposition to another still very much shaped Bennecke’s political thinking in post-war Germany.89
Nevertheless, his studies were seen as important contributions to the field in the 1960s and 1970s, not only because of their intimate knowledge but also because of a lack of alternatives on the book market.90 In hindsight, Bennecke’s historical writings on the SA illustrate the general problem that dogged the early IfZ’s efforts to write an ‘objective’ and purely ‘factual’ history of the recent past. As critics like historian Nicolas Berg have argued, the heavy emphasis on ‘primary sources’, which necessarily relied on official documents in which the Nazi perspective was encoded, involuntarily favoured a narrative that followed the paths chalked out by the regime – all the more so in cases such as Bennecke’s, in which the interpreting historian was identical to the former historical agent.91
Politics of Remembrance
The most up-to-date historical scholarship inevitably has only limited power in resolving contemporary public debates, as the public perception and memory of the stormtroopers in Germany after the Second World War demonstrates.92 Historians ranging from the academically trained Bennecke to the journalist Heinrich Höhne with his best-selling book Mordsache Röhm (1984),93 also serialized in the influential weekly Der Spiegel, remained interested in the SA’s role in politics in the 1920s and early 1930s. However, beginning in the 1970s, many Germans were more disposed to remember the Brownshirts’ public appearances, marches, brawls, and terror alongside their standing in their local communities. Whereas most ordinary people had not had close personal contact with the SS, SD, or Gestapo, the Nazi organizations mainly responsible for the regime’s crimes, the stormtroopers had been familiar figures – neighbours, colleagues from work, the ambitious schoolteacher, or, in more unfortunate circumstances, the notorious village underachiever, who, merely because of his uniform, was for once in his life given the opportunity to look down on and dominate others.
The vast majority of former Nazi activists were able to enjoy the fruits of the German Wirtschaftswunder, or ‘Economic Miracle’, after the war. The social and interpersonal networks of the pre-1945 period often survived the war, particularly in the countryside and in small cities. German shooting associations, riders clubs, and sports clubs – which in many cases had been integrated into or at least presided over by the SA in the 1930s – continued to operate, ignoring or passing over in eloquent silence the twelve years of the Third Reich. When German men told stories of the Nazi past, they usually spoke about the years of the Second World War, in which the majority of them had been conscripted. Fighting for the homeland and suffering as a soldier of the allegedly ‘clean Wehrmacht’ made a much better impression than insisting on one’s voluntary contribution to the Nazi project as a brown-shirted stormtrooper.94 Because of the modest educational background of many former rank-and-file SA men, detailed autobiographies recounting their youthful political activism remained extremely rare. Whereas the veterans of the Waffen-SS in post-war West Germany regularly met for ‘comradely gatherings’ that attracted up to several thousand people, no SA veterans’ organizations were created.95 Slowly but surely the SA as an organization that had not only contributed to the Nazi terror, but also shaped the lives of millions of German men and their families, vanished from public memory.
Against this background it is not surprising that some former SA leaders even became respected local dignitaries or had successful second careers as journalists, politicians, and environmental campaigners. Particularly noteworthy is the post-war career of the long-time SA propagandist and SA-Obersturmbannführer Hans Sponholz, whose books about the stormtroopers from the 1930s and early 1940s have been cited in previous chapters.9
6 A journalist for the conservative Bavarian newspaper Merkur for many years, he also enjoyed a modest political career in the Bavaria Party. Sponholz became regionally famous as a highly regarded conservationist who initiated the Association for the Protection of the Ebersbach Forest (Schutzgemeinschaft Ebersberger Forst), an environmentalist group that decisively prevented the Bavarian State government from permitting the construction of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in the extensive woodlands east of Munich. Sponholz’s rhetoric in the environmental campaigns of the 1960s illustrates the degree to which the passage from Volksgemeinschaft to Schutzgemeinschaft was at times a short one: ‘Nature conservancy must be ready for battle,’ the former SA propagandist now urged.97 For his commitment he was awarded the Bavarian Conservation Award (Bayerischer Naturschutzpreis) in 1973, together with the famous behaviourist and Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz.98 Sponholz also received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1980, and two streets in the region were named in his honour. However, his Wikipedia entry as of late 2015 provided no details of his post-1945 career and listed the date of his death as ‘unknown’.99
Starting in the late 1970s, the history of the everyday gained prominence in the Federal Republic, inspired by the History Workshop movement in Britain and by the Swedish author Sven Lindquist, who memorably proclaimed, ‘Dig where you stand!’ Action groups now began to work on local and regional histories of the Third Reich, tracing the roots of former Nazi networks and identifying their main participants.100 Members of these groups located former SA prisons and early concentration camps and recorded the biographies of those ordinary men and women who had fallen victim to the Nazi terror. After what were often long delays, some of these historic places of violence were transformed into museums, as with the prison of the SA Field Police in Berlin’s General-Pape-Straße, which opened to the general public in 2013. Some thirty years passed after residents of the area had learned about the former use of their cellars before the commemoration of SA violence could be institutionalized in the form of this museum.101 In the eastern part of the city, by contrast, ‘Köpenick’s week of bloodshed’ in June 1933 was commemorated as early as 1945. In the decades to follow, the GDR made considerable efforts to remember the early Nazi terror, yet it also shaped this remembrance to fit its own anti-Fascist founding myth. As with the former SA prison in General-Pape-Straße, the district of Berlin-Köpenick today supports a small museum to commemorate the early Nazi terror.102
