125.BArch Berlin, NS 23/474, p. 105,174: Letter from SA-Mittelschlesien Süd to OSAF, 26 September 1932.
126.Grosche, ‘Dressler’, p. 194.
127.Thomas Grosche, Die Zigarettenindustrie in Dresden – Von den Anfängen bis zum zweiten Weltkrieg, MA diss. (unpublished), TU Dresden, 2009, pp. 71–2. I am grateful to Thomas Grosche for providing me with a copy of his work.
128.Industrie- und Handelskammer Dresden, Chronik, http://www.dresden.ihk.de/150jahre/chronik.html.
129.Lindner, Die Reemtsmas, pp. 91–2.
130.Ibid., pp. 72–141, esp. pp. 88–90.
131.Ibid., pp. 92, 114–19. According to National Socialist sources, the largest German cigarette producers had invested 3 million reichsmark on advertising in party newspapers and magazines in 1932 alone; BArch Berlin, NS 23/474, p. 105,123: Letter from the Führer of the SA-Gruppe Franken, W. Stegmann.
132.Grosche, Die Zigarettenindustrie, pp. 76–7, with further references.
133.Grosche, ‘Dressler’, p. 198.
134.Schünemann, ‘Bilderwelten’, p. 125.
135.On the interrelations between the Christian churches and the Nazi stormtroopers, see Bergen, Twisted Cross, in particular pp. 70–81; Gailus, Protestantismus und Nationalsozialismus; Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich; Klauspeter Reumann (ed.), Kirche und Nationalsozialismus: Beiträge zur Geschichte des Kirchenkampfes in den evangelischen Landeskirchen Schleswig-Holsteins (Neumünster: Karl Wachholtz, 1988); Siemens, The Making of a Nazi Hero, pp. 126–7.
136.GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 77, titl. 4043, no. 423, p. 79: Prussian Minister of the Interior, Notation from 20 August 1931 (signed Dr Gräser).
137.See his lengthy (and querulous) letter to the East Prussian Gauleiter Koch, 22 April 1932, in GStA PK, XX. HA, Rep. 240 B 27 d+e, pp. 168–77. On the Nazis’ ‘deadly hate’ for the Centre Party, see Geiger, Die soziale Schichtung des deutschen Volkes, p. 112; on their problem of winning over Catholic voters, see Falter, Hitlers Wähler, pp. 177–88.
138.According to the historian Richard Steigmann-Gall, in 1930 only about 120 out of 18,000 Protestant pastors in Germany were members of the Nazi Party. However, he argues that the number of supporters was certainly much bigger, particularly given the fact that the churches ‘discouraged their clergy from formally joining any political party’; Steigmann-Gall, Holy Reich, p. 76.
139.All facts and quotations in this paragraph are taken from Trauthig’s excellent study on Württemberg’s Protestants, Im Kampf um Glauben und Kirche, pp. 55–67. Benedikt Brunner has recently demonstrated to what extent such ‘male’ rhetoric of religious battle even shaped the autobiographies of Protestant theologians in the first two decades after 1945; Benedikt Brunner, ‘Geschlechterordnung im Kirchenkampf: Konstruktion von Gender in der autobiographischen Verarbeitung der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus’, in ‘sichtbar unsichtbar: Geschlechterwissen in (auto-)biographischen Texten’, ed. Maria Heidegger et al. (Bielefeld: transcript, 2015), pp. 103–17.
140.A telling example is the provost Ernst Szymanowski, who later changed his surname into Biberstein. In his parish in Bad Segeberg he would hold church services in front of entire SA units and dressed in the brown shirt himself on these occasions. He even put pressure on other pastors who did not conform to his views by sending stormtroopers to disturb their services. See Stephan Linck, ‘Eine mörderische Karriere: der Schleswig-holsteinische Theologe Ernst Szymanowski/Biberstein’, in Manfred Gailus and Clemens Vollnhals (eds), Für ein artgemäßes Christentum der Tat: Völkische Theologie im ‘Dritten Reich’ (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2016), pp. 239–59, here pp. 244, 246.
