Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts

by Daniel Siemens

  7.On the early Reichswehr and its clandestine paramilitary forces, the so-called ‘Black Reichswehr’, see Bergien, Die bellizistische Republik, pp. 107–30; Francis L. Carsten, Reichswehr und Politik (Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1964), pp. 168–173; Franz von Gaertner, Die Reichswehr in der Weimarer Republik: Erlebte Geschichte (Darmstadt: Fundus, 1969), pp. 129–35. For partisan views on the extremely controversial topic of the ‘Black Reichswehr’ in the 1920s and 1930s, see the ‘defence statements’ by Bruno Ernst Buchrucker, Im Schatten Seeckt’s: Die Geschichte der ‘Schwarzen Reichswehr’ (Berlin: Kampf-Verlag, 1928); Friedrich Wilhelm von Oerzen, Die Deutschen Freikorps 1918–1923 (Munich: Bruckmann, 1938), pp. 462–73; for a critical voice of the 1920s, see Emil Julis Gumbel, Verschwörer (Vienna: Malick, 1924), pp. 100–17.

  8.The historian Peter Keller has recently argued that the use of Freikorps as a catch-all term for those military units that operated with the consent of the German government, but were not officially part of the Reichswehr, largely stems from a tradition invented in the 1930s. Instead of Freikorps, Keller prefers the term Regierungstruppen – government forces. See Peter Keller, ‘Die Wehrmacht der Deutschen Republik ist die Reichswehr’: Die deutsche Armee 1918–1921 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2014), pp. 81–101. See also Sprenger, Landsknechte; Perry Biddiscombe, ‘The End of the Freebooter Tradition: The Forgotten Freikorps Movement of 1944/45’, Central European History 32:1 (1999), pp. 53–90, here p. 58; Kai Uwe Tapken, Die Reichswehr in Bayern von 1919 bis 1924 (Hamburg: Kovač, 2002), p. 115; Schulze, Freikorps und Republik, pp. 35–47.

  9.Richard Bessel, ‘Militarismus im innenpolitischen Leben der Weimarer Republik: Von den Freikorps zur SA’, in Militär und Militarismus in der Weimarer Republik: Beiträge eines internationalen Symposiums an der Hochschule der Bundeswehr Hamburg am 5. und 6. Mai 1977, ed. Klaus-Jürgen Müller and Eckardt Opitz (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1978), pp. 193–222, here pp. 200–3.

  10.Jan-Philipp Pomplun, ‘Freikorps als personelle und organisatorische Keimzellen des Nationalsozialismus? Eine sozial- und politikgeschichtliche Untersuchung am Beispiel süddeutscher Einheiten’, speech delivered at the conference ‘Wegbereiter des Nationalsozialismus: Personen, Organisationen, Netzwerke des völkisch-antisemitischen Aktivismus 1919–1933’, Gelsenkirchen, 30 September–2 October 2013. According to Pomplun, 1 per cent of former Freikorps members later joined the SS, and 17 per cent became members of the NSDAP. The previously dominant perspective emphasized the continuity in membership between Freikorps units and the Nazi Party; see Robert G. L. Waite, Vanguard of Nazism: The Free Corps Movement in Postwar Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970); Bernhard Sauer, ‘Freikorps and Antisemitismus in der Weimarer Republik’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 56:1 (2008), pp. 5–29, here p. 29; Bessel, ‘Militarismus im innenpolitischen Leben der Weimarer Republik’, p. 202.

  11.After the failed Kapp Putsch in March 1920, Hermann Ehrhardt moved his brigade from Berlin to Munich, where Bavarian authorities welcomed him and his men. He then set up a secret terror organization, the Organization Consul (OC), under the guise of the Bayerische Holzverwertungsgesellschaft, literally the ‘Bavarian Forest and Wood Company’. For details, see Gabriele Krüger, Die Brigade Ehrhardt (Hamburg: Leibnitz, 1971), pp. 68–99.

