Stormtroopers and Crisis in the Nazi Movement

Activism, Ideology and Dissolution

Thomas D. Grant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134645015
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Containing illustrations from archival material, this book scrutinizes two sets of hitherto understudied records:

* SA morale reports in the US National Archive which show what Nazi leaders themselves knew about their radical paramilitary wing
* police reports on the stormtroopers, from the former DDR state archive in Potsdam which show what Republican authorities knew.

Stormtroopers and Crisis in the Nazi Movement casts fresh light on the crisis that beset Nazism during the final months of Germany's first republic.

1 The landscape

Parties, paramilitaries, and the pitfalls of Weimar politics

The landscape of public life under the first German Republic was complex, violent, and changeable. A seeming incapacity of the polity to organize itself into broad-based political organizations produced a surfeit of parties, reflecting fine gradations of the political spectrum and too narrowly constituted to oversee any of the coalition-building and compromise which, in a typical two- or three-party system, simplifies the work of the legislature. As Ralf Dahrendorf has noted, virtually every division in German society was projected onto the floor of the Reichstag by a system unable to reach preliminary compromises within party structures.¹ The resultant disagreements could bring parliamentary process to a standstill. They were sometimes carried over into the streets. Political terror was consequently a recurrent feature of public life in the Republic, with particularly severe spasms seizing the country in the first five years after World War I and again during the economic depression prior to the Machtergreifung. Though some of the violence might have been the work of individual radicals, it was in large part institutionalized. The rise and persistence of paramilitary formations, some affiliated with political parties and others independent, was one of the most serious problems to vex the Republic.

Constituents in their allegiance to parties and paramilitaries were mercurial. The great diversity of political organizations may have been to blame for the constant splintering and migration of constituents. If not pleased with their affiliation, people could — and often did — transfer allegiance to a competing movement. There were plenty to choose from. Or it may have been the fugacious tendency of the German polity that sustained such a multifarious political system in the first place. Whether the multiplicity of potential affiliations produced constituents ready to change allegiance or vice versa, the result was a nearly unmanageable political system and a persistent popular frustration with public life.

It was as part of this landscape that the Hitler movement competed for support.

The parties and the struggle for allegiance

From the initial reorganization of party politics in 1918 to the end of the Republic in 1933, various parties confronted the challenge of Germany's fluid political situation. Especially at the extremes of the spectrum, the experience of a number of these is instructive when considering the condition of National Socialism in the final months of its drive to seize control of the State.

German Democrats, German Nationalists, and the fractious polity of the new Republic

A signal failure of the Weimar political system was its inability to sustain a viable centrist party. A reshuffling of constituencies after World War I produced both the German Democrats and the German Nationalists, but aspirations of the former to constitute a solid middle would quickly be frustrated. The latter would have a momentary success in assembling diverse forces of the right, but fractious tendencies similar to those crippling the Democrats would limit the Nationalists' coalition-building as well. The experiences of these two parties begin to illustrate how difficult it was to hold together any but the narrowest constituency.

It is axiomatic that millions of Germans failed to make the mental transition from subjects of an empire to citizens of a republic. November 1918 and its immediate aftermath was a period of acute political disorientation, as familiar signposts of public life disappeared and economic crisis descended on the country. Military triumph, promised for over four years and in fact largely achieved in the East, seemed to turn almost instantaneously into defeat. The old order gave way to a political vacuum. No “new order” emerged in Germany after the war, but instead a period of indirection exacerbated by the material and psychological shocks of the Versailles settlement and hyperinflation. The constituent forces of German society, to be sure, were more familiar with parliamentary democracy than those of Russia or Turkey — other great empires to disappear at the end of World War I. The Reichstag had functioned for decades in the Wilhelmian empire and had accumu-lated substantial authority. A highly developed party system was also in place. The Imperial government, though perhaps high-handed and arbitrary by the standards of France, Britain, or the United States, belonged to a class substantially more representative than the true autocracies that endured elsewhere into the early twentieth century. The German parliament was nonetheless circumscribed by a militarized aristocracy and the alliance that that aristocracy forged with heavy industry. Moreover, largely under the direction of General Erich Ludendorff, a virtual military dictatorship had displaced many parliamentary competences from the middle of the war onwards. The sudden advent in 1918 of fully representative government was a shock in itself for which the polity was ill prepared. Military collapse, anticipated by few, made the crisis a double catastrophe. Not only had the old political order suddenly given way to a democratic republic, but also the most vaunted institution of the Second Reich — the armed forces — had been dealt a mortal blow.

In the unusual climate following military defeat and the birth of the Republic, many individuals felt displaced from their accustomed political categories and therefore began to search for new niches. Some eventually with varying enthusiasm aligned themselves with new political parties.

Choosing new parties was in fact a necessity for a large segment of the public. With barely two exceptions, the parties that had dominated the imperial Reichstag did not survive the war. The only parties to enter the republican period more or less intact were the Social Democratic Party and Catholic Center. The SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) profited from a concisely defined social base, the organized proletariat, and from its immediate prewar electoral success. The 1912 Reichstag election had awarded the SPD a pronounced plurality in the parliament — much to the alarm and dismay of its conservative foes. The Center Party, like the SPD, benefited from an explicitly defined and faithful block of constituents, in its case, Germany's Catholics. The Catholics retained a strong sense of confessional community that Bismarck's campaign against Catholicism, the Kulturkampf, had imbued in the 1870s. Thus the only two parties that largely retained their prewar forms shared two traits: a positive identity deriving from unambiguously defined constituencies (organized labor and Catholics) and a negative identity deriving from clear-cut external opposition (the Socialists from conservatives and business management, the Catholics from the Protestant majority and the Bismarckian state).²

On parts of the political spectrum where constituencies were not so clearly defined, political organization all but collapsed and new parties arose in attempts to fill the void. Semi-skilled and unskilled workers had only recently joined the Social Democratic camp, and many of them lacked attachment to the SPD. This poorly integrated part of the SPD constituency became increasingly displeased with SPD leaders' willingness to negotiate and cooperate with conservatives. SPD chairman Friedrich Ebert reached a deal in autumn 1918 with the Reichswehr commander, General Groener, and the so-called Ebert-Groener Pact epitomized SPD willingness to come to terms with right-wing counterparts. The Pact impelled the flight of many workers into a new, radicalized proletarian party — the USPD (Unabhängige Sozial Demokratische Partei Deutschlands).³ Organized and led by the arch-radicals Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht, the Independent Social Democrats provided the basis for the KPD (Kommunistiche Partei Deutschlands), the Communist Party of Germany. The KPD, as the party of the extreme left, was founded late in December 1918 and soon became one of the most noticeable new fixtures on the German political scene.⁴

The reshuffling which gave rise to a new extreme left party occurred across the political spectrum, but it was most pronounced amidst the middle and the right. Social splintering made it difficult for the German middle class to organize itself as effectively as the unionized laboring class.⁵ One effort to organize the middle class into an effective political block resulted in the foundation of the German Democratic Party, the DDP (Deutsche Demokratische Partei). The DDP leader, Friedrich Naumann, had long envisioned a middle class, liberal party that might form a working coalition with the SPD. His 1906 work Die Erneuerung der Liberalismus: Ein politischer Weckrufwas an early attempt to clarify his goal. Naumann's efforts toward “the renewal of liberalism” culminated at the close of World War I, when, together with members of the nearly defunct Progressive Party and some National Liberals, Naumann established the DDP. The objective of Naumann and his fellow Democrats was “the consolidation of the German bourgeoisie in a highly organized, class-conscious liberal party capable of collaborating with the Social Democrats on the basis of complete parity.” Toward this end, the DDP launched campaign appeals to win working class votes and conducted negotiations to cement alliances with the SPD. Efforts to link the DDP to the proletariat, however, confused the party program, alienated much of the middle class, and in the end defeated Naumann's principal purpose of establishing bourgeois unity.⁶

The establishment in early 1919 of a new middle class party, in competition with but to the right of the DDP, highlighted the German Democrats' weakness and the fractious nature of the political middle. Gustav Stresemann, a young and dynamic politician, had led the National Liberal party through the end of World War I. Stresemann, along with other National Liberals during the war, endorsed extensive territorial annexations, and, also like many Liberals, he remained loyal to the monarchy even after its demise in November 1918. Some members of the new DDP came from the National Liberal party, but many of these were suspicious from the start about Friedrich Naumann's efforts to cooperate with the proletarian left. Stresemann was among the former National Liberals who looked warily upon left-wing alliances. Many middle class Germans agreed with Stresemann, and they became staunchly opposed to trafficking with the SPD after the abortive but bloody communist uprisings of autumn 1918 and winter 1918–1919. In early 1919, Stresemann led a break from Naumann and the fledgling DDP. With a following of many of the more conservative middle class constituents, Stresemann established the German People's Party, the DVP (Deutsche Volkspartei).⁷ According to Larry Eugene Jones, the break between the DVP and DDP “severely frustrated the legitimation of Germany's new republican order.”⁸

The breakaway of the DVP from the DDP was not the full extent of the fracturing of the German middle. Before long, Stresemann faced a split within the ranks of his own party, as the DVP developed into two mutually antagonistic camps. The first several years of the Republic brought many prominent industrialists to the DVP, so many, in fact, that the party became associated with the notion that “what is good for industry is good for the nation.”⁹ Stresemann feared that his hopes of making the DVP “the centre of a vital and realistic liberalism” would be unattainable if the right wing of the organization became too strong.¹⁰ Though a significant block within the party endorsed Stresemann's decision in 1923 to enter a coalition that included the SPD, the right wing did not.

If his cooperation with the SPD convinced DVP industrialists such as Stinnes, Vögler, and Kalle that Stresemann lay too far to the left, Stresemann's diplomatic victory at Locarno in 1925 alienated many other rightists.¹¹ At Locarno, Stresemann (as foreign minister) promised to respect as final the western frontiers demarcated at Versailles. In return, he obtained from France an implicit recognition of Germany's interest in redrawing the frontier with Poland. The right wing of the DVP failed to recognize Locarno as the diplomatic victory that it was,¹² and accused Stresemann of renouncing his own nationalist convictions.¹³ Stresemann's pragmatic compromises alienated those who wished to ally the DVP with the right-most elements in parlia-ment, and his efforts to reconcile right-wing DVPers with his policies doubtless fatigued Stresemann. The struggle between the DVP factions, in conjunction with a grueling intra-party disagreement over whether to support the Müller cabinet, may have contributed to Stresemann's premature death in October 1929. The hotly contested Young Plan, which moderated the reparation payments schedule, contributed furthe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge studies in modern European history
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The landscape : parties, paramilitaries, and the pitfalls of Weimar politics
• 2 July 31, 1932: apogee?
• 3 Political warfare and cigarettes
• 4 The price of ideology
• 5 Disintegration or victory: Nazism in the final months of the Republic
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index