The SA as Reality, the SA as Myth

The importance of the SA for the National Socialist movement in Germany, both in practical and in symbolic-ideological terms, is difficult to overstate. Founded in August 1921 as a street-fighting organization to protect Nazi meetings and speakers, the SA grew into a powerful mass movement that represented an uneasy combination of social-revolutionary and military-putschist aspirations. Conflict over the role of the SA—Hitler wanted it to remain a propaganda and marching unit aimed at “the conquest of the streets”—fueled an atmosphere of simmering crisis that occasionally broke into open rebellion, especially during the difficult series of election campaigns that paved the way for Hitler's accesion to power in January 1933.Footnote ³ The SA, both leaders and ranks, tended to disagree on principle with electoral campaigning, which from their perspective, defeated the purpose of SA activism in both its soldierly and revolutionary iterations.Footnote ⁴ These and other concerns fueled the dissension that underpinned the “Stennes” (1930-31) and “Stegmann” (1932-33) revolts associated with regional SA leaders, as well as countless smaller revolts in the period of transition from republic to dictatorship, including some estimated sixty in the three months prior to the blood purge of June 1934.Footnote ⁵

Contemporary interpretations of these revolts and the milieau out of which they sprang reveal a great deal about the internal logic of Weimar radicalism. In the analyses of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) as well as in those of its enemies—the Communist Party (KPD), Social Democratic Party (SPD), and a myriad of extremist splinter groups (many of the latter occupying an uneasy position at the crossroads of left and right)—we see a picture of the SA, sometimes as it was, but more often, as it was hoped or feared to be. To be sure, intelligence assessments of the SA—artifacts of the clandestine world of espionage and infiltration in which operatives of competing radicalisms watched, interacted with, and attempted to influence each other—represent one of our most important sources for understanding the nature of SA radicalism as it actually existed; yet just as significant is what intelligence assessments and propaganda initiatives aimed at the SA tell us about the preconceptions and aspirations of the SA's many “suitors.” Just as important as what was true about the SA was what was assumed to be true, and indeed, the two are interrelated; for, in attempting to channel the radicalism of the SA in expedient directions, Nazis, Communists, and young bündisch utopians played with a common stock of ideas and symbolic references that represented for them not the dead end of democracy's collapse and dictatorship's rise, but the open road of political possibility.

We must begin with the observation that, for contemporaries, the SA was understood as standing at the juncture of radical left and right, both in social and in ideological terms. This assessment was seen variously as a threat (by liberal and conservative commentators), as an opportunity (by the Communist Party), or as a combination of the two (above all by the NSDAP, which aspired to use the SA to destroy or subvert the radical left, but worried when SA men began to take subversive national-social-revolutionary ideas too much to heart). To be sure, in its official pronouncements and in antiterror initiatives such as the “strike the fascists wherever you find them” campaign that began in summer 1930, the KPD placed the SA unequivocally on the right, that is, on the side of fascism, a place which, in the party's Stalinized analysis, also included the “social fascist” SPD. But in the initiatives of the party's secret M-Apparat—a secret bureau charged with the task of internally disrupting the police, armed forces, and enemy political organizations—(which included infiltration and the printing of a fake SA “underground press” aimed at accentuating preexisting displeasure with Hitler) and in the prosyletizing campaigns launched by Communist mass organizations such as the Kampfbund gegen den Faschismus (KgdF) and the Rotfrontkämpferbund (RFB), the attitude toward the storm troopers was much more ambiguous. Similarly, radical youth clubs and National Socialist splinter groups—the Group of Social Revolutionary Nationalists around Karl O. Paetel, the d.j.1.11 of Eberhard Koebel (“Tusk”), the Revolutionary Freedom Movement of Wilhelm Kayser, the Black Front of Otto Strasser—saw the SA as a reservoir of untapped revolutionary potential, even as they rejected the NSDAP's electoral strategy or complained about the embourgeoisement of the party itself.

