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The most important Nazi Paramilitary
organizations where the SA (Sturm Abteilung, literally Storm Troops) and the
SS (Schutzstaffel, literally Elite Echelon). The HJ or Hitlerjugend (Hitler
Youth) was not really a paramilitary organizaiton in the beginning, since it
was designed to organize and recruit young people for the Nazi movement.
The antecedent of Himmler's "Black Corps," or SS, is to be found in Hitler's
private bodyguard, formed before the 1923 Putsch from a small clique of
desperados known as the Assault Squad. The Assault Squad's few men,
demobilized NCOs, freebooters, laborers, and adventurers, shared utter
loyalty to the person of Hitler, whom they had sworn to protect at all
costs.
The Assault Squad was led by an SA man, Julius Schreck, and a stationer who
worked in the party treasury, Joseph Berchtold. It was prepared to perform
whatever task their Führer gave them, usually requiring muscle or a show of
force. Thus 50 of Berchtold's men, already wearing black-bordered swastika
armbands and black ski-caps with a silver death's head button, accompanied
Hitler when he made his melodramatic entry into the Bürgerbräukeller on
November 8, 1923, to announce the misadventure known as the Beer Hall
Putsch. Five of them were killed during the melee with the police in front
of the Odeonplatz. At the time the SA probably had about 2,000 men and the
Assault Squad no more than 100, reflecting their respective importance then
and later.
The strong-arm wing of the party had a rather innocuous beginning as the
"gymnastics and sport section," founded by Emil Maurice, a 23 year old
watchmaker, in November 1920. After Hitler seized control of the party in
the following year, and changed the name to Sturmabteilung, expansion in
size and role helped to solidify his own control and create an activist core
for the movement. A notorious Free Corps leader, Captain Hermann Ehrhardt,
provided recruits and money. The nascent SA was different from the numerous
Free Corps, composed largely of veterans who had served the new government
as a kind of counter-revolutionary force. They later created a militaristic
subculture, violently opposed to the Weimar Republic. The SA, however,
appealed to youth and restricted membership to those between the ages of 17
and 23. It was much younger, included fewer veterans, and gave the party
much of its bravado. Battling the communist and socialist "enemy," was the
main task of the SA, and helped to turn it into "the most active and radical
paramilitary organization in Bavaria" already before 1923.
During the Putsch the SA was hardly distinguishable from the other völkisch
groups in the coalition Hitler put together for the coup. After its failure,
Hermann Göring, the actual commander of the SA in 1923, went into exile,
Hitler and other leaders were in jail, and all party organizations were
outlawed. Captain Ernst Röhm, most active liaison officer of the Bavarian
Reichswehr to the paramilitary organizations, had been the main organizer of
the early SA. When he was released from prison in April 1924, Röhm proceeded
to reactivate SA units throughout the country and organize them, along with
other völkisch paramilitary groups, into the Frontbann.
This organization, which acquired some 40,000 members, was a military
association in the old style, whereas Hitler wanted a political combat
league more appropriate to the legal course he adopted after the Putsch.
When Hitler began to rebuild the party in 1925, he refused to accept the
Frontbann, while Röhm declined Hitler's offer to command a new SA. Röhm
could not agree - and never really did - that this paramilitary tool should
be at the discretionary disposal of the political leadership and shed its
purely military characteristics. Röhm then went off to Bolivia in a sulking
mood, the Frontbann disintegrated, and the SA submitted to direction from
local party leaders. Significant growth began with the appointment of
Captain Franz Pfeffer von Salomon as Supreme SA Leader (OSAF) in the fall of
1926. He built the SA into a disciplined and reliable party army, which
fought the "internal enemy" by violent means.
Uncertainty over the basic character of the SA, alerted Hitler to the need
for a totally reliable force, a kind of praetorian guard, which would put a
check on the rowdy streetfighters. In February 1925, before the SA was
officially reborn, Hitler created small elite echelons (Schutzstaffeln) in
various cities where SA units already existed. Two months later the
miniscule SS, patterned to some degree on the extinct Assault Squad,
revealed its essential future character by serving as funeral torchbearers
for the former police president of Munich. But in the shadow of an expanding
SA, the SS barely maintained its existence under several ineffective
leaders. In July 1926, during the same party rally which recognized Kurt
Gruber's HJ at Weimar, the SS was declared to be the elite organization of
the party.
