Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts

by Daniel Siemens

  42.The lawyers of the SS adopted a similar defence strategy, but – hardly surprisingly – failed to achieve comparable results. See Kim C. Priemel, ‘Beyond the Saturation Point of Horror: The Holocaust at Nuremberg Revisited’, The Journal of Modern European History 14:4 (2016), pp. 522–47.

  43.UAK, Archives, Zugang 726, File 2: Letter from Theodor Klefisch to an unknown addressee, 5 November 1946.

  44.See the comprehensive collection of cases in Edith Raim, Justiz zwischen Diktatur und Demokratie: Wiederaufbau und Ahndung von NS-Verbrechen in Westdeutschland 1945–1949 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2013), pp. 659–944, as well as the database Nazi Crimes on Trial: German Trial Judgements Concerning National Socialist Homicidal Crimes 1945–2012, ed. Christiaan F. Rüter and Dick W. de Mildt, http://www1.jur.uva.nl/junsv.

  45.Carina Baganz, ‘“Milde gegen die Verbrecher wäre Verbrechen gegen die Opfer”: Die Hohnstein-Prozesse 1949’, in Osterloh and Vollnhals, NS-Prozesse und deutsche Öffentlichkeit, pp. 207–20.

  46.Weinke, Die Verfolgung von NS-Tätern im geteilten Deutschland; Andreas Eichmüller, ‘Die strafrechtliche Verfolgung von NS-Verbrechern und die Öffentlichkeit in der frühen Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1949–1958’, in Osterloh and Vollnhals, NS-Prozesse und deutsche Öffentlichkeit, pp. 53–73, here p. 54.

  47.Carina Baganz, ‘Vom Wachmann zum Inoffiziellen Mitarbeiter: Täter der frühen sächsischen Konzentrationslager und ihr Wirken für die Staatssicherheit’, in Günther Heydemann, Jan Erik Schulte, and Francesca Weil (eds), Sachsen und der Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), pp. 351–64.

  48.As quoted in Margarete Mitscherlich-Nielsen, ‘Erinnern, Vergessen und Verdrängen – Überlegungen zur Unfähigkeit zu trauern’, in Sibylle Drews (ed.), Freund in der Gegenwart: Alexander Mitscherlichs Gesellschaftskritik (Frankfurt am Main: Brandes & Apsel, 2006), pp. 23–34, here p. 23.

  49.The tendency of many Germans to deny any emotional or deliberate involvement in the National Socialist ‘project’ was evident as early as 1945. Committed Nazis seem to have disappeared overnight, with only disappointed or embittered ‘victims’ of the regime remaining who now turned against the previously much-loved Führer. For a very early analysis of this phenomenon, see Saul Padover, Experiment in Germany: The Story of an American Intelligence Officer (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1946). For the term ‘little guardians of the people’s community’, see Werner, ‘Die kleinen Wächter der “Volksgemeinschaft”’.

  50.Eichmüller, ‘Die strafrechtliche Verfolgung von NS-Verbrechen’, p. 55.

  51.See chapter 9.

  52.LArch NRW-Westfalen (Landesarchiv NRW, Abt. Westfalen), Staatsanwaltschaft Dortmund, nos 1293–1305, 1542–6.

  53.LArch Hannover (Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv, Hauptstaatsarchiv Hannover), Nds. 171, no. 25522.

  54.LArch Freiburg, V 1, Nr. 2473: Badisches Staatskommissariat für politische Säuberung, Verdict of the Spruchkammer Freiburg in the proceedings against Dietrich von Jagow, 13 February 1950.

  55.Bernhard Gotto, ‘Die Erfindung eines “anständigen Nationalsozialismus”: Vergangenheitspolitik der schwäbischen Verwaltungsbeamten in der Nachkriegszeit’, in Peter Fassl (ed.), Das Kriegsende in Bayerisch-Schwaben 1945: Wissenschaftliche Tagung der Heimatpflege des Bezirks Schwaben in Zusammenarbeit mit der Schwabenakademie Irsee am 8/9 April 2005 (Augsburg: Wißner, 2006), pp. 263–83, esp. pp. 282–3.

