CONCLUSION
Stormtroopers and National Socialism
As early as 1932 the stormtroopers had been deemed worthy objects of academic study, as revealed by a German PhD dissertation submitted to and accepted by Leipzig University’s Institut für Rassen- und Völkerkunde. The author of this study was a twenty-five-year-old student and SA man, Peter Sachse, the son of a Protestant pastor from Dittersbach in the Erzgebirge. For his dissertation Sachse had photographed and anthropometrically measured 300 stormtroopers from the Leipzig SA-Standarten 106 and 107 between November 1932 and February 1933. His findings – that the average height of Leipzig’s stormtroopers was 171 centimetres, their average weight was 64 kilograms, and their skulls were predominantly of the ‘brachycephal type’ – offer little more than an illustration of the curious state of a particular strand of German science in the 1930s, as they demonstrate only that Leipzig’s stormtroopers were rather average men for their times.1
However, one should be careful not to dismiss such studies too easily. That they were planned, undertaken, and from 1933 onward financed with public money sheds a spotlight on the close nexus existing in the 1930s between ideological preferences, political activity, and ‘scientific’ claims of racial superiority. At least those exemplary mechanics, bookkeepers, and construction workers photographed naked and so portrayed in this study were pleased to figure as visual representations of a racially superior type of German manhood. Yet, more importantly, the mentality expressed here would ultimately have significant repercussions for the Nazi bureaucrats’ settlement of stormtroopers in eastern Europe a few years later. Within the Third Reich race was a flexible concept and – despite its ideological pre-eminence – not the most important criterion when it came to questions of ethnicity, as the historian Gerhard Wolf has recently demonstrated with regard to the Deutsche Volksliste in German-occupied western Poland during the Second World War.2 While the Nazis were certainly racist and shared an axiomatic belief in the genetic inferiority of Slavs and ‘Semites’, part of the movement’s attraction for large segments of the German population was its apparent voluntarist character. Within the borders of a racially defined ‘people’s community’, personal dedication and ideological conviction were taken as markers of alleged racial superiority. This understanding not only benefited Nazi leaders such as Hitler and Goebbels who hardly represented the ideal ‘Aryan’ man, but also elevated rank-and-file Brownshirts to the status of an alleged racial elite that was called to transform German society according to Nazi ideals and lead the nation to a bright future.3
The previous chapters have analysed the origins, growth, and decline of the SA between 1921 and 1945. The story that emerged in them is one full of contradictions: high hopes and lasting disappointments, individual empowerment and collective mobilization, pressure to conform and pressure to obey, selfishness and comradeship, extreme violence and boredom. Prior histories of the stormtroopers did not fully grasp these contradictions. Because they generally concentrated on only one period of the SA’s existence and were primarily interested in the organization’s contribution to the Nazi rise to power rather than the consolidation of that regime, the mainstream historiography on the Third Reich has tended to downplay the importance of the SA. Consequently, recent work on subjects such as the voluntarist and coercive elements in Nazi society or the centrality of the regime’s colonial ambitions has frequently made no reference to the SA at all. To address this lacuna and suggest ways of overcoming it, I will here summarize the principal results of my analysis and discuss how they contribute to a new general history of National Socialism more broadly.
1. As the initial chapters of this book demonstrated in detail, the first National Socialist SA was established in Munich in 1920–1 and grew to considerable size and regional might up to 1923, when the Hitler Putsch took place. This early SA was a party-protection force typical of the early 1920s that embraced elements of both Wehrverbände and political terror organizations. The social composition of this early and rather insignificant SA was less working class than is usually claimed. Instead, students and members of the middle classes constituted a considerable portion of its rank and file and certainly dominated its leadership ranks, alongside the small band of older professional ex-militaries. Although this first SA was firmly rooted in Bavaria, with a slowly developing web of cells in neighbouring states such as Württemberg and Thuringia, its prominent activists (e.g. Maurice, Heines, Klintzsch, and Göring) originated from the northern and eastern parts of Germany. Antisemitism was from its inception the key element of both the early SA’s ideological convictions and its violent practices. Whereas the possibility of participating in antisemitic mob violence especially attracted young men in quest of excitement and purpose, many conservative politicians as well as the High Command of the Bavarian Reichswehr downplayed these youthful ‘excesses’, instead highlighting the importance of the SA as a bulwark against the Communist menace and pacifist tendencies within German society. The stormtroopers thus benefited from and at the same time contributed to the deepening rifts within German society following the First World War, but they remained too insignificant to challenge the existing order, let alone destabilize the state.