How did the SA achieve this special status, this revolutionary credibility that cut across the radical spectrum? To answer this question, we must first look at the role the SA played in the Nazi movement. Nazism's self-understanding was very much as a bulwark against the menace of bolshevism. As the spearhead of National Socialism's anticommunist offensive, the physical embodiment of the National Socialist “idea,” and instrument of propaganda both physical and ideological, the SA played a key role in mediating Nazism's relationship with communism. The entire mythology of the SA was constructed out of its battle in the streets with Communist opponents. Especially in “Red Berlin,” where Joseph Goebbels took over as Gauleiter in 1926, the struggle of the SA against the Red Front became a key component of Nazi propaganda and self-understanding.Footnote ⁶ Arguably more destructive for the working-class movement in Germany than physical assault was the SA's ability to penetrate the working classes, to take advantage of the breakdown of class allegiances and problems within the SPD and KPD to win over workers. From a social perspective, the SA represented National Socialism's bridge to the working masses and, in particular, to communism's target constituency, the industrial proletariat.Footnote ⁷

Most important of all was the storm troopers' symbolic function. It was the SA that was the vehicle for Hitler's attempt to steal the weapon of propaganda from the left and to take back the street physically and aesthetically as a site for propaganda. Here, it was the SA man himself who was the “decisive propaganda medium.”Footnote ⁸ As the formation in which the proletariat became integrated with the lower middle classes proletarianized by economic crisis, as well as with higher-class officers, the SA represented the coming together of militarized youth and the nation, becoming, in effect, the embodiment of the Nazi version of a “classless society.” Joseph Goebbels, in particular, was fond of portraying the SA as the collective embodiment of “young Germany.” He emphasized the proletarian makeup of the SA (particularly in Berlin) to draw the connection between class and nation, using the SA as a living, breathing symbol of the proletarian nation. The SA represented an “embodied National Socialism” (Ernst Röhm) that reproduced, in physical reality, concepts (in Gerhard Paul's words) such as “the Volksgemeinschaft, values such as selflessness, readiness for action and sacrifice, and [a] nationalist and socialist will.”Footnote ⁹

Such values were widely understood and overwhelmingly approved of by radicals in the Weimar Republic. In showing “socialist” (i.e., plebian) masses, young, manly masses, marching for the cause of the nation, the SA represented what everybody—the youngsters of the bündisch groups, the National Revolutionaries, and, on some level, the Communists—thought should be happening. For the KPD, obviously, the SA was a threat that had to be combated, but even here, there were strong differences of opinion about whether this would be better accomplished with carrot or stick, and about whether SA men were better seen as murdering thugs for finance capital or as admirably radical but “misled” proletarians hoodwinked into following the demagogue Hitler.Footnote ¹⁰

Tactical considerations aside, the key importance of the SA was recognized by all the revolutionary contenders of the Weimar Republic, which accounts for the heavy emphasis placed on the SA in attempts to blunt, subvert, or redirect Nazi radicalism. The SA was the site of National Socialism's most important “theft” from the revolutionary left. The National Socialists “stole the street,” wrote Ernst Bloch, “the pressure it exerts. The procession, the dangerous songs that had been sung.” The SA was central to Nazism's ability to, in Bloch's words, “[pretend] to be merely workers and nothing else.”Footnote ¹¹ The French anarchist Daniel Guérin, traveling in Germany in the early 1930s, made a similar observation. Of an old socialist song appropriated by the Nazis, he wrote:

The SA was, in effect, the site at which the “revolutionary charge” stolen from the left by National Socialism was stored.

