Army of Evil: A History of the SS (10 page)

In 1930, Goebbels’ activists blanketed Germany in a blizzard of propaganda, agitation and street violence, forcing themselves onto the front pages of newspapers that had ignored them two years previously. The result of the election was astonishing: the NSDAP’s share of the vote rose from 2.6 to 18.3 per cent. As Ian Kershaw has pointed out: “the NSDAP was [now] no mere middle-class party, as used to be
thought. Though not in equal proportions, the Hitler movement could reasonably claim to have won support from all sections of society. No other party in the Weimar period could claim the same.”
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That is a little misleading, as the party never gained mass working-class support, but it made significant inroads even in that sector in 1930.

However, in spite of this electoral success, the NSDAP had been lurching from one internal crisis to another. The first problem was precipitated by Otto Strasser, younger brother of Gregor, who questioned whether the party had a meaningful programme beyond its quest for political power. He espoused a variety of National Socialism that emphasised radical anti-capitalism alongside nationalism and anti-Semitism, and he soon gathered a coterie of supporters who propagated their ideas via his Berlin-based publishing house, Kampfverlag. They were dismayed by the NSDAP’s increasingly close relationship with the bourgeois establishment and heavy industry, and published ever more critical tracts against this tendency in the first few months of 1930. Hitler and especially Goebbels—who was Regional Leader in Berlin—were infuriated by this lack of loyalty. Goebbels now fully accepted Hitler’s argument that the party’s first priority was to achieve power—only then could it begin the National Socialist revolution.

The dispute reached a head in April and May 1930. Hitler convened a series of meetings of the party leadership to denounce Kampfverlag, and followed these with a face-to-face meeting with Otto Strasser himself on 21 May. Opinions differ as to whether this was designed to bring Strasser into line or to force him out of the movement. Hitler was probably simply probing Strasser to see whether an accommodation could be reached or more decisive action was needed. Whatever the motive for the meeting, it did not go well. Strasser forcibly argued that “the idea” was greater than “the leader.” Leaders, he said, were fallible and temporary, while the idea was eternal. Not surprisingly, Hitler thought this was nonsense: “For us, the Leader is the Idea, and each party member has only to obey the Leader.”
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He was equally dismissive of Strasser’s claim that the NSDAP’s strategy of
legality and cooperation with the bourgeois right would hinder the “Social Revolution” that they both espoused. In Hitler’s view, this was “Nothing but Marxism.”
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Despite the frosty nature of this meeting, Hitler typically hesitated before deciding to act against Strasser’s clique. In fact, he took so long that he was pre-empted by Strasser and his supporters, who in early July announced that they were leaving the NSDAP to create their own radical National Socialist organisation: the Union of Revolutionary National Socialists, later known as the Black Front. This proved to be political suicide: very few National Socialists followed Strasser, and his departure signalled the end of any serious “socialist” strand within the NSDAP. It also allowed Goebbels’ elevation to National Propaganda Chief.

The second internal party crisis—which also began in 1930, although it only came to a head the following year—had a profound effect on the position of the SS within the movement.

As we have seen, the chief of the SA, Pfeffer von Salomon, recruited a number of ex-officers from the German armed forces, the Free Corps and the
Frontbann
in a bid to instil some military-style discipline into a corrupt and brutal gang. One of these new recruits was a former police captain, Walter Stennes, who became
SA-Oberführer Ost
(SA-Senior Leader East)—responsible for Berlin and eastern Germany. However, this appointment effectively supplanted the man who had created and built up the Berlin SA into a force of over five hundred men: Kurt Daluege—a tall, burly building engineer. Born in Kreuzberg in 1897, Daluege had joined the NSDAP in 1922
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and had swiftly gained a reputation as a vicious and effective operator in Berlin street politics (where his limited intelligence earned him the nickname “DummiDummi”
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). Unsurprisingly, he was far from happy when Stennes was brought in to run “his” unit.