  12.The Freikorps Epp, named after its leader Franz Xaver Ritter von Epp (1868–1947), was founded in Thuringia as the Bavarian Free Corps for the Protection of the Eastern Frontier in the spring of 1919. It participated in the toppling of the Munich Soviet Republic in May 1919 and later that month was integrated into the provisional Reichswehr as the 1. Bayerisches Schützenregiment, literally the ‘First Bavarian Shooters Regiment’. Later leading National Socialist politicians Rudolf Hess, Ernst Röhm, and Gregor and Otto Strasser were all members of the Freikorps Epp. See Bruno Thoß, ‘Freikorps Epp’, in Historisches Lexikon Bayerns, http://www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de/artikel/artikel_44494; Katja-Maria Wächter, Die Macht der Ohnmacht: Leben und Politik des Franz Xaver Ritter von Epp (1868–1946) (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1999), pp. 53–113.

  13.On the Freikorps Oberland that in 1921 was renamed Bund Oberland, see Hans Fenske, Konservatismus und Rechtsradikalismus in Bayern nach 1918 (Berlin and Zurich: Gehlen, 1969), pp. 53–6, 159–64; Reinhold Friedrich, Spuren des Nationalsozialismus im bayerischen Oberland: Schliersee und Hausham zwischen 1933 und 1945 (Norderstedt: Books on Demand, 2011), pp. 76–90; Rüdiger Ahrens, Bündische Jugend: Eine neue Geschichte 1918–1933 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015), p. 56.

  14.The best book that provides a comprehensive picture of Munich society during the war and post-war years is Martin Geyer, Verkehrte Welt: Revolution, Inflation und Moderne. München 1914–1924 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), here esp. pp. 94–129.

  15.David Clay Large, The Politics of Law and Order: A History of the Bavarian Einwohnerwehr, 1918–1921 (Philadelphia, PA: The American Philosophical Society, 1980), pp. 3–4, 20–6; ‘Ein “Bund der erwachenden Bayern”’, Das Jüdische Echo 9:11, 17 March 1922, p. 146. On the Bavarian Einwohnerwehren, see also the older but still relevant accounts by Fenske, Konservatismus und Rechtsradikalismus, pp. 76–112; Werner Gabriel Zimmermann, Bayern und das Reich 1918–1923 (Munich: R. Pflaum Verlag, 1953), pp. 98–104.

  16.Large, The Politics of Law and Order, pp. 25–31, 39, 43. In contrast to Large, Dirk Schumann has argued that the Einwohnerwehr movement had only a limited influence on the radicalization of the middle classes, at least in Saxony: Schumann, Politische Gewalt in der Weimarer Republik, p. 361. For Bavaria, however, this nexus is irrefutable.

  17.On the Orgesch, see Christoph Hübner, ‘Organisation Escherich (Orgesch), 1920/21’, in Historisches Lexikon Bayerns, http://www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de/artikel/artikel_44558.

  18.Dietrich Orlow, Weimar Prussia 1918–1925: The Unlikely Rock of Democracy (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986). See also his second volume: Weimar Prussia 1925–1933: The Illusion of Strength (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991); as well as Hans-Peter Ehni, Preußen-Regierung, Reich-Länder-Problem und Sozialdemokratie 1928–1932 (Bonn: Neue Gesellschaft, 1975). For a first-hand account, see the memoirs of the former Prussian Minister of the Interior, Albert C. Grzesinski, Inside Germany (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1939).

  19.Revealing in this context is that the Bavarian government did not accept the Reich laws designed to protect the democratic order after the murder of the Foreign Minister, Walther Rathenau, on 24 June 1922, which was the most prominent of a series of political murders between 1919 and 1922 that were meant to punish those whom the nationalist right branded as appeasement politicians, traitors to the German cause, and Jews. See Martin Sabrow, Die verdrängte Verschwörung: Der Rathenau-Mord und die deutsche Gegenrevolution (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1999); Ulrike Claudia Hofmann, ‘Verräter verfallen der Feme!’ Fememorde in Bayern in den zwanziger Jahren (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000); Gumbel, Verschwörer.