Yet it was precisely this role of the SA that was potentially problematic for the Nazis. As a vehicle for recruitment of militant opponents, including Communists, the SA was expected to provide its recruits with sufficient preparation to wage ideological warfare, and where appropriate, to win people over. One of the aims of the Reich Leadership School (Reichsführerschule, or RFS) founded in summer 1931 was to provide the SA with a firm grounding in the National Socialist worldview.Footnote ¹³ Alongside lectures on practical (i.e., military) matters and attempts to inculcate military values of duty, comradeship, and honor, students heard lectures on topics such as “Volk and Race” and “German History from a Racial-Biological Standpoint.”Footnote ¹⁴ Another lecture, introduced into the curriculum toward the end of 1931, dealt with “Subversive Work of the Enemy and How to Defend Against It.”Footnote ¹⁵

The NSDAP made much of the presence of ex-Communists in the ranks of the SA and attempted, in much the same way as the KPD, to proselytize in the enemy's ranks.Footnote ¹⁶ Yet implicit in the SA's role as a bridge to the working masses was the dangerous potential that any tendency of Communists to switch sides might be matched by an opposite tendency on the part of SA men, and that proletarians (especially ex-Marxists) in Nazi ranks were prone to be susceptible to Marxism and therefore fundamentally suspect (the flip side of an essentialist view of the SA's social makeup that fueled Communist efforts to subvert the SA). This fear would come strongly to the fore after the seizure of power. The SA was thus a source not only of pride but also of worry for Nazi leaders. At times of particular stress in the movement, SA and party leaders were prone to warn of the danger that their charges might defect to the KPD. This was sometimes done for effect, as when Hitler tried to shock Bavarian authorities into supporting him by warning of potential defections from the SA to the Red Front.Footnote ¹⁷ Sometimes it really happened, especially in the crisis year of 1932, but the idea that the SA represented a sort of “brown bolshevism” with the potential to play into the hands of Moscow was more important as a potential—as a representation of hopes and fears—than an actual occurrence.Footnote ¹⁸

Nevertheless, confusion about just where Nazism ended and communism began was widespread. This uncertainty was evident in the response to a series of anonymous flyers that began appearing in Berlin, Leipzig, and other cities weeks prior to the Nazi victories in the Reichstag elections of September 14, 1930. “We are nationalists and socialists,” the authors of the first flyer proclaimed, “but we are above all revolutionaries. For that reason, the plan to take place in the government after the elections is treasonous.” Any kind of alliance with the bourgeois “parties of the goldsacks,” any kind of participation in the system, they continued, was a “betrayal of socialism,” a betrayal of the slogan, “the common good over the individual good!,” enshrined in the NSDAP's own program.Footnote ¹⁹ The liberal Frankfurter Zeitung observed, not without sarcasm, that although “the matter has a distinctly Communist flavor, the directness of the language and the undisguised hate that rings out of every line speaks for its authenticity.”Footnote ²⁰ Others were not so sure. Police authorities in Pomerania, where the flyers were also in circulation, attributed them to the rebel group around Walter Stennes and Otto Strasser.Footnote ²¹ The Nazi Party, in contrast, charged the flyers to the account of the KPD. A memorandum from the party in Berlin reproduced parts of the flyer to illustrate what it called “typical phrases” used by Communist propagandists, such as “the only thing that will help now is ruthless openness,” “is there a point to fighting the Marxist and bourgeois parties when in our own party,” and so on.Footnote ²²

Similar ambiguity reigned in the aftermath of the so-called “Stennes revolt” that took place just a few months later. Expelled from the party after months of rising tension—the Berlin SA had gone “on strike” against the party in the run-up to the elections, upset over issues of pay, outfitting, and insufficient respect for the SA's soldierly sacrifices from “civilian” party Bonzen (“big shots”), the deputy SA leader Stennes formed his own group, the Nationalsozialistische Kampfbewegung Deutschlands (NSKD). Stennes subsequently allied himself with the renegade Nazi Otto Strasser, who had quit the party two years earlier over Hitler's alleged failure to respect the “socialism” in National Socialism.Footnote ²³ Stennes's charge that the Nazi leadership was subverting the “revolutionary momentum of the SA” through its “bourgeois-liberal tendencies” evoked a strong initial resonance.Footnote ²⁴ Early success was quickly dissipated by a combination of Stennes's own ineptness and the strong response of the Nazi leadership.Footnote ²⁵ Yet the revolt unleashed an explosion of extravagent hopes and fears on the part of both the NSDAP and its enemies. The Niedersächsische Zeitung urged its readers to avoid any premature Schadenfreude at the expense of the Nazis, warning that the radical elements detached by the revolt were likely to find their way to an organization with even more dangerously radical credentials, the KPD.Footnote ²⁶ The Kölnische Zeitung similarly worried that by expelling the most radical elements in the SA, Hitler was rewarding the Communists with a large cadre of “largely untapped activist forces.”Footnote ²⁷

