The Himmler's SS (3 page)

Hermann Göring as Commander-in-Chief of the SA, 1923. Note the Ehrhardt Brigade steel helmet with swastika, and the order ‘Pour le Mérite' at the neck. Rank is denoted by the wide stripes on the armband.

In March 1923, Hitler ordered the formation of a Munich-based bodyguard known as the Stabswache, comprising twelve old comrades who swore an oath of loyalty to him personally and owed no allegiance to the leaders of the Freikorps or SA. Two months later, using the Stabswache as cadre, the 100-man Stosstrupp Adolf Hitler was created and fully kitted out with military-style uniforms and two trucks. The Stosstrupp quickly adopted the death's head as its distinctive emblem, and was led by Hauptmann Julius Schreck and Leutnant Josef Berchtold, both veterans of the Ehrhardt Brigade. Its headquarters were located in the Torbräu public house, and there met the first members of Hitler's bodyguard, who were destined to remain faithful to him at all times and follow his way up the political ladder. They included ‘Sepp' Dietrich, Ulrich Graf, Rudolf Hess, Emil Maurice, Julius Schaub and Christian Weber.

Hitler quickly recognised that the volatile situation of 1923 was a transient thing, and he resolved to take full advantage of it. He reckoned that his SA and its Freikorps allies might at last be strong enough to seize power in Bavaria and, with luck, march from Munich on Berlin for a final triumph. Similar coups had taken place with varying degrees of success elsewhere in Germany since 1918, and the fascists under Mussolini had just swept to power in Italy after a march on Rome. At the beginning of November, the 15,000 men of the SA were put on full alert and a suitable opportunity suddenly arose on the 8th of the month. That day, the three most powerful men in Bavaria, Prime Minister von Kahr, local army commander Lossow and police chief Seisser, attended a political meeting in the Munich Burger-bräukeller where they could be handily seized by a strongarm squad. The Reichskriegsflagge Freikorps was having a ‘social' in the Augustiner beer cellar when its commander, Röhm, was ordered in his SA capacity to seize the Reichswehr Ministry on the Leopoldstrasse. His troops immediately set off, led by a young former army officer cadet, Heinrich Himmler, who carried an imperial war flag, the banner of the unit which bore its name. Meanwhile, armed SA men surrounded the Burgerbräukeller and Hitler had von Kahr, Lossow and Seisser arrested and bundled into a side room. They managed to escape, however, and sped off to organise resistance to the Nazi putsch.

SA men, in an assortment of military and civilian clothing, muster at Oberwiesenfeld prior to attending the Labour Day parade in Munich on 1 May 1923. Such events usually ended in street fighting between Nazis and communists, hence the distribution of rifles.

The Stosstrupp Hitler leaving for ‘German Day' in Bayreuth, 2 September 1923. Josef Berchtold stands leaning on the cab, beside von Salomon and Ulrich Graf. Julius Schreck, with goggles, is seated at the left of the front row.

On the morning of 9 November, the main force of the SA under Röhm was besieged in the War Ministry by regular army units summoned by Lossow. Hitler and Göring organised a relief column of 2,000 SA men and, accompanied by the former General Erich Ludendorff, marched through the streets of Munich. They ran into the first cordon of Seisser's police on the Ludwig Bridge, but brushed them aside. A second police cordon on the edge of the Odeonsplatz, however, gave them a different reception. They were in a strategic spot outside the Feldherrnhalle war memorial and were determined not to retreat. Ulrich Graf, who with the rest of the Stosstrupp Adolf Hitler was present to protect his Führer, stepped out and shouted to the police officer in charge, ‘Don't shoot! His Excellency Ludendorff is here!'. But this was the police, not the army, and Ludendorff's name had no magic sound. A volley of shots rang out. Josef Berchtold collapsed under a hail of bullets. Andreas Bauriedl, the swastika standard-bearer, was in his death throes, drenching the flag with his blood. The tattered artefact was rapidly gathered up and spirited away, to be piously preserved as the famed Blutfahne, or Blood Banner. Hitler had locked his left arm with the right of his close confidant, Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, and when the latter fell mortally wounded he pulled Hitler to the ground with him. Instantly, Ulrich Graf threw himself on his leader and was at once peppered by a dozen bullets which might otherwise have killed Hitler. Somehow, Graf survived it. Sixteen Nazis lay dead and the rest dispersed or were captured, but the Stosstrupp had fulfilled its primary duty – Hitler's life was preserved. The firing outside the Feldherrnhalle finally ended the era of the Freikorps, which had started, five years before to the day, with the revolution of 1918. The time for fighting men had now passed, giving way to the politicians.

A group of the Reichskriegsflagge Freikorps behind the Bavarian War Ministry on 9 November 1923. From left to right in the foreground are: Weickert, Kitzinger, Himmler (with imperial war flag), Seidel-Dittmarsch and Röhm.