  20.Maurice, born in 1897 in Westermoor near Itzehoe in Schleswig-Holstein, had come to Munich in October 1917. There, he briefly worked as a watchmaker, his learned profession, before he was drafted into the military, where he was wounded but apparently never deployed in combat. He was released from the army on 25 January 1919 and returned to his former employer. Apparently aided by the introduction of the eight-hour workday, which gave him more spare time, Maurice became involved in politics and the world of paramilitarism over the course of 1919. He joined the new Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP) in late 1919, played leading roles in the SA and later the SS, and in 1923 participated in the Beer Hall Putsch. Protected by Hitler, with whom he was on an intimate footing beginning in the early 1920s, Maurice became a Munich city councilman in 1933 and president of the Munich Chamber of Crafts in 1936. On his early life, see the Bavarian police’s note about him from 3 November 1921 in StA München, Pol. Dir. 6804, pp. 1–2; on his later life, see Anna Maria Sigmund, Des Führers bester Freund: Adolf Hitler, seine Nichte Geli Raubal und der ‘Ehrenarier�
� Emil Maurice – eine Dreiecksbeziehung (Munich: Heyne, 2003).

  21.StA München, Pol. Dir. 6803, pp. 1–7, here p. 2: Memorandum of the Bavarian Police on the Self-Defence Leagues, undated.

  22.Longerich, Geschichte der SA, p. 23; Fenske, Konservatismus und Rechtsradikalismus, pp. 77–8; Werner, SA und NSDAP, pp. 19–27; Jeremy Noakes, The Nazi Party in Lower Saxony, 1921–1933 (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 24–5.

  23.Paul Hoser, ‘Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Arbeiterverein e.V. (NSDAV), 1920–1923/1925–1935’, Historisches Lexikon Bayerns, http://www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de/artikel/artikel_44775.

  24.Auer acted as Minister of the Interior in the revolutionary government in 1918–19 and was from 1919 until 1933 the leader of the Bavarian SPD. See Markus Schmalzl, Erhard Auer – Wegbereiter der parlamentarischen Demokratie in Bayern (Laßleben: Kallmünz, 2013), pp. 468–79. While the SPD in exile in 1934 still knew that the Nazis had ‘stolen’ the term ‘SA’ from the Bavarian Social Democrats, this knowledge came to be forgotten later. See Sopade, Deutschland-Berichte, vol. 1 (1934), p. 262.

  25.On Valley, see Friedrich Hitzer, Anton Graf Arco: Das Attentat auf Kurt Eisner und die Schüsse im Landtag (Munich: Knesebeck and Schuler, 1988).

  26.Wilhelm Buisson (1892–1940) had studied pharmacy science in Munich between 1913 and 1920, with an interruption for his military service. With the help of Auer, he was able to open his own pharmacy in 1924. Two years later he started to volunteer as ‘leisure warden’ (Vergnügungswart) for the Bayern Munich sports club. He was sentenced to death because of his anti-Fascist activities in the 1930s, and the Nazis executed him on 6 September 1940 in Berlin-Plötzensee. His role as a Social Democratic activist in the early 1920s is virtually unknown. For biographical details, see Dietrich Schulze-Marmeling, Der FC Bayern und seine Juden: Aufstieg und Zerschlagung einer liberalen Fußballkultur (Göttingen: Die Werkstatt, 2011), pp. 190–1, 239; ‘Erinnerungstag 2015 – Wilhelm Buisson – FC Bayern-Funktionär und Widerstandskämpfer’, Südkurvenbladdl Onlinemagazin, http://suedkurvenbladdl.org/erinnerungstag-2015-wilhelm-buisson-fc-bayern-funktionaer-und-widerstandskaempfer.

  27.StA München, Pol. Dir. 6803, pp. 13–15: Memorandum of the Bavarian Police on the SA of the NSDAP, undated (but after 3 February 1923); Robert Hofmann, ‘Auergarde, 1919–1924’, Historisches Lexikon Bayerns, http://www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de/artikel/artikel_44656; Günther Gerstenberg, Freiheit! Sozialdemokratischer Selbstschutz im München der zwanziger und frühen dreißiger Jahre (Munich: Eulenspiegeldruck, 1997), vol. 1, p. 75.