Stennes himself worried openly about the possibility of losing rank-and-file SA men to the KPD; a key item in the curriculum in the political training he instituted for his storm troopers was a section on the question “What distinguishes us from the KPD?”Footnote ²⁸ Stennes and his lieutenants worried in particular about the danger posed by the example of Richard Scheringer. An army officer convicted of treason in October 1930 for supporting the National Socialists, Scheringer shocked everyone a few months later by defecting to the KPD.Footnote ²⁹ A cause célèbre not only for the Communists, but also for those whose political aspirations seemed to lie in some sort of “third way” between Nazism and communism, Scheringer's first official act was to issue a series of Communist appeals to the storm troopers unhinged by the revolt.Footnote ³⁰ “It is not an exaggeration,” complained one of Stennes's lieutenants, “when people say that either something will be done, or our people will abandon us [and] go over to the enemy.” He went on to add that activists who might be expected to join the SA were joining the local Antifa [Anti-Fascist Action] instead: “The bearing of Lieutenant Scheringer . . . has made a powerful impact. Are these warning signs not enough for Munich?”Footnote ³¹

Grandiose expectations greeted the Stennes revolt in the Communist camp, with the Russian newspaper Pravda expressing the hope that the “proletarian elements” in the SA would now turn their backs on the Nazis and “march to the left.”Footnote ³² The KPD hailed the revolt as evidence that the long-predicted split in the Nazi movement was finally at hand.Footnote ³³ Hans Kippenberger, the head of the Communist M-Apparat, saw the revolt as evidence that the Nazi movement was finally coming apart under the strain of reconciling its contradictory elements.Footnote ³⁴ The divide was understood, first and foremost, as a class divide between a bourgeois-reactionary party organization and a proletarian-revolutionary paramilitary wing. This was, simultaneously, a divide between officers and ranks, a view that had a certain grounding in reality.Footnote ³⁵ Kippenberger's interpretation of the revolt as an “officer's mutiny” with only tenuous support among the rank and file was confirmed by police authorities in Berlin, who noted, for example, that “with the exception of its leaders,” the “most heavily proletarian Sturm” in Berlin had refused to join the revolt.Footnote ³⁶

Kippenberger's view was contradictory, however, for he simultaneously located the motive force of the revolt in the increasing unwillingness of proletarian storm troopers to be “misused” in the NSDAP's campaign for the defense of finance capital. Hitler was trying to rid his movement of these social-revolutionary elements, argued Kippenberger, to ingratiate himself with the bourgeois elites whose help he sought in the parliamentary struggle. Stennes's “objective role” in this context was thus to prevent the rebellious proletarians in the SA from following the example of Richard Scheringer, a deterministic interpretation no doubt reinforced by the way in which Stennes played up his socialism to the plebian SA rank and file.Footnote ³⁷

Yet, analysts such as Kippenberger generally failed to probe very deeply into the nature of SA “socialism.” The Stennes revolt was fought out less around any specific ideological positions than according to a series of antinomies—steadfastness versus dereliction, honor versus betrayal, comradeship versus treason—derived from the experience of the Great War, a war in which older storm troopers such as Stennes had fought and in which young recruits had been lore-steeped since boyhood. Adolf Hitler himself compared the rebellion to the “stab in the back” of 1918.Footnote ³⁸ The rebels denounced the party's failure to recognize the SA's sacrifice of “blood and lives” on behalf of the movement as a “betrayal” intimately linked to the “civilian” party leadership's failure to observe the laws of comradeship that were commonsense aspects of the soldier's creed.Footnote ³⁹ “Selfish” (eigennutzige) party leaders—a term lifted deliberately from point 24 of the party program, “The common interest before individual interest” (Gemeinnutz vor Eigennutz)—were accused of introducing “fratricidal warfare into the ranks of the party,” leaving the SA no choice but to continue the fight on its own. The rebellion was explicitly linked with key tenets of Nazism—the SA represented a “cumbersome conscience that reminded people of the betrayed party program and that demanded the fight for the old ideals of National Socialism”—but the “betrayed” party program really served a symbolic function: failure to honor its “socialist” provisions provided an opportunity to level charges of betrayal that carried a greater emotional charge than the provisions themselves.Footnote ⁴⁰