Contrary to Bennecke’s attempts to portray the stormtroopers as misguided idealists, the increasingly dominant view saw them as little more than ruffians, dim-witted toughs, or uniformed philistines (Spießbürger), who under the influence of alcohol turned into part-time hooligans. In light of this development, it is not surprising that comparisons with the SA were used early on in both German states to denounce organizations and individuals for political purposes (Plate 33). Two examples demonstrate the tone and character of such comparisons. First, in the heated atmosphere of the Cold War, Heinrich von Brentano, Foreign Minister of the Federal Republic, in a parliamentary speech in 1957 defended the decision of his ministry not to financially support a guest performance in Paris by the Bochum municipal theatre of Bertolt Brecht’s famous Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera), using the argument that the writer’s ‘late lyrics’ could only be compared with the poems of the SA bard Horst Wessel. Such a comparison was utter nonsense, of course, at least from an artistic point of view. Brentano was taking deliberate aim at Brecht the politician, who after the war had accepted a call from East Berlin and, at least in the eyes of West Germany, was now providing the Communist rulers with support in return for personal privileges.103 Brentano’s comparison might also have been a clumsy attempt to counter the persistent revelations by the GDR, the self-declared ‘Better Germany’, of the Nazi past of several high functionaries within the Federal Republic.104
The second example dates back to the late 1960s. With emotions running high in the streets, lecture halls, and newspaper offices of West Berlin in the summer of 1968, the best-selling staunchly anti-Communist tabloid Bild, published by Springer Press, denounced the protesting students as being like new Brownshirts: ‘They must see blood. They wave the red flag and believe the red flag. Here the fun ends [. . .] and democratic tolerance. We have something against SA methods.’105 The Marxist philosopher Theodor W. Adorno joined in such criticism, yet on a very different intellectual and personal level. The former emigrant of German-Jewish descent was shocked when confronted with the tumultuous ‘teach-ins’ at West German universities in the late 1960s. He regarded the most radical students not as members of a new political avant-garde but as ‘stormtroopers in jeans’.106 Similarly, the political scientist Ernst Fraenkel, who in The Dual State (1941) had offered a pioneering analysis of National Socialism, warned members of the left-wing Socialist German Student League (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, or SDS) to abstain from ‘exactly the same methods as the raiding squads of the SA’.107
More recent scholarship has sometimes echoed such views when accusing the more radical protesters of 1968 of ‘Nazi hooliganism’, a charge referring in particular to these students’ frequent shouting down of those professors who were not to their liking.108 Students in the late 1960s in turn used similar metaphors to denounce the alleged ‘pogrom journalism’ of the Springer Press.109 In their eyes the work of these journalists deliberately sought to provoke physical violence. The students regarded Springer as a cornerstone of the repressive ‘capitalist system’ that had allegedly been established in the Federal Republic. Both antagonistic views shared common ground in referring to the Nazi past to denigrate their political enemies. Remarkably, these political fights continued to carry echoes of the interwar period.
Over the last decade or so the number of people who could personally remember the SA has diminished for natural reasons. However, the Brownshirts have remained a point of reference in German public debate, particularly with regard to acts of political and criminal violence. This was most obvious in the early 1990s, immediately after reunification, when waves of xenophobic riots broke out across the country. The most notorious incidents were the assaults in Rostock-Lichtenhagen, a Plattenbau area in one of the largest cities of the former GDR, in August 1992, and the arson attacks in the West German cities of Mölln in November 1992 and Solingen in May 1993 during which, respectively, three and five people were killed. The liberal politician Cornelia Schmalz-Jacobsen of the Free Democratic Party, acting as federal commissioner for foreigners, commented at the time on these outbursts of violence in a way that illustrated the still-vivid memory of the Nazi years, at least among older Germans: ‘Human beings are being hunted down as they were in the worst times of the SA.’110 This comparison was obviously incorrect insofar as the xenophobic riots of the 1990s, unlike those of the Third Reich, were not sponsored by the government. The perpetrators rather understood their violence as a sign of their frustration with the political establishment, and their excessively nationalistic slogans were at least partly a sign of desperation in the face of a quickly changing political and economic environment.
New outbursts of political and racial violence have taken place in Germany since the autumn of 2015. However, despite this development, ‘SA’ as one of the most contested political catchwords of twentieth-century Germany has continued to lose its power. Attempts by right-wing extremists to re-establish the stormtroopers as exemplary role models of patriotic pride and political activism have failed and seem unlikely to achieve success in the near future.111 The history of the SA meanwhile is a genuine historical topic, yet it amounts to more than an academic exercise. The defeat of National Socialism and the subsequent establishment of a capitalist democracy in Germany is rightly seen as a political, economic, and social success story, yet it will not be the end of history. Significant numbers of youths in search of a transcendental, national, or social vision that provides them with meaning and a place in the world
continue to be attracted to physical violence. A society that glorifies the satisfaction of consumer and bodily desires through means that are beyond the reach of many of its younger citizens invites both criticism and violence, if only as a means to express frustration and helplessness. The history of the Nazi stormtroopers between 1921 and 1945 provides a poignant example of the forces that this mixture of youthful longing, political exploitation, militaristic predisposition, and social degeneration can unleash. Although this particular example is historically specific, its patterns are not unique to either a single time or a single place. Political regimes based on violent mobilization and disciplinary integration are still widespread; to overcome them by advocating more peaceful and humane ways for communities to coexist remains as important as it has ever been.
Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts Page 47
