Hitler’s curious double life, as spy against the Party and its most active member, had not made trouble for him with his army employers. On the contrary, the army and the Freikorps units which now, in uneasy alliance, controlled Bavaria, saw Hitler as a valuable ally. The man who had created the intelligence department into which Hitler had been recruited joined the German Workers’ Party as member No. 623. This man, Ernst Rohm—a thickset ex-General Staff officer with a scarred face and coarse manners—was a captain in the Reichsheer who acted as political adviser to the local Freikorps commander. Captain Rohm described himself as immature and wicked and made no secret of his homosexual activities. But Rohm had proved a fearless soldier in the war and afterwards had been entrusted with the task of organizing secret arms dumps all over Bavaria. Rohm was impressed by Hitler’s activities and speeches and became close friends with him, one of the few who used the familiar “du” form of address. Rohm was able to supply Hitler with both finance and guns. No less important were the recruits he sent—tough ex-army men who were not afraid of physical violence.
This supply of ex-soldiers increased when the Berlin government decided to reduce the power of the paramilitary forces. In June 1921 the citizens’ militia was disbanded, followed by the Oberland Freikorps in July. Rohm selected a squad of men from No. 19 Trench Mortar Company to provide physical protection for Hitler and then began to organize other such recruits into a proper formation. More men came from No. 2 Naval Brigade—the Ehrhardt Brigade—after the unsuccessful coup led by Dr. Wolfgang Kapp. Until now the exsoldiers attached to the Nazi Party had been referred to as the “Sports Division,” or SA, but soon, without changing its initials, the SA was renamed the Sturmabteilung (Storm Battalion).
The Communists had always outmatched the parties of the right and center. The middle-class liking for exclusivity made the latter accept into their party only people they liked. The Communists recruited from all classes of society and energetically sought new members; they organized a flag-waving uniformed body of men who chanted slogans, marched in step, and didn’t shun street violence. Hitler learned both lessons. Responsible for recruitment, he opened the Nazi Party to all comers, and now he had a uniformed body of fighting men as formidable as the Communists.
But Hitler v/as disturbed to find that his SA men were not entirely his own. They were often unavailable to him because of maneuvers or drill parades. When Hitler went along to such events, he was received politely but not permitted to control the men. He was, in fact, being used by these men. Now that the Freikorps was being disbanded on orders from the Berlin government, whole formations were joining the SA intact. Rohm made sure that the military structure was preserved; there were motorized units, cavalry units, and even an artillery section. The SA was little more than the banned Freikorps under a new name. Its uniforms, its swastika badges, its rank system, and the raised-hand salutes could all have been found in the various Freikorps formations.
Senior officers of the Reichswehr watched this transformation with mixed feelings. Many saw it as a chance to build a secret reserve for the tiny 100,000-man force that the peace treaty permitted. Even its strongest opponents admitted that the SA—under whatever name its men marched—had by now become an essential part of the border defenses of Pomerania, Silesia, and East Prussia, where Polish forces were a constant threat. SA men themselves felt close to the army, in which many of them had served, and some had only joined the SA as a way of getting into the army. The tiny German Army was selective and turned away many applicants. Now it was being said that the SA would be incorporated into the German Army, as some of the Freikorps units had been.
In March 1923, aware of Hitler’s misgivings about the SA, his friend Rohm provided him with a small bodyguard of SA men distinctively dressed in gray with black ski caps. They were called the Stabswache (HQ Guard). Hitler’s relationship with the SA continued to be uncertain. It remained quite separate from the rest of the Party (the political organization) and refused to take orders from Party officials. Rohm’s attitude was expressed in a memo he sent to Hitler: “Party politics will not be tolerated... in the SA.” Only a couple of months after getting his Stabswache, Hitler quarreled with his SA and lost it again.
Now Hitler formed his own bodyguard of carefully selected men. Stosstrupp Adolf Hitler—as its name implies—was to be unequivocally loyal to Hitler. It was the beginning of the SS (Schutzstaffel, or Guard Detachment). Far from being apolitical, its members were to be indoctrinated with the Nazi creed to the extent of eventually policing, by means of the Gestapo and SD (Geheime Staatspolizei, or Secret State Police, and Sicherheits Dienst, or security service) the whole Nazi empire.
Meanwhile Hitler had no choice but to make concessions to the ever more powerful, ever more boisterous, and ever more independent SA. A consignment of shirts, intended originally for German soldiers in East Africa in the First World War, became available to the SA in Austria in 1924 and provided its members with a Nazi uniform that earned them the name “brownshirts,” but it did not make them any more compliant to Hitler’s wishes. And yet Hitler passionately believed that the power of Marxism came from its combination of ideology with violence, and his brownshirts gave him a way to counter Communist power in the streets.
Rohm and Eckart provided Hitler with the keys to power. Hitler himself added energy, intuition, a contempt for the public, and a fluent willingness to tell lies. As he himself was to say, “The receptive capability of the masses is limited, their understanding small. On the other hand they have a great power of forgetting.” Or simply, “When you lie tell big lies... in the primitive simplicity of their minds they fall victims to the big lie more readily than to the small lie.”
Austrians are not, and probably never were, the gemiitlich, tolerant folk portrayed in song and story. The crude, embittered creed of Nazi prejudice found acceptance among the Austrians and their Bavarian neighbors in a way that it never did in northern Germany.