Yet socialism and soldierly virtue were, in the event, synonymous. A self-justificatory essay published by Stennes shortly after the revolt reprinted an open letter to Hitler from an “anonymous SA man”—probably Stennes himself—that sought to link the fight against the party with National Socialism's fight against bourgeois corruption (the use of the “anonymous SA man” simultaneously attempted to achieve “rank-and-file” credibility while calling up associations of “unknown soldierhood”). Formerly a revolutionary movement, the letter argued, the NSDAP now served, “like all the other parties[,] only as a crib for Bonzen.” The hallmark of the Bonze was, again, his inability to respect the laws of comradeship. “Every big shot,” the letter continued, “cares only for himself, and asks only ‘How can I suppress all the sincere fighters so that my position won't be endangered when the posts are distributed in the Third Reich?’” The ascendancy of Bonzentum in the party proceeded in parallel with the NSDAP's transformation from a movement to a bourgeois association, a change over which Hitler presided as “president of the NSDAP club” (belonging to a bourgeois leisure club was the ultimate insult for a revolutionary in the Weimar Republic).Footnote ⁴¹ Stennes's supporters in the Pomeranian SA took up a similar theme, accusing the NSDAP of leaving “the revolutionary course of true National Socialism” and becoming a reactionary “coalition party.”Footnote ⁴² In portraying the revolt as a struggle against “the system,” the rebellion transformed bureaucratizing tendencies in the NSDAP into a synonym for the system against which National Socialism struggled.

If there was little in all this of the socialism that the KPD and Otto Strasser (or, for that matter, worried conservative commentators) saw in the revolt, socialism was nevertheless key; it simply held a meaning that rendered it impervious to meddling by outside, “unsoldierly” elements. Socialism in the language of the SA was both a radical egalitarianism and a revolutionary intransigence that rejected compromise with the system; it was a synonym for soldierhood and self-sacrifice, where socialism equaled “comradeship”—a connection straight out of the postwar radical right's fantasy of a “trench community” or “socialism of the trenches.” Bonzentum, which represented both a rejection of egalitarianism and a betrayal of the party into alliances with reactionaries, as well as the primacy of “civilian” over “military,” of “female comfort” over “manly struggle,” was the opposite of socialism.

“[P]resent the Issues . . . as Primitively as Possible”: Communist Subversion in the SA

The primacy of emotive concepts in the ideological makeup of the SA did not stop the Communist Party from trying to shape and direct the radicalism of the storm troopers along the lines predicted by Marxist theory; on the contrary, work within and around the SA became a centerpiece of Communist subversive efforts in the final Weimar years.Footnote ⁴³ Communist attempts to infiltrate the radical right organizations—primarily the Stahlhelm veterans' organization—dated from the early 1920s.Footnote ⁴⁴ These efforts reached a new pitch beginning in 1930, focusing now on the rapidly growing Nazis. Appeals to working-class Nazis to abandon their leadership—a version of the “united front from below” strategy used against the SPD from the end of the 1920s—were a staple of the Communist press from 1930 on, as were reports of Zersetzung (“disintegration”) in Nazi ranks.Footnote ⁴⁵ A profusion of flyers and local newspapers attempted to exploit Nazi discontent in the wake of the Stennes revolt and to capitalize on the example of Richard Scheringer. Communist papers such as Der Rote Angriff, published in Berlin beginning in early 1931, attempted to unmask the demagogