MASTER'S THESIS M-895 I I MORTON, Richard Lew i THE : AN INSTRUMENT FOR ACQUIRING TOTALITARIAN POWER.

The American University, M.A., 1965 History, modern

University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan THE STURMABTEILUNG

AN INSTRUMENT FOR ACQUIRING TOTALITARIAN POWER

By

Richard IÏ, Morton

Submitted to the

Faculty of the School of International Service

of The American University

In Partial Fulfillment of

The Requirements for the Degree

of

MASTER 0F ARTS

in

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Signatures of Committee:

Chairman: ^

Date! ) 4 U t A ^ / î é * r ‘

Doan o f tM tf ^ « h o o l AMERICAN UNIVERSITY l i b r a r y Date: 3, V _____ JAN 4 1066

W a s h i n g t o n , d . e ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Recognition for assistance in compiling the data relevant to the Sturmabteilung is gratefully extended

to Oberst Freiherr Hans von Uslar-Gleichen, Liaison

Officer from the Federal Republic of to the

United States Materiel Command. During his more

than 40 years of service, particularly in the , and later in the and , Colonel von

Uslar observed facts about the S.A. which were left unrecorded by history.

Recognition must also be extended to Dr. Georg

Hopfer, once a member of the Hitler Jugend, and now

associated with the University of Library.

His access to early S.A. documents, unavailable in the

United States, has isolated a small part of the

N.S.D.A.P. movement in which writers have shown little

interest.

Through the years these two gentlemen have

convinced me that the unhappy conditions which once prevailed in Germany— and spawned the S.A.-- would have difficulty returning again. TABLE OP CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I, THE PROBLEM AND DEFINITIONS OP TERMS USED . . 1

The Problem ...... 2

Statement of the Problem ...... 2

Definition of Terms Used ...... 4

The Sturmabteilung. (S.A.)...... 5

The , (S.S.)...... 6

The . (S.D.) ...... 7

The Geheime Staatspolizei. () . . 8

Dynamism of the S.A...... 11

II. THE ROOTS OP THE STURMABTEILUNG...... 18

Storm Troops of the First World War .... 18

The German Free Movement in the

B a l t i c ...... 21

The Birth of the German Free Corps

Movement in the Republic .... 2?

The ...... 30

Expansion of the Free Corps • ...... 34

The German Youth M o v e m e n t ...... 39

Transition into the S.A...... 4l

III. THE RISE OP THE S T U R M A B T E I L U N G ...... 44

Source of R e c r u i t s ...... 44

Source of F i n a n c e s ...... 49 iv

CHAPTER PAGE

The Early Days of the Stuxmab tell ting:

1 9 2 0 - 1 9 2 3 ...... 54 The Period of Minimum Activity:

1 9 2 4 - 1 9 2 6 ...... 60

Prom Pfoffer Back to Roehm: I926-I93O • • • 64

IV. INTERNATIONAL REACTION ...... 68

Foreign Policy ...... 68

The S.A. and Di s armament ...... 73

V. HITLER'S SOLUTION ...... 80

Return to Roehm ...... 81

The Supreme Leader becomes Chancellor . . . 85

The S.A. and the Reichswehr...... 90

Decapitation: 1934 ...... 96

VI. CON C L U S I O N S...... 99

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 108 Clear the street For the Battalionst Clear the street For the S.A. Man! Millions look with hope to the , The day of freedom and bread is at hand!

(The Horst Vessel Song , 1930) CHAPTER I

THE PROBLEM AND DEFINITIONS OF TERMS USED

Since the termination of hostilities of the

Second World War a great flood of literature concerning

the impact of and his National

has appeared throughout the world. One aspect of

Hitler's rise to power has not been examined in great

detail by any scholar dealing with the period 1920 to

1945. This is the Sturmabteilung (s.A.), the uniformed

organization that attracted so much of the world's

attention during the period between the two World Wars.

Various comments dealing with the importance of the

S.A. by learned scholars and Journalists differ as to

the importance of the organization within Europe in

general and Germany in particular.

In spite of the foregoing, a detailed word

on the S.A. is not to be found. Heinrich Bennecke, one

of the few scholars who has given thought to the S.A.,

finds no particular reason for this obvious gap.^

Wolfgang Sauer, a keen student of the pre-Hitler era,

^Heinrich Bennecke, Hitler und die SA (: Guenter Olzog Verlag, I9 62), p. 9» feels that the importance of the S.A. was eclipsed by 2 Hitler's meteoric rise to power. Lastly, a case for the lack of scholarly interest in the S.A. could be made because of its acquittal during the Trials:

Although in specific instances some units of the SA were used for the commission of War Crimes and , it cannot be said that its members generally participated in or even knew of the criminal acts. For these reasons the Tribunal does not declare the SA to be a criminal organization within the meaning of Article 9 of the Charter. ^

All of this may help explain the inadequate treatment of a subject of considerable historical value. In the quest for bigger game the world has been seeking the more important Nazis from organizations which engaged in even greater acts of violence and terror.

I . THE PROBLEM

Statement of the problem. It was the purpose of this study (l) to trace the development of this storm troop or movement as a tool in the hands of a dictator in his rise to the leadership of his nation,

(2 ) to gauge its importance, and (3 ) to present adequate

2 Wolfgang Sauer, "Die SA - Terrorinstrument Revolutionsarmee?" Die nationalsozialistische Maohter- greifung (Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag, I96O), p. 829*

^"Judgment", Trial of the Major War Criminals. Vol. I. (: Allied Control Authority for Germany, 194?), p. 275. proof to support a thesis that this S.A. movement was one of Adolf Hitler's many projects that proceeded without any master plan to guide it.

Adolf Hitler, in both his rise to power and his

12 years as Fuehrer of the Third German , seemed to ignore long-range contingency planning. Decisions were often made on an ad hoc or piecemeal basis. Fre­ quently this worked in Hitler's favor. Sometimes it did not. Hitler's arrival at the with­ out any firm plan to proceed with the war was an example of his inability to grasp the importance of planning for the difficulties he certainly must have known might lie ahead. His sudden decision to strike at the

Union, in the east, without having solved the problem of

Great Britain in the west, constitutes a prime example of irresponsibility in the field of contingency planning. ^

This study will stress this lack of planning as it per­ tained to the S.A. and indicate how this failure to anticipate developments became a disadvantage and an acute dilemma by 1934. Nevertheless, the S.A. was an

L Otto-Heinrich Kuehner, Vahn und Untereang ( * Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1956), p. 59*

^Kuehner, o£. cit., pp. 112-113» organization created to satisfy a political need of the times. Unfortunately, with Hitler's ascendency to the chancellorship, no plan existed to deal with this powerful force then in being. The S.A. had struck terror within Germany and dismayed most major powers in the world. , England, and Belgium, among others, had just completed a long, costly, and bloody war with

Germany. The sight of so many young Germans in uniforms did little to cast any feeling of peace and security across Europe in the late 1920's and early

1 9 3 0 's. « But the man who had to solve the problem of the

S.A. was Hitler himself. He had authorized its creation.

His poor planning had allowed it to become a distinct embarrassment to himself and his party. The scope of this study will restrict itself in chronology to the day of the purge, 0 , 1934. The S.A. survived until 1 9 4 5 » but the drastic action necessiated by the events of the purge left only a weak and decapitated paramilitary organization.

II. DEFINITION OP TERMS USED

Major works dealing with this period of history treat the S.A. as a relatively unimportant child of the

Nazi revolution and doom it to obscurity in the shadows ot its own once-subordinate organizations such as the s,s., the S.D. , and the Gestapo. In this connection a myth surrounding the S.A. has emerged from the wreckage of the Third Reich. This myth, perpetuated by Journal­ ists, Hollywood, and, of late, the television industry, equates storm troops with any German military formations between 1925 and 1945. This failure to differentiate between the various military and paramilitary organiza­ tions, both private and official, stems from what George

Kennan cites as victimization by our own prejudices concerning Nazi Gennany,^ In short, the general public was blinded by reports of uniformed

Germans oppressing the populace and committing atrocities.

By 1940 it had become fashionable to identify any German in uniform as a ruthless, militaristic, Prussian, storm trooper. In reality, however, this was not the case.

Before a student of the era can appreciate the impact of the S.A. , he must first define what the S.A. was and what it was not.

The Sturmabteilung. (Storm ). This Organi­ zation was the parent unit of many military and semi- 7 military formations that emerged during the Third Reich.

^George F. Kennan, and the Vest under Lenin and Stalin (New York: Mentor Books, I96O), p. 345»

^Alfred Vagts, Hitler's Second Army (Washington: D.C.: Journal Press, 1943), p. 11. The Initials, S.A., represent an abbreviation of the

original German designation. The members of the organi­

zation were Hitler's original storm troops. Characterized

by the brown they wore, these political troops were

the nucleus for a private paramilitary force identified

with the National Socialist Gez*man Workers' Party of

Adolf Hitler. They are credited with doing many things

that they in fact did not do. Pinson gives what is per­

haps the most concise definition of the mission of the

S.A. *

To maintain the power of the rising N.S.D.A.P. the S.A. was boxm as a strong-armed band to protect party meetings and break up the meetings of opponents. The S.A. was an instrument of mass raids; it arranged mass confiscations; it staged mass demonstrations; it acted as auxiliary police ;gand it arranged "spontan­ eous" mass demonstrations.

The Schutzstaffel. (Protection ). The

initials 8.8. are an abbreviation for what was initially

a small group of S.A. men charged with the personal o safety of Adolf Hitler. During the period covered by

the scope of this thesis, the S.S. was primarily a body­

guard for the leader.Members of the S.S.

Q Koppel S. Pinson, Modern Germany (New Yorks The Macmillan , 1954), ^ 511. Q ^Vagts, 0£. cit.. p. 35.

^^, The SS t Alibi of a Nation (: William Heinemann Ltd., 1956), pp. 1-2. were clearly identifiable by their impressive , uniforms. Later, however, the S.S. grew into a special­ ized force which included entire elite axmored divisions.

These dedicated units saw action on every front. Adolf

Hitler. Hermann Goering. and Gross Deutschland were only a few of the many elite formations encountered by American and Army forces during operations from North Africa to the Volga. These were excellent military organizations which fought with a tenacity sufficient to cause reports of 'storm troops' to be perpetuated by war correspondents.

In addition there was also a General S.S. with which many civilian Nazi Party members became affiliated; these per­ sonnel were permitted to wear the distinctive black uni­ form. , its commander until 19^5 •

Martin Bormann, and are names associated with the S. S. The important point, however, is that the

S.S, was originally subordinate to the S.A. and grew in power and importance as the strength of the S.A. waned.

The Sicherheitsdienst. (Security Service). The secret S.D. was often confused with the S.A. and S.S.

The S.D. was organized within the S.S. in 1931 on direct orders of Heinrich Himmler, leader of the S.S., for the

^^Reitlinger, loc. cit. 8

12 primary purpose of gathering intelligence. The S.D. became infamous for its emergency measure detachments

() which were instrumental in the exter­ mination of . Heydrich and Eichmann are two names associated with the despicable S.D. The terror insti­ gated by this organization did much to perpetuate the legend of the storm troops.

The Geheime Staatspolizei. (). Re­ membered as the Gestapo (a contraction), this confusing organization was destined to become a large and terrify­ ing force within Hitler's Third Reich. The Nuremberg

War Crime Trials failed to unravel the exact relation­ ship it enjoyed with the S.A., S.S., and other organiza­ tions for which it worked. It seems fairly certain that it was organized in 1933 for the task of keeping the

German populace under surveillance and to assist in the promotion of discipline. To help the people identify the Gestapo with National Socialism and, at the same time, reduce the criticism which might otherwise have been directed at this police force some of its members were equipped with S.A. and S.S. uniforms. 13

1 9 Reitlinger, 0£. cit., pp. kO-kl, 13 A.M.S. Neave, "Summary of Evidence Heard on Commission," Documents in Evidence. Vol. XLII (Nuremberg: Allied Control Authority for Germany, 194?), p. 42. Gerald Reitlinger reminds his readers that the establishment of a secret political state police branch occurred during the early days of the and that it operated as an intelligence apparatus to monitor the activities of parties of the extreme right 14 and left. By late 1931 the Nazi Party was ravaged by a spy mania. When Hitler came to power, therefore, it was an easy task to augment this special force with personnel from both the S.A. and the S.S, for purposes of compelling cohesion within the party and insuring nazification sunong all German political parties, The curious method employed to reinforce the existing

Gestapo organization in 1933 will be amplified in

Chapter V. below.

Even Nazi Party members must have been confused by the organization and mission of the Gestapo. Prom the evidence heard at the we also read:

The general impression grew up even within Germany that S.S. and S.A. men formed the staffs of the Gestapo offices. This was not in fact so. The executive and administrative posts were held from the start by officials of the State Police; it was only the subordinate jobs that were held by S.S. and S.A. men.

^^Reitlinger, 0£. cit. , p. 42. ^^Ibid.

Neave, 0£. cit. . p. 42. 10

If loyal Nazis were themselves bewildered by this S.A. -Gestapo relationship it would follow that foreigners tended to continue the tradition of equating the Gestapo with storm troops.

The organizations described above were but some of the many which have caused confusion that exists to

the present day. A complete list would be difficult to compile, as it would have to include the uniformed forces of the various political parties in the Weimar

Republic as well as the innumerable paramilitary for­ mations of freebooters operating with or without the

consent of the German Government.

It is important to mention the fact that most books dealing with the rise and fall of the Third Reich

devote considerable space to the S.S. and its subordinate

organizations and, at the same time, limit their analysis

of the S.A. It must be remembered that both the S.A. and

the S.S. had their respective peaks of power under differ­

ing circumstances. One was not necessarily better or

worse than the other. In this connection, it should not

be forgotten that the S.A. was the original instrument of

Nazi terror and that the methods of the S.S. , legalized

by an irresponsible and totalitarian government, can be

traced to their beginnings in the S.A. 11

III. DYNAMISM OP THE S.A.

The distinguishing character or tone of the S.A. as a group of German citizens is quite cohiplex. In later chapters attention will be invited to the deplorable economic and political conditions which prevailed in the short history of the Weimar Republic. The young and thoroughly disillusioned youth of Germany needed an outlet to protest this sorry state of affairs. Indeed, there were many outlets provided for the release of emotions.

The emergence of more than a score of political parties, each professing to have the solution for a better

Germany, bears witness to the prevailing need to rectify a worsening situation. As a succession of governments rose and fell, a sense of urgency appeared to arise and to demand a radical solution to a vexing problem. For this the S.A. of the N.S.D.A.P. provided a growing and popular appeal. The ideology of the Nazi Party cannot, by itself, explain the attraction of the S.A. to its recruits, for there is considerable doubt if National

Socialism really had an ideology. Pinson sums up the attraction of the Nazi Party to the masses :

The National Socialist philosophy was mainly the "grafting of all sorts of different fruits on the stem of the common crab-apple planted at the time of its first meetings in the beer house in Munich." These fruits came from the Vaterlandspartei, from 12

pan-German racialism, socialism, traditionalism, , Prussianism, and so on. And the pro­ grams always abounded in generalities so that any and every group could read into it whatever it wanted--farmers, workers, industrialists, small shopkeepers, youth, and so on. "Concrete promises divide, generalities unite." Hitler was the man with the authoritarian panacea that was out to fit all malcontents.