2. After the failed 1923 putsch, state authorities prohibited the SA. Despite the fact that many regional cells survived by adopting cover names and maintaining a loose connection to the Frontbann, Ernst Röhm’s new umbrella organization, they lacked coordination and in many cases developed into private forces at the disposal of regional Nazi luminaries. Against this background the internal reforms initiated by SA Chief of Staff Franz Pfeffer von Salomon in 1926 can be seen as an attempt to centralize power. They provided the organizational basis for the subsequent growth and national breakthrough of the SA between 1928 and 1930. Pfeffer von Salomon modelled the Brownshirts on the German army, allowed the organization a degree of financial autonomy, and organized a system for providing care to wounded party soldiers. It was this organizational framework that allowed the SA to cope with the massive increase in membership that it experienced from the late 1920s. The reinvigorated SA promoted a new style of mass politics that demanded absolute loyalty and high levels of personal and financial commitment in return for political orientation, job opportunities, and diverse outlets for male sociability. These benefits proved all the more alluring during difficult economic times, when many men found themselves unable to maintain a lifestyle that upheld the traditional ideas of respectable manhood. The habits promoted by the SA, with its own brands and rituals, was key to the group’s appeal in these years. It was based not on an elaborate set of theoretical ideas, but on feelings of community and self-empowerment. This dynamic did not go unnoticed. An important strand within the Christian churches attempted to ‘channel’ this energy into a new Volksmission, or Christian renewal, while at the same time deploring the stormtroopers’ excessive acts of violence. The Reichswehr likewise started to reach out to the SA in hopes of using it as a recruitment pool in the absence of compulsory military service. Cooperation between the two organizations was particularly intense in border areas.
3. The rise of the stormtroopers from scattered splinter groups into a powerful political organization, which mobilized followers like a social movement but operated on a tight hierarchical basis and attracted hundreds of thousands of men in the early 1930s, was as much a vital element as it was the result of the ‘vibrant and violent cultures of interwar Germany and Austria’.4 Although the SA was initially an urban phenomenon, by the early 1930s it had expanded into rural Germany, contributing to the ‘Nazification’ of the countryside, a fundamental step in the party’s rise to power. The increasingly violent character of political clashes throughout the Reich in the early 1930s further contributed to the SA’s popularity, and not only because it allowed the stormtroopers to prove themselves ‘in battle’. It also undermined the general public’s belief in the power of the state to enforce its monopoly on violence and in the eyes of the quickly growing numb
er of sympathizers justified the embrace of Nazi ‘self-help’. Despite circumstances to the contrary, the SA insisted on the purely defensive character of its actions, a view that an increasing number of judges and police officers came to accept. National Socialist victims of the political clashes of these years were indeed numerous, yet they were also a product of a deliberate party strategy that cynically sacrificed the lives of its rank and file in its drive to attain power.