In an arcane ceremony, typical of many mysterious practices with which the
SS was to be associated, the "blood banner" which had been stained during
the conflict with the police on the Odeonplatz in 1923, was transferred to
the SS for safekeeping. The SS was not to exceed ten percent of SA strength
in any one locality. Such deliberate restriction enforced its elitist
feeling, while stern discipline turned the SS man into "the most exemplary
party member conceivable." Neither hard-bitten party bosses, nor swaggering
and uncouth SA commanders took kindly to the elitist pretensions of the SS
and used them mainly to run errands, recruit party members, and sell
newspapers. In January 1929, when the SS had some 1,200 members, things
began to change quickly. Hitler appointed a little known and apparently
unassuming 28 year old party bureaucrat Reichsführer of the SS. His name was
Heinrich Himmler, surely one of the strangest and most unfathomable men in
modern history. During his short sojourn he has left a trail of blood and
terror behind him which few can equal.
At the time Himmler was hardly noticed or appreciated, having served as
secretary and deputy to party propaganda chief, Gregor Strasser. Coming from
a proper Catholic middle-class family, with a father who had been tutor to
the Bavarian royal house and had a successful career as professor and
director of several prestigious Bavarian Gymnasia, Himmler's upbringing was
anything but irregular. Psychohistorians have found reason to believe that
his prolonged adolescence consisted of an unsuccessful effort to master
libidinal drives, forcing him to resort to obsessive repression, projection,
and exaggerated self-discipline. He is supposed to have developed an
inordinate identification with his tyrannical father, later replaced by
surrogates, like Röhm and Strasser (both of whom he helped to murder
subsequently), but the most notable of which was to be Hitler. Weak object
relation and the lack of a feeling of self-worth and distinct individuality,
theoretically, led him to imbibe the prevailing values of the post-war
generation. These values included xenophobic nationalism, fear of
conspiratorial secret societies like Freemasons, and Jews, militaristic
violence and social probity.
Although the young Himmler's conversion to the völkisch ideology was
gradual, almost accidental by virtue of his random but avaricious reading
habits, he developed two early obsessions, the satisfactions of a military
life and the appeals of character-building agrarian pursuits. These were to
find their perverse fulfillment in the Waffen-SS and a population policy
based on the blood and soil ideology. While these aspects of his wartime
career may have been in part the result of an unsuccessful adolescence, they
were imposed on thousands of adolescents whose formative years were probably
no more successful than his and whose choices were more restricted. He also
develop an early interest in spying, which he practiced on his older brother
Gebhard's fiance, alleging that she was promiscuous and hence unfit for
inclusion in the Himmler family. Eventually he managed to break up the
romance.
In a conventional sense, the young Himmler was certainly more successful
than most of his contemporaries. He completed military training as a cadet,
a career in uniform being stymied by the end of the war. Completing his
studies in agronomy at the Technische Hochschule in Munich, he made a career
for himself as a minor bureaucrat in the Nazi Party, in part because he
could not find a post as farm manager, although he was willing to go
anywhere, even Russia and Turkey. At the same time he pursued his ambitions
in the Artamanen, an agrarian youth movement, the paramilitary
Reichskriegsflagge, and even tried his hand at scientific poultry-breeding.
His marriage to an older woman was not too promising from the start, and may
have had something to do with his unrealistic but conventional conception of
women as weak and subordinate, fit primarily for domestic chores and
childbearing.
The SS provided Himmler with an outlet, particularly his penchant for order,
detail, organizational finesse, and misplaced sense of moral and social
rectitude. His father's pedantry, which went so far as to correct his son's
diary entries, played a role here. The feeling of superiority, which these
attitudes generated, compensated for inner emptiness, the absence of
self-assurance and a satisfying sense of moral values. He naturally adopted
Hitler as his superego, replacing an earlier fascination with Ernst Röhm.
Himmler built up the SS, as a consequence, by assiduously appealing to
old-line aristocrats and wealthy members of the middle class, making them
patrons and honorary members in exchange for financial support and
transferred social prestige. This set Himmler's SS off from the SA and the
rest of the party, whose misbehavior and ideological deviation the SS was,
after all, to watch and report. Being a kind of party police both by precept
and function, the raison d'etre of the SS was loyalty to the Führer. The
political context of the times and the projected role of the SS, led Himmler
to imbue the organization with military titles, ordered hierarchy, and
combative spirit.