The S.A. , therefore, offered the young man a number of things. One of these was a sense of belonging to a movement which was pledged to restore Germany to its rightful place within the community of nations. Besides companionship the young man could also boast membership in a uniformed band - an important status symbol to

Gennans of the period. Later, when unemployment in­ creased and money became scare, the young German could find room and board at houses provided by the Nazi Party for its destitute street brawlers.

But the N.S.D.A.P. did not merely allow the S.A. to subsist without doing something of value for the Party.

The S.A. member was required to fight in beer halls in defense of his Party's meetings, in meeting places where opposition party rallies had assembled, and especially in the streets. , for all his evil ways, was aware of the value of dominating the streets for the

17 Pinson, o£. cit., p. 488. 13 purpose of terrorizing the opposition. In 1922 at a meeting in the he first proclaimed this doctrine and forecast the impact the S.A. would have *

Whoever can conquer the street will conquer the State one day, for every form of power politics and any dictatorially run State has its roots in the street. We cannot have enough of public demonstra­ tions, for that is far and away the most emphatic way of demonstrating one's will to govern. It means a darned sight more than election statistics. When we can see our men, thousands of them, marching up and down the streets, that is nothing short of mobilization for powerI

The S.A. was well suited for fighting in the^ streets. Its ranks were full of bullies and brawlers who knew little else in life. For the average member a victoiry over an opponent in a street brawl was comparable to victoi*y over an enemy of Gexmiany. It is important to remember that the storm troopers usually did not carry arms. As will be discussed. Hitler forbade the use of weapons after his abortive in Munich on »

1923. It is possible that this fiasco convinced him that armed party members might be a future political liability,

This action did little to give the S.A. a cloak of respectibility, but it did take the organization out of the category of the ordinary armed bands (Wehrverbaende) of the times.

18 Roger Manvel1 and Heinrich Fraenkel, Dr. Goebbels t His Life and Death (London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 196o77"p. 82. 14

In his street brawls the S.A, man was usually operating in a quasi-illegal manner. On some occasions his entire organization was legally banned, but this seemed- to inspire him to greater efforts to work toward the overthrow of the Weimar Republic which he equated with oppression of Germany. Defiance of the legally constituted government, therefore, gave him a sense of accomplishment. In this connection, their mass attitude was actual enjoyment of the fact that they were feared by others. The street gangs of youths in America's large cities are not much different. In the opinion of the average S.A. member the political and economic conditions in Germany could not sink to a lower level. Germany had no place to go but up, and the instrument to perform the task of revitalizing Germany was Adolf Hitler's N.S.D.A.P.

To fight for the Party, therefore, was not only an act of personal courage but an expression of patriotism as well.

Hitler had set the stage for this sort of philosophy as early as September 18, 1922:

The Marxist taught - If you will not be my brother, I will bash your skull in. Our motto should be - If you will not be a German, I will bash your skull in. For we are convinced that we cannot succeed without 15

a struggle. ¥e have to fight with ideas, but if necessary, also with our fists.^9

This willingness to do battle for the Party and for Germany was ruthlessly exploited by Hitler and other leading Nazis. In the campaigns to enlist new members

the attraction of uniforms, insignia, and young men willing to fight was always there. Bullock writes:

There were the posters, always in red, the revolu­ tionary colour, chosen to provoke the Left; the swastika and the flag, with its black swastika in a circle on a red background, a design to which Hitler devoted the utmost care; the , the uniform and the hierarchy of ranks. Mass meetings and demonstrations were another device which Hitler borrowed from the Austrian Social Democrats. The essential purpose of such meetings was to create a sense of power, of belonging to a movement whose success was irresistible. Hitler here hit upon a psychological fact which was to prove of great importance in the histox*y of the Nazi movement: that violence and terror have their own propaganda value, and that the display of physical force attracts as many as it r e p e l s . 20

A later chapter will stress the fact that the S.A.

also comprised a group of rootless veterans who knew nothing of patriotism but much of fighting, pillage, and

rule by force of violence. Writing of the masses of such

19 ^ Norman H. Baynes, The Speeches of Adolf Hitler Vol. I. (London: The Oxford University Press, 19^2), p. 107. 20 , Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (New York: Bantam Books, I9 6 1 ), ppT %ïb-?7. 16 men in the Weimar Republic, Bullock summarizes;

In the years after the war it was from ex- servicemen like this who felt more at home in a unifozm, living in a mess or barracks, men who could never settle down into the monotonous routine life in "Civvy Street" that the . the Nazis, and a score of extremist parties recruited their members, The war, and the impact of war upon the individual lives of millions of Germans, were among the essential conditions for the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party.2^

Hence, the opportunity to fight for self or country was always present. It was a way of life in

Germany from 1919 to 1933, The S.A, apparently was able to attract the better brawlers, and in that sense it was successful. But if the average S.A. man was a rowdy, he was almost a saint in comparison to the S.A. leaders.

Maurice, Klintzsch, Goering, Roehm, Hess, and Lutze had little to recommend them as leaders. Corruption, homo­ sexuality, lovers' quarrels, and mutiny were almost daily occurrences engaged in by the elite of the S.A.

Is it any wonder that the average storm trooper could not achieve a good reputation when his superiors were no better than common criminals with a growing political party to help protect them?

The leadership, as will be noted, was the key to

21 Bullock, 0£. cit., p. 30, 17 the eventual decapitation of the S.A. The guiding credo of acquiring spoils of victory led the leader­ ship to demand more than Hitler could deliver. In the streets and in the beer halls the S.A. was the master. In Hitler it met its master. CHAPTER II

THE ROOTS OF THE STURHABTEILUNG

Historians such as Wheeler-Bennett, Churchill,

and Bullock profess the creation of the S.A. to have been

Hitler’s doing. Hitler did take credit for the S.A, before he himself discredited its leadership,^ This

chapter deals with the roots of the and will

show how these military and paramilitary organizations were common in Gennany before Hitler became involved

in politics.

I. STORM TROOPS OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR

The costly and stalemated trench warfare which

characterized the military operations in Europe from ipi4

to 1018 defied the ingenuity of tacticians and inventors

to provide an effective offensive weapon. A new arsenal

of weaponry was born during this period. Poison gas,

the bombardment aircraft, and the tank all made their

first appearance on the Western Front, but their

In his letter to the S.A. and S.S. of September 2, 193c, acknowledging the resignation of Captain von Pfeffer, Hitler writes: "Ich uebernehme mit dem heutigen Tage die oberste Fuehrung der gesamten einst von niir gegruendeten SA und SS." [^italics not in the origina^ . Voelkischer Beobachter. September 3» 193C. 19 availability to each side seemed to cancel out any advan­ tage that in theory should have accrued. The price of penetrating the enemy's line to a depth of only a few hundred meters on a narrow front had to be paid in thou­ sands of human lives. Having made a penetration of the enemy's front, the attacking force was usually too weak to hold its expensive gains and was forced to withdraw,

Passchendaele, Vimy Ridge, and Verdun are only three engagements testifying to the inefficacy of tactics and armaments of the times. Hall and Davis summarize this frustration extremely well :

Both the French and the British tried their best in 1915 to break through, the former in the Artois district and in Champagne, the latter at Neuve Cha­ pelle and at Loos. The results were disappointing. It proved possible to demolish the German front-line trenches with comparative ease, and even to capture parts of the second line. But behind this was al­ ways a third, bristling and foimidable. Before the artilleiry could be moved forward to destroy this barrier, the Germans were always able to hurry for­ ward reserves and to concentrate their own batter­ ies on the chief points of danger. These inner trench lines simply could not be stormed [italics not in the originaiQ . 2

The efforts of the to break the

Allied front proved equally disastrous. In 1916 a

2 Walter Hall and William S, Davis, The Course of Europe Since Waterloo (New York: D. Appleton- Century Company, 1941),p. 603. 20

German officer, Major Rohr, organized, equipped, and

trained a of troops that could storm an 3 enemy front when all else had failed. The intent here was to engage the enemy with a highly mobile force, in

superb physical condition, and armed with light but

effective weapons such as automatic rifles and hand

grenades. In short. Major Rohr created an elite unit

that received the best rations, latest equipment, and distinctive insignia. The success of his storm troops

in battle can be proved by a German Army order requiring 4 each to organize a similar unit. There is no question that these small detachments created morale

problems within the ranks. The American Army of the

Second World War also created elite units of airborne

and ranger troops. Those troops were seldom popular

with regular troops of the line who suffered in combat

day after day, saw the elite troops stage a short engage­

ment, and read later that, the elite organization had

won the battle. The Stosstinipps of Major Rohr had set

the stage for the storm troops of the immediate future.

^Robert G.L, Waite, Vanguard of (Cam­ bridge , Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952), p. 23» 4 Ibid. 21

The Important point is that the legend of the storm troops can be traced to an era earlier than Hitler’s, I II, THE GERMAN FREE CORPS MOVEMENT IN

THE BALTIC

Other roots of the Nazi storm troops can be traced to the Freik-orpsbewegung (free corps movement) that sprang up in Germany during the post-war period. It is not in­ tended here to examine the various free corps or free­ booters in detail* There were simply too many of them.

Attention will be invited to the effect of these various free corps on German foreign policy of the times and to the role these freebooters came to play in the development of the new Nazi Party of Adolf Hitler.

The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk between Germany and

Russia ended the war in the east with German troops spread from the Baltic States to the Ukraine. The word­ ing of the Armistice of November 11, 1918, however, required that these far-flung divisions be returned to the frontiers of Germany. The exact wording is curious:

All German troops at present in territories which before the war formed part of Russia must return to within the frontiers of Germany (as they existed on August 1, 1914) as soon as the Allies shall think the moment suitable having 22

regard to the Internal situation of these _ territories [italics not in the originajQ.

This odd wording of the Armistice failed to spell out in any detail what the Allies might consider to be a suitable moment. The Allied intervention in the

Russian Revolution kept the Baltic States in an active military situation for the following two years. Suffice it to say that German troops were available to the Allies in the very areas in which the counter-revolution was forming. The fact that there were anti-Bolshevik forces in the Baltic did not escape the Allies. There is no evidence that indicates any attempt on the part of the Allies to force a withdrawal of German units as the year 1918 drew to a close. On the contrary, the Allies

'suggested* that the German divisions co-operate with the governments of the Baltic States in repelling the forces of the new ,^

Robert Waite is quick to point out that the Germans, smarting under the humiliation of the Armistice, were in no sense interested in carrying out the policies of

^Harry R. Rudin, ATOlstice. 1918 (New Havent Yale University Press, 1944), Appendix G, é\ Warren E. Williams, "Die Politik der Alliierten gegenueber den Preikorps im Baltikum 1918-1919»" Viertel.iahrshefte fuer Zeitgeschichte. 12, Jahrgang 1964, (April, 1964), pTI l46. 23

7 their former enemy. On the contraiy, many soldiers mutinied, threw away their weapons, and began to 8 return to Germany in any mariner they could.

Latvia in particular was being hard pressed by the advancing Red Army. The Latvians, cognizant of their own military inadequacies, appealed to the German

Ambassador, Herr Winnig, who suggested that the Latvian

President take his problems to the British. A British flotilla, sweeping mines in the Baltic Sea, was actually operating in Latvian waters. This British flotilla had arrived before Christmas of 1918 for the alleged task of monitoring the Armistice. In practice its secret mission was to gather intelligence on developments in the newly 9 fozTned Soviet Russia. Details of what followed are difficult to find, but the British political represen­ tatives aboard the flagship, H.M.S. Princess Margaret, approved the concept of the formation of a unit of Ger-? man volunteers for the defense of .The German

7 W a i t e , 0£. cit. . p. 100.

®Ibid. 9 Williams, op. cit. . p. 150.

^^Waite, o p . cit .. p. 102. 24

General Count Ruediger von der Goltz, an adventurer who was destined to play many roles in the troubled times of 1918-1920, immediately undertook the formation of a private army that would be responsive to his command.

This private army, probably the first to be organized in post-war Germany, was only one of many that appeared in the Baltic and later in Germany,

The importance of this private army, free corps, gang of freebooters, Preikorps. or whatever one might call them, seemed to be minimized at the time. Robert

Hales, however, a member of the U.S. Senate Mission to

Finland, Latvia, and , foresaw the impact of this and other private German operating in the

Baltic. He wrote in his report ;

The Germans were, therefore, present in the Baltic Provinces with the full consent of the Allies and, indeed, by their implied command. The framers of the Armistice recognized that the red tide could not be held by any bulwark which any of the native states could maintain. ^

Willians, however, saw a sinister development in the success of this and other private armies in the Baltic.

^^Edgar von Schmidt-Pauli , Geschichte der Preikorps. 1918-1924 (Stuttgart: Schramm Verlag, 1936) , p. 8 7 . 12 United States Congress, Senate, Documents, Report of the Mission to Finland. Latvia, and Lithuania. 66th Congress, December I9I8 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1919), p. 8. 25

He maintains that the Weimar Republic was interested in annexing the entire Baltic area. 13 In any event the free corps of von der Goltz and others were fairly successful. Von der Goltz was able to build his private army to such size that, by , it was the largest military force operating in the Baltic; fell to the ill Preikorps on , 1919» Had it not been for a con­ flict within the private army of von der Goltz, it might have gone on to greater military glory. The Latvians finally became convinced that these freebooters posed as large a threat as the Red Army and took action directed

toward encouraging the withdrawal of the von der Goltz

forces back to Germany.

The Latvians were destined to learn quickly how

easy it was to find and employ a private army and how

difficult it was to deactivate it. There was consider­

able looting and rioting on the part of the von der

Goltz Preikorps before it could be driven out of Latvia by the summer of 1919, and Schmidt-Pauli, himself a

soldier in the free corps, obsexves that freebooters

^^Williams, oj^, cit. . p. l48. ill Waite, op. cit.. p. 118.

^^Waite, pp. cit., p. 119» 26 were very hard to suppress,This was not the last

complaint to be heard concerning the difficulties

encountered in dealing with private armies.

An important historical fact to be stressed

about the Gennan private army operating in the Baltic

area is that the Allies not only knew of its existence

but even sanctioned its operations. Waite comments

accordingly:

The Frelkorps had operated in the Baltic because the Allies were not ready to supply their own troops, and they further believed that the Preikorps would withdraw as soon as their mission was accom­ plished. The Allies discovered quite early the fact that paramilitary organizations such as the Prei­ korps remained unmoved by the usual diplomatic methods or arguments.^7

Units of German freebooters could possibly have

continued to operate in the Baltic, but Lloyd George had

just won an election based on immediate demobilization,

austerity, and cessation of activities related to the

waging of war in any form. Waite believes that, al­

though British backing of the von der Goltz Preikorps

may have been able to pay even greater dividends. His

Majesty's government quickly lost interest in pursuing

^^Schmidt-Pauli, o£. cit.. p. 12?. 17 Waite, 0£. cit., p. l68. 27

18 further military adventures in the Baltic.

The von der Goltz paramilitary force was not the only free corps operating in the Baltic with Allied and local support, but it was the largest and most specta­ cular, Various bands of freebooters in the Baltic and in Germany arose under the auspices of newly separated

German officers whose names they incorporated in their titles. Die Erhardt Brigade. Preikorps Rossbach. and

Maercker's Volunteer Rifles are only a few of the many organizations that sprang up throughout Germany in the period of I9I8 to 1924. These freebooters had no loyalty except to their leader whose name they proudly b o r e .

III. THE BIRTH OP THE GERMAN PREE CORPS

MOVEMENT IN THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC

Various political, economic, and military needs of the Weimar Republic were satisfied by the freebooters.

The was to limit the new German

Army to 100,000 men of all ranks. This was scarcely enough military manpower to preserve internal order and, at the same time, to defend the Weimar Republic against

l^Ibid.

19Williams, op. cit.. p. l46. 28 potential foreign aggression. Perhaps the first officer

in the German Army to recognize this was Lieutenant

General Kurt von Schleicher, then a major who, about

Christmas of 1918, encouraged both the new government

and von Hindenburg to organize volunteer corps recruited

from the old army and commanded by former professional 20 officers. Shortly thereafter, was named

as first Minister of Defense and charged with the addi­

tional mission of maintaining internal security in the

face of Spartacist militancy. On January 4, 1919 he

asked , Chairman of the Council of People's

Commissars, to accompany him to review a group of

volunteer soldiers whom General von Maercker had just

organized into a Preikorps; at this review Noske 21 apparently found an immediately available army.

By subsidizing a private army that was anxious to

do what they had been trained to do for the four years of

war immediately preceding, Noske apparently felt he had

cleverly found a way around the unfair Diktat of

Versailles soon to come and a means to help ease the

employment situation as well. Waite's comment on this

20 Waite, op, cit.. p. 12.

2XWaite, pp. cit.. p. l6. 29 action might just as well have been made about Hitler or

Roehm instead of Noske when he writes ;

What Noske did was simply to give official authorization to a movement which was already sweeping the country. He did not organize an army, he collected o n e , 22

The Peace of Versailles complicated the military

situation within Germany by limiting the new 100,000 man army to 4,000 officers. It follows that the great number of officers, newly separated from the service,

faced not only unemployment, but a great loss of

prestige as well. Erhardt, von der Goltz, and Maercker had been fairly senior officers in the Imperial Navy

or German Army, The movement had to have leadership of

some sort, and the leaders were everywhere to be found.

It also follows that many of the soldiers would have

preferred searvice in the Reichswehr, but only a handful

could have been ’officially' absorbed into such a

diminutive organization.

But a militarily denuded Germany needed fighting

troops and was in no position to question the source of

these volunteers. Wheeler-Bennett 's account of what the

Ebert Government did thereafter is significant*

22 Waite, pp. cit., p. 33< 30

They had legalized the Free Corps by Issuing an appeal (January 6, 1919) to all able-bodied men to join these military foundations for the defense of the frontiers of the and the preservation of order in the interior. This step, which was taken two days after the review of Maercker's Jaegers at by Ebert and Noske on January 4, placed the Free Corps on an independent footing; whereas they had previously existed as the independent creation of the General Staff, they were now accorded of­ ficial recognition by the Government, and became, in effect, almost its sole military r e s o u r c e . 23

The Allied Commission of Control, however, was not fooled by these maneuvers and had seen enough of von der Goltz and Captain Erhardt to demand the demo- 24 bilization of their two corps on , 1920, The events of the Kapp Putsch a few days later were to demonstrate the violence of which these paramilitary forces were capable,

IV, THE KAPP PUTSCH

The events of March 13-1?i 1920 took place with

such rapidity that even the conspirators had insufficient

time to complete their planning. There is little doubt

that the disgruntled freebooters were manifestly unwilling

to allow themselves to be demobilized. Waite points

^^John W, Wheeler-Bennett, The Nemesis of Power (London* The Macmillan & Company, Ltd.l 1953), p. 4l. 24 Wheeler-Bennett, o^. cit,. pp. 71-72, 31 this out in his appraisal of the various causes of the ill-fated revolt*

The Kapp-Luettwitz Putsch, like other events in history, may be attributed to causes of two differ­ ent kinds— the underlying cause was the violent reaction among the nationalist-military circles to the signing of the "Diktat" of Versailles. The immediate cause— the catalytic agent--was the attempt of the government to demobilize a part of its volunteer army in accordance with the provisions of the peace treaty. The most important immediate result of the signing of the Versailles Treaty was that the precarious and temporary alliance between the Free Corps and the civilian government was now finally and irreparably shattered.25

A detailed analysis of the chronology of the

Kapp Putsch is beyond the scope of this dissertation. It is, however, important to the development of the presen­ tation that the free corps participation in the affair be recorded. In this connection it is important to record the defeat of Erzberger, Minister of Finance, in a libel suit. Enemies of the new German government saw this as proof of the utter weakness of the existing regime and felt that one simple blow would bring the entire house of cards crashing down,But the political

^^Waite, 0£. cit, . p, l4z.

^^Erich Eyck, A History of the Weimar Republic, Vol. I., trans, Harlan Hanson and Robert Waite (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 147. 32 enemies of Ebert underestimated this weakness and overestimated their own abilities in rallying support to their cause.

The historian, Erich Eyck, also views the con­ spiracy as an event precipitated by the reduction of the size of the officer corps and the army and further agitated by the militancy of free corps units ;

The problem was made even more complex by the existence of the Frelkorps. These private armies • had been active during the weeks of the revolution and in battles against the . Their members believed they had found a military career and, following the lead of the Baltic Volunteers, they refused to obey the Allied order to disband. '

At six o'clock on the morning of March 13, 1920, the rebellious troops of the Erhardt Brigade marched through the Brandenburg Gate; only an hour later

Dr. , then East 's provincial director-general, appeared at the national chancellery —" 2 Q on the Wilhelmstrasse to seize the title of chancellor.

Waite introduces accounts of witnesses to show that the Erhardt Brigade made use of howitzers, bombers, and heavy machine guns in their efforts to dominate the 20 capital. Brigadier General John H. Morgan, British

27 Eyck, 0£, cit., p. 7 1 ,

^®Ibid,

^^Waite, o£, cit.. p. 7 1 » 33

Army, was at this time the chief military representative on the In ter-Allied Council of the Control Commission, the Allied organization whose task it was to supervise the disarmament of Germany. He was present at the square in Berlin where the crowd gathered as the Erhardt

Brigade made its infamous withdrawal from the city, and his account of the irresponsibility and utter disregard for life and property on the part of the freebooters is significant*

But the crowd was to pay dearly a few hours later for its cheering. As I passed down the Wilhelms tras se after lunch I saw guns limbering up and teeuns hooked in. The 'Baltic' troops, after their brief and inglorious adventure, were preparing to evacuate the city over which they had lorded it for five days. Their faces were surly and I looked for trouble. It came. They formed up in the Unter den Linden, guns in a column of route, troops in column of fours. A dense crowd watched them in silence. A boy laughed. Two soldiers broke out of the ranks, clubbed him with the butts of their rifles and kicked his inanimate body as he lay prostrate on the ground. No one dared interfere, but the crowd hissed. At that, an officer shouted some words of command of which only the word ' ruecksichtslos ' reached me. The troops opened fire. The crowd was an easy target. The street suddenly resounded with the 'rat-tat ' of machine-guns, the whistling of bullets, the crack of splintered glass, and the cries and groans of the wounded. The people ran. The rest lay where they had fallen. The strick­ en bodies had a strangely shrunken look. They seemed like heaps of old clothes. Then came another command -to cease fire-followed by 'Quick March! ' The troops marched out under the arch of the Brandenburger Tor in the direction of Chariottenburg, some of them occasionally breaking out of the ranks to run on to the pavement and beat an unoffending civilian, whose face they did not like, over the head with the tail-end 34

30 of their stick-bombs,

A more worthy group of candidates for Hitler's future S.A. would be difficult to imagine. Astonish­ ingly, however, Ebert not only gave amnesty to the free corps after this disgusting performance, but paid them to put down Communist uprisings shortly thereafter! 31

But Noske, a victim of the reorganization that followed, probably had learned the same lesson that

Americans learned in the lawless days of the west % hired guns are easy to enlist, but they create more problems than.they solve.

The Kapp Putsch was shattered by two primary forms of resistance; the general strike of the workers and the refusal of the civil servants to cooperate with the 32 rebels. The failure and disgrace of the freebooters apparently did not prevent an expansion of the movement.

V. EXPANSION OP THE FREE CORPS

If Germany received a shock as a result of the excesses of the freebooters in Berlin during the Kapp

30 '* John H, Morgan, Assize of Arms. Vol. I, (London: Meuthen & Co., Ltd., 19'^), PP* 74-75» 31 Waite, 02» cit. , p. 171» 32 Eyck, 02» cit., p. 151 » 35

Putsch.» it was to be a minor shock as compared with the horror of the Munich suppression only two months later,

Munich, a breeding ground for radicals of both right

and left, suffered a Communist uprising in May in which

the leftists declared to be a Soviet Republic.

This revolution failed to last as a result of the

Preikorps units sent in to suppress it. Waite has com­

piled evidence to show that, when the freebooters had

completed their bloody mission in Munich, 1200 bodies 33 were counted in the streets and in the Isar River.

Shortly thereafter, the Reichswehr itself began

to worry about the free corps monster. President Ebert

had seen enough of them by the summer of 1920 to begin

dissolving their units. 34- The fact that these Preikorps

existed for at least four more years is indicative of

their operations on an underground basis. The "black

Reichswehr" did not make its appearance until the Ruhr

occupation; in the interim Germany had no other source

of troops to augment the legal but small Reichswehr.

Minor operations in which the Preikorps defended

the frontiers of Gezmany against Baltic and Polish forces

^^Waite, 2 2 . cit ., pp. 87-90»

^^Waite, 22» cit., p. 182. 36 would add little to the foregoing. The actions in Upper

Silesia, however, were a different matter. The French were opposed to allowing the regular Reichswehr to take

action against active Polish militancy following the Si- 35 lesian plebiscite of March 20, I92I. Against regular

Polish units, therefore, the Germans would have had no

troops to enforce the results of their victory in the Si­

lesian plebiscite, Preikorps units were committed, and the

British, to the dismay of their French ally, came out in

■favor of this freebooter intervention in international af­

fairs. No less a person than the British Prime Minister,

Lloyd George, on May 13, addressed Commons and stated:

Either the Allies ought to insist upon the Treaty being respected, or they ought to allow the Germans to do it. Not merely to disarm Germany, but to say that such troops as she has got are not to be permit­ ted to take part in restoring order in what, until the decision comes, is their own province — that is not fair. Pair play is what England stands for, and I hope she will stand for it to the end.

Pertinent to the development of these private aimiies

is the blunt fact that at least one of the victorious Al­

lies was ready to sanction the deployment of Reichswehr or

35 Sarah Vambaugh, Plebiscites Since the World W a r . Vol. I. (Washington, B.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1933)» p . 255» 36 ' Waite, 02» cit . , p, 228. 37 free corps units in Europe. This was the second occasion on which the British gave encouragement if not authorization to the freebooters. Certainly if

England had nothing against the Preikorps. why should

Germany be opposed to them? Here we have a curious situation in which the Allies were unwilling to use their own forces to enforce the Versailles Treaty and, at the

same time, permitted limited German forces to operate as an army in the explosive border areas. As has been shown, the unwillingness of the Allies to take action in the Baltic and in Upper Silesia paved the way for paramilitary forces. This example was not lost on

Hitler's S.A.

The final event in which the Preikorps played a major role was the French and Belgian occupation of the

Ruhr in I92 3 . Both Ebert and von Seeckt agreed that,

since these Preikorps units were in being, however unofficially, they might as well be sent to the Ruhr so

that the German Government could claim they were exerting pressure to stop the occupation. 37 Into this struggle, marked by cruelty on both sides, three free corps were

37 'Wheeler-Bennett, o£. cit. , p. 89. 38

OQ senti the von Epp, Rossbach, and Luetzow detachments,

Adolf Hitler, realizing that the hatred of France was unifying the German people, recognized a threat to his

new Nazi Party and consequently refused to participate in

even discussing the problem. 39 One of his newly recruited

S.A. members, , formerly a Baltic

freebooter, went on his own to the Ruhr where he is

alleged to have demolished a bridge and was shot by a 40 French firing squad. Hitler's reluctance to participate

in the Ruhr struggle did not prevent his S.A. from glori­

fying Schlageter, Nazi propaganda claims that the

N.S.D.A.P. fielded a parade of ?0,000 S.A. men and an

equal number of youths at Schlagerter ' s funeral on , 4l 1923. Although many S.A, detachments did parade, the

S.A. at that time could not have numbered more than 42 15,0 0 0 , This was not the last time that Nazi propaganda

would inflate the numbers of the S.A,

^®Ibid.

^^William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (Greenwich, Connecticut: Fawcett Publications, 1962), p. 9 8 .

^^Waite, o£. cit., p. 236, 41 Voelkischer Beobachter. May 27, 1923, 42 Alan Bullock, Hitlert A Study in Tyranny (New York: Bantam Books, I96I), p. 6 7 . 39

The French and Belgians, having accomplished nothing by their actions in the Ruhr, withdrew later in 1923 ; but there were various elements in Germany that took credit for this victory. Schmidt-Pauli gives the Frelkorps credit for leadership in the passive 4-3 resistance to French and Belgian efforts, Waite scorns this thesis and submits that the freebooters did 44 not know the meaning of passive resistance.

It will be pointed out in a later section how ready and willing the freebooters were to continue their way of life after their activities in the Ruhr. One organization that promised a continuation of their brawling abilities was the S.A.

VI. THE GERMAN YOUTH MOVEMENT

At the same time that the freebooter movement was at its zenith a parallel trend was also nearing its peak.

This was the German youth movement which had its beginnings 4 5 before the first decade of the twentieth century.

Although this movement was exploited by Hitler and

43 Schmidt-Pauli, 0£. cit., p. 277» 44 Waite, OJ2. cit. , p. 235» 45 , Koppel S, Pinson, Modern Germany (New York* The Macmillan Company, 19547"! p. 272, 40

Bal dur von Schlrach in the Hitler.iugend. () , the detailed development of its history lies beyond the bounds of this presentation.

Pinson relates the youth movement to a growing political unrest as he writes:

Youth groups of different political and cultural persuasions and of different economic strata, but all aspiring to find a way out of the meshes of the mechanized modern life, organized themselves first in 1896 as the Wanderbund. and then in I9OO as the Wandervoegel. Soon, however, the movement split into various groups and the coming of the war in 1914 took a grave toll of leadership and following. Out of the experiences and traditions of the Youth Movement, however, came much of the idealism, the intellectual groping, the quest for new forms of social and political life and also the mental confusion, the moral anarchy, and the political , which blossomed forth in the Weimar Republic.

None of the foregoing is meant to imply that the members of youth movements marched in large numbers into the folds of the free corps or later into S.A. What is . important, however, is that this movement took the form of a search for a better life and a change of the existing situation in post-war Germany. Thus another mass of young potential recruits was available for anyone pro­ fessing an ideology of change. No scholar has been able to measure the full impact of the youth movement on the

^^Ibid. 41 political life of the Weimar Republic or the Third

Reich, but it must have been considerable.

Laqueur, one of the foremost writers on the German youth movement, is quick to point out that most members of the various movements were initially repelled by the rowdy and brawling behavior of the Hitler Youth; but he also admits that some of the leaders went over to the Nazis, 47

After 1933 the youth of Germany had little choice but to join either the S.A, or Hitler Youth,

VII. TRANSITION INTO THE S.A.

The birth of the S.A. offered the freebooters con­ tinued employment and a chance for their leaders to dream of military glory of the past and the future. One of the

S.A. leaders of whom the world was soon to hear more was

Ernst Roehm. Roehm had been both in a Freikorps unit,

Freikorps Epp. and in the German Army where it had taken him 12 years and a major war to rise to the rank of 48 captain. Roehm's appalling lack of morality can be

47Walter Z. Laqueur, Young Germany: A Histoary of the German Youth Movement (New York: Basic Books, 196277 pp. 191-195. 48 Pinson, 0£. cit., p. 480. 42 traced to the free corps whose leadership Waite describes in few words:

Competition and conflict amongst the Freikorps leaders was intensified by the fact that many were homosexuals and hence prone to jealousy and lovers' quarrels,

But the S,A, accepted the rank and file of free corps membership. Schmidt-Pauli's writings would lead his readers to believe that freebooters flocked to the S.A. in wholesale numbers and that they stood for everything the Nazis stood for: love of Fatherland, hatred of Bolshevism, a disrespect for the Weimar

Republic, and intolerance of Jews. Waite challenges this philosophy:

It was only after 1933 that men of the Free Corps found it expedient to jump on the band wagon and proclaim they had always considered Hitler to be their great leader. Prior to that many of them considered him a miserable little politician and a petty who sought to stage revolutions with his mouth. As many more joined nationalist groups in direct and open opposition to the N.S.D.A.P.^

Somewhere between these two viewpoints lies the truth. The biographies of too many S.A. members

4q ^Waite, 0£. cit.. pp. 222-223.

^^Schmidt-Pauli, o^. cit. . p. 3^7*

^^Waite, o£. cit.. p. 278. 43 with Frelkorps backgrounds prove the gradual trans­

ition of freebooters into Hitler's private army during

the tnid-ip20*s. In the last anal3''sis the official Nazi

historian for the S.A. , Dr. Baj’-er, credits the free

corps in general and the Rossbach Brigade in particu­

lar as being the initial source of recruits for the

S.A, 52 But the fact remains that T'-oung Germans of

this era were disillusioned and desired to struggle

for something better. The S.A. was not to lack a

reservoir of recruits. Hitler's claim to have built

the S.A. may be valid, biit"~he inherited a firm

foundation on which to build.

5? Ernst Bayer, "Die SA," Schriften der Hoch- schule fuer Politik (Berlin: Junker und Duennhaupt Verlag, 193^77 Also appears as Document 2168-PS, Documents in Evidence. Vol. XXIX. , (Nuremberg: Allied Control Authority’- for Germany, 1947), p. 285 CHAPTER III

THE RISE OF THE STURMABTEILUNG

The brief but spectacular rise of Hitler's private political army can be divided into five phases:

the early days prior to Hitler's Putsch of November

1923» the period of minimum activity that followed, the

appointment of Captain Pfeffer as Supreme Leader in

late 1926, the return of Roehm from Bolivia, and the

final truncation followed by the subsequent decline of

the S.A, into obscurity. This chapter addresses itself

to the first three phases preceded by a brief look into

the source of recruits and finances,

I. SOURCE OF RECRUITS

It is estimated that on June 30, 1934, the &.A.

comprised an active strength of 4.5 million men.^ Such

an organization could not have grown from a handful of men into an army of millions unless it had something

to offer. Initially the S.A. had little to offer other than a chance for a young man to use his mugcles in defense of the extremely general N.S.D.A.P, program.

A.M.S. Neave, "Summary of Evidence Heard on Commission," Documents in Evidence. Vol. XLII (Nuremberg: Allied Control Authority for Germany, 1947), p. 136. h3

The preceding chapter has discussed the Frei- korps movement and elaborated on the rootless veterans of the World War who knew how to fight and little else.

Attention was also invited to the German youth, organized into bands, disillusioned with the times, and earnestly

seeking a better life for themselves and Germany. A

catalyst, hitherto unmentioned, was the economic conditions

that prevailed in Germany until Hitler was able to ease

the problem by means of rearmament and public works,

Pinson divides the economic life of the Weimar

Republic into 3 distinct stages: (l) the period of in­

flation, 1918-1 9 2 3 » (2) the period of prosperity and boom, 1923-1929 ; and (3 ) the period of economic crisis, 2 1929-1 9 3 2 . The fortunes of the S.A. appear to coincide with the first and third periods. During the second

period, the S.A. was in a stage of stagnation by virtue

of Hitler's indecision or lack of plan concerning its

future. Its rapid numerical growth after 1932 must

be attributed to the fact that enlistment into the

^Koppel S. Pinson, Modern Germany (New York: The Macmillan Company, 195^) > pT 446.

^Alan Bullock, Hitler : A Study in Tyranny (New York: Bantam Books, I9 6 1 ), pp. 98-99* 46 organization was no longer on a completely voluntary basis.

Concerning the first period, Pinson stresses that the inflation was not merely an inflation that hurt the Germans receiving a fixed salary:

Workers had to pay the equivalent of nine to ten hours of work for a pound of margarine, several days' work for a pound of butter, six weeks' pay for a pair of boots, and twenty weeks* pay for a suit of clothes.

There can be little doubt that a young man in

Germany, experiencing and observing this deplorable

economic state of affairs, might join the ranks of a politician who could blame the inflation on Versailles, a

stab in the back, Jews, or something non-German.

The inflation, discouraging as it undoubtedly ap­ peared, was not as depressing as the unemployment that began in 1929. The growth of the S.A. can be shown from

1929 onwards as increasing in membership as the number of unemployed likewise increased. Detailed strength figures

are subject to the Influence of propaganda, but with

5,668,000 men unemployed in the summer of 1931 the K strength of the Nazi Party itself was about 500,000.

^Pinson, 0£. cit., p. 44?.

^Bullock, 0£. cit., p. 155* 47

At this time Bennecke estimated the true size of the

S,A. as about $0,000 in spite of Nazi propaganda that would have one accept a figure of 104,000.^ Pinson claims 6,014,000 unemployed as the peak figure reached 7 in 1932. At this point the N,S,D,A,P. had a party membership of over a million and a private army of

400,000.®

Bennecke cites an interesting fact that seems to have escaped most authors who have written on Hitler's rise to power. Inadequate state unemployment relief was given on the basis of greatest need, but this was

complicated by employers who hired only heads of house- 9 holds. The impact of this action, humane as it may have seemed, was to put on the street the young men who had no family responsibilities. The pages of any Amer­

ican newspaper are filled with accounts of the activities of young men who have nothing to do but exist. Germany

from 1929 to 1933 was not too different.

^Heinrich Bennecke, Hitler und die SA (Munich: Guenter Olzog Verlag, I962) , pp. I65-I6 6 .

^Pinson, o£. cit., pp. 452-453. g Bullock, 02* cit.. p. 181. 9 Bennecke, op. cit.. p. 17O. ^°Ibid. 48

The (Steel Helmet), the largest German veterans' organization, was transferred to S.A, control in the spring of 1934. This added at least 1 million 11 men to the strength of the already bulging S.A.

Judging from the conflicting Nuremberg testimony concerning the infiltration by S.A. men into the

Stahlhelm. a scholar would have an exceedingly difficult time in analyzing the tnie course of events that brought this amalgamation about.

Neave, in his summary of evidence at Nuremberg, concluded that up to the appointment of Hitler as

Chancellor enlistment in the Nazi Party was a matter of individual preference; but after the N.S.D.A.P. was in power the situation changed quickly:

Service with the SA or SB is obligatory for all German students. They cannot enroll or have passes renewed at the universities unless they show certi­ ficates of registry issued by the SA Office for Universities.

The inference is that a young man seeking education either had to join an organization within the Nazi Party or seek his fortune in a Germany that discriminated against him.

^^Neave, og. cit., p. 9» 12 Document SA-I5 6 , "Decree of the SA Office for Universities, Munich: April I6 , 1934," Documents in Evi­ dence . Vol. XLXI., (Nuremberg: Allied Control Authority for Germany, 194?), p. 422. 49

But whether German youths entered the S.A. through choice or pressure, the fact remains that they did come,

Bullock is convinced that the compelling force was the unemployment situation which freed the young men to brawl with the Communists and break up rival political meetings rather than simply do nothing. 13 Hoover saw their growing numbers as proof of smoldering emotions which received sanctioned relief when Jews, Poles, and other l4 minorities could be beaten or molested. Indeed, the sheer size of the organization argues well for the hypothesis that the movement was normal for the prevailing political climate of Germany between the wars. The fact remains, however, that by June 30, 1934, the S.A, had

attracted or swallowed the majority of Germany's potential military manpower,

II. SOURCE OF FINANCES

The story of providing some sort of a salary for

this growing political army is a sad chapter in the history of the S.A. This is particularly true of the

^^Bullock, o£. cit., pp. 134-135* l4 Calvin B. Hoover, Germany Enters the Third Reich (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1933)» PP* 110-113* 50 period 1929-1932 wlien Germans, both in and out the

N.S.D.A.P,, were hard pressed to provide themselves with the basic necessities of life. As will be pointed out, this led to a corruption within the S.A, that cast no credit on the organization or the Nazi Party,

In the early days of the S.A., prior to Hitler's abortive attempt to seize power in Munich, there is no record of how the S.A. was paid. This suggests that they were not paid at all and joined the ranks for the sheer love of fighting. But Bennecke has good reason to believe that Ernst Boehm, at that time filling a responsible Reichs- wehr appointment, was able to siphon funds normally allo-

Gated to Freikorps units into the S.A, 1 5 Roehm was cer­ tainly able to do this with food and tools of war required by armies.If there were other monies available for payment of the storm troopers between 1921 and I923 they must have come from party funds. , a native of Munich during these troubled times, kept the S.A. under close watch; he states that the S.A, was usually unpaid but clung to Hitler because he appeared to be

^^Bennecke, oj^, cit. . p. 18. l^Ibid. 51 equally poor. 17

Little is recorded of S.A, finances following

Hitler's failure to seize power in Bavaria on November 9,

1923. Judging from the near collapse of the N.S.D.A.P. itself, a student of this period would have to conclude that the S.A. was left to its own devices. The arrival of

Captain Franz Pfeffer von Salomon as Roehm's replacement in the autumn of 1926 caused a review of financing the

S.A, Pour revenue-producing measures for which Pfeffer took credit were the establishment of a

(uniform depot) to sell uniforms to S.A, members, the operation of the Sturm-Zigarettenfabrik (cigarette factory), the founding of mobile kitchens, and the attempt 18 to organize a private insurance company.

But the rapid rise in membership, combined with the growing unemployment and general poverty of the times, created a situation wherein all of these measures were incapable of producing the required revenues. By

17Konrad Heiden, Per Fuehrer. Hitler * s Rise to Power. trans. Ralph Manheim (Boston : Houghton Mifflin Company, 1944) p. 102. 18 Wolfgang Sauer, "Die SA-Terrorinstrument oder Revolutionsarmee?" Die nationalsozialistische Machter- grelfung (Cologne ; Westdeutscher Verlag, 196O), pp. 8^5-846. 52

September 1930 Hitler had to intervene personally and levy a most unpopular special tax for the S.A. on the entire Nazi Party.Bullock's description of Hitler's efforts to overcome the results of the revolt of the

Berlin S.A. is significant. Hitler was forced to visit beer-halls and plead with the S.A. m e n , promise them higher salaries, and assure them they were on the eve of 20 great victories. In spite of all the efforts to raise money and keep the expenditures down, the debts of the S.A. at the time of the purge were between 60 and 21 100 million marks. It would appear that promises were the key to holding this private army together.

The rank and file of the S.A. received little by way of tangible monetary rewards. The leadership also was grossly underpaid. This may be attributed to the party leaders' emulation of the Fuehrer who never projected an image of being affluent. A case in point Is Reitlinger's findings that even Heinrich

Himmler, during the peak of the war years, never received a salary of more than twenty-four thousand

19 Bullock, 02* cit., p. 135*

^°Ibid. 21 Heiden, 02* cit ., p. 11?. 53 22 per annum. With such parsimony, corruption was the inevitable result, and the S.A, movement became a distinct embarrassment to Hitler.

Typical of the growing corruption of S.A. and

S.S, leadership and following is Heiden's description of an incident which occurred in December 1932:

In the city of the SA had mutinied because it had come to light that their leaders had embezzled and sold food donated by peasants for starving storm troopers I the SA men did not mutiny against the embezzlement, however, but because the leadership had been forced to discipline the culprit ; for leaders and rank-and-file were both involved in the embezzlement. The guilty leader issued an indignant statement to the effect that SA men had informed 'party officials (meaning the of the Kassel district) outside the SA' of the events; they should take note 'that the affairs of the SA are absolutely no concern of the outsiders', and anyone who shot off his mouth again would be thrown out. They really did have something to keep secret, for the SA leader, in order to cover up the embezzlement, had arranged for subordinates to break into his office and stage a faked burglary.

This corruption continued even after the S.A. was eclipsed by Himmler's S.S. Bullock writes of the death of , Ernst Roehm's successor, who was killed 24 in 1942 while returning from a black-marketing expedition.

22Gerald Reitlinger, The SS: Alibi of a Nation (London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1956), p. 19*

Heiden, op. cit. , p. 516.

Bullock, op. cit.. p. 607» 54

III. THE EARLY DAYS OF THE

STURMABTEILUNGt 1920 - 1923

For those few Americans who have read in its entirety the standard German edition of Mein Kainpf a special medal should be struck. A duller and more verbose political writing is hard to find. The shelves of local Washington military libraries are adequately stocked with this volume, and perusal of the books leads to some interesting findings: (1) the pages are still uncut as they were when the books were originally bound; (2) the volumes were almost all presented to newlyweds by a local official of the Nazi Party;

(3) the cost to the purchaser was 12 marks, a high price to pay in Germany of the depression era; and (4) they were mostly 'liberated' by advancing American troops who brought them home as souveniers.

Hitler had pathetically little education, and what he did have did not qualify him to write great books.

William Shirer had difficulties finding even one fanati­

cal Nazi who admitted he had read the volume in its en- 2 5 tirety. Max Beloff was equally disturbed to find that

William L, Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (Greenwich, Connecticut: Fawcett Publications, 19^2), pp. 121-122. 55 foreigners were also avoiding reading the book*

An inquiry at Geneva in 1936 revealed that Litvinov was the only statesman of those regularly attending conferences there who had read it () in full.

With such a lack of ability to express himself in writing, how was Hitler able to draw the voting public to heed his words?

Hitler did hot rely on the written word too heavily*

Indeed, he did not even dictate the book to Hess until he was imprisoned in the in 1924.

His abilities lay as a speaker, and he was well aware of his capabilities in that field. One technical develop­ ment, the radio, had not yet been accomplished; Hitler, the orator, had to take his message directly to the German public in the early 1920's. Pinson points out that

N.S.D.A.P. speeches and meetings sometimes went on for 4 or 5 hours and that they were frequently interrupted by fights ; an organization was needed to go in and maintain the attention of the crowd so that the orators, speaking without a public address system, could be heard without 27 interruption. Such an organization was to be the S.A.

^^Max Beloff, The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia: 1929-1941 (London: Oxford University Press, 1956) , p. 90* 27 Pinson, o£. cit., p. 491. 56

Bullock has traced the formation of the first

* strong-arm' to the summer of 1920 when Emil

Maurice, an ex-convict, brought them into being for the 2 g protection of party meetings. The word Ordnortrupps

(squads for maintaining order) appears throughout the history of the organization until late 1921, Hitler later too]: credit for the S.A, under any name he might have cared to call it, for in Mein Kampf he writes;

When our political meetings first started, I made it a special point to organize a suitable defense squad,.« Some of them were comrades who had seen active service with me; others were young party members who had been trained and brought up to realize that only terror is capable of smashing terror.

Nowhere, however, does Hitler mention the S.A, by name or by initials, and notes that he did not 30 recognize the S.A. per se until 1928.

If students of this era are confused by what the

S.A. stood for or what it was called they may take com­ fort from the words of Hitler who much later on recalling

the deeds of the S.A., appeared equally uncertain :

g Q Bullock, £_£. cit. . p. 48.

^^Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf. trans. James Murphy (London; Hurst and Blackett, 1939), P« 406. 30 Hans Frank, Im Angesicht des Galgens (Graefelfing: P.A. Beck Verlag, 1952), p. 103. 57

It was in 1921 that I first heard men­ tioned, The SA was horn in 1920 without my having the least idea what was going on in . Italy developed in a manner at which I was the first to be surprised. I could see fairly clearly the orienta­ tion that it would be proper to give the party but I had no idea concerning paramilitary organizations. I began by creating a service to keep order and it was only after the bloody brawls of 1920 that I gave these troops the name Sturmabteilung as a reward for their behavior. (^Italics not in the original], ^

An Allied demand for more drastic and genuine dis­ armament of Freikorps units in June 1921 caused the S.A. to lose its weapons temporarily and to change its name to

Turn- und Sportabteilung. (Sports Section), a typical freebooter trick. 32 The month of August witnessed the dispatch of Hans Ulrich Klintzsch on temporary duty from

Erhardt ' s Naval Brigade to the N.S.D.A.P. headquarters in 33 Munich. It is astonishing to note that Klintzsch had been in prison for the Freikorps assassination of Brz- berger, the statesman who came out for the Versailles

Treaty.The exact relationship between Captain

Erhardt and Adolf Hitler has never been satisfactorily

Henry Picker, Hitler's Table Talk, trans. Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens ( London : Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1953)» P» 266. This was stated on January 31» 1942. 32 Reitlinger, o^. cit., p. 9»

33Bennecke, jO£. cit. . p. 28. 34 Bullock, loc. cit. 58 explained, but Klintzsch*s mission was to build a private political army for the Nazi Party-- a task which he accomplished. 35

The celebrated Saalschlacht or battle against the

Communists of , 1921 was the baptism of fire for the organization and the birth of the name, given O ^ them by the Nazi Party, Sturmabteilung.

Bayer, the official S.A. historian, writes in an

Orwellian manner when he describes the 'heroic deeds' of

Rudolf Hess and his detachment of 46 in this engagement as they threw ' thousands of Marxists' out of the Hof- braeuhaus. 37 Vagts insists they were attacked by less than 800 Communists. Heiden, a witness to the event, writes :

The National Socialist^were inferior in numbers and would probably have got the worst of it, if President Poehner's police had not, as always, come to their assistance. Prom that day on, the National Socialist private army was known as the Sturmabtei­ lung (storm Division), or S A , ^

^^Sauer, loc. cit. ^^Sauer, oj?. cl t. . p. 833*

^"^Ernst Bayer, "Die SA," Document 2168-PS, Documents in Evidence. Vol. XXIX. (Nuremberg; Allied ■ Control Authority for Germany, 1947), p. 281.

^®Alfred Vagts, Hitler's Second Army (Washington, D.C.; Infantry Journal Press, 1943), p. 11. 39 '^Heiden, 0£. cit. . p. 111. 59

Bvtt Poeliner had not seen the last of the S.A,

On the evening of November 8, 1923 the S.A. surrounded

the now famous Buergerbraeulceller with rifles and

machine guns in the first phase of Hitler's Putsch.40

This phase was fairly successful. The following day, however, the S.A.'s story was one of confusion,

indecision, and cowardice.

Goering, Klintzsch's replacement as commander of

the S.A., set some sort of an example by being wounded

while trying to save Roehm's S.A. detachment besieged in 4l the War Ministry building in downtown Munich. Roehm

and the S.A. leaders were arrested and brought to trial

for treason.

Prior to Hitler's arrest and imprisonment in

Schloss Landsberg an important development had taken

place in the S.A. This time Hitler appears to be very

accurate in his description;

Being convinced that there are always circumstances in which elite troops are called for, I created in 1922-3 the 'Adolf Hitler Shock Troops', They were made up of men who were ready for revolution and knew that some day things would come to hard knocks. When I came out of Landsberg everything was broken up and scattered in sometimes rival bands. I told

^^Shirer, o^. cit., p. 104.

^^Shirer, o^. cit., pp. 111-114. 60

myself then that I needed a bodyguard, even a very restricted one, but made up of men who would be enlisted without conditions, even to march against their own brothers, only twenty men to a city (on condition that one count on them absolutely) rather than a dubious mass. It was Maurice, Schreck, and Heiden who formed in Munich the first group of toughs, and were thus the origin of the SS ; but it was with Himmler that the SS became an extraordinary body of men, devoted to an ideal, loyal to death.

Of great importance here is that Hitler did create a system of checks and balances within the S.A. itself. When a large and unwieldy parent S.A. became

too large, its child would be the chosen instrument to do away with the father.

IV. THE PERIOD OF MINIMUM ACTIVITY:

1924 - 1926.

Ernst Roehm, on his release from his one day's sentence on April 1, 1924, made a number of observations:

(1) Hitler was still In prison and would remain there for

at least half a year; (2) Goering had fled to ;

(3) the S.A. and other private armies participating in

the Putsch had been banned in Bavaria; (4) he had a man­ date from Hitler to rebuild the S.A.; and (5 ) the remain­

ing paramilitary forces in Bavaria were now subordinate

42 Picker, o£. cit.. p. I6 7 . 61 to General von Epp in an organization known as the 4-3 Notbann.

Bennecke, himself a member of the underground

S.A. in those days, recalls that Roehm was not popular 44 because of his Reichswehr background and attitude.

Roehm appears to have overcome this handicap at least outside of Bavaria where Bennecke grudgingly gives him credit for rebuilding and keeping the S.A. loyal to

Hitler in northern and western Germany. 4 5 To get around the Bavarian Notbann Roehm organized a Frontbann which agitated the government and apparently Hitler as well, for Bullock writes:

The Frontbann, as it was now called, grew rapidly, for Roehm was an able organizer and possessed untir­ ing energy: he journeyed from one end of Germany to the other, including Austria and , and soon had some thirty thousand men enrolled. But the greater Roehm's success, the more uneasy Hitler be­ came. His activities threatened Hitler's chances of leaving prison. The Bavarian Government arrested some of the subordinate leaders of the Frontbann. and Hitler's release on parole, which he had expected six months after sentence had been passed, on 1 October, 1924, was delayed,^6

43 Ernst Roehm, Die Memoiren des Stabschefs Roehm (Saarbruecken, Uranus Verlag, 1934), p, 289. 44 Bennecke, 0£, cit.. p, 110, 45 Bennecke, ojd. cit. . p. 111. 46 Bullock, 0%). cit. , p. 9 6 . 62

Although it is not specifically recorded, it is very likely that Hitler felt the militancy of the S.A, was one of the reasons why he was in prison. Wheeler-

Bennett indicates as much as he writes:

When Adolf Hitler was released from the fortress of Landsberg on December 20, 1924, he came forth a wiser, if not a better man,..One vitally important decision he had taken. must he and his followers confront the rifles of the Reichswehr. For Hitler the Way of Armed Revolt was no longer open. ”

Perhaps this accounts for the minimum of activity

that the S.A. then engaged in. In addition, Hitler's remarks concerning the scattering of his party during his

confinement lends credence to the thesis that these were

good years for the German economy, but bad years for the

N.S.D.A.P, in general. What must not be overlooked here

is the lack of statements in both Hitler's speeches and

the Voelkischer Beobachter to the S.A, Indeed, Roehm

twice went to Hitler in early 1925 for guidance on high

policy matters involving thfe S.A,, received no decisions, i) and perhaps correctly concluded that the Fuehrer had lost

interest in his private army. 48 Of particular concern was the even stronger military character that Roehm was

47 John W, Wheeler-Bennett, The Nemesis of Power (London: The Macmillan Company, Ltd,, 1953) , p. 202. 48 Roehm, o^» cit,, pp. 308-3Ü9. 63 trying to give the S.A. after the attempt to seize power in November 1923» end in being refused permission to con- 49 tinue this he submitted his resignation on April 17» 1925*

Hitler chose not to answer the first or second letter of resignation which Roehm submitted on April 30* An item concerning his retirement in the Voelkischer Beobachter the following day was the official word Roehm received that his resignation had been accepted,

Prom this.point in time until the appointment of a new commander for the S.A, in November 1926, the storm troops appear to have been leaderless. History has not recorded Hitler's thinking in the matter, but Wheeler-

Bennett is convinced that Hitler's fear of antagonizing the Reichswehr caused him to issue the orders for the

S.A. not to carry weapons and to minimize the activities 51 of the organization.

Reflecting on the few accomplishments of this period, Roehm could have pointed with pride to a new development which was also an historical curiosity. He had succeeded in taking the S.A. out of their drab gray

49 ^Bullock, 0£. cit., pp. 98-99* 50 Voelkischer Beobachter. , 1925*

^^Wheeler-Bennett, ojo* cit., pp. 204-205* 64

52 uniforms and introducing the infamous brown ,

A great number of these uniforms had been manufactured during the War for German forces in the African colonies;

it speaks well of the British Royal Navy for having prevented these stocks from leaving Germany. Whether

these uniforms were purchased from the government or not

is not recorded,

V. PROM PFEFFER BACK TO ROEHMî 1926-1930

With the November 1926 appointment of Franz

Pfeffer von Salomon as Supreme Leader of the S.A., Adolf

Hitler appears to have made the same mistake as he had with both Klintzsch and Roehm, for Pfeffer was a former 53 Freikorps fighter. By now Hitler had come to the con­

clusion that the S.A. would need his personal direction if

it were to function as a political and not a paramilitary

force ; he collaborated with Pfeffer in the issuance of

an endless series of orders called S.A.B.E. (Sturmabtel-

lungsbefehle) and basic regulations entitled G.R.U.S.A. Vj (Grundsaetzllche Anordnungen) , all designed to keep the

S.A. working within N.S.D.A.P. bounds. 54

52 Bennecke, oj>. cit. . p. 125 53 Sauer, _op. cit. , p. 839* ^^Ibid. 65

Pfeffer accepted the challenge and plunged into his duties with great enthusiasm. He appears to have been one of the few realists in the S.A, Pfeffer recognized

the need for a sound policy of fiscal management in pro­

gramming S.A. activities. A discussion of his attempts

to raise revenue can be found in Section II. of this

chapter. He and not Roehm introduced the new and highly

flexible formations of Schar. Sturm, . Brigade.

and Gruppe that would allow the S.A. to absorb huge masses of men in the years ahead. 55

There is every reason to believe that Pfeffer, at

least initially, had good Intentions to keep his S.A.

toeing the party line. He went out of his way to discour­

age , enforced Hitler's decision that the S.A.

should not carry weapons, required all members of the S.A.

and S.S, to be members of the N.S.D,A,P., forbade military

maneuvers, and refused all members permission to frater- 56 n^ize with the Reichswehr and private armies. Above all he instituted a program of instruction to teach all forms

of fighting other than with the use of firearms. 57 But

5 5 -^Bennecke, 0£. cit. . p. 133»

^^Sauer, o^. cit., p. 841. ^^Ibid. 66 this honeymoon was not to last. The leadership and the troops of the S.A, were too thoroughly imbued with mili­ tary attitudes to take orders from Nazi politicians. On the issue of the subordination of S.A. to

(political leaders) the S.A. rebelled in at least one city In Germany: Berlin.The revolt by the local S.A. unit against the Gauleiter of Berlin caused the first action by the S.S. against the S.A. and sealed the doom of Pfeffer as Oberster S.A. Fuehrer (Supreme S.A. Leader);

Hitler named himself as O.S.A.F. 59 Sauer writes that this action set an example Hitler would follow in taking over

the Wehrmacht in 1938 and the Army after its failure

to take Moscow in 19^1.

Bennecke points out a forgotten fact of history resulting from the retirement of Pfeffer: the S.S, became partially independent of the S.A. on November 7* 1930.

This point is amplified by Sauer who regards it as a

reward for the actions of the S.S. in putting down the

Berlin revolt,This was not a complete independence,

g Q Bullock, o£. cit., p. 135* 59 Voelkischer Beobachter. September 3, 1930»

^"sauer, ££. cit., p. 849. «Isennecke. Ofi. cit., p.153. 6 2 Sauer, o£. cit., pp. 850-851. 67 but it probably set an example tliat Himmler would remember in the summer of 1934.

By now Hitler had a wild beast by the tail and dared not release or try to tame it. The free corps character of the S.A, with its bullies and street fighters had helped bring the message of the Nazi Party to Germany, but had also created Incidents and problems that were no credit to any political party. Corruption, debts, and even murders were mounting; but Hitler apparently saw himself within an ace of the chancellor­ ship, He took very little meaningful action at this time. CHAPTER IV

INTERNATIONAL REACTION

By 1930 the S.A. was embarked on a collision course with Adolf Hitler, The impact would occur less than five years later, but in the meantime the powers of Europe viewed the rise of the S.A, with mixed emotions.

The strategic position of Germany in Europe, combined with her defeat by the Allies, had made her somewhat of a focal point in the years between the wars. The

S,A.'s relationship to Germany's foreign policy and its role in disarmament will be discussed from the stand­ point of the international reaction to its formations and activities.

I . FOREIGN POLICY

Ex-Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop, testifying before the Allied Tribunal in Nuremberg, denied that the

S.A, had any influence on foreign policy.^ It is inter­

esting to note that the prosecution, apparently eager to

get on with the more spectacular activities of the German

Foreign Office, did not press the point. In reality.

Von Ribbentrop, "Testimony."Trial of the Major War Criminals, Vol. X (Nuremberg: Allied Control Authority for Germany, I947), p. 322. 69 however, the S.A, was involved in a number of events of international significance. Originally, the fine line between the Freikorps and the S,A, allowed various S.A.

personnel to be members of both organizations simultaneous­

ly. The activities of Leo Schlageter constitute a good

example of an S.A. man involved in international intrigue.

Bennecke cites the fact that the strength of the

Austrian S.A. was always included in the total S.A.

strength figures from 1924 onwards. This not only

complicated the problem of trying to ascertain true

strength figures, but indicated the operation of the S.A.

beyond the borders of the Weimar Republic. Goering

initially fled to Austria after the events of November 8

and 9» 1923» and shortly thereafter the Austrian S.A.

was operational. By 192? Adolf Hitler was able to present

the -Austrian S.A. units with their own distinctive banner

plus a speech which is rather significant:

You are accepting this standard as a symbol of the indivisibility of our movement, until the shameful agreements of Versailles and St. Germain are shattered.^

^Heinrich Bennecke, Hitler und die SA (Munich: Guenter Olzog Verlag, 1962), p. 112. 3 •^Bennecke, o£. cit. . p. 137* 70

The former Austrian Premier Seyss-Inquart, testifying at Nuremberg, freely admitted the use of k 6,000 Austrian S.A, men at the time of the ,

Although subsequent historical events lie beyond the bounds permitted this paper, it is important to stress that the S.A, found its way into German-speaking areas of Europe at an early date; Danzig and the are additional cases in point.

Without the consent of Chancellor Hitler, Roehm's final bid for power took on an international flavor,

Sauer gives the following description of this unusual undert aking:

At the beginning of March, 193^ he CRoelinQ strength­ ened his foreign political offensive; he organized a Ministerial Office within the Supreme S ,A, Head­ quarters, Its mission was the establishment of liaison with chiefs of missions in order to clear up any international misunderstandings about the S.A, The German Foreign Office immediately complained about this activity, but in Berlin Roehm hosted large banquets for foreign diplomats, particularly the Italian Ambassador, and continued his talks with Ambassador Prancois-Poncet, He is further alleged to have entered into discussions with various military attaches. In the last analysis, his efforts produced the awaited failure; but it is obvious that they drew fire from the Foreign Office and from other sources as well. Not the last of these critics was Hitler, whose mistrust of Roehm was

h. Seyss-Inquart, "Testimony,” Trial of the Major War Criminals. Vol, XVI (Nuremberg: Allied Control Authority for Germany, 19^?), p. 99* 71

further provoked,^

It became apparent after Hitler's appointment to power that the S.A, was not too highly regarded by most nations. The excesses of the S.A, muscle men mitigated against the acceptance of these political troops as a peaceful instrument. Even Americans were to suffer from the barbaric tactics of the street brawlers. Herman I, Roseman, an American tourist in

Berlin, was molested and beaten by the S.A. on March

10, 1933» after having pleaded with two German policemen and producing his passport,^ Another American tourist, Mrs, Jean Klauber, was beaten in a Berlin hotel room on the same ; her crime was one of 7 having married a German Jew. But treatment of foreigners was insignificant in comparison with the action taken against German minorities, Heiden compiled a total of 51 political murders officially reported in

Wolfgang Sauer, "Die SA - Terrorinstrument oder Revolutionsarmee?" Die nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung (Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag, I960), pp, 933-93 4 ,

^Herman I. Roseman, "Testimony," Trial of the Major War Criminals. Vol, IV (Nuremberg: Allied Control Authority for Germany, 19^?), p. 138. 7 Jean Klauber, "Testimony," Trial of the Major War Criminals. Vol. IV (Nuremberg: Allied Control Authority for Germany, 19^7), p, 139» 72

g the German press between and March 5» 1933*

When one adds to this the beatings that must have occurred, it is small wonder that the new Nazi administration did not win many friends abroad. Viktor Lutze, Roehm’s successor, was well aware of these excesses when he Issued his first order to the S.A, after the purge. His proclama­ tion of July 11, 193^ to stop the acts of terror read in part :

As is known from the Geneva negotiations, our opponents have piled up material, collected in Germany and submitted to them, which they use _ against us on every occasion during the conference.

But perhaps the bloody purge of the S.A, made the greatest Impact on the foreign powers in Europe, Not the last of the heads of state to observe Hitler's solution was , Kennan goes to great lengths to prove the influence of this purge on the Soviet dictator: he gives convincing proof to show how Stalin, concerned with the emergence of opposition within the Soviet Communist

Party to his dictatorial supremacy, saw in this purge 10 the solution to his own problems.

8 Konrad Heiden, Per Fuehrer. Hitler * s Rise to Power, trans, Ralph Manheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 19^4), p. 548,

^Viktor Lutze, Document D-44, Trial of the Major War Criminals. Vol, IV (Nuremberg: Allied Control Authority for Germany, 1947), p. 150»

^^George P, Kennan, Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin (New York: Mentor Books, I962), pp. 284-295» 73

II. THE S.A. AND DISARMAMENT

If foreign powers were disturbed by the growing militancy of the S.A, after January 1933» they could not have been assuaged by the arming of the S.A. in the early summer of 1934, when arms, sufficient to equip 10

Reichswehr divisions, were issued to S.A, units.If

France, Great Britain, or any other power had hopes of halting the threat of those paramilitary organizations they were seven years late, Eyck brings this out as he writes :

On December 12, 1926 an investigation protocol was signed, encompassing 5 points. Of these, however, only one-the third-was of practical importance. It stated: "on January 31, 1927» the Inter-Allied Military Control Commission will be withdrawn from Germany.

Eyck concludes that on this date the victors of I9I8 had forsworn every means of precluding violations of the disarmament provisions of Versailles. 13 By the time of the disarmament discussions in Geneva the private army of Adolf Hitler could no longer be ignored.

^^Sauer, 0£. cit,. p, 947 « IP 'Erich Eyck, A History of the Weimar Republic. Vol, II, trans. Harlan Hanson and Robert Waite (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 97.

^^Ibid, 74

Une Ill-fated disarmament negotiations at Geneva were in progress as Hitler became .

With so many other possible stumbling blocks in its path, the conference, nevertheless, quickly got into difficulties l4 on the mere existence of the S.A, The British Historian,

Arnold Toynbee, summarizes the crux of the German-French disagreement t

In addition to the short service army, it was apparently the intention of the Geimian Government to maintain intact the SA and SS, which, in the French view, fell into the category of 'paramili­ tary' organizations. The German Government denied that the SA and the SS, which were admitted to contain some 2 ,500,000 members of all ages, were of a military nature. Their sole object, it was declared was 'to organize the political masses of our people so as to make the return of the Communist peril impossible for evermore', ^

Whether Hitler was stalling for time while con­ solidating his position at home is not clear. As Chan­

cellor, he initially insisted on retaining the S.A, and offered "to consider the establishment of common rules

for political associations and organizations for

14Arnold J. Toynbee, Survey of International Affairs ; 1935 Vol, I, ( London : The Oxford University Press, 1936)7 P» 7* ^^Ibid. 75 preparatory and advanced military training in the various countries"; but on January 1, 1934 the French rejected this proposal,

Germany countered the French rejection with a note insisting that paramilitary forces could not be compared, from the point of view of military value, with the trained reserves which existed in countries where universal military service had been in force since 1918 (France),

The S.A, propaganda machine was instantly motivated to join in the condemnation of the French reaction. The

Reichswehr had also been annoyed by the French attitude which equated the S,A, with the Army, Walter Jost, a

Captain in the Reichswehr. penning a typical response to

French intransigence, stated the German Army's case succinctly t

The so-called defensive organization-storm troops of the National Socialists, "Steel Helmet", "Republi­ can Banner," etc,-have no connections whatsoever with the Reichswehr (on the contrary, the Command of the Reichswehr is violently opposed by the majority of these organizations), they are not armed and are use­ less as military. Despite this French critics regard them as veritable "invading" armies and allow them to be subsidized out of the inexhaustible Reichswehr budget,

^^Toynbee, 0£. cit,, p. 10. ^^Ibid, 18 Walter Jost, "French Criticism of the German Military Budget," The Problem of Disarmament (Berlin; Carl Heymanns Verlag, 1933), P . l6?, 76

By , England attempted to put France at rest concerning this dilemma, but France was not to be moved.

By now the British representatives at the Disarmament

Conference, Hugh R, Wilson and Lord Londonderry, Secretary of State for Air, gained the conviction that practically no French Government had the remotest intention of surrendering or reducing its power to dictate to Germany and, therefore, deliberately wrecked any possible chance of accomodation at Geneva, 19

Evidence supporting the contention that Hitler was genuinely in favor of the British disarmament proposals is meager, G, M, Gathorne-Hardy feels that the French 20 with their requirements for security doomed all proposals,

Konrad Heiden, however, viewed Hitler's interest in the plan as an oppotunity to use the S,A, as bait in a trade;

Hitler implied the MacDonald plan for disarmament was good. He went out of his way to point out that the SA-whatever might be thought of it abroad-was not such an army and never could be. Here Hitler was speaking the truth; the Reichswehr did not allow the SA to be an army. Hitler even offered to place the

19 Hermann Lutz, German-French Unity; Basis for European Peace (Chicago; Henry Regnery Company, 1957), p, 103. 20 G.M, Gatho me-Hardy, A Short History of Inter­ national Affairs. 1920-1939 (London; The Oxford University Press, I960), ^ 352, 77

SA under foreign supervision if other countries would do the same with their own semi-military formations.21

If Hitler had gotten his way he may conceivably have solved his own dilemma of what to do with the growing and increasingly dangerous 8,A, But even had he been able to make such a trade, it is doubtful if Roehm and his cronies would have accepted such a deal at their expense. In any event, the lack of plan on Hitler's part was accelerating some sort of drastic action.

It is not beyond the realm of possibility that

Hitler may have seen the solution to the S,A, question in just such a trade. He was well aware of the growing foreign hostility toward his private paramilitary force,

Anthony Eden, British Minister to the League of Nations, had occasion to visit Hitler in 1934, Eden came back to

England and confided to Churchill that Hitler wanted it known he stood ready to do away with the terrorist rule of ?2 the S,A, which was so offensive abroad,~ Gathorne-Hardy

accepts the fact that by , Hitler was desperately 23 seeking a plan to eliminate the S,A, and still save face.

21 Heiden, ojg.» cit, . p, 621, 22 Winston S, Churchill, The Gathering Storm (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 19^8), p V 97» 2 3 Gathorne-Hardy, o£, cit,. p. 355« 78

Hitler, not wishing to have the responsibility of breaking off the disarmament negotiations reflect on him, did nothing to cause an end of the discussions. His

Vice Chancellor, Papen, even spoke of an alliance of the S.A, with the French Array as a great shield against

Bolshevism,'ph But the French recognized this propaganda effort and the appointment of Harriot as premier negated any serious undertakings in that direction.

By mid-1934 Europe had seen in Hitler the rise of a spirit of German militarism, Francis P. Walters, an authority on the League of Nations and the Disarmament

Conference, writes that this specter dominated the thinking of the conference and branded the S,A, as a symbol of what lay in store for the future:

This certainly was the sentiment of France, driven more and more on the defensive, politically against the Italo-German campaign for treaty revision, and militarily against the sudden revival of German fighting power. For Germany, though not rearmed, was now remilitarized. The French had always accused her of having violated the Treaty by concealing arms which she was under the obligation to destroy; but they had never substantiated their claim and their famous dossier on the subject (the British had one too) was generally believed to contain nothing of great military importance. On the other hand, the advent of a nationalist and reactionary government in Berlin meant that the fighting power of all the remaining

2h Heiden, o^. cit.. p. 468, 79

para-military organizations wouldpheneeforth he merged in that of the Reichswehr.

On this latter point, however, the French were in error. The S.A, was never merged with the Gennan

Army in the manner which the French and Roehm imagined,

But the mere existence of the S.A,, combined with its reputation for violence, was enough to create an excuse which the French were able to seize upon. It is an interesting footnote to history to mention that the final day of the Geneva Disarmament Conference was

June 11, 1934. Less than three weeks later Adolf Hitler would prove to the French how wrong their assumptions had been.

05 Francis P, Walters, A History of the League of Nations (London: The Oxford University Press, I960), pp. 5^0-541, CHAPTER V

HITLER’S SOLUTION

Hitler's appointment of himself as 0,S,A,F.

(Supreme Leader, S,A«) meant that he had taken another step on the road to becoming a Fuehrer in the full sense.

He was soon to discover that, as Supreme Leader of the

S.A,, he would have to listen to all the S.A, problems in addition to running his political machine; Hitler did not have time for this, Bennecke observes that this placed

Hitler in the position of having to make plans and decls- ions--two things that he simply hated to do.^ He obvious­ ly required a buffer, a person who could act in his name, in the administration of the growing S.A, No writer has risked a definite opinion on why Hitler asked Roehm to give up his appointment of lieutenant colonel in the Bo- 2 livian Army and return to Germany, Roehm had to come back

to the S.A, with a lesser appointment than when he left--

Chief of Staff, S.A, But the fact remains that he did

^Heinrich Bennecke, Hitler und die SA (Munich* Guenter Olzog Verlag, I962), p, l4o. 2 John ¥, Wheeler-Bennett, The Nemesis of Power (London: The Macmillan Company, Ltd., 1953), p. 226, lÔieeler-Bennett gives perhaps the most detailed and schol­ arly account of the development of the relationship be­ tween the Nazi Party and the Reichswehr. He does not, however, shed any light on the conditions which motivated Roehm to return to Germany following his break with Hitler, 81 return and, during his 3 l/2 years in this position, the

S.A, was destined to rise to the peak of Its power and then collapse.