Stennes, for his part, seems to have been in sympathy with Otto Strasser. Certainly, both he and the men of the Berlin SA shared Strasser’s frustration at the slow pace of the National Socialist “revolution.”
Their unrest grew when the party leadership refused to nominate Stennes and several other leading SA officers as candidates for the Reichstag. But this was just the tip of an iceberg of disquiet in Berlin and throughout the SA. Stennes was by no means alone in disagreeing with Hitler’s legal route to power, and the economic crisis that followed the Wall Street Crash threw this dispute into sharp focus.

The SA benefited greatly from the crisis, with its membership increasing in 1930 to between “60,000 and 100,000.”
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But most of these were not hard-core National Socialists; rather, they were unemployed and distressed, and had turned to the SA simply as a source of food and support. Stennes himself reported: “In some Berlin units 67% of the men are unemployed.”
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Meanwhile, the central party organisation—administrators who were widely derided within the SA as “civilians”—kept the SA on a tight financial rein. Resentment grew at the traffic of cash from SA street collections and membership dues to party headquarters, with little coming back the other way. SA commanders wanted to hang on to their new recruits, and felt the need to spend some money on them in order to do so, but all of that money—which they had collected—was being channelled into the election campaign.

Notwithstanding the SA’s lack of cash, its huge increase in membership, combined with its increased activity in the run-up to the September election, had the potential to cause a shift in the balance of power within the party. SA members were on the streets, fighting with their Communist and Social Democrat opponents, and this gave Stennes the opportunity to make his move. He demanded that senior SA commanders should be on the party’s electoral list for the Reichstag; an increase in funding for the SA, including payment for members who guarded party meetings; and a reduction in the power of the “civilian” regional leaders. On 23 August, just three weeks before the election, he led a delegation to Munich to put these demands directly to Hitler. The latter refused to see them, which led to a kind of strike by the Berlin SA: Stennes’ staff officers resigned and refused to carry
out their propaganda or protection duties. Then, on 28 August, a group of SA men raided the Berlin party headquarters and beat up the business manager. In response to this attack, SS guards were posted at the building.

By now, the Berlin SS was under the control of Stennes’ predecessor, Daluege. Seething with resentment at Stennes’ appointment, he had left the SA and had joined its rival organisation on 25 July (membership number 1119). He gained immediate promotion to senior leader rank and was given command of the Berlin SS
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in place of the relatively ineffectual Kurt Wege. Thereafter, Daluege was specifically commissioned by Hitler to keep an eye on the manoeuvrings of Stennes and his clique, and a number of trusted former SA colleagues supplied him with information. Even so, Daluege failed to predict the Berlin SA’s next move, which came on the night of 30 August. A large group of SA men again attacked the party headquarters, where they beat up the seven SS guards (two of whom received serious head injuries) and then smashed up the furniture inside. The raid was reported to Goebbels—who had been speaking at a party meeting in Breslau—and he drove through the night to take control of the situation. Humiliatingly, the only way to get Stennes’ men out of the headquarters was to enlist the help of the much despised Berlin Police. A riot squad duly arrived and arrested twenty-five SA men.

This infighting represented a real crisis for the NSDAP, so Goebbels quickly contacted Hitler, who was in Bayreuth, and asked him to intervene. The next day, Hitler met with Stennes at a hotel near the Anhalter railway station in Berlin. Then he toured Berlin’s SA bars and cafés, where he told the disgruntled SA men that they could trust him and that he would soon remedy their complaints.

Hitler’s intervention papered over the cracks for the time being. Little news of the dispute reached the press and the election duly
passed off successfully. Nevertheless, Hitler was well aware that he would need to address the deep-rooted problems in the SA sooner rather than later. Before long, he dismissed Pfeffer von Salomon and took over the role of
Oberste SA Führer
(SA Commander-in-Chief) himself. He also wrote to Ernst Röhm (who was still in Bolivia) to ask him to return and become SA
Stabschef
(Chief of Staff). Röhm had kept in touch with the situation in Germany and was fully aware of the implications of the NSDAP’s success in the general election.
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Critically, the SS’s loyalty to the party leadership in the face of the SA unrest had not gone unnoticed, and soon it was given a new official function. In a circular sent to senior SA officers at the beginning of October 1930, the SS was described as a police organisation within the movement, with the authority to prevent illegality among party formations. This required the SS to be functionally independent of the SA in recruitment (its membership was supposedly capped at 10 per cent of total SA strength) and to perform its new policing function, even though it remained notionally subordinate to the SA.