141.Heinrich Rendtorff, ‘Kirche und Nationalsozialismus’, Das evangelische Hamburg 25 (1931), pp. 166–7 (first published in Mecklenburgische Zeitung, 23 April 1931).
142.Trauthig, Im Kampf um Glauben und Kirche, pp. 60–1. Wurm was a central figure of German Protestantism in the twentieth century. On his fierce opposition to Allied denazification procedures after the Second World War, see his Memorandum by the Evangelical Church in Germany on the Question of War Crimes Trials before American Military Courts (Waiblingen-Stuttgart: Stürner, 1949); Jon David K. Wyneken, ‘Memory as Diplomatic Leverage: Evangelical Bishop Theophil Wurm and War Crimes Trials, 1948–1952’, Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 19:2 (2006), pp. 368–88.
143.Manfred Gailus, ‘1933 als protestantisches Erlebnis: emphatische Selbsttransformation und Spaltung’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 29:4 (2003), pp. 481–511.
144.Kurt Hutten, Nationalsozialismus und Christentum (Stuttgart: Evangelischer Volksbund, 1932), p. 31. On the Protestants’ generally welcoming attitude to the Nazis between 1930 and 1934, see also Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, Vierter Band: Vom Beginn des Ersten Weltkriegs bis zur Gründung der beiden deutschen Staaten 1914–1949 (Munich: Beck, 2003), pp. 797–804.
145.Hansjörg Buss, ‘“Für arteigene Frömmigkeit – über alle Konfessionen und Dogmen hinweg”. Gerhard Meyer und der Bund für Deutsche Kirche’, in Gailus and Vollnhals (eds), Für ein artgemäßes Christentum der Tat, pp. 119–33, here pp. 121, 124.
146.Ralf Czubatynski, ‘Domprediger Ernst Martin (1885–1974) im Spannungsfeld von Politik und Kirchenpolitik in der Zeit der Weimarer Republik und des Nationalsozialismus’, in Sachsen-Anhalt: Beiträge zur Kultur und Landesgeschichte 15 (Halle: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 1999), pp. 101–24, here pp. 112–13; Hattenhorst, Magdeburg 1933, pp. 120–3.
147.Czubatynski, ‘Domprediger Ernst Martin’, pp. 114–23.
148.Franz Tügel, ‘Kirche und Nationalsozialismus’, Das evangelische Hamburg 26 (1932), pp. 52–6, here pp. 53–4.
149.Wackerfuss, Stormtrooper Families, pp. 26–32, 220–3.
150.Stehn, ‘Über die politische Betätigung der Pastoren’, Das evangelische Hamburg 25 (1931), p. 357.
151.In Württemberg the Protestant Church temporarily prohibited their pastors from participating in political party activities on 29 September 1932; Trauthig, Im Kampf um Glauben und Kirche, p. 58. In reaction to such orders, the liberal press in November 1932 reported that Röhm had requested every SA group in the Reich to appoint an ‘SA clergyman’ to consecrate party flags and provide pastoral care for the stormtroopers. Such pastors, the newspapers reported, were required to be party members and were to be supervised by Ludwig Münchmeyer, a notorious antisemite and former Protestant pastor who since 1930 represented the NSDAP in the Reichstag. Two weeks later, however, the Nazi paper Der Völkische Beobachter disclaimed such rumours. With the appointment of Hitler to the position of Reichskanzler soon afterwards, the Nazi Party no longer needed to rely on specially chosen pastors. Some upright dissenters notwithstanding, local clergymen now happily performed services for the party – another indicator that National Socialism had struck a chord with many Protestant pastors in the previous years. See ‘Pfarrer als Sturmbannführer’, Vossische Zeitung, 4 November 1932, p. 2; Kater, ‘Ansätze zu einer Soziologie der SA’, p. 807. On Münchmeyer, see Gerhard Lindemann, ‘Typisch jüdisch’: Die Stellung der Ev.-luth. Landeskirche Hannovers zu Antijudaismus, Judenfeindschaft und Antisemitismus 1919–1949 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1998), pp. 136–220.