  28.On the origins and first years of the Reichsbanner, see Benjamin Ziemann, Contested Commemorations: Republican War Veterans and Weimar Political Culture (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 60–94; idem, Die Zukunft der Republik? Das Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold 1924–1933 (Bonn: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 2011), pp. 13–20; Carsten Voigt, Kampfbünde der Arbeiterbewegung: Das Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold und der Rote Frontkämpferbund in Sachsen 1924–1933 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2009).

  29.See StA München, Pol. Dir. 6804, p. 52: Memorandum from Bauerreiter of the Munich police, 3 November 1921.

  30.Given the overwhelming evidence on this point, it is striking that the Bavarian police under Pöhner in a memo from 1923 still claimed that the National Socialist stormtroopers had never taken the offensive. See StA München, Pol. Dir. 6803, pp. 13–15, here p. 13: Memorandum from the Bavarian Police on the SA of the NSDAP, undated (but after 3 February 1923).

  31.Johannes Schwarze, Die bayrische Polizei und ihre historische Funktion bei der Aufrechterhaltung der öffentlichen Sicherheit in Bayern von 1919–1933 (Munich: Wölfle, 1977), p. 151.

  32.BayHStA, MInn, no. 71712, pp. 32–4, here p. 33: Letter from the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior to the Police Headquarters in Munich, 11 February 1921.

  33.StA München, Pol. Dir. 6803, p. 8: Note by the Bavarian police, 24 September 1921.

  34.BayHStA, MInn, no. 71712, pp. 32–4: Letter from the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior to the Police Headquarters in Munich, 11 February 1921.

  35.StA München, Pol. Dir. 6803, pp. 13–15: Memorandum of the Bavarian Police on the SA of the NSDAP, undated (but after 3 February 1923).

  36.On the early SA in Bavaria, see above all Longerich, Geschichte der SA, pp. 9–44; Eric G. Reiche, The Development of the SA in Nürnberg, 1922–1934 (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 1–49; Werner Maser, Der Sturm auf die Republik: Frühgeschichte der NSDAP (Munich: DVA, 1973), pp. 284–464; Werner, SA und NSDAP; Heinrich Bennecke, Hitler und die SA (Munich and Vienna: Günter Olzog Verlag, 1962), pp. 25–103.

  37.StA München, Pol. Dir. 6803, pp. 1–7, here p. 2: Memorandum from the Bavarian Police on the Self-Defence Leagues, undated; ‘An unsere deutsche Jugend!’, Völkischer Beobachter, 11 August 1921 (trans. Heiden, History of National Socialism, pp. 82–3); Werner, SA und NSDAP, pp. 38–40.

  38.Krüger, Brigade Ehrhardt, pp. 105–7; Hans-Günter Richardi, Hitler und seine Hintermänner: Neue Fakten zur Frühgeschichte der NSDAP (Munich: Süddeutscher Verlag, 1991), p. 368; Werner, NSDAP und SA, 23; HA-Spiegel, Personal Papers of Heinz Höhne, no. 242: Letter from the SA-Gruppe Hansa, 9 July 1936. For Johannes Paul Klintzsch (1861–1920), see the entry in Evangelisches Pfarrerbuch für die Mark Brandenburg seit der Reformation, ed. Brandenburgischer Provinzialsynodalverband, vol. 2 (Berlin: Mittler, 1941), p. 417.

  39.Krüger, Brigade Ehrhardt, pp. 105–6. For a biographical sketch of Klinzsch’s life, see Friedrich Walsdorff, ‘Hans-Ulrich Klintzsch’, in Alma Mater Joachimica: Zeitschrift der Vereinigung Alter Joachimsthaler e.V. 53 (1981), pp. 1,253–7.

  40.It is telling that in Friedrich Freksa (ed.), Kapitän Ehrhardt: Abenteuer und Schicksale (Berlin: Scherl, 1924), a popular but authorized account of Ehrhardt’s life, all references to the illegality of the SA and NSDAP are omitted.