  56.‘Otto Straßer und der Solidarismus’, Arbeiter-Zeitung (Vienna), no. 9, 12 January 1949, p. 2, http://www.arbeiter-zeitung.at/cgi-bin/archiv/flash.pl?seite=19490112_A02;html=1.

  57.‘Senat stellt Strafantrag’, Hamburger Abendblatt, 12 March 1952, p. 3. I am grateful to Christoph Strupp for providing me with a copy of this article.

  58.BayHStA, MSo, Nr. 1929: Letter from the Treuchtlingen Municipal Council to the Bavarian Ministry of Justice, 17 August 1956. In this case the municipal council had demanded clemency for Andreas Güntner, who from 1933 to 1944 had served as mayor of Treuchtlingen. In 1950 he was sentenced to a prison term of three and a half years because of his participation in the ‘anti-Jewish pogrom in Treuchtlingen’.

  59.On Gmelin’s education and his professional and political career in the 1930s, see the information provided in his SA files, in BArch Berlin, SA 4000001096; as well as in his personnel file with the Reich Ministry of Justice, in BArch Berlin, R/3001/57470 and 57471.

  60.BArch Berlin, R/3001/57470, p. 41: Letter from the Reich Minister of Justice to the Foreign Office, 23 April 1941. In 1944, Gmelin praised his boss as an ‘outstanding personage’; IfZ Archiv, MA 650, pp. 4,995–5,000, here p. 4,999: SD note on Gmelin’s lecture at a party leadership meeting in Vienna, 14 January 1944. On the relationship of Ludin and Gmelin, see also Tönsmeyer, Das Dritte Reich und die Slowakei, pp. 89–90. According to Gmelin’s daughter, her father ‘took care’ of Ludin’s widow Erla and her children after the war; email from Dr Herta Däubler-Gmelin to the author, 26 February 2015.

  61.Information provided by Niklas Krawinkel, Marburg, who is currently writing his PhD thesis on Gmelin under the supervision of Eckart Conze. I am also grateful to Krawinkel for providing me with a copy of Gmelin’s denazification file.

  62.IfZ Archiv, MA 650, pp. 4,995–5,000, here p. 4,999: SD note on Gmelin’s lecture at a party leadership meeting in Vienna, 14 January 1944.

  63.BArch Berlin, R 9354/601: Letter from R. Brandt to SS-Standartenführer Leg. Rat Wagner in the Foreign Office, 4 December 1944.

  64.On the living conditions in these camps, which ultimately did not ‘re-educate’ the former National Socialist leadership but instead provided an echo chamber for their reconstruction of the past, see Christof Strauß, ‘Zwischen Apathie und Selbstrechtfertigung: Die Internierung NS-belasteter Personen in Württemberg-Baden’, in Paul Hoser and Reinhard Baumann (eds), Kriegsende und Neubeginn: Die Besatzungszeit im schwäbisch-alemannischen Raum (Konstanz: UKV, 2003), pp. 287–313.

  65.LArch Sigmaringen, Wü13 T 2, Nr. 2108/068: Verdict against Hans Gmelin, 13 July 1948.

  66.This argument was frequently voiced in German politics post-Second World War. The best-known case is that of Chancellor Willy Brandt, who, as a young Socialist, had escaped Nazi persecution by going into exile in Sweden and Norway and later had to defend himself against accusations of not having been a patriot. See Mergel, Propaganda nach Hitler, pp. 217–18.

  67.StA Tübingen (Stadtarchiv Tübingen), ZGS-1: Hans Gmelin, election speech from 24 September 1954, Schwäbisches Tagblatt, 2 October 1954.

  68.Gerhard Ebeling, ‘Wiederkehr des Nationalsozialismus’, in Schwäbisches Tagblatt, 27 October 1954.

  69.‘Thema des Tages: Wiederkehr des Nationalsozialismus’, in Schwäbisches Tagblatt, 28 October 1954. Such accusations and demands to stop the current denazification proceedings were common; see Strauß, ‘Zwischen Apathie und Selbstrechtfertigung’, pp. 310–13.

  70.‘Fortsetzung der Debatte über “Wiederkehr des Nationalsozialismus”: Sind wir in Tübingen schon wieder so weit?’ in Schwäbisches Tagblatt, 30 October 1954.