Both SS and SA soon experienced phenomenal growth, as the depression drove
unemployed lower middle-class men and workers into the latter and
middle-class intellectuals and professionals into the former. Himmler's
Elite numbered 10,000 by 1931 and Pfeffer's organizational skills and
training methods turned the SA into a movement in its own right by the fall
of 1930, when it claimed 60,000 streetwarriors. The use of the SA as
propaganda army, "a sort of permanent election campaign with terroristic
methods," had much to do with the election breakthrough of the Nazi Party in
the September elections to the Reichstag. But success created its own
disparities and frictions which the SA-owned economic enterprises could not
mitigate. Resentment of slack and corrupt party politicians, who reaped the
benefits while the SA did all the work, added to impatience with Hitler's
continued "legal" approach to power. It brought restlessness and buried
"socialist" tendencies in the activist SA to a head.
In the summer of 1930 Pfeffer resigned in a fit of anger. Shortly before the
September election, the Berlin SA revolted against the temporizing party
politicians, namely Gauleiter Josef Goebbels and his SS allies, followed by
a more serious SA revolt in April 1931, led by Walther Stennes, Pfeffer's
erstwhile deputy. Since the rebellion was not directed at Hitler personally,
he was able to quell it by a shrewd combination of concessions and charisma.
During the episode the SS came into its own for the first time by protecting
the politicians who were physically in danger and by keeping the SA rebels
at bay with weapons drawn. Hitler, who had assumed overall command of the SA
shortly after Pfeffer's resignation, decided to recall Röhm and make him
chief of staff. Röhm was more than eager to resume the leadership over what
was clearly an exploding organization with 260,000 members at the end of
1931 and over half a million men in January 1933.
The slower growing SS, for whom Hitler was more of a surrogate father than
he was for the SA, reached a milestone with the Stennes affair. After this
event Hitler gave his dependable SS the motto which was to become its most
characteristic symbol until the final days of the war: "SS man your honor is
loyalty!" A nearly mystical idea of loyalty expressed the core of Himmler's
personality and now it was to be also the heart of the SS organization.
It was more than fortuitous that 1931 was also the year when two of
Himmler's most important associates joined forces with him to create two
essential SS organizational segments with their own ideological props and
pervasive activities: Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich and Richard Walther
Darré.
Heydrich's upbringing was both normal in the conventional sense and more
privileged than Himmler's. Certainly the cultural environment was more
refined, his father being the founder and director of a musical conservatory
and a fairly well-known composer of operas and popular fare. The sensitive
and withdrawn boy developed a certain distance from his father, being much
closer to his mother, in this sense being not unlike Himmler. Unsure of
himself, despite his obvious talent and intellect, he early became arrogant
and cynical, jealous of his siblings greater social success. His father's
running battle against rumors of his Jewish origins, a legend never
successfully quashed during his lifetime, was to have its effect on Reinhard
from early youth. Even though he played the violin well and dabbled with the
idea of becoming a chemist, Reinhard choose the navy nearly on the spur of
the moment.
His promising career in the somewhat politically suspicious service did not
get very far. As a 27 year old ex-naval lieutenant, who had left the service
under scandalous circumstances, Heydrich presented himself to Himmler in the
fall of 1931 with plans for an SS intelligence operation. Perhaps influenced
by the fact that the navy had once rejected him on physical grounds and
impressed by Heydrich's quick intelligence, maybe even awed by the handsome
man's reputation as chronic womanizer, Himmler gave Heydrich a virtual carte
blanche. The Security Service (SD) which he created became his and Himmler's
vehicle to power by acquiring exclusive intelligence prerogatives first
within the SS, then within the party, and finally within the state.
Darré was quite different from Heydrich, the cynical, pragmatic realist and
political tactician with few peers in the Nazi melange. Born in Argentina
and educated at King's College School, Wimbledon, Darré, the ex-official in
the Prussian Ministry of Agriculture, had developed unusual theories about
the nature of current agrarian problems. He insisted they were largely a
matter "of blood," i.e., a hereditarily healthy peasantry alone could
maintain the racial fecundity and cultural superiority of the Aryan stock.