152.In Holzkirchen, a market town south of Munich, the local priest reported that four-fifths of his believers were National Socialist; Pridham, Hitler’s Rise to Power, p. 157.
153.Ibid., p. 168.
154.Ibid., pp. 166–9, 177.
155.Hastings, Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism, pp. 107–42, 168–70. See also idem, ‘How “Catholic” Was the Early Nazi Movement? Religion, Race, and Culture in Munich, 1919–1924’, Central European History 36:3 (2003), pp. 383–433; Thomas Forstner, ‘Braune Priester – Katholische Geistliche im Spannungsfeld von Katholizismus und Nationalsozialismus’, in Täter und Komplizen in Theologie und Kirchen 1933–1945, ed. Manfred Gailus, 2nd edn (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015), pp. 113–39.
156.Pridham, Hitler’s Rise to Power, pp. 164–5.
157.On 28 April, SA Chief of Staff Röhm was among those present in the
church, and he met at least twice with the archbishop. See the entries from 27 and 29 April 1933 in Faulhaber-Edition, Critical Online Edition of the Diaries of Michael Kardinal von Faulhaber (1911–1952): http://p.faulhaber-edition.de/exist/apps/faulhaber/dokument.html?collid=1933&sortby=year&doctype=bb&docidno=BB_06393_0542r; http://p.faulhaber-edition.de/exist/apps/faulhaber/dokument.html?collid=1933&sortby=year&doctype=bb&docidno=BB_09263_0030s.
158.GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 77 titl 4043, no. 311, pp. 275–85: Hans Georg Hofmann (ed.), Pflichtenlehre des Sturm-Abteilungsmannes (SA-Katechismus) (Dießen: Huber, undated [1934]), p. 10.
159.Werner Betcke (ed.), Der kleine Katechismus Dr. Martin Luthers für den braunen Mann (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1934), pp. 4, 24.
160.Klintzsch’s father, the pastor Johannes Paul Klintzsch, had died on 11 September 1920, at the age of fifty-nine. The father of Horst Wessel, the pastor Ludwig Wessel, had died on 9 May 1922, at the age of forty-two; Stadt Lübbenau, Letter to the author from 8 May 2015; Siemens, Making of a Nazi Hero, p. 27.
161.Walsdorff, ‘Hans Ulrich Klintzsch’, p. 1,257; LKA Stuttgart, A 127, no. 1293 (personnel file of Hans Ulrich Klintzsch). His appointment by the Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Württemberg was partly financed with donations from the Evangelical-Lutheran churches in the USA. Klintzsch quit the job as a catechet in 1952 when he was granted an officer pension. He died in Berlin on 17 August 1959.
162.Emil Maurice, Letter to the pastor of Gettorf, dated 3 June 1924, as quoted in Sigmund, Des Führers bester Freund, p. 29.
163.Andrew Wackerfuss in his case study of the Hamburg SA likewise stresses the importance of religious beliefs for understanding the stormtrooper mentality. See Wackerfuss, Stormtrooper Families, pp. 218–23.
164.StA München, Pol. Dir. 6804: Police report from the NSDAP’s Christmas Party in the Bürgerbräukeller, 18 December 1922. On this occasion, the well-known Bavarian humorist Weiß Ferdl also contributed to the popularity of the event.
165.Ibid.
166.Joseph Berchtold, ‘Auferstehung’, S.A.-Mann, March 1929, as cited in StA München, Pol. Dir. 6805: Extracts from Munich’s Police Lagebericht, no. 77, 7 May 1929. On the biography of Berchtold, see Hein, Elite für Volk und Führer?, pp. 42–3, 69–70.
167.See Jürgen W. Falter, ‘The Young Membership of the NSDAP between 1925 and 1933: A Demographic and Social Profile’, Historical Social Research, Supplement 25 (2013), pp. 260–79, here pp. 271–2; Jörg Thierfelder and Eberhard Röhm, ‘Die evangelischen Landeskirchen von Baden und Württemberg in der Spätphase der Weimarer Republik und zu Beginn des Dritten Reiches’, in Die Machtergreifung in Südwestdeutschland, ed. Thomas Schnabel, pp. 219–56, here p. 229.