Ultimately, the decisive appeal of the stormtroopers rested on the emotions and hopes they were able to evoke. The organizational principles of the SA encouraged the creation of strong bonds that provided leaders with self-esteem and influence and the rank and file with imagined social power. Whatever may be rightly said about the anxieties and fears of this period, with its social dislocations and leadership problems, it must be emphasized that the SA, in the eyes of its members, provided one forceful and seemingly persuasive answer to the omnipresent problem of (democratic) representation in interwar Germany. At a time when individual longing and national unity were increasingly seen as mutually exclusive, the SA ‘community of action’ created the impression of offering a solution to this fundamental problem of modern societies. It could be achieved, so the Nazi activists hoped, without giving up traditional liberal ideas of self-determination through education and economic independence in favour of a set of vague ‘totalitarian’ ideologies that eliminated the self by focusing on the collective, as previous historians have sometimes claimed. On the contrary, mass participation in paramilitary political movements such as the SA was – somewhat paradoxically – viewed as a way to reassert a male identity even in the absence of financial assets, family status, or particular professional and intellectual skills. Paramilitary participation was not seen as an exchange of individual identity for a new collective identity. The Fascist activists in mass organizations like the SA regarded themselves not as individuals, but as personalities. The SA’s popularity among male students in the early days of the Third Reich makes it clear that the common image of the stormtroopers as ‘losers’ only covers one segment of the organization’s followers, at least in the first half of the 1930s. The combination of an upbringing in times of material hardship and resentment, youthful idealism and bold self-esteem contributed to this unusual liaison of mind and muscle. True, the stormtroopers voluntarily subjugated themselves to the rule of a messianic Führer and his regional proxies, but they expected considerable rewards in return. Their commitment to the SA not only provided them with everyday guidance and a sense of spiritual salvation, but also empowered them to become leaders themselves, viewing their role as the guardians of the people’s community and the visual embodiment of the sacralized nation.5 It was not least this obscene pretentiousness that caused many contemporaries as well as later historians to avert their eyes from the SA and its violent ideology in disgust.
4. Somewhat counterintuitively, the year 1933 marked not only the heyday of the SA’s influence but also the beginning of its decline. Social unrest and disappointment among the ‘socialist’ faction of the SA, which had its strongholds in the northern and eastern industrial cities of Germany, had become an ever more pressing problem for the organization since the early 1930s, yet the NSDAP addressed it only half-heartedly. Instead, the constant assertion that Hitler’s chancellorship would solve all problems had increased the expectations of many rank-and-file stormtroopers to an extreme level. Combined with the strong desire for revenge after years of uncertainty and danger, these expectations translated into extreme violence in the spring of 1933. Stormtroopers hunted down, incarcerated, and murdered their political and ideological adversaries. Besides overseeing provisional concentration camps that interned approximately 80,000 people over the course of 1933, the SA also engaged in highly symbolic acts of public humiliation in which their victims, who were overwhelmingly men, were ‘feminized’ and the Brownshirts’ own (hyper-)masculine identities were reasserted. Jews in particular became the target of degrading practices, and even those who were not imprisoned and tortured suffered from the nationwide boycotts that took place in March and April of this year. That SA leaders were appointed police presidents in many German cities and regions at this time rendered the stormtroopers de facto immune from prosecution, even if some unsung heroes within the German justice system attempted (largely in vain) to punish at least the most outrageous crimes.
In return for carrying out the ‘dirty work’ of the National Socialist seizure of power, the SA men expected to receive material and symbolic rewards. Hundreds of thousands of stormtroopers did indeed benefit from special initiatives that aimed to provide previously unemployed SA men with work, or at least with shelter and a small pay cheque in one of the more than sixty SA ‘auxiliary camps’. Particularly effective was the appointment of stormtroopers as auxiliary policemen, a solution that allowed political and employment strategies to converge. However, Röhm’s attempt to irrevocably influence the course of politics during the Nazi ‘revolution’, by appointing SA ‘special representatives’ to control and influence the German bureaucracy, quickly failed, for both ideological and practical reasons. He succeeded, however, in channelling millions of reichsmark to his organization and at least in Bavaria was able to become an influential figure who shaped regional politics through a dense web of allies. Nationwide, the SA received at least 72 million reichsmark from the governments in 1933–4, with most of the money trickling down to the local and regional levels.