Five years Himmler's senior, the blood and soil ideologue took Himmler under
his wing as a willing pupil when they met in the Artamanen, in which both
were active during the 1920s. Before 1931 Darré had founded the party's
Agrarian Political Office, converted himself into the party's agricultural
expert, and then joined the SS as chief of the new SS Race Office created in
December 1931. Two years later it became the Race and Settlement Office, a
more appropriate designation for an agency that purveyed racism, elitism,
suburban housing developments and reversion to an agrarian culture all at
once.
While Himmler had adopted the prevailing culture's anti-semitism in his
youth, it was Darré's agrarian racism more than Hitler's Austrian version,
or the 1920 party program's anti-capitalist and anti-semitic "slavery of
interest" version, which laid the basis for the racial fixation of the SS.
Genetic reconstitution became the propagandistic gospel of the SS,
symbolized by Himmler's notorious marriage code, suggested by Darré, a
biogenetic engineer before his time, and in the view of one recent
biographer the "father" of the environmentalist "Greens" in West Germany
today. This code required that SS men and their prospective wives submit
certified proof of Aryan ancestry and undergo minute physical examinations.
Himmler, whose relationship with girls in adolescence had been stiff and
distant, himself pored over photographs of SS brides in scanty apparel to
make sure they met his standards of Nordic health and beauty.
Here was the origin of the so-called SS Order, which later was infused with
medieval pomp and arcane ceremony, inspired by Himmler's dead heroic model,
King Henry the Fowler of Saxony, conqueror of Slavs and initiator of
eastward imperial expansion. Himmler was to revive this imperialism with a
racist vengeance, based on the "soldier-farmer" settlement notions of Darré,
which actually had their antecedents in Roman and Austro-Hungarian frontier
defense policies. These anachronistic preoccupations of the SS were to find
at least partial implementation in the HJ Land Service and the population
policies of the National Youth Directorate.
The security functions and self-conscious elitism had a tendency to set the
SS apart from the SA, illustrated by the fact that the SS had 50 percent
more casualties than the SA in the street battles of 1930 to 1933. The
elitist ideology, aside from its historical and racist underpinnings, its
emphasis on height and presumed Aryan physical characteristics, led Himmler
to be increasingly more selective in the acceptance of new recruits. His own
comparative youth, his association with the Artamanen, and as a way of
putting distance between his SS and the SA, Himmler insisted, particularly
after January 1933, that new recruits should be under 25 years of age. This
was bound to lead him eventually to view the HJ as a most significant ally.
The suppressive role of the SS, the assignment of security duties at the new
party headquarters in the Brown House, and the reservation of leadership
appointments to Himmler, gave the SS distinction from the party-controlled
and party-financed SA. The SS, not regularly financed through the party
until 1938, was dependent on its own resources. Himmler's ingenious use of
the "Sponsoring Membership" mechanism, vastly extended from Berchtold's
original idea, allowed the SS to become financially independent, while at
the same time adumbrating its elitist image and attraction. Honorary
memberships, titles and medals, were thus bestowed on thousands of "lay
brothers" who contributed a fixed number of Marks per month. Wealthier
members of society could afford to make such contributions more easily than
poorer ones.
The proportionately large percentage of upper middle-class sponsors and the
nearly negligible proportion from the working-class, had a tendency to
confer old-fashioned respectability of the traditional elites to the newly
proclaimed elite of the SS in the popular mind. In 1931, old-line
aristocrats, who in the calculations of most sociologists no longer deserved
even a separate category for purposes of structural analysis, occupied some
10 percent of the regional administrative posts in the SS. In addition to
aristocrats and retired army officers, the SS was especially successful in
attracting large numbers of young landowners, industrialists, professors and
lawyers, the latter two being particularly prominent in Heydrich's SD.
Using the potent appeals of social and economic elitism, biological
racialism, police and espionage functions, Himmler was able to attract a
solid phalanx of professionals, technicians, experts, militarists,
aggressive ideologists, and rationalistic bureaucrats, to whom
organizational success and achievement as such mattered a great deal. Old
fashioned morality and ethical standards, for most of them, seemed to be
clearly overshadowed by overweening ambition to make careers for themselves
and create pockets of personal power within the larger context of the SS and
Hitler's approaching regime.
By January 1933 the SS with its 52,000 members was in a position to play a
decisive role in the process of seizing power and encompassing a disoriented
society. The HJ, with a membership twice that size, played an equally
important role in "synchronizing" the youthful masses. In the course of this
disruptive and murderous campaign both SS and HJ moved away from the SA,
still dominant on the streets. |