The reverse experienced at the Munich putsch and Hitler's subsequent imprisonment, far from harming the cause of the party and its leader, merely served to get them better known. Yet there were still plenty of troubles ahead. Following the putsch, the NSDAP was banned and the SA and Stosstrupp dissolved. Those Nazi leaders who managed to avoid arrest fled to other German states where Bavarian law could not touch them. Refugees from Munich set up personal clandestine SA units under the name Frontbanne, with overall control being exercised by Ludendorff and his deputy, Albert von Gräfe. The largest was Frontbann Nord, centred around Berlin and commanded by Kurt Daluege. Hitler, cooped up in jail with his bodyguards penning
Mein Kampf
, realised that an armed insurrection against a government which enjoyed the loyalty of both the police and the army would be doomed. Henceforth, he determined to employ only legal methods in his struggle for power.

On his release from Landsberg prison on 20 December 1924, Hitler began to rebuild his party, and in February 1925 the NSDAP was reconstituted and the SA reactivated. Hitler the politician now categorically forbade the SA to bear arms or function as any sort of private army. Its purpose was solely to clear the streets of his political enemies, a role hotly contested by Röhm, who envisaged the SA as a citizen army which could bolster and ultimately supersede the Reichswehr. The disagreement between the two became so bitter that Röhm eventually resigned from the party and quit Germany for a military adviser's post in Bolivia. His job as Chief of Staff of the SA fell to the former Freikorps leader Franz Felix Pfeffer von Salomon, but the latter failed to enjoy Hitler's confidence and Röhm was duly reinstated in a stronger position than ever.

In April 1925, Hitler formed a new bodyguard commanded by Schreck, Schaub and his other Stosstrupp favourites. The guard, which came under the auspices of the SA High Command, was known first as the Schutzkommando, then the Sturmstaffel, but on 9 November, probably at the suggestion of Göring, it adopted the old fighter squadron title of Schutzstaffel, which was not subject to any of the governmental prohibitions and was not identified with any of the Freikorps traditions. The ‘Schutzstaffel der NSDAP' soon commonly came to be known as the SS.

Men of the newly formed SS proudly display an NSDAP Feldzeichen at the end of 1925. Note the wild variety of dress, particularly the strange caps with massive eagle insignia, and the assorted belt buckles.

From the start, it was laid down that the SS, unlike the SA, should never become a mass organisation. In September 1925, Schreck sent a circular to all regional groups of the NSDAP asking them to form a local bodyguard, the strength of which was to be fixed at one leader and ten men. This was the beginning of the so-called ‘Zehnerstaffeln' or Groups of Ten. Not just anybody could join, for the seeds of élitism had already been sown. Applicants had to be between 25 and 35 years of age, have two sponsors, be registered with the police as residents of at least five years' standing, and be sober, disciplined, strong and healthy. Habitual drunkards and gossip-mongers were not to be admitted. The reason for all this was simple. Hitler and his followers were beginning to travel outside Bavaria in their tireless campaigning to increase the membership of the NSDAP. They were now venturing into areas where Nazi allegiance was local, rather than to Hitler himself. The Führer needed a small, hand-picked bodyguard on which he could rely wherever he went. The new SS had its first opportunity to distinguish itself at Chemnitz in Saxony at the end of the year. It was a bold decision to hold a public meeting in this Red territory, but Hitler's audacious stroke proved to be justified. In anticipation of trouble, Schreck gathered fifty SS men from Chemnitz, Dresden, Plauen and Zwickau. They had to face some several hundred counter-demonstrators armed with iron bars and knives. The SS taught them such a lesson in street fighting that Hitler's meetings in that region were henceforth conducted almost without opposition.

In April 1926, Schreck was nominated personal bodyguard and chauffeur to the Führer, and Josef Berchtold re-emerged to take over command of the SS, which then numbered about 1,000 men. On the second anniversary of the Munich putsch, the existence of the SS had been officially proclaimed in a ceremony outside the Feldherrnhalle, and in the spring of 1926 no less than seventy-five Schutzstaffeln were formed right across the country. A new SS-Oberleitung was created and Berchtold adopted the self-styled title of Reichsführer der SS. On 4 July, in a gesture symbolising his intention that the SS should become the true guardian of Nazi values, Hitler solemnly handed over the Blutfahne from the Munich putsch into their safekeeping and appointed Jakob Grimminger from the Munich SS detachment to be official bearer of the Blutfahne at all subsequent special party rituals. Yet despite the extension of its numbers and theoretical prestige, the SS remained a limited organisation subordinated to the SA. When von Salomon attempted to absorb the SS completely in March 1927, Berchtold resigned and was replaced by his deputy, Erhard Heiden, who managed to retain its partial autonomy. However, the SA kept a jealous eye on SS expansion and local SA commanders consistently used the SS under their control for the most demeaning tasks, such as distributing propaganda leaflets and recruiting subscribers to the party newspaper, the
Völkischer Beobachter
. By the end of 1928, morale in the SS was at an all-time low and membership had fallen to 280. On 6 January 1929, a dejected Heiden resigned his titular position as Reichsführer der SS in favour of his timid young deputy, Heinrich Himmler. The SA leadership were cock-a-hoop. This colourless nonentity posed little threat and was just the man to command the SS and to ensure its continued subordination to the SA. They were in for a rude awakening.