  41.‘Kritische Zeit’, Das Jüdische Echo 9:32, 11 August 1922, pp. 403–4. On Ludendorff and his ‘movement’ in the 1920s, see Bettina Amm, Die Ludendorff-Bewegung: Vom nationalistischen Kampfbund zur völkischen Weltanschauungssekte (Hamburg: Ad Fontes, 2006); Bruno Thoß, Der Ludendorff-Kreis 1919–1923: München als Zentrum der mitteleuropäischen Gegenrevolution zwischen Revolution und Hitler-Putsch (Munich: Woelfle, 1978).

  42.See the instructive article ‘Kapitän Ehrhardt’, Das Jüdische Echo 9:49, 8 December 1922, p. 607.

  43.Bessel, ‘Militarismus im innenpolitischen Leben der Weimarer Republik’, p. 208.

  44.On Hitler’s life and political development between 1918 and 1921, see the exemplary Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936 (Stuttgart: DVA, 1998), pp. 149–276; Evans, Coming of the Third Reich, pp. 161–75; Plöckinger, Unter Soldaten und Agitatoren; Thomas Weber, Hitler’s First War: Adolf Hitler, the Men of the List Regiment, and the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 227–87.

  45.Richardi, Hitler und seine Hintermänner, p. 369. After the Second World War, Klintzsch likewise claimed that he had only been responsible to Ehrhardt, but not Hitler. He even denied that there ever was a formal affiliation between the Ehrhardt men and the organizations under Hitler’s command; Landeskirchliches Archiv Stuttgart (LKA Stuttgart), A 127, no. 1293: Letter from Klintzsch to a Protestant Oberkirchenrat in Württemberg, 25 March 1948.

  46.StA München, Pol. Dir. 6803, pp. 174–83: an early list of SA members (from Maurice), presumably intercepted by the police in September 1921. A newspaper report from October 1922 likewise gave the age of the stormtroopers involved in public appearances as ‘between 18 and 25 years’; see ‘Bayerischer Skandal’, Oberfränkische Volkszeitung, no. 295, 20 October 1922, in BayHStA, MInn, no. 81589. As the SA was, at least between 1921 and the first half of 1922, divided into two categories – Category A comprising those between seventeen and twenty-three and Category B comprising the more ‘senior gentlemen’ – it is possible that the total number of stormtroopers was actually slightly higher than estimated, so that Longerich’s number
of 300 seems plausible; Longerich, Geschichte der SA, p. 26. In light of these sources, Rösch’s claim that the SA in November 1921 comprised 1,500 men seems exaggerated; Mathias Rösch, Die Münchner NSDAP 1925–1933: Eine Untersuchung zur inneren Struktur der NSDAP in der Weimarer Republik (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2002), p. 80. See also StA München, Pol. Dir. 6803, pp. 20–1: Letter from the Munich police to the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior, 25 June 1923.

  47.It remained a characteristic of the SA until the early 1930s that its rank and file as well as Führer were often of very young age. See Bessel, ‘Militarismus im innenpolitischen Leben der Weimarer Republik’, pp. 216–17.

  48.See the documents in Klintzsch’s investigation file, in LArch Freiburg, F 179/4 no. 110.

  49.Hermann Göring (1893–1946), a well-known fighter pilot during the First World War, had spent most of the years 1919–21 in Denmark and Sweden, before he moved to Bavaria in 1922 and enrolled in the Faculty of Arts at Ludwig Maximilians University (at least for the winter term of 1922–3). He suffered from morphine addiction for most of his life and – perhaps because of it – at times behaved so violently that he eventually spent several weeks in a psychiatric hospital in Stockholm in 1925. Within the Third Reich, Göring, as Hitler’s deputy, served in several influential positions, most notably as Prussian Minister of the Interior in 1933 and later as Reich Minister for the Four-Year Plan. Sentenced to death by the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, Göring committed suicide by ingesting a potassium cyanide capsule prior to his execution. On Göring’s drug-related physical violence, see Hermann Weber et al. (eds), Deutschland, Russland, Komintern. II. Dokumente (1918–1943). Nach der Archivrevolution: Neuerschlossene Quellen zu der Geschichte der KPD und den deutsch-russischen Beziehungen (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015), pp. 958–9.