  71.‘Die meisten Einsender sagen: Nein’, in Schwäbisches Tagblatt, 2 November 1954.

  72.For Gmelin’s post-war career, see also the instructive account by Hans-Joachim Lang, ‘Die rechte Hand des Botschafters’, Schwäbisches Tagblatt, 28 April 2005.

  73.Critics, however, argue that Gmelin’s involvement in the Holocaust should prevent him from being labelled an ‘honorary citizen’, an honour bestowed on him by the Tübingen city council in 1975. See Gerlind Strasdeit, ‘Stellungnahme für die Fraktion DIE LINKE in Tübingen’, 18 December 2014, http://www.die-linke-bw.de/nc/magazin/aus_den_kreis_und_ortsverbaenden/detail/zurueck/magazin/artikel/solange-hans-gmelin-ehrenbuerger-von-tuebingen-ist-bleibt-die-scheefstrassen-umbenennung-ein-ink.

  74.Email from Dr Herta Däubler-Gmelin to the author, 26 February 2015.

  75.On Bennecke’s activities in the SA, see esp. chapter 4 as well as Peschel, Die SA in Sachsen vor der ‘Machtübernahme’, pp. 7–22. Mike Schmeitzner of the
Hannah-Arendt-Institut für Totalitarismusforschung at the TU Dresden is currently preparing a biographical study of Bennecke that will provide further details of his life both prior to and after 1945.

  76.Documents from the Hausarchiv, the internal archive of the IfZ, demonstrate that critical collaborations with formerly high-ranking National Socialists were common. For example, the files that contain the institute’s correspondence with Bennecke also enclose similar and usually extremely polite correspondence with former SS heavyweights Werner Best and Gottlob Berger. Researchers with the IfZ certainly aimed at and in many cases succeeded in extracting inside knowledge from these figures for use in critical historical scholarship. However, it also seems vital to analyse if, when, and why the former Nazis were successful in giving their partisan views on the Nazi past the stamp of scholarly excellence. See Nicolas Berg, Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker: Erforschung und Erinnerung (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003), pp. 270–321; Hett, Burning the Reichstag, pp. 283–308. On the formation of the IfZ, see also Winfried Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1989), pp. 229–42; and John Gimbel, ‘The Origins of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte: Scholarship, Politics and American Occupation’, American Historical Review 70:3 (1964–5), pp. 714–31.

  77.See, for example, Bennecke’s interviews with the former SA leader Franz Pfeffer von Salomon and the Nazi writer Hans Zöberlein in IfZ Archive, ZS 177 and ZS 319. For Bennecke’s memorandum of the Reich SA-Hochschulamt, see IfZ Archive, ZS 1685-1, pp. 21–4.

  78.IfZ Archive, ID 200/177: Letter from Anton Hoch to Heinrich Bennecke, 25 May 1962; IfZ Archive, ID 300/23: Internal note by Thilo Vogelsang, 17 November 1958.

  79.IfZ Archive, ID 200/177: Contract signed by Bennecke and Helmut Krausnick, director of the IfZ, 5 July 1963.

  80.The surviving documents do not provide a clear explanation for this decision, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable to assume that the appointment of a former Nazi functionary had the potential to harm the institute’s reputation. IfZ Archive, ID 300/23: Internal note of the IfZ, 8 May 1963. The same document is also included in IfZ Archive, ID 103/85, p. 127.

  81.Heinrich Bennecke, Hitler und die SA (Munich and Vienna: Olzog, 1962); idem, Die Reichswehr und der ‘Röhm-Putsch’ (Munich and Vienna: Olzog, 1964). After the publication of Hitler und die SA, Bennecke intended to send one copy to IfZ director Krausnick with the dedication ‘To Dr Krausnick with many thanks for the help of the Institute for Contemporary Research’; IfZ Archive, ID 300/23: Letter from Bennecke to Thilo Vogelsang, 2 November 1962. In a letter to Krausnick, Bennecke remarked that his book was ‘basically produced in the Institute’ (Sie entstand ja im wesentlichen im Institut für Zeitgeschichte); IfZ Archive, ID 103/85, p. 128: Letter from Bennecke to Krausnick, 25 November 1962.