In Austria and Bavaria there were many who still treasured dreams of a Catholic monarchy. Hitler, a Catholic according to his application to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, hated the Habsburg monarchy. He certainly never wanted them back in power, but he readily used the prejudice and fears of both Catholics and monarchists. He discovered the political advantages of being anti-Protestant, anti-Jewish, anti-Communist, and above all anti-Berlin, for Berlin was historically regarded as the seat of Protestant-dominated Prussian central government. Hitler obliged his sympathizers by tailoring a creed to “prove” that all the voters’ past troubles were caused by Berlin’s incompetent Prussian generals and Jews paid by Moscow gold.
And even the word “Jew” was used by the Nazis as a catchall word to describe foreign immigrants, especially Russians and Poles, who fled to Germany after the First World War. The Nazi tirades against
Jews were designed to foment the fears of the xenophobes; the promises to build a strong Germany and defy the Versailles Treaty powers were intended to allay those fears.
Nazi slogans such as “Germany Awake” and other trappings were all primarily nationalistic. To the “Aryan” swastika of the Freikorps were added the imperial colors of old Germany (red, white, and black). Another imperial relic adopted by Hitler was General Erich Ludendorff, probably the greatest general of the First World War. Senile by 1923, when he announced his alliance with the Nazis, Ludendorff was devoting much of his time to “proving” that the First World War was part of a conspiracy that international Freemasonry, Jews, and the Pope had arranged. However, the old man’s illustrious reputation was useful to the Nazis, and, when in November 1923, with Germany in a nightmare of inflation. Hitler made a crazy attempt to gain power at pistol point, the old general gladly led the march through Munich.3
Hitler thought that Ludendorff’s presence would ensure for him the support of the army. It was a grave misjudgment; the German Army was controlled by General von Seeckt, who had modeled it to his own ideas. “Where does the army stand?” he had been asked by Ebert. “The army, Mr. President, stands behind me,” Seeckt had answered arrogantly. Far from helping the Nazis, Seeckt offered the Munich authorities his help in crushing the revolt.
A cordon of police opened fire when the marchers tried to break through. Fourteen demonstrators died and so did three policemen. Most of the 9,000 marchers fled. Hitler escaped from the scene and was not arrested until two days later, when he was found some 35 miles away. Only Ludendorff faced the police rifles without flinching. He was arrested and stood trial with nine Nazi leaders. Hermann Goring, however, escaped to Austria.
It was Ludendorff’s participation that gained worldwide publicity for the trial. Hitler used this chance to make political speeches, which were widely published in newspapers that had never before mentioned Hitler’s name. One witness said that Hitler was “tactless, limited, boring, sometimes brutal, sometimes sentimental, and unquestionably inferior.” But the prosecutor said that Hitler was “highly gifted,” with an impeccable private life, that he was hardworking and dedicated.
He was “a soldier who did his duty to the utmost and could not be accused of using his position for self-interest.” With a prosecutor like that, a defense lawyer was hardly needed. Hitler’s prison stay was short and his conditions in prison most comfortable. He was regularly visited by friends and supporters and used some of his time to dictate a book—Mein Kampf—to his faithful friend and helper Rudolf Hess.
Mein Kampf (My Struggle) showed that Hitler’s ideas had already moved from national politics to world conquest. It is a curious and prejudiced ragbag of ideas. It devotes ten pages to syphilis and goes rambling on through art, history, and film without organizing the material to any conclusion. The book is dominated by vague antiJewish generalizations about Aryan man, mixed blood, and German heritage. Economic realities are avoided.
Hitler’s prison experience brought about a change in his ambitions. No longer were they centered on Bavaria; his eyes were now on Berlin. He changed his tactics too. He abandoned ideas of violent revolution; the police and the army were too strong to oppose. From now on. Hitler’s policy was largely decided by the attitude of the army. He was pleased, he said, that the police and not the army had fired at his marchers. It left open the prospect of an alliance with the army.
However, his chances of power, in any context, seemed slim when he came out of prison. The inflationary spiral, which had finally required armfuls of paper money to pay for a tram ticket, had ended with a drastic currency reform. The new paper money was just as worthless as the old, but the change provided an opportunity for people to believe in paper money once more. From that time on there was a new, optimistic mood in Germany. Britain and France were more conciliatory and the burden of war reparations renegotiated. There was investment from the USA. Economic stability began to provide more jobs for the unemployed, and by the end of 1924 radical and nationalist political movements were in decline.
Since Hitler’s trial the Nazi Party had been put under severe restrictions of assembly and publishing. The SA was banned. But Rohm collected together his old brownshirts under the name of the Frontbann and began recruiting outside Bavaria for the first time. While Hitler was in prison, Rohm’s force grew from the previous 2,000 to 30,000 men. By the time Hitler was paroled, Rohm was demanding rnore independence than ever before. The sudden growth of the brownshirts under Rohm gave him a new importance and threatened to overshadow Hitler and his political organization. On 30 April 1925 Hitler said goodbye to Rohm and his brownshirts. A press statement announced that the Nazis had no intention of setting up another such organization and would simply have a few men to keep order at meetings, as they had done before 1923. The “few men” were more or less the same ones as had made up Hitler’s Stosstrupp, but now they wore the brown shirts, with black tie, and were to be called the Schutzstaffel (Security Squadron or SS). There were to be similar SS squadrons of ten men in other important towns. Only when Hitler had this tiny elite force organized throughout Germany did he resume connections with the brownshirts.
For the Nazis and the SA formations, the latter part of the 1920s marked a change in planning and method. No longer were they a provincial movement centered in Munich. More and more attention was given to northern Germany, particularly to Berlin, where the government and army high commanders were.
World History
