No one watches more closely over his revolution than the Fuhrer.
The tactics of legal revolution developed by Hitler made possible a relatively bloodless seizure of power, and avoided that deep rent in the body politic with which every nation emerges from a revolutionary period. But those same tactics had the drawback that the old leaders could infiltrate the revolution by adaptation and thus could contantly threaten the existence of the new regime, at least theoretically. Overrun and for the time being carried along, the former ruling class was by no means eliminated, by no means paralyzed. At the same time, the militant advance guard of the SA, who had fought for the movement and cleared the obstacles from the path to power, found themselves cheated of the wages of their wrath. Scornfully, and with some bitterness, the brown pretorians watched the way “reaction”—the capitalists, generals, Junkers, conservative politicians and others in the “cowardly bunch of philistines”—clambered onto the reviewing stands at the victory celebrations for the national revolution and sedulously moved their black tailcoats in among the brown uniforms. If everyone enrolled in the party, where would the revolutionaries find their enemies?
An old-fashioned, straightforward roughneck like Rohm could not help being furious at the way things were going. And he let his displeasure be known quite early, in repeated public statements. By May, 1933, he had thought it appropriate to issue an order warning the storm troopers against all the false friends and false celebrations, and reminding them of unfulfilled goals: “We have celebrated enough. I wish that from now on the SA and SS visibly withdraw from the endless succession of celebrations…. Your task is to complete the National Socialist Revolution and to bring about the National Socialist Reich. That still remains to be done.” Hitler, craftier than the clumsy Rohm, regarded the revolution as a pseudolegal process of undermining the established order. It operated by demagoguery, attrition, and deception; force was merely an auxiliary instrument handy for purposes of intimidation. Rohm, on the other hand, could not conceive of a revolution without an insurrectionary phase, a storming of the citadels of the former powers, culminating in the classical “night of the long knives.” Nothing of the kind had taken place, and Rohm was deeply disappointed.
After a short period of tactical uncertainty he tried to keep his storm troops out of the great national smelting process. He emphasized the need for a martial posture and hailed the special mentality of the SA: “It alone will win and preserve the victory of pure, unadulterated nationalism and socialism.” He warned his subleaders against taking posts and positions of honor in the new government. While his rivals Goring, Goebbels, Himmler, Ley, and countless followers of the third rank extended their influence by acquiring bastions of political power, Rohm tried to go the opposite way. By consistently building up his forces, which soon increased to between 3.5 million and 4 million men, he was preparing the way for the SA government, which one day would be superimposed right on top of the existing order, crushing it.
Under these circumstances the old antagonisms between the SA and the Political Organization inevitably flared once again. There was the natural resentment of militant revolutionaries against the thick-necked, middle- class egotists of the Political Organization, who were apt to win out in the petty skirmishes for sinecures and jobs. The rancor increased after Hitler demanded, with growing insistence, the end of revolutionary activities. As early as June, 1933, the government had begun breaking up the many unauthorized camps for protective custody set up by the SA. Soon afterward, the SA’s auxiliary police squads were disbanded. In vain, Rohm’s followers pointed to the sacrifices they had made, the battles they had endured; they felt that they had been passed over. They were the forgotten revolutionaries of the unconsummated revolution. More and more often word went out that the seizure of power was over, and the tasks of the SA had been fulfilled. Rohm sharply retorted to such pronouncements in June, 1933. Those who were now calling for abatement of revolutionary fervor, he declared, were betraying the revolution; the workers, peasants, and soldiers who were marching under the banners of his storm troops would finish their job without consideration for the “co-ordinated philistines and gripers.” He added, “Whether they like it or not, we shall continue our struggle. Along with them, if they at last grasp what is at stake! Without them, if they don’t want to grasp it. And against them, if so it must be.”
That was also the meaning of the slogan “The Second Revolution,” which henceforth began to circulate through the barracks and headquarters of the SA. This slogan implied that the seizure of power in the spring of 1933 had bogged down in a thousand wretched halfway measures and compromises, had been altogether betrayed and must be pushed on to the point of total revolution, to a taking possession of the entire state. Many have pointed to this as proof that there was indeed some kind of constructive social concept, no matter how sketchy, within the brown formations. But no such definable concept ever arose out of the fog of phrases about the “sacred socialist seeking-the-whole,” and no one attempted to describe how the SA state would be made up. This socialism never went beyond a crude, unconsidered soldier’s communism—even more radicalized in Rohm’s case by the cliquishness of homosexuals against a hostile world. The gist of it was that the SA state would be the kind of state that would solve the desperate social problem of so many unemployed storm troopers. There were also the cheated expectations of political adventurers who had masked their nihilism in the ideology of the Nazi movement and refused to understand why, now, after the victory had been won at last, they should bid adieu to excitement, fighting, and turmoil.
The very aimlessness of the SA’s revolutionary fervor had in the meantime aroused anxieties in much of the public. No one knew against whom Rohm was planning to turn the enormous force that he flaunted in a furious series of parades, inspections, and spectacular demonstrations throughout Germany. Ostentatiously he set about reviving the old military tendencies within the SA, but he also sought connections and suppliers of funds in industry. He set up a task force of his own, the SA field police, and was likewise beginning to build up the SA’s own judiciary. The latter set extremely severe penalties for unwarranted beatings, robbery, theft, or plundering by the SA; but it also ruled that “as retribution for the killing of an SA man the SA leader in charge of the case can require that up to twelve members of the enemy organization which prepared the murder may be condemned.” The language was just sufficiently ambiguous to suggest that “condemned” meant “executed.” At the same time, Rohm tried to secure a footing in the administration of the states, in academic and publishing fields, and in general to project the special claims of the SA everywhere. He was continually criticizing the regime, its foreign policy, its attacks on the unions, and its repression of freedom of opinion. He denounced Goebbels, Goring, Himmler, and Hess in the bitterest terms. As for his opinion of Hitler, he was personally outraged by the Fuhrer’s deviousness and would freely air his grievances when among friends:
Adolf is rotten. He’s betraying all of us. He only goes around with reactionaries. His old comrades aren’t good enough for him. So he brings in these East Prussian generals. They’re the ones he pals around with now…. Adolf knows perfectly well what I want. I’ve told him often enough. Not a second pot of the Kaiser’s army, made with the same old grounds. Are we a revolution or aren’t we?… Something new has to be brought in, understand? A new discipline. A new principle of organization. The generals are old fogies. They’ll never have a new idea….
But Adolf is and always will be a civilian, an “artist,” a dreamer. Just leave me be, he thinks. Right now all he wants to do is sit up in the mountains and play God. And guys like us have to cool our heels, when we’re burning for action…. The chance to do something really new and great, something that will turn the world upside down—it’s a chance in a lifetime. But Hitler keeps putting me off. He wants to let things drift. Keeps counting on a miracle. That’s Adolf for you. He wants to inherit a ready-made army all set to go. He wants to have it knocked together by “experts.” When I hear that word I blow my top. He’ll make it National Socialist later on, he says. But first he’s turning it over to the Prussian generals. Where the hell is revolutionary spirit to come from afterwards? From a bunch of old fogies who certainly aren’t going to win the new war? Don’t try to kid me, the whole lot of you. You’re letting the whole heart and soul of our movement go to pot.37
What Rohm most wanted was to absorb the numerically smaller Reichswehr into his brown mass army and thereby create a National Socialist militia. It seems that Hitler had no intention whatever of letting him do this. The disagreement on the purpose of the SA was old, and Hitler continued to hold that the brown formations should carry out a political, not a military function. They were to be an enormous “Hitler shock troop,” not the cadres of a revolutionary army. Outwardly, however, he faked indecisiveness, obviously hoping to hit upon some compromise between Rohm’s ambitions and the claims of the Reichswehr. Undoubtedly he shared with Rohm a profound