  82.IfZ Archive, ID 200/177: Internal note from the IfZ, 13 February 1963.

  83.Peschel, Die SA in Sachsen vor der ‘Machtübernahme’, pp. 23–77. The IfZ files include an unsigned draft contract between the Federal Archives and Bennecke for a study on the SA in Saxony prior to the Nazi takeover of power; IfZ Archive, ID 200/177.

  84.IfZ Archive, ID 300/23: ‘Entwurf eines Vorworts’. Bennecke distinguished between ‘four distinct periods’ of the SA’s history: The period up to 1923, the one between 1926 and April 1932, the one between June 1932 and 30 June 1934, and the one after 30 June 1934.

  85.Peschel, Die SA in Sachsen vor der ‘Machtübernahme’, p. 21.

  86.Bennecke, Hitler und die SA, pp. 28–30.

  87.Ibid., p. 194.

  88.Instructive in this respect is Schmerbach, Der Kampf der Kommunistischen Partei, pp. 118–20.

  89.Bennecke, Hitler und die SA, pp. 197–200.

  90.For the rather ambivalent reviews, see ibid., pp. 78–82.

  91.For a lucid discussion of this important problem, see Habbo Knoch, ‘Review of Nicolas Berg, Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker: Erforschung und Erinnerung, H-Soz-Kult’, 4 February 2004, http://www.hsozkult.de/publicationreview/id/rezbuecher-2433.

  92.See the examples in Klaus Große-Kracht, Die zankende Zunft: Historische Kontroversen in Deutschland nach 1945 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005).

  93.Höhne, Mordsache Röhm.

  94.On the long-lived myth of the ‘clean Wehrmacht’, see Ben Shepherd, ‘The Clean Wehrmacht, the War of Extermination, and Beyond’, Historical Journal 52:2 (2009), pp. 455–73; Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, Hannes Heer, and Birgit Otte (eds), Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941–1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1996).

  95.Karsten Wilke, Die ‘Hilfsgemeinschaft auf Gegenseitigkeit’ (HIAG), 1950–1990: Veteranen der Waffen-SS in der Bundesrepublik (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2011).

  96.Hans Hermann Karl Sponholz, born 9 April 1902 in Kolberg, volunteered for a Jungmannenkommando in his home town in the last year of the First World War, at the age of sixteen. After falling severely ill in a prisoner-of-war camp, he spent two years in the sickbay. Sponholz’s health remained fragile for the rest of his life. From 1921 to 1923 he was a member of the Verband nationalgesinnter Soldaten, and from 1924 to 1931 he belonged to the Stahlhelm. On 1 July 1931 he joined the SA in Flatow and three months later entered the ranks of the NSDAP. Sponholz was exempt from regular SA duty but fought very effectively with words. Struggling to make a living from his modestly successful novels, he became a full-time SA leader on 15 January 1934. From 1937 onward the father of five children lived in Munich, where he rose to become one of the principal propagandists of the SA. On his biography, see BArch Berlin, VBS 264, no. 4001006602 (Sponholz, Hans) and SA 4000003627 (Sponholz, Hans).

  97.Hans Sponholz, ‘Naturschutz in der Defensive’, Natur und Landschaft: Zeitschrift für Freunde und Schützer der Deutschen Heimat 41:9 (1966), pp. 191–3, here p. 193. For more on the ‘brown heritage’ of the West German environmentalist movement after the Second World War, see the pioneering Joachim Radkau and Frank Uekötter (eds), Naturschutz und Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2003); Franz-Josef Brüggemeier and Jens Ivo Engels (eds), Natur- und Umweltschutz nach 1945: Konzepte, Konflikte, Kompetenzen (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2005).

  98.Michael Seeholzer, ‘Hans Sponholz – von Nazivergangenheit eingeholt’, Merkur, 5 October 2013, http://www.merkur.de/lokales/ebersberg/ebersberg/hans-sponholz-nazi-vergangenheit-eingeholt-3148688.html. On Lorenz and National Socialism, see Benedikt Föger and Klaus Taschwer (eds), Die andere Seite des Spiegels: Konrad Lorenz und der Nationalsozialismus (Vienna: Czernin, 2001).

