of their provisions. If we fight against them with every means at our disposal, we will be on the way of the Revolution.
This reply, which turned the concept of revolution against the outside world, concealed his plans for domestic policy. When the presiding judge asked whether the revolution directed against the outside world would also make use of illegal methods, Hitler was remarkably frank: “All methods, including those that from the world’s viewpoint are illegal.” Asked about his many threats against so-called traitors at home, Hitler responded:
I stand here under oath to God Almighty. I tell you that if I come to power legally, in my legal government I will set up state tribunals which will be empowered to pass sentences by law on those responsible for the misfortunes of our nation. Possibly, then, quite a few heads will roll legally.10
The applause from the gallery indicated the mood in the courtroom. The counterarguments of the Ministry of the Interior, which came forth with ample proofs of the Nazi party’s anti-Constitutional activities, were disregarded. With perfect calm the court heard Hitler’s subsequent statement that he felt bound by the Constitution only during the struggle for power; as soon as he possessed constitutional powers he would eliminate or at any rate replace the Constitution. In fact, according to the tenets of the time, this was not so brazen as it seems. The Constitution could be legally abrogated. One of the people’s rights was to give up its sovereignty. This was a door through which Hitler could advance unhindered, paralyze all resistance, seize the government and subject the state to his will.
But there was more behind Hitler’s pledges of loyalty to the Constitution, more than his frank admission that he was forgoing violence only until he could cloak it with legality. Throughout this period Hitler injected into his professions of legalism a note of disturbing ambiguity. Though he proclaimed that he stood “hard as granite on the ground of legality,” he was encouraging his followers to make reckless speeches in which violence appeared chiefly in images and frightening metaphors: “We come as enemies! Like the wolf breaking into the sheepfold, that is how we are coming.” Strictly speaking, only the party heads talked the language of legality. Further down, in the backyards of the Berlin Wedding District, a working-class area, in the nocturnal streets of Altona or Essen, murder, manslaughter, and contempt for the law prevailed. Evidence of such conduct was dismissed with a shrug as “excesses of local units.” Goebbels gave the game away. Speaking to Lieutenant Scheringer, one of the three young officers at the Leipzig trial (who were ultimately convicted), Goebbels said jokingly: “I regard this oath [of Hitler’s] as a brilliant move in the chess game. Now what can they possibly do to us? They were only waiting for the chance to strike. Now we’re strictly on the up and up.”
The very uncertainty about Hitler’s intentions, his continual veering between oaths of loyalty to the Constitution and threats against it, served his cause in many ways—which was precisely what he intended. The general public was reassured, but there was always that edge of uneasiness which produces deserters and renegades. As for those who guarded the doors to power, above all Hindenburg and the army, Hitler was on the one hand making an offer of alliance, on the other hand warning them that they had better meet him halfway. Finally, the ambiguity was directed to those among his followers who were still expecting a march on Berlin. To them he seemed to be winking the message that the Fuhrer would know how to trick every imaginable adversary. From all these angles, then, Hitler’s testimony under oath at Leipzig was enormously effective.
Viewed as a whole, however, Hitler’s tactics of leaving doors open on all sides reveal something more than clever calculation. They also reveal his character; for such tactics conformed to the deeply rooted indecisiveness of his nature. There are paradoxes here, for such tactics were also extremely risky; they required a keen sense of balance and therefore also satisfied his craving for risks. If he failed, there remained only a premature and all but hopeless attempt at a putsch, or withdrawal from politics.
The SA was a living example of the idea underlying Hitler’s tactics and illustrated the risks and difficulties inherent in them. For by Hitler’s complicated principle, the party’s brown-shirted army was to combine a formal respect for the law with the romanticism of insurgency. The men were supposed to abjure weapons but keep up the spirit of armed conflict. Pfeffer had been unable to slant things along these paradoxical lines. Early in 1931 Ernst Rohm took office as chief of staff of the SA, and immediately shifted the stress back toward the military model. The territory of the Reich was divided into five supergroups (
Pfeffer had issued a vast number of isolated orders that added up to a highly complicated system. Rohm now had these summed up in an SA service manual. As if under some mechanical compulsion, all his measures continually reverted to the old idea of an army for civil war. This time, unlike 1925, Hitler gave him the green light. One reason for this was Hitler’s greater confidence in his own authority; but more important, Rohm’s idea suited his deliberate policy of ambiguity. If we examine the reforms put through after the replacement of Pfeffer, we see all the traits of Hitlerian sham reforms. Instead of a decision made on basic principles, a few of the leading personalities were changed. Oaths of loyalty were taken, and a competing institution was created. For in view of his continuing difficulties with the SA, Hitler began cautiously to expand the SS, which, as a kind of elite and “inner party police,” had played a shadowy role and by 1929 numbered only 280 men, and to give it increasing independence of Rohm. Moreover, the whole thing was to end in a manner characteristically Hitler’s: the inevitable conflicts arising from contradictory tendencies would be resolved by a bloody and disproportionately violent coup.
Under Rohm the SA began its development into a mass army. Thanks to the new chief of staff’s outstanding organizational gifts, by the end of 1932 his army had swollen to more than half a million men. Attracted by the SA homes and the SA kitchens, vast numbers of the out-of-work poured into the brown-shirt formations. The bitterness of the unemployed combined with the hatreds of the adventurous activists into a high charge of aggressiveness.
One of Rohm’s first acts was to oust Pfeifer’s Frontbann officers and replace them with his own homosexual friends. Behind them, a sizable and notorious company moved in; word went around that Rohm was building a “private army within the private army.” Soon there were noisy protests. Hitler replied to these in a message that was to become famous. He rejected the reports on the morally culpable behavior of the supreme SA leadership “fundamentally and with all sharpness.” The SA, he declared, was “an association of men for a political purpose… not an ethical institution for the education of gentlewomen.” What counted was whether or not the individual did his duty. “The men’s private lives can be the object of examination only if they run contrary to essential principles of National Socialist ideology.”
This message constituted a charter for the lawless elements within the SA. In spite of all the pledges of legality, Hitler’s army was soon creating a wave of paralysis and terror which in turn increased the demand for a dictatorship. According to reports of the police, the arms stores of the SA contained all the classic weapons of criminals: blackjacks, brass knuckles and rubber truncheons. In tight situations, they had their “molls” carry the hand guns. Their jargon also had an underworld ring. In Munich a pistol was called a “lighter” and the rubber truncheon an “eraser.” The Berlin SA, in the manner of gangs, adopted nicknames that gave the lie to their allegedly revolutionary spirit. One SA “storm” in Wedding called itself the Robber Storm, while many troopers assumed various desperado names—Potshot Muller or Pistol Packer. The typical mixture of assertive proletarianism, love of violence, and threadbare ideology can be seen in the Berlin SA song, which ran:
