So far from fear, So close to death— Hail to you, SA!
Joseph Goebbels
Ernst Röhm once declared that he always took the opposite view.1 In saying this he was not merely acknowledging his spirit of contradiction and his self-confidence. The representative of a truly lost generation, he spoke in his self-revelation for those who came together after the First World War with vague but consistent feelings of opposition, of protest, in the Freikorps and armed nationalist associations, in order to transmute their incapacity for civilian life into extremist adventurism and
criminality masquerading as nationalism. Active unrest, readiness to take risks, belief in force and irresponsibility were the essential psychological elements that lay behind the organized nihilism of those whose formative experience had been the war, with its underlying sense of the decline of a culture, and whose heroic myth was the spirit of the front-line soldier. Agents of a permanent revolution without any revolutionary idea of the future, they had no goal, but only restlessness; no idea of values that looked to the future, but only a wish to eternalize the values of the trenches. They fought on and marched on beyond the Armistice and the end of the war, not towards any vision of a new social order, but for the sake of fighting and marching, because the world appeared to them a battlefront and their rhythm was that of marching feet. ‘Marching is the most meaningful form of our profession of faith.’
It only required the combination of this blind dynamism with a purposeful revolutionary will to make this group all but irresistible. The SA was this combination. It arose on the one hand because a ‘pure driving force’ wandering aimlessly in political space needed aims and tasks, and on the other because Hitler’s plans for gaining power were, after vague beginnings, acquiring a sharper outline. Like a magnet drawing iron filings, to use one of his favourite metaphors, Hitler
attracted these men who had been irrevocably thrown off course early in life. He was one of them himself, and he fitted their extremism, their moral brutalization, into his tactical system for the conquest of power. It was not only because there were natural points of contact here, not only because he found in these people a human type perfectly prepared to serve his purposes, that he directed his propaganda so expressly towards
the militant groups. The truth was rather that he quickly saw the
propaganda advantages to be gained from intimidating his opponents by the parade of uniformed groups ready and willing to use violence, and here more than anywhere else he showed his psychological astuteness. Contrary to civilized expectations, he put his trust in the propaganda value of terror, the attraction of terror spread by the most brutal methods. ‘Brutality is respected,’ he once stated, enunciating this principle. ‘The people need wholesome fear. They want to fear something. They want someone to frighten them and make them shudderingly submissive. Haven’t you seen everywhere that after the beerhall battles those who have been beaten are the first to join the party as new members? Why babble about brutality and get indignant about tortures? The masses want them. They need something that will give them a thrill of horror.’2 The SA’s mobilization of the coarse instincts released by the war, intensified by the introduction of unequivocally criminal elements, of thugs and riffraff, was not an inevitable aspect of a revolutionary outbreak, nor, as was at times stated in an unmistakable attempt at excuse, was it made necessary by the organization of similar militant formations by political opponents; it was planned psychological exploitation. With growing tactical assurance Hitler ever more carefully appreciated the advantages of strong-arm bands over rhetorical and liturgical propaganda as a means of winning recruits; he expressly advocated combining ‘activist brutality’ or ‘brutal power with brilliant planning’.3
In spite of the difficulty of distinguishing the meaning and function of the SA within the movement as a whole, we may now see the true task of the Brown Shirt detachments, in contrast to that of the Political
Organization, to have lain in emphasizing the belligerent element in the setting up of an all-embracing system of coercion. The rise of the NSDAP and its conquest of power show the combination demanded by Hitler, although theory was continually complicated by practical difficulties because there were two distinct, though curiously interwoven, power groups with competing demands both struggling for independence. In general, however, the system proved practicable and successful so long as there was a firm goal and an accepted authority at the top, to whose
tactical moves both blocs unprotestingly adapted themselves. But once power had been achieved the ambitions of the SA for independence previously smouldering more or less underground, strove for open
expression. Hitler solved the structural problem of the ‘double party’ with bloodshed.4 On 30 June 1934 and the following two days he arranged the liquidation of his old follower and friend Ernst Röhm, together with the homosexual element within the SA that had lent not merely the brown terrorist army but the whole of Hitler’s movement some of its most
striking and repellent features.
Death before the firing squad against the walls of Stadelheim prison and the Lichterfeld Military College meant for most of the high SA leaders, from Ernst Röhm through Edmund Heines down to August Schneidhuber, the identical conclusion to identical careers.5 Service as an officer in the war and in the Freikorps or the right-radical defence
associations had in most cases been followed by half-hearted attempts to get a foothold in civilian life, as a traveller, commercial employee, estate manager or simply head of household. At intervals they cultivated the old contacts; there was a deeply ingrained longing for male companionship, for the trade of arms, for the unconstrainedness of the soldier’s life, and finally, for unrestrained indulgence in eating and drinking. These men were merely hibernating behind a bourgeois facade which they felt to be alien and ‘civilian’; meanwhile they conspired, joined in enterprises that amounted to high treason, in the assassination of Republican politicians, in vehmic murders. Almost every one of these careers includes a period of imprisonment, a symptom of the inability to adapt on the part of men who, in fruitless resentment, always took ‘the opposite view’, opposed in any case to that despised and hated bourgeois world whose values and concepts of order had irrevocably perished for most of them in the course of their wartime experiences. Suddenly, with entry into the emergent SA, this empty, self-alienated life regained its central system of reference: now in all their unrest, their love of adventure, their feelings of hatred, they once more stood shoulder to shoulder with others; their feeling of meaninglessness was shared with comrades and thus, in the blurred reasoning of revolutionary irrationalism, acquired meaning.
There were various reasons for this generation’s extraordinary inability to adapt to civilian life. For some it was the excessive psychic and intellectual demands made upon them by war and its aftermath. This was true above all for the mercenaries, whose outlook often swung from right to left extremism, but it was also true for the ‘idealists’, who
imagined they had grasped in the ‘fires of the war of equipment’ the hem of a new, still vague meaning of life which they sought in vain to
rediscover in the drab normality of peace. It was these who formed the true revolutionary core of the SA. For others economic ruin or social decline threatened or had already been suffered. The petty-bourgeois stratum, which provided the main manpower of the SA, was joined by another category, former professional soldiers who felt themselves socially reduced, deprived of their livelihood, and on top of this morally defamed by the Versailles Treaty, and were consequently full of
new forms of community, aroused even before the war by the youth movement and confirmed and reinforced by the legendary comradeship of the front, and now neither absorbed nor adequately represented in existing parties that followed the methods of civilian organizations.6 It is no statistical coincidence that the top leadership of the SA in the early days was made up almost exclusively, not of the dregs of the urban masses, but predominantly of failures who had started life with every advantage, an uprooted bourgeoisie which found its way to crime as a result of lost honour, lost faith, or lost social status, but took care to cover itself by orders from above, ideological pretexts and formal safeguards. Destined in normal times for the middle ranks of society and with a rather conservative outlook on life, these men were pushed, by the combination of a past they had been unable to cope with and multiple aggressive impulses, on to a revolutionary course outside and in deliberate opposition to every form of order except the military. Instead of the moderate social privileges they had once looked forward to, they now noisily and demonstratively claimed the privileges of force that go with the soldier’s life. In the inimitable words of a toast proposed by one of the leaders of the Freikorps, making lofty claims to patriotism at the time of the battles in Upper Silesia: ‘There’s nothing better than a little war like this! God preserve the theatre of war. I’m threatening to become sober.’ And Ernst Röhm wrote: ‘Since I am an immature and wicked man, war and unrest appeal to me more than the good bourgeois order.’7
The fat little man with the bullet-scarred, always slightly red face was the typical representative of this group, which had gone off the rails and only found its way back in Hitler’s army of brown-shirted terrorists; it was obviously more than a caprice of fate that this man should provoke the spectacular trial in the course of which Hitler thrust the prototype of the robust and popular trooper with the blustering self-confidence out of the top leadership of the movement. Coming from an old Bavarian family of civil servants, Röhm shared not only the sociological values but also many of the psychological values common to a number of Hitler’s leading followers: above an intense attachment to his mother there rose the commanding shadow of his father, who was ‘harsh towards himself, righteous and thrifty’.8 Röhm was a fanatical soldier and officer, though without the arrogance and strained intensity that put a touch of martial demonism into the blank face of the General Staff officer of the old school. Although from childhood he had had ‘only one thought and wish, to be a soldier’, and towards the end of the war was actually on the
General Staff and a magnificent organizer, he was much closer to the type of the field officer. He was a daredevil who had come out of the war with numerous wounds and even in his memoirs he expressed a curiously
exalted aversion for the word ‘prudent’ (besonnen)9 He divided men simply into soldiers and civilians, into friend and enemy, was honest and without guile, coarse, sober, a simple-minded and straightforward
swashbuckler who liked ‘the noise of the camp and the bustle of the quartermaster’s stores’.10 Wherever he appeared, one of his comrades from the period of illegal military activity noted, ‘life came into the place, but above all practical work was done’.11 His robustly practical Bavarian mind, to which all brooding was alien, had no time for profound cults, for emotional enthusiasm for the Nordic ideal, or insane race fantasies, and he openly mocked the complex philosophical mysticism of Rosenberg, Himmler and Darré. His successor, Viktor Lutze, later remarked
reproachfully that he had never been able to get on friendly terms with Röhm because he ‘did not take sufficient interest in questions of
Weltanschauung’.12
At the same time, Röhm was a brutal boss, who gathered around him a dissolute crew who did not shrink from a bad reputation and actually prided themselves on their corruption, perverse debauchery and crimes of violence. Admittedly the functions and aims of the SA quickly brought out the criminal energies liberated by the First World War, but only under Röhm was there that ostentation which, so to speak,
institutionalized them and finally stamped the SA as a kind of wrestling club with a political bias. Röhm had no qualms of conscience; murder did not worry him, and whereas Captain Weiss wrote that wherever Röhm appeared ‘life’ came into the place, often enough precisely the opposite was the case. When his close friend Edmund Heines was condemned by a court of law for murder, he called this, in angry ignorance of legal
standards, ‘an encroachment by formal justice upon a soldier’s right to be “consciously one-sided”’,13 as he proudly proclaimed. In his memoirs he spoke with enthusiasm of the time when the soldier was ‘everything’, and openly demanded special privileges for his caste, ‘the primacy of the soldier over the politician’.14 His view that those in the opposing, un- uniformed camp consisted exclusively of ‘draft-dodgers, deserters and profiteers’ was based on the argument that the only man entitled to lead was the one who, free from private interests, was ready to die for his principles—‘an outlook of staggering naïvety’, as has rightly been said, ‘a kind of total military resentment against the civilian environment’.15 He once stated that, since they shared the same activist attitude, he had more in common with the Communists than with the ‘bourgeoisie’, and in 1933 he told a British diplomat that he ‘would reach an understanding more easily with an enemy soldier than with a German civilian; because the latter is a swine, and I don’t understand his language’.16
Conditions after the First World War were extraordinarily favourable to Captain Röhm of Reichswehr Group Headquarters 4 in Munich. He was one of a large group of ambitious captains and majors who, after their return from the front, exploited the helplessness of public institutions and, with the real power at their disposal, occupied a growing area where no one was in control. Not least of their reasons for being the most resolute in refusing to recognize the revolutionary new democratic state was their almost traumatic self-reproach for having failed to defend the monarchy in November 1918. In Bavaria above all they were all the more free to develop their counterrevolutionary activity against the Reich and its legality because here, as a result of the more radical revolutionary events and the resultant chaos, they found wide popular support reaching up into the highest echelons of the government. Röhm himself rose, through various positions the precise sequence of which we cannot examine here, to be master of a secret cache of weapons in Bavaria, and accordingly one of the most powerful men in the province.17 The
activities of the Freikorps and armed associations would have been inconceivable without the restless initiatives of this man who, less by virtue of his rank than through his actual influence, became one of the key figures on the political scene. Guided by the idea of the soldier’s right to leadership, he first organized a special intelligence department for the General Staff, with whose aid he kept watch over the political groups and thus made contact with the ‘V-man’ Adolf Hitler. Impressed like almost everyone else by the young agitator’s oratorical genius, Röhm obtained for him his first valuable links with the politicians and military leaders of the province. In his efforts to promote the party, one of whose early members he was and which enjoyed many special favours thanks to his initiative, he brought it numerous supporters from among his own friends or the ranks of the Reichswehr and also supported it during the founding and building up of the SA. But whereas Hitler, the tactician out to achieve unrestricted authority, envisaged the SA purely as a terrorist organization to assist the party leadership, Röhm’s intention, after his discharge from the army enabled him to take an active part in the movement, was to create an armed military force for the revolutionary conquest of the state.
Vague as the two opposing conceptions were at first, a silent
conflict, fought with growing stubbornness, soon broke out between them and was not resolved until 30 June 1934. To begin with, Hitler was at a disadvantage. His position was difficult not only because of the far greater power Röhm held at that time, but also because of the large number of soldiers who were joining the SA. There was an increasing tendency, for reasons of organization, for the SA to develop military
forms, which in turn increased the self-confidence with which the Brown Guard demanded wider functions. From 1923 onwards Röhm succeeded more and more openly in imposing his ideas, so that the NSDAP visibly developed into a ‘double party’ made up of two rival blocs: the SA, or Storm Troops, as Hitler had christened them after a beerhall battle that became a party legend;18 and the Political Organization, abbreviated to PO and contemptuously dubbed ‘P-Zero’ by the SA. Hitler at this period was little more than an expert speaker recruiting for a movement whose true core was the paramilitary organization led by Röhm, and if
everything indicates that the leader of the NSDAP was at this time
content with such a distribution of roles, subsequent events proved that it had its effect on his desire for self-assertion. At the latest after the
unsuccessful enterprise of 9 November 1923, which saw Hitler on his knees before the authority of the state on the steps of the Feldherrnhalle, he realized that Röhm’s crude idea of a head-on conquest of power was hopeless and that consequently the building up of a great military party organization was fundamentally wrong. Whereas Röhm, released on probation immediately after the trial, at once tried to reassemble the shattered nationalist armed organizations, Hitler, even while still in Landsberg prison, began to dissociate himself from Röhm, to drop the military presuppositions of his plans for seizing power, and, as he proudly stressed later, remained ‘immune to advice’.19 Various half-hearted
attempts by both sides to reach an understanding came to nothing, so that soon after his release Hitler brought about the break that robbed Röhm of all further opportunities for activity. Repudiated by Hitler, whose position and prestige within the movement had been greatly strengthened largely