168.Otto Wagener, Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant, ed. Henry Ashby Turner (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 19–21, as cited in Steigmann-Gall, Holy Reich, p. 66.
169.Ibid.
170.See Charlotte Tacke, Denkmal im sozialen Raum: Nationale Symbole in Deutschland und Frankreich im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995); Rudy Koshar, From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory, 1870–1990 (Berkeley, CA: University of Berkeley Press, 2000), pp. 35–40.
171.The idea of a ‘muscular Christianity’ was popular in the first half of the twentieth century in North America and western Europe alike. In Germany its proponents usually referred to such ideas as a ‘Germanization of the Christian faith’. See Clifford Puttney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Arthur Bonus, Von Stöcker zu Naumann: Ein Wort zur Germanisierung des Christentums (Heilbronn: Salzer, 1896); Rainer Lächele, ‘Protestantismus und völkische Religion im deutschen Kaiserreich’, in Handbuch zur ‘Völkischen Bewegung’ 1871–1918, ed. Uwe Puschner, Walter Schmitz, and Justus H. Ulbricht (Munich: Saur, 1999), pp. 149–63. Such ideas even resonated among the Catholic priesthood in interwar Germany; see Forstner, ‘Braune Priester’, pp. 131–3. For an instructive case study on the Protestant pastor Gustav von Bodelschwingh, who in the Third Reich recruited SA students of Protestant theology to his settlement project in Dünne near Bielefeld using similar arguments, see Ulrich Rottschäfer, ‘Gustav von Bodelschwingh und die Gründung des Sammelvikariats in Dünne’, Jahrbuch für Westfälische Kirchengeschichte 89 (1995), pp. 216–47, here pp. 223–31. I am grateful to Johannes Lübeck, Tangermünde, for pointing me to this article.
172.See the instructive contributions in Matthew Feldman and Marius Turda (eds), Clerical Fascism in Interwar Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 2008).
173.From the recent literature, see Dylan Riley, The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain, and Romania, 1870–1945 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), as well as the contributions in Alejandro Quiroga and Miguel Angel des Arco (eds), Right-Wing Spain in the Civil War Era: Soldiers of God and Apostles of the Fatherland, 1914–1945 (London: Continuum, 2012).
174.Rory Yeomans, ‘Militant Women, Warrior Men and Revolutionary Personae: The New Ustasha Man and Woman in the Independent State of Croatia, 1941–1945’, Slavonic and East European Review 83:4 (2005), pp. 685–732, here p. 705.
175.As quoted in Stephen Fischer-Galati (ed.), Man, State, and Society in East European History (London: Pall Mall, 1970), p. 330. For a comparative investigation into the religious elements of the Romanian and Croatian Fascist movements, see the excellent study by Radu Harald Dinu, Faschismus, Religion und Gewalt in Südosteuropa: Die Legion Erzengel Michael und die Ustaša im historischen Vergleich (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2013), pp. 204–52.
176.Hofmann, Pflichtenlehre des Sturm-Abteilungsmannes, p. 11. Irrespective of those promises, the relations between the National Socialist regime and the churches soon became complicated.
177.Bergen, Twisted Cross, p. 71.
178.The printmaker Schwarzkopf was born on 11 April 1893 in Bonn, educated in the 1910s at the Kunstgewerbeschule Düsseldorf, and, in 1933, appointed professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. In 1937 he became a leader in the National Socialist German Lecturers League and was also elected president of the Malkasten artists’ association, a position he held until 1945. He served again as its president beginning in 1956. Schwarzkopf died on 31 May 1963 in Düsseldorf. On his biography and works, see Dietrich Grünewald, ‘Der Totentanz bei Rethel, Ille und Schwarzkopf’, Deutsche Comicforschung 5 (2009), pp. 21–32, here pp. 30–2; Sabine Schroyen, Bildquellen zur Geschichte des Künstlervereins Malkasten in Düsseldorf. Künstler und ihre Werke in den Sammlungen (Düsseldorf: Grupello, 2001), pp. 34–6, 316–18.