5. In the years following the Nazi takeover of power, the party’s appeal extended beyond the ideologically faithful. Social integration in National Socialist Germany must be analysed as a product of the interaction between ‘staged’ (i.e. party-orchestrated) community experiences and everyday practices, a blend that provided individuals with a sense of emotional belonging and the possibility of pursuing their individual goals.6 My account of the history of the SA has attempted to combine and examine the interaction of these different analytical angles in order to better explain the violent mobilization and individual attraction of National Socialism. Particularly during 1933 and 1934 the stormtroopers fulfilled a dual role. First, they provided millions of German men with the opportunity to join the Nazi camp and thereby benefit from the new pool of political and job opportunities. Second, they violently enforced the regime’s segregationist policies and contributed to the implementation of an ‘antisemitic Konsensfiktion’, namely the phenomenon that – regardless of one’s actual approval or disapproval of Nazi antisemitic policies – interpersonal communication in the Third Reich increasingly proceeded from the assumption that the majority of Germans took such consent for granted.7
Although the SA continued to exercise these roles well into the 1940s, hopes for personal advancement through service in the organization as well as far-reaching hopes of transforming the German economy and society according to ‘German Socialist’ principles came to an abrupt end in the summer of 1934 with the ‘Night of the Long Knives’. After this event, disciplinary integration in and through the SA mattered more than political mass mobilization, particularly as the regime adopted other means of coercion. Belonging to the people’s community was no longer guaranteed by membership in one of the many Nazi organizations but became a state of permanent uncertainty. The individual Volksgenosse had continually to prove his or her worthiness by performing social acts that demonstrated persistent commitment to the cause. This became difficult for many SA men once their political opponents had been defeated, as their previous ways of distinguishing themselves – by street-fighting, violent acts, or forms of ‘manly’ sociability such as heavy drinking and the symbolic occupation of public places – increasingly proved inadequate.
The murder of Röhm and his followers in 1934 combined with the liquidation of key anti-Nazi ‘neoconservatives’ fundamentally altered the history of the Third Reich. The regime now started to exploit the homophobic prejudices previously nurtured by the anti-Fascist left to discredit National Socialism in order to stigmati
ze the SA leadership corps as morally questionable. At the same time it actively sought to appeal to the desire of rank-and-file stormtroopers for order, ‘cleanliness’, and völkisch morality. To friends and foes alike, the Nazi dictatorship made it unmistakably clear that it would respect neither legal limits nor previous political norms.
6. The men who continued to engage in the SA after 1934 were a remarkably heterogeneous group, comprising people from different walks of life. Besides the predominantly working-class ‘Old Fighters’, who remained loyal to the SA out of a mixture of ideological conviction and a lack of professional and social alternatives, there were also middle-class men who regarded membership in the SA as a means of demonstrating loyalty to the regime without giving up their hobbies of shooting and riding, important areas of male middle-class sociability in interwar Germany. By contrast, young men from the lower-middle and working classes who entered the ranks of the elite Feldherrnhalle units in the late 1930s deliberately opted for a career in the military, embracing the group’s ideological leanings. Finally, the Volksdeutsche who joined the new units established in the annexed and occupied territories after 1938 saw membership in the SA as a chance to participate in and benefit from the new political regime. However, as the war continued and the SA was more and more used for police tasks to help uphold public order, service in the SA and its Wehrmannschaften was transformed from a voluntary commitment to compulsory service.
7. The stormtroopers, despite being barred from involvement in upper-level decision-making since 1934, continued for the remaining years of the Nazi regime to be principal actors in the enforcement of the NSDAP’s will in everyday life. They were ‘coercive instruments of violence’, ‘protecting’ the racial community of Germans against its alleged enemies to the bitter end,8 but they were also involved in securing public order in the Nazi-occupied and annexed territories as well as on the home front in the Old Reich. Although the SA suffered severely from the drafting of the majority of its more than one million members into the Wehrmacht beginning in the autumn of 1939, the organization continued to provide a multitude of services to the regime until 1945. These services were not limited to the provision of paramilitary education and ideological training. They also comprised the transport and guarding of prisoners and concentration-camp inmates, the policing of forced labourers, the provision of paramilitary fighting units that operated undercover behind the front lines, and the carrying out of more ‘civilian’-style tasks – the organization of clean-up operations after air raids on German cities and the provision of aid to wounded soldiers and their families. In order to preserve what they perceived as a ‘spiritual and emotional defence community’,9 many stormtroopers continued to engage in deadly violence up until the last weeks of the Third Reich.
Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts Page 48