I, RETURN OF ROEHM

The party and the S.A, to which Roehm returned were far different than the splintered political and para­ military organization which he had left behind in 1925»

Most of his friends were still active in the S.A, , but

the size of both the private army and the N.S.D.A.P, had

increased dramatically, Roehm's first act was to surround himself with a huge staff of S.A, officers who had an army background and to begin cementing relations with the

Reichswehr; Bullock writes*

At the beginning of January, 1931, Roehm took over his new duties as Chief of Staff of the SA, He im­ mediately set to work to make the SA by far the most efficient of the Party armies. The who 1 e of Germany was divided into twenty-one districts, with an SA Group in each under the command of an Obergruppen- fuehrer. The organization was closely modelled on that of the Army, with its own headquarters and General Staff quite separate from the organization of the Party, and its own training college for_SA and SS leaders opened at Munich in June, 1931 «

A number of milestones were passed by the S.A,

prior to the fateful day when their Supreme Leader became

n ■'^Alan Bullock, Hitler* A Study in Tyranny (New York: Bantam Books, I961), p, I3 6, 82

Chancellor, The first of these was the second revolt of

the S.A, in Berlin in hy , Ober-

gruppenfuehrer or Area Commander of Eastern Germany.

Bullock claims the cause of this revolt to have been

Hitler's order of February which prohibited the S.A, from 4 fighting in the streets, Sauer, however, traces the

roots of the problem to the S.A.'s subordination to the

local political leadership. The use of the S,S, in

quelling the revolt was the second time the pattern of

disciplining the S,A, by N,S,D,A,P, means would occur,

Berlin and Munich seem to have been the centers of each

revolution. Putsch. or counter-revolution ever since the

Armistice. Pinson was well aware of this:

The two cities where the SA was the strongest, Munich and Berlin, showed an increased development of gambling, erotic scandals and homosexuality, nudism, jazz mania, and various forms of occult astrology and magical hocus-pocus,°

The second milestone, and one that defies adequate

explanation, was the return of the S.S. into the fold of

the S.A. Himmler still enjoyed considerable autonomy.

II Bullock, UQ. cit., p. 150.

Wolfgang. Sauer, "Die SA-Terrorinstrument oder Revolutionsannee?" Die nationalsozialistische Machter- greifung (Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1960%} pT 852,

^Koppel S, Pinson, Modern Germany (New York: The Macmillan Company, 195^), pT 457• 83

7 but his orders came directly from Roehm, Reitlinger feels he has a strong case for insisting that Roehm had increased his power to the point where he could demand Q this reorganization.

Sometime in , the third milestone was passed, Roehm, apparently without the knowledge of Hitler, engaged Schleicher in a series of confidential discussions which terminated in an agreement to bring the S.A. into 0 the Reichswehr in the event of a war,' This must be re­ garded as a political maneuver on the part of Schleicher, for the S.A. was not armed at the time and officially for­ bidden by Hitler to engage in field exercises of a mili­ tary nature, Nevertheless, the irrepressible Freikorps spirit of Roehm and his associates had led to secret field training of a number of S.A, units, Roehm was, there­ fore, launched on an undercover journey that would end on

June 30, 1934,. The government’s discovery of the Boxenheim papers, documents which were alleged to be official Nazi plans for an anti-Communist insurrection, created such a stir

7 Bullock, loc, cit.

^Gerald Reitlinger, Hie SS : Alibi of a Nation (London: William Heinemann, Ltd, , 1956) , p, 26, 9 Bullock, 02» cit, , p, I7 0 ,

^^Bennecke, op, ci t, . p, I63, ^^Sauer, 0£, cit, . p, 854, 84 that Hindenburg was forced to ban the S.A. and S.S, on 12 April l4, 1932. Bennecke reminds his readers that the ban on the S.A. was nothing new; it had happened in 13 Bavaria in 1923 and later in Prussia. In Bavaria the ban on the organization was avoided by changing the name of the S.A,; in Prussia the banning of the brown shirts was observed by the wearing of white shirts or no shirts at all,

By June it was obvious that the ban on the S.A, was unworkable in spite of the subversive nature of the S.A,

Only two other private armies in the Weimar Republic had been forbidden; therefore, the ban was lifted on June 15, 15 1932. Another milestone had been passed. But the S.A,, now legal, stepped up its campaign against Communists in particular; Bloody Sunday in Altona and the brutal Potema murder are only two examples,

The last mass use of the S.A, prior to the success of its Supreme Leader occurred in December.

German unemployment, discussed in an earlier chapter.

12 Bullock, 0£_, cit. , pp. 167-1 68.

^ ^Bennecke, jO£. cit, . p, l46, ^^Ibid,

15Bennecke, _ox>. cit. . p, 181.

^^Sauer, ojd. cit. . p. 86I, 85 had reached new heights. Financial conditions within

the N.S.D.A.P, were in a sorry state. Election on top

of election had bled the campaign funds. Conditions were so bad that the unemployed S.A, men were required

to turn over their unemplojnnent checks to the party;

but many young men, not having family responsibilities,

were completely cut off from the most basic compensations

and did not even have an unemployment check to donate. 17

These young men flocked the S.A, "homes" where they could

at least survive, Bennecke suggests that the only alter­

native for a young man with no income was to commit a

crime and draw a sentence in a prison where, at the very 18 least, he could subsist. At this time the S.A, was

sent into the streets to beg for money. 19 In such a

deplorable state of affairs the youth of Germany could

certainly assume that the Nazis could lead them nowhere

but up,

II, THE SUPREME LEADER BECOMES CHANCELLOR

By the end of 1932 the power of the N.S.D.A.P,

17Bennecke, o^, cit,. p, 175* ^^Ibid,

^^Bullock, 0£, cit,, p, 204, 86 could no longer be ignored in German politics. As a re­ sult, Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler Chancellor of Ger­ many on January 30, 1933. The Supreme Leader of the

Sturmabteilung had achieved his long-sought goal and that night his political army joined the celebrations in Berlin,

Shirer has captured the S.A. spirit that prevailed:

That evening from dusk until far past midnight the delirious Nazi storm troopers marched in a massive torchlight parade to celebrate victory. By the tens of thousands, they emerged In disciplined columns from the depths of the Tiergarten, passed under the triumphal arch of the Brandenburg Gate and down the Wilhelmstrasse, their bands blaring the old martial airs to the thunderous beating of the drums, their voices bawling the new Horst Vessel song and other tunes that were as old as Germany, their jack boots beating a mighty rythm on the pavement, their torches held high and forming a ribbon of flame that illuminated the night and kindled the hurrahs of the onlookers massed on the sidewalks. Prom a window in the palace Hindenburg looked down upon the marching throng, beating time to the military marches with his cane, apparently pleased that at last he had picked a Chancellor who could arouse the people in a traditionally German way. Whether the old man, in his dotage, had any inkling of what he had unleash­ ed that day is doubtful, A story, probably apocryphal, soon spread over Berlin that in the midst of the parade he had turned to an. old General and said, "I didn't know we had taken so many Russian prisoners."

Bennecke estimates the true strength of the com- 21 bined S.A, and S.S. to have been ^ 0 0 , 0 0 0 on that night,

2Ci William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (Greenwich, Connecticut: Fawcett Publications, 1962 ) , p, 19.

21Bennecke, op. cit.. p , 213. 87

Within the next 18 months, the S.A, was destined to in­ crease to 15 times that size. But in the new government the older S.A, men saw their salvation. The veterans had done their best to put their 0,8,A,F, into office.

It would have been unnatural for them to expect anything less than a claim on rights to at least some government office. They had given virtually everything In-loyalty to their Fuehrer: time,unemployment checks, courage, and even their lives. Bayer, seldom writing the truth, nevertheless has claimed the figure of 46 S.A, men who 2? were killed in fights during Hitler's rise to power.

This is hard to prove or disprove.

But there was no plan for assigning these masses to useful work With 6 million unemployed not even

Adolf Hitler, miracle worker though he later appeared to be, could bring good times to his private army within the first week, month, or even year of his new adminis­ tration, The astonishing fact remains that, even though he had no plan, he still allowed the S.A, to grow.

Hermann Goering, for all the contemptuous things said of him by history, was aware of the problems of the

p o Ernst Bayer, "Die SA," Document 2168-PS, Documents in Evidence, Vol, XXIX, Nuremberg: Allied Control Authority for Getmiany, ip47 ) , p , 285, 88

S.A. he had once commanded. Goering assigned 50,000

S.A, men to work In Prussia as Hllfspoilzei (auxiliary police); the result of this was a reign of terror by

the S.A. who were given police 'protection* by order of Goering, acting in his strange capacity as Prussian 23 Minister of the Interior. Heiden amplifies this in his description:

They simply took over Prussia in a reign of terror, paid for no meals in restaurants, forced customers to buy pictures of Hitler at fantastic prices, and drew 3 marks daily. Thus the first 50,000 men wer>e scantily provided for,

Bullock claims Goering to have been the employer

of at least ten additional members of the S.A, who burned 25 the on February 28, 1933. At the same time

the S.A, was also running wild in Bavaria where their members took over and began to govern, Heiden does not hold back as he writes :

The regularity and uniformity of procedure arose from the lust for loot and pillage which for years had been nourished in these masses,^”

23 -^Bullock, ojD, cit. , p, 220. 24 Konrad Heiden, Per Fuehrer. Hitler's Rise to Power, trans, Ralph Manheim (Boston ; Houghton Mifflin Company, 1944), p. 550,

^^Bullock, OTD. cit. , pp. 223-224,

^^Heiden, ojd, cit. . pp. 565-566, 89

But, except for jobs requiring 'police' brutality, arson, or looting, there was no employment suitable for the peculiar talents of the S.A, as a whole. Recognition under the cloak of the Reichwehr had been a target of the S.A, since freebooter days. 27 The S.A, had been held together largely by such promises by their leaders ^ s and the personal attraction of Adolf Hitler," Tlie lack of a plan on the part of Hitler, combined with the grow­ ing power and confidence of Roehm, gave particular rise to the feeling that merger with the Reichwehr would be the S.A.'s reward, Heiden writes of this growing atti­ tude of t>ie S.A, after Hitler had been in power for one year :

Roehm, as a member of the Reich cabinet, now raised his voice and demanded that the SA be made a part of the Reichswehr, Even if only a fraction of the 3 million SA men, most of whom were engaged in civilian activities, could have become soldiers, as many SA leaders as possible were obviously to become officers, and this with a rank more or less corresponding to their SA rank. Thus, one fine morning these armed poultry farmers or department store porters would wake up with the rank of general or at least colonel, just because they had won the tj ties of SA group or brigade leaders as a result

07 " Robert G.L. Vaite, Van/u-iard of Nazism (Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 1952), pp. 183-184, 28 Sauer, oj%, cit. , p. 851. 90

of various scuffles in beer-cellars or bac^galleys. Blomberg sharply rejected Roehm's demands,

On this issue the S.A. was fated to founder.

They would, be brought into the Reichswehr but not under the conditions they foresaw. Roehm may have been in­ fluenced by Mussolini's solution to the blackshirt problem in Italy, but the Fuehrer was not to be compared with the .

III. THE S.A. AND THE REICHSWEHR

Hitler's first recorded statement on the relation­ ship between the S.A., N.S.D.A.P,, and Reichswehr dates back to his closing testimony at his trial for treason after failure in the Munich insurrection :

When I learned that it was the "Green Police" which had fired, I had the happy feeling that at least it was not the Reichswehr which had besmirched itself. The Reichswehr remains as untarnished as before. One day the hour will come when the Reichs­ wehr will stand at our side, officers and men, ^

Here we can see that Hitler had come to realize that his hopes for revolution had to be founded on Reichswehr toleration. From this point on he warns his listeners and readers that the Reichswehr was a force to be reck­ oned with.

29 Heiden, o^. cit,. p, 746,

30Norman H, Baynes, The Speeches of Adolf Hitler Vol. I, (London: The Oxford University Press, 1942) , p. 86, 91

Shortly thereafter, in his dictation of Mein

Kampf« came his undisguised concept on what the S.A, was and what it was not :

The SA must not be either a military defense organization or a secret society,,, Its training must not be organized from the military standpoint, but from the standpoint of what is most practical for Party purposes.

As usual. Hitler's written words had a habit of

gathering dust. But a good case can be made that, at

least outwardly, Hitler wanted no friction between the

Reichswehr and the S.A, The S,A. ban on weapons which

lasted from 1924 to 1934 is a cogent argument in his

favor. Also cited have been the restriction on field

exercises and the efforts to prevent fraternization with

the Reichswehr. But the freebooter spirit was not to be suppressed,

Sauer has traced the initial causes of the friction

to a confidential letter, allegedly written by Pfeffer, in which Pfeffer wrote of his dream of the S,A, as the bearer 32 of arms in the future German Vehrmacht, But what

Pfeffer is alleged to have kept underground, Roehm was

31 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf trans. James Murphy (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1939)» PP* 447-448, 32 Sauer, otd, cit. , p, 851, 92 soon to bring into the open.

Hitler, on September 25» 1930» seized the oppor­ tunity offered by the I.eipzig trial of three Reichswehr officers, to give the German Army to understand that its future could be brighter under a Nazi regime. In his closing testimony he stated:

I have always held the view that every attempt to disintegrate the Army was madness. None of us have any interest in such disintegration. We will see to it that, when we have come to power, out of the present Reichswehr shall rise the great army of the German people,

Wheeler-Bennett maintains that this speech opened the eyes of the Reichswehr to future possibilities ; but he brings out an essential difference between the

N.S.D.A.P, of 1920 and I93O:

There was, however, one important difference be­ tween the 'twenties and the 'thirties. In 1920 the Reichswehr felt themselves strong enough to use the Nazis as a tool; a force which they could control and utilize to their own advantage. In 1930 the position had changed in that the Nazis had become a power in their own right. They remained a force which might be utilized, but they were no longer a tool, subject to direct control. If the Reichswehr wished to utilize the Party, their approach must be on the basis of negotiation with a potential ally oyer whom only an indirect control could be exercised,3

33-^Baynes, o_£, cit, . p, 552. 34 Wheeler-Bennett, ojd, cit. . p , 222, 93

Wheeler-Bennett thereby suggests that a deal would have to be made between the Reichswehr and the N.S.D.A.P,

Even prior to Hitler's appointment as Chancellor the secret negotiations between the S.A. and the government were taking place. Roehm's agreement with Schleicher, already cited, created further complications in arriving at a solution for the S.A,

And even the Reichswehr was not com%)letely opposed to the S.A, Wheeler-Bennett lists three types of officers who had no objection to Hitler's private army:

(l) those desiring an auxiliary force in the event of a

Polish attack, (2 ) those who saw Hitler coming to power an^rway and making good his promises to the Reichswehr. and (3 ) those who saw the S.A, as a good disciplinary and training force. 3 5

Nevertheless, after Hitler had taken power, he was obliged to walk a narrow line between the S.A, and the Reichswehr. This was made difficult by

Roehm's increasing greed and bitterness; Roehm confided to Rauschning;

The basis of the new army must be revolutionary. You can't inflate it afterwards. You only get the

35 " Wheeler-Bennett, OJH’ cit. . p, 228, 94

opportunity once to make something big that'll help us lift the world off its hinges. But Hitler puts me off with fair words,,.. He wants to inherit an army all ready and complete. He's going to let the 'experts' file away at it. When I hear that word, I'm ready to explode. Afterwards he'll make National Socialists of them, he says. But first he leaves them to the Prussian generals. I don't know where he's going to get his revolutionary spirit from. They're the same old clods, and they'll certainly lose the next war,^

Hitler must have been aware of this revolutionary free­ booter spirit being sustained in the S,A, by Roehm. In walking his narrow path between the two forces in 1933» however. Hitler began siding more and more with the

Reichswehr. His statement in July to the Reichswehr was significant:

Tliis army of the political soldiers of the German Revolution has no wish to take the place of our Army or to enter into competition with it,37

And again to the Reichswehr in September:

On this day we should particularly remember the part played by our Army, for we all know if, in the days of our revolution, the Army had not stood on our side, then we should not be standing here today. We can assure the Army that we shall never forget this, that we see in them the bearers of our glorious old Army, and that with all our heart and all our powers we will support the spirit of this Army.