179.See in particular the reproductions in Oberste SA-Führung, . . . wurde die SA eingesetzt: Politische Soldaten erzählen von wenig beachteten Frontabschnitten unserer Zeit (Munich: Eher, 1938), pp. 43, 55, 91.
180.For details, see Grünewald, ‘Der Totentanz bei Rethel’; Alfred Rethel, Auch ein Todtentanz, 11th edn (Leipzig, Schlicke, 1879); Hans Jürgen Imiela, ‘Alfred Rethel und der Tod’, in Der Tod in Dichtung, Philosophie und Kunst, 2nd edn, ed. Hans Helmut Jansen (Darmstadt: Steinkopff, 1989), pp. 371–9.
181.Grünewald, ‘Der Totentanz bei Rethel’, p. 27.
182.Der Kampf der SA: Eine Bildfolge nach 6 Holzschnitten von Prof. Richard Schwarzkopf (advertising brochure), in LArch Ludwigsburg, PL 505 Bü 12. For earlier versions in which Life defeats Death, see Grünewald, ‘Der Totentanz bei Rethel’, p. 32.
183.Besides German Passion, the series was also referred to as The Fight of the SA and Totentanz der SA; Schroyen, Bildquellen zur Geschichte des Künstlervereins Malkasten, p. 35.
184.Fest, ‘Ernst Röhm und die verlorene Generation’, p. 190.
185.Ibid., pp. 191, 193.
186.Emre Sencer, ‘Fear and Loathing in Berlin: German Military Culture at the Turn of the 1930s’, German Studies Review 37:1 (2014), pp. 19–39, here p. 22. In reality, this erosion of authority began during the last two years of the war.
187.Horst von Metzsch, ‘Nie wieder ein solches Jahrzehnt!’, Militär-Wochenb
latt, 4 July 1929, as quoted in Sencer, ‘Fear and Loathing in Berlin’, p. 23.
188.Until 1928 the relationship between the Reichswehr and the NSDAP was distant – partly as a result of long-term mutual antagonism between the two in the wake of the failed November 1923 putsch, and partly because of the consolidation of Weimar democracy in the mid-1920s. On 5 December 1928 Hitler even formally prohibited members of his party from joining the Reichswehr, thereby indirectly acknowledging the military’s self-image as an institution ‘above politics’. See Peter Bucher, Der Reichswehrprozeß: Der Hochverrat der Ulmer Reichswehroffiziere 1929/30, Militärgeschichtliche Studien 4 (Boppard am Rhein: Boldt, 1967), p. 9.
189.Bucher, Der Reichswehrprozeß, p. 11.
190.Timothy S. Brown, ‘Richard Scheringer, the KPD and the Politics of Class and Nation in Germany, 1922–1969’, Contemporary European History 14:3 (2005), pp. 317–46, here pp. 323–5; Bucher, Der Reichswehrprozeß, pp. 110–13.
191.Sencer, ‘Fear and Loathing in Berlin’, p. 25.
192.For a detailed discussion of Ludin’s biography and later career, see the following note and chapter 10.
193.Bucher, Der Reichswehrprozeß, p. 130; Brown, ‘Richard Scheringer’, pp. 323, 337.
194.Ernst Niekisch, Erinnerungen eines deutschen Revolutionärs. Erster Band: Gewagtes Leben 1889–1945 (Cologne: Wissenschaft und Politik, 1974), p. 185.
195.Eckart Kehr, ‘Zur Soziologie der Reichswehr’, Neue Blätter für den Sozialismus 1 (1930), pp. 156–64, here p. 163.
196.On the complex relationship between the German nobility and the SA, see Malinowski and Reichardt, ‘Die Reihen fest geschlossen?’
197.Peter Hoffmann, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg und seine Brüder (Stuttgart: DVA, 1992), p. 101. On the ‘George circle’ and George’s ideas of a ‘secret Germany’, see Thomas Karlauf, Stefan George: Die Entdeckung des Charisma (Munich: Blessing, 2007); Robert E. Norton, Secret Germany. Literary Modernism and Visual Culture: Stefan George and His Circle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).
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