One motive for its creation was the disbanding of the paramilitary “citizen’s militias in June 1921 and, a month later, the dissolution of the Oberland Free Corps, just home from Upper Silesia. Many members of these organizations, who at one blow found themselves deprived of the comradeship and glamour of the soldier’s life and felt that life had lost its meaning, joined up with the adventure-hungry juveniles who had already become members of the NSDAP. Almost all of the SA members came from the numerically strong petty bourgeoisie that had long been prevented from rising socially and had attained to positions of some leadership only during the war, because of the heavy casualties in the officers’ corps. Robust and eager for action, they had expected glorious careers in the postwar period. The terms of the Versailles Treaty, quite aside from all national humiliations, had thrown them back socially. They had ended up teaching in grammar schools, standing behind store counters, at the grilled windows in government offices. Such lives seemed to them narrow, wretched, and utterly unworthy of them. The same impulse to evade normality that had led Hitler to politics now brought them to Hitler.
Hitler himself regarded these recruits, so like him in type, as ideal material for his militant advance guard. In thinking out the tactics of achieving power, he included in his reckoning the resentments, the energy, and the incipient violence of these men. It was one of his psychological adages that uniformed men showing intent of violence had an attractive as well as an intimidating effect. Terrorism could exert a special magnetism. “Cruelty impresses” was the way he once phrased this insight. “People need a good scare. They want to be afraid of something. They want someone to make them afraid, someone to whom they can submit with a shudder. Haven’t you noticed, after a brawl at a meeting, that the ones who get beaten up are the first to apply for membership in the party? What is this rot you talk about violence and how shocked you are about torture? The masses want that. They need something to dread.”25 With growing assurance, then, Hitler made brute force figure in the party’s image. It brought in members who would perhaps not be fetched by propaganda and the appeal of ceremony.
Hitler may have had this principle in mind when he instigated the so-called Battle in the Hofbrauhaus of November 4, 1921, in which the “myth of the SA” was created. Sizable Social Democratic heckler squads had turned up at an NSDAP demonstration. Hitler later said there were as many as 700 to 800 of the enemy. It happened that the party business office was moving on this day, so that only fifty of the SA men were present at the meeting. Hitler himself has described how he whipped up the nervous little unit by a passionate address. Today was the day of decision, he declared; they must not leave the hall unless they were carried out dead. He would personally strip cowards of their armbands and badges; the best defense was a good attack. In Hitler’s own description:
The answer was a threefold
Then I went into the hall and surveyed the situation with my own eyes. They were sitting in there, tight- packed, and tried to stab me with their very eyes. Innumerable faces were turned toward me with sullen hatred, while again others, with mocking grimaces, let out cries capable of no two interpretations. Today they would “make an end of us,” we should look out for our guts….
In spite of the disruptive forces, however, Hitler managed to talk for an hour and a half and had begun to think he was master of the situation, when suddenly a man jumped up on a chair and shouted the Social Democratic slogan:
In a few seconds the whole hall was filled with a roaring, screaming crowd, over which, like howitzer shells, flew innumerable beer mugs, and in between the cracking of chair legs, the crashing of the mugs, bawling, howling and screaming.
It was an idiotic spectacle….
The fracas had not yet begun when my storm troopers—for so they were called from this day on— attacked. Like wolves they flung themselves in packs of eight or ten again and again on their enemies, and little by little actually began to thrash them out of the hall. After only five minutes I saw hardly a one of them who was not covered with blood…. Then suddenly two shots were fired from the hall entrance toward the platform, and wild shooting started. Your heart almost rejoiced at such a revival of old war experiences….
About twenty-five minutes had passed; the hall looked almost as if a shell had struck it. Many of my supporters were being bandaged; others had to be driven away, but we had remained masters of the situation. Hermann Esser, who had assumed the chair this evening, declared:
In fact, from that day on Hitler had the floor in Munich in a much broader sense. According to his own statement, the streets henceforth belonged to the NSDAP, and with the beginning of the following year the SA carried its successes deeper and deeper into the rest of Bavaria. On weekends it undertook propaganda drives through the countryside. It organized noisy marches, at first marked only by the armband, then in gray windbreakers, carrying knobby walking sticks, parading through villages and booming out the SA’s special songs. According to one of Hitler’s early followers, they deliberately made themselves look “as savage and martial as possible.” They pasted slogans on the walls of houses and factories, brawled with their opponents, tore down black, red, and gold flags, or organized commando strikes against black marketeers or capitalist profiteers. Their songs and slogans had a bloodthirsty ring. At a meeting in the Biirgerbrau they passed around a collection box marked: “Donate for the massacres of Jews.” As so-called peacemakers, they broke up meetings or concerts that displeased them. “We’re brawling our way to greatness,” was the SA’s whimsical slogan. And it became apparent that the unspeakably rowdy conduct of the storm troopers was no hindrance to the growth of the party—just as Hitler had thought. Violence did not undercut the attractiveness of the movement even among the solid, honest petty bourgeoisie. The breakdown of standards caused by war and revolution is not the only explanation for this phenomenon. Hitler’s party could also count on a certain characteristically Bavarian coarseness; it became the political embodiment of that coarseness. The meeting-hall battles with their flailing chair legs and whirling beer mugs, the “massacres,” the murderous songs, the large-scale brawls—it was all a
The generation of soldiers who had fought in the war and had formed the initial core of the SA was soon followed by younger groups. The combination of promised violence, elitist association of men, and conspiratorial ideology always exerted a strong allure. “There are two things that can unite men,” Hitler declared in a public speech at this time: “common ideals, common scoundrelism.”27 The SA offered both, inextricably entwined. In the course of 1922 the SA, organized in groups of 100 men, grew by such leaps and bounds that by autumn the eleventh group, consisting entirely of students, was set up under the leadership of Rudolf Hess. That same year a group from the former Rossbach Free Corps, under Lieutenant Edmund Heines, joined the SA as a separate unit. With all these special formations, the storm troop took on an increasingly military aspect. Rossbach himself set up a bicyclists’ section. There was an intelligence unit, a motorized squad, an artillery section, and a cavalry corps.
Except for a generalized nationalistic belligerence, the SA did not develop any distinctive ideology (contrary to what many participants have said in their reminiscences). When it paraded through the streets under waving banners, it was certainly not marching toward a new social order. It had no utopian ideas, merely an enormous restiveness; no goal but dynamic energy, which often ran out of control. Strictly speaking, most of those who joined its columns were not even political soldiers. Rather, their temper was that of mercenaries, and the high- sounding political phrases were only a cloak for their nihilism, their restlessness, and their craving for something to which they could subordinate themselves. Their ideology was action at all costs. In keeping with the spirit of male comradeship and homosexuality that permeated the SA, the average storm trooper gave his allegiance not to a program, but to an individual, “a leader personality.” Hitler, in fact, wanted it so. In a proclamation he had stipulated: “Let only those apply who wish to be obedient to the leaders and are prepared, if need be, to meet death.”
Nevertheless, this indifference toward ideology made the SA into a hard conspiratorial core free from any