^^Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks (London: Thornton Butterworth, Ltd,, 1939)» pp. 154-156,

^^Ibid, 95

Wheeler-Bennett accepts the thesis that the pact between the Reichswehr and Hitler took place during the

first of Hitler's two recorded sea voyages, aboard the pocket battleship Deutschland, on April 11, 193^.^^ At

this time Hitler is supposed to have promised to support

the Reichswehr by putting an end to the menace of Roehm

in return for Reichswehr support in his bid to take over

the office of the Presidency on the death of Hindenburg, Uo Bullock also accepts this view.

It is surprising that this pact had been so long

in coming. Only a month earlier Roehm had written a

cabinet memorandum designed to bring every German mili­

tary and paramilitary formation under this cabinet post.

Wheeler-Bennett illustrates the result of this naked

grab for power:

The immediate effect of this demarche was to fan into flame the conflict which had been for so long smouldering beneath the surface. Here was the clash of concepts and ideologies : on the one hand, Roehm's dream of great revolutionary armies bearing with them not only the palms of German victory but also the tenets of National Socialism; on the other, the carefully matured plans of the Reichswehr for the elaborate development, on the lines laid down by von Seeckt, of the existing Army into a military force, of which the professional excellence should

39 Wheeler-Bennett, o^. cit. , pp. 313.-312,

^^Bullock, cit., pp. 247-248. 96

be unexcelled, but which, should be devoid of any extraneous doctrine, dogma or creed, save that of m i l i t a r y o r t h o d o x y , ^1

Now the problem and Hitler's lack of a plan were out in the open. In early June, in a conversation which is still open to question. Hitler berated Roehm and urged 4 2 him to place himself and the S.A, on a month's leave.

Roehm, probably thinlcing he had nothing to lose, immediately made an important speech to the S.A.J

If the foes of the SA are nursing the hope that the SA will not return from their leave, or that only a part will return, we are ready to let them enjoy this hope for a short time. At the hour and in the form which appears to be necessary they will receive the fitting„answer. The SA is, and remains, Germany’s destiny,

Tliis was about as far as Hitler could allow such potential insubordination to go. The date of the speech was June 7,

1934. The Reichswehr was obviously concerned with the action that Hitler would have to take,

IV, DECAPITATION: 1934

The literary road to 30 June has been traveled by a goodly number of authors: Bullock, Wheeler-Bennett,

41 Wheeler-Bennett, ££, cit., p, 309* 42 Bullock, oji. cit. , pp. 250-251» 43 Baines, o j d. cit, . p, 28?. 97

Shirer, and Heiden are only four of many. A detailed account of the grisly chain of events of the last week of June would add little to this paper. It was almost an anti-climax. It certainly was a fitting monument to

Adolf Hitler, his ruthlessness, and his complete disregard for human life,

A student, attempting to reconstruct those events, will be struck by a complete lack of primary sources.

Bullock is convinced that there is no primary source:

The official accounts fail to cover all the known facts and involve obvious contradictions, while the accounts compiled from the evidence of men who survived and from hearsay necessarily contain much that is unverifiable, even where it rings true. Unfortunately, the documentairy material captured in Germany at the end of the Second World War and so far published has yielded virtually nothing: per­ haps this was one of the episodes in the history of the Thij^g Reich of which no records were allowed to remain,

Heiden reminds us that not even the location of Roehm's 4-5 grave is known. So uncertain are the facts surrounding the purge that not one of these writers is prepared to risk stating an exact number of victims.

Two facts, however, emerge from the purge. The first deals with the S.A, which lived on, but in a

44 Bullock, loc. cit.

^ ^Heiden, oji, cit. . p, 765. 98 truncated fashion. The head had been severed and the body withered away until 19^5. The new leader was 46 Viktor Lutze, a former Frelkorps fighter. It would appear that Hitler would not profit from his former mistakes of appointing men with a freebooter spirit of pillaging and brutality to positions of high respon­ sibilities, The second fact is that the S.S, emerged from the wreckage of the S.A. The violence and terror begun by the S.A, in Germany would spread to most of

Europe through the agency of the S.S. The men in the units had almost identical backgrounds. Onl]^ the name of the organization and the color of their unifonns were different. Thus the legend of the storm troops was given new credence by the same types of street fighters and brawlers who utilized their strong-armed tactics to force their will on people powerless to resist their brutalitv.

^^Sauer, _ou. cit. , p. 84?, CHAPTER VI

CONCLUSIONS

Preceding chapters have stressed Adolf Hitler's approach toward the S.A. He permitted its members to be armed until his failure to seize the streets of Munich by force. He forbade weapons until he was himself the dicta­ tor of all German laws. In the interim he committed the S.A, only to the point where official resistance was met. Never after 1923 did he condone the use of armed violence to overthrow the Weimar Republic. Thus the

S.A, was, among other things, a testing or probing organization.

But the chief value was the display of forc-e or terror which its units were able to generate on the shortest notice. The pro%iaganda value of these activities cannot be overestimated. The Nazi Party faced consid­ erable competition with other political parties of the times. Without a means of keeping itself in the public eye National Socialism might well have been diluted in a sea of other radical parties of the political right.

The size of the S.A,, insignificant at first but almost always growing, was a virtually sure source of votes during the endless elections. In this connection it is astonishing that Hitler and Pfeffer did not require 100

S.A, men to be members of the Nazi Party until 1928.

But this was not the only aspect of the S.A. that was improvised as the occasion demanded.

The character of^ the S.A, man, Nazi propaganda not withstanding, has been portrayed as poor throughout this paper. Whatever motivation he might have had in joining the organization, the member was swept up in a of violence, corruption, and indecency by his un­ believably greedy leaders. If the average recruit re­ mained in the S.A. he had little choice but to carry out the orders of the leadership. The alternative was to leave the S.A, and the Nazi Party. This, however, in the violent world of German politics would have been a difficult decision to make.

It has also been discussed in preceding chapters how the doctrine of the S,A. leadership, influenced by years of pillage and violence, led to the development of a rank and file of S.A, membership which knew little else.

Hitler was obviously aware of the poor leadership the

S.A, enjoyed. On the evening of January 3, 1942, he mentioned to a visiting group of officers of the ¥ehr- macht: "The heads of the SA, for their part, didn't 101 succeed In giving their troops a soul.

Later, in May 19^2, in confidence to Martin Bor- , he revealed a problem which had plagued him for a score of years— the leadership of the S.A, He sadly admitted he was no nearer solving this vexing problem than he had been a decade earlier;

I have not been able to find the right man to place at the head of the SA, This shows you how rare are men of real merit. As regards the SA, which formed our shock troops before our assumption of power, it has now tended to become a force which often either fails to realize in time which way its duty lies, or bungles the execution of it.^

Whatever good the S.A, might have been able to do, the effect was nullified by the acts of the leaders.

But in spite of the embarrassment created for him by Roehm and other S.A, leaders Hitler did, nevertheless, come to power. Konrad Heiden evaluates the worth of the

S.A, in the early years of struggle in Munich as follows;

...after another party meeting they marched, for the first time, four abreast through the city, sing­ ing: 'When Jewish blood gushes from our knives, things will be better.' And Hitler learned from his followers. He learned that this kind of troop possess­ es more than the power of its fists; it possesses an almost irresistible power over men's souls. The

Henry Picker, Hitler's Table Talk, trans, Norman Cameron and R.H, Stevens (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1933), P« l6?.

Picker, ojd. eft. , p. 46l. 102

troopers tramped through the state itself. Five hundred marching storm troopers expressed more jjower and authority than ten mounted policemen. In the onlooker, doubts arose; was this marching „ monster rebellion, or was it already state power?

This, then, was the key to keeping the S.A,

alive and allowing it to grow in size with the Nazi

Party. The people of Germany needed a symbol and the

symbol of a marching and military-minded people, already discussed in Chapter I, was only one of many which

Hitler and his staff were able to create. The swastika

is, perhaps, the best remembered of all his symbolic

devices. The is another. In January 19^2

Hitler revealed to his highest officials the importance he attached to this simple but effective :

In the days of , people saluted with their hats, with pompous . In the the serfs humbly doffed their bonnets, whilst t h e noblemen gave the German salute. It was in the Ratskeller at , about the year 1921, that I first saw this style of Salute, It must be regarded as a survival of an ancient custom, which originally signified: "See, I have no weapon in my hand!" I introduced the salute into the Party at our first meeting in Weimar. The SA at once gave it a soldierly style. It's from that moment our oppon-2^ ents honored us with the epithet "dogs of Fascists."

Perhaps Hitler stumbled upon the value of such

3 Konrad Heiden, Per Fuehrer. - Hitler's Rise to Power. trans, Ralph Manheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1944), p. 102, 4 Picker, o^. cit., p. 173. 103 trappings. Perhaps he knew exactly what he was doing in developing these military and paramilitary symbolisms.

Wheeler-Bennett attributes all of them to Hitler's genius of recognizing their need, and ties the S.A, into the Nazi movement in his concept of Hitler's strategy:

Adolf Hitler had an uncanny understanding of the German national psychology. He recognized, whether by instinct or study or merely by a fellow-feeling, that the German people are the most inhibited in Europe, fundamentally governed by a sense of infer­ iority for which they over-compensate by arrogance, and altogether lacking in self-assurance and a sense of responsibility to themselves. All these symptoms Hitler read aright and used them to his own advantage. The SA, with its military formation, its ranking hierarchy, its banners and its bands, was designed to satisfy the German craving for uniforms and emblems, for that military glamour and display which the drab rule of Weimar had done its poor best to suppress. But at no time had Hitler destined his Brown Shirts _ as even an auxiliary, let alone a rival, to the Army,

S.A, units, their bands, their excellent music, their uniforms, their military marching, all played a role in attracting votes for the N.S.D.A.P. Pinson carries this one step further and devotes considerable space to re­ minding his readers that the female influence, an im­ portant power in any election, was attracted by the S.A, in that girls and women flocked in droves to see and admire these S.A, formations in uniform more than to

5 John W. Wheeler-Bennett, Tlie Nemesis of Power (London: The Macmillan Company, Ltd., 1953), pp. 203-204. 104 listen to the oratory.^ The S.A,, therefore, did this job well. They were particularly well suited to perform this task of creating an image of paramilitary power.

But its sin was in later trying to do the army's _job as well.

Did Hitler organize the S.A.? It has been shown in this presentation that Hitler took credit for it, but it also has been emphasized that the conditions for founding this private paramilitary force were in existence throughout the Weimar Republic. Hitler could merely have stood back and let developments take their inevitable course under Maurice, Klintzsch, Goering, and their successors. The recruiting and training of a group of brawlers certainly requires no specific skill, especially if there are many of these fighters willing to enlist.

It would probably have been difficult to prevent an S.A, from materializing under such peculiar conditions.

Wheeler-Bennett ' s comment of collecting rather than or­ ganizing a band of semi-official freebooters is equally applicable to the S.A, \

Could Hitler have stopped or deactivated the S.A,?

^Koppel S, Pinson, Modern Germany (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1954), p. 491• 105

The answer would hnve to be yes , but Hitler was no fool.

He knew a good thing when he saw it, was aware of the advantages and disadvantages, and simply tried to derive the greatest advantage from the organization. Mention has been made of the difficulties involved in making a political speech in days when radio and electronic am­ plification equipment were lacking. Heckling of the speaker, however, was seldom lacking, and here the S.A, performed a mission which had to be accomplished if

Hitler and his small Nazi Party wanted to be heard. To have deactivated the S.A. prior to 1933 would have meant a loss of party members to the many prive te armies of other political parties. The Roter Frontkaenipferbund

(Communists) and the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold

(Socialists) both had large contingents which competed with the S.A. for manpower. Denial of potential recruits to other organizations was justification for the existence of the S.A. and its continued expansion.

But Adolf Hitler had to solve a problem that the

Communists and other parties did not have to worry about: what to do with their paramilitary forces after power was achieved? How did Hitler plan to solve it? Tlais was the

^Pinson, op. cit., p. 467. 106 dilemma. By 1933 the S.A, had run out of worlds to con­ quer for their leader. In fairness to the rank and file which made considerable sacrifices during the 12 years of struggle some suitable reward would have to be made.

The German Army wanted none of them, What other reward was left?

Obviously there was no other reward nor was any planned. The S.A. had done its fair share and still had little to show for its efforts. Roehm undoubtedly felt justified in yearning for a second revolution, Hermann

Rauschning doubts that the leaders of the N.S.D.A.P, ever had a program for what they were going to do after they g were in power. Pinson agrees with this and cites the value of the S.A, in compensating for the lack of a de- 9 tailed program by its massive demonstrations and parades.

The S.A,, having accomplished its mission, had a certain right to demand some sort of compensation, but Hitler had nothing to give after the Pact of the Deutschland. It was ironical that the S.A, was the victim of the very lack of plan on the part of the leaders it supported so fanatically.

g Hermann Rauschning, The (New York : G,P, Putnam’s Sons, 1941), pp. 260-261,

^Pinson, o^, cit . , p, 492, 107

How did Hitler plan to solve this problem? It is obvious that the situation had outgrown any solution.

To have nullified his agreement with the German Array was unthinkable. Decapitation of the S.A, was the only way out of a worsening dilemma. Hitler had no plan.

His ad hoc solution, forced upon him at the time and so typical of Hitler during the war, was born on

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