  99.‘Hans Sponholz’, in Wikipedia.org, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Sponholz, date accessed: 28 October 2015.

  100.For paradigmatic statements as well as self-critical reflections, see the contributions in Hannes Heer and Volker Ullrich (eds), Geschichte entdecken: Erfahrungen und Projekte der neuen Geschichtsbewegung (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1985) and Alf Lüdtke, Alltagsgeschichte: Zur Rekonstruktion historischer Erfahrungen und Lebensweisen (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1989); idem, ‘Arbeiten und Dabeisein: Wie Alltagsgeschichte den Nationalsozialismus erklärt’, in Axel Lubinski (ed.), Historie und Eigen-Sinn: Festschrift für Jan Peters zum 65. Geburtstag (Weimar: Böhlau, 1997), pp. 75–86.

  101.For the discovery of this place and its early exploration, see Kurt Schilde, Rolf Scholz, and Sylvia Walleczek (eds), SA-Gefängnis Papestraße: Spuren und Zeugnisse (Berlin: Overall Verlag, 1996). More recently, see Irene von Götz and Petra Zwaka (eds), SA-Gefängnis Papestraße: Ein frühes Konzentrationslager in Berlin (Berlin: Metropol, 2013). For information on Berlin’s central institution for the remembrance of the Nazi terror, the Stiftung Topographie des Terrors, see Reinhard Rürup (ed.), 10 Jahre Topographie des Terrors (Berlin: Topographie des Terrors, 1997).

  102.For a historical sketch of ‘Köpenick’s blood murder week’, see Yves Müller, ‘Vom Traditionskabinett zur Gedenkstätte Köpenicker Blutwoche’, in SA-Terror als Herrschaftssicherung, ed. Hördler, pp. 232–45.

  103.See Stephan Buchloh
, ‘Pervers, jugendgefährdend, staatsfeindlich’: Zensur in der Ära Adenauer als Spiegel des gesellschaftlichen Klimas (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2002), pp. 142–5, here p. 144.

  104.See, in particular, Nationalrat der Nationalen Front des Demokratischen Deutschland (ed.), Braunbuch: Kriegs- und Naziverbrecher in der Bundesrepublik: Staat, Wirtschaft, Armee, Verwaltung, Justiz, Wissenschaft (Berlin: Staatsverlag der DDR, 1968); there were several editions under slightly different titles between 1959 and 1981.

  105.Der Spiegel, no. 34, 5 May 1968, quoted in Varon, Bringing the War Home, p. 39.

  106.Lorenz Jäger, Adorno: A Political Biography (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 192.

  107.Interview of Ernst Fraenkel with the Berliner Morgenpost, 11 November 1967, as quoted in Thomas Pegelow Kaplan, ‘“Den mörderischen Alltag bei seinem richtigen Namen nennen”: Linke Protestbewegungen,  jüdische Remigranten und die Erinnerung an Massenverbrechen in den 1960er Jahren’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 62:7/8 (2014), pp. 600–19, here p. 612. In turn, the most radical students denounced Fraenkel as a ‘reactionary’; see ibid. and Simone Ladwig-Winters, Ernst Fraenkel: Ein politisches Leben (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2009), pp. 318–25.

  108.Uwe Siemon-Netto, ‘The 68er Regime in Germany’, Orbis 48:4 (2004), pp. 641–56, here p. 645.

  109.Berliner Extra-Dienst, April 1968, quoted in Varon, Bringing the War Home, p. 40.

  110.For a summary of these events, including the quote from Schmalz-Jacobsen, see Human Rights Watch Helsinki (ed.), ‘Germany for Germans’: Xenophobia and Racist Violence in Germany (Helsinki: Human Rights Watch 1995), http://www.hrw.org/reports/1995/Germany.htm.

  111.For an overview of the actual situation and the historical references of current neo-Nazis, see Alexander Häusler and Jan Schedler (eds), Autonome Nationalisten: Neonazismus in Bewegung (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, 2011); Ulli Jentsch and Frank Metzger, ‘Die “Blutzeugen der Bewegung” im Blick des heutigen Neonazismus’, in Bürgerkriegsarmee, ed. Müller and Zilkenat, pp. 417–32.