At the same time, the overall role of the SA was re-examined. At a meeting of the organisation’s leadership in Munich on 30 November 1930, Hitler proposed Röhm as his nominee for Chief of Staff against considerable opposition, especially from the Stennes faction. Röhm was, in his own way, as radical in his views about the future role of the SA as anybody within the organisation. Nevertheless, he was a strict disciplinarian who could be counted on to recognise how high the stakes now were for the National Socialist movement. High on the momentum of the party’s recent electoral success and in the expectation that the NSDAP would soon assume power, the organisation’s existing leadership (Röhm did not take up his new role until January 1931) began to prepare themselves for their future after the seizure of power. In principle, the SA was to “turn away from propaganda, guard duty and the solicitation of funds”
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and start to organise itself into the NSDAP’s national military force. In turn, the SS would take over most of the SA’s former tasks as the movement’s political foot soldiers. On
1 December, Himmler—somewhat prematurely, as it turned out—announced the formal separation of the SS from the SA.
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If anything, the NSDAP’s success in the election heightened the tension between the party and the Stennes faction within the SA. With power almost within his grasp, Hitler knew he needed to tread carefully in order to avoid provoking the somewhat rattled establishment into a decisive strike against the whole National Socialist movement. But this softly-softly approach frustrated many members of the SA, who clung to their romantic, albeit brutal, notions of seizing power by force. The election campaign had witnessed an upsurge of political violence between right and left, and this had continued largely unabated afterwards, partly because the Communists had also significantly increased their support. This had led Röhm, in his first month as Chief of Staff, to ban SA participation in street battles. Meanwhile, Daluege’s Berlin SS continued to keep a wary eye on the Stennes clique, after all attempts to buy off and intimidate its leader had failed. For instance, when Stennes was offered the Interior Ministry of the state government of Brunswick—which had come under NSDAP control in the elections—he not only turned it down but openly criticised the corrupt and cynical party leadership in Munich.

All of this tension finally came to a head on 28 March 1931, when President Hindenburg gave Chancellor Heinrich Brüning’s government the power to act against political excesses. The NSDAP leadership viewed this as a possible prelude to a ban on the party—or at least the SA—so Hitler ordered strict compliance with the rule of law. Stennes, seeing this as an attempt to curb his freedom of action, refused. Then, at a meeting in Weimar on 31 March, Hitler announced that Stennes was to leave his role as SA-Senior Leader East and would become Röhm’s executive officer in Munich. This transfer could have been seen as a sideways move rather than a demotion, but there is no doubt that Hitler—warned of Stennes’ continued plotting by Daluege—fully intended to provoke a strong reaction. He did not have to wait long. The very next day, the SS guards at Berlin’s party offices
were again beaten up by a mob of Stennes’ SA supporters, who then occupied the headquarters as well as the offices of Goebbels’ newspaper,
Der Angriff
(
The Attack
). Stennes then announced Hitler’s “dismissal” as party leader, and SA leaders throughout northern and eastern Germany publicly declared their support for their man.

Berlin Regional Leader Goebbels had been trying to steer a middle course between Stennes and the Munich party leadership for many months, but now he clearly had to choose one side or the other. He had considerable personal sympathy for Stennes’ political views, but after being given plenipotentiary powers by Hitler to resolve the crisis, he came out firmly in support of the leadership. The Berlin Police again cleared the SA men from party headquarters. Then, in the face of a barrage of propaganda and persuasion from Hitler and Goebbels, support for Stennes collapsed. A few hundred of his leading supporters were purged, the dust settled, and the revolt was over.

As an odd postscript to this tale, Stennes managed to survive the Third Reich. Imprisoned in a concentration camp after the NSDAP came to power, he was released after the personal intervention of Hermann Goering. He was smuggled across the Dutch border and then made his way to China, where he served as commander of Chiang Kai-shek’s bodyguard. During that time, he became an agent of Soviet Military Intelligence,
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but his warnings about the imminent German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 went unheeded by Stalin. He left China when the Nationalists were defeated in 1949 and returned to Germany, where he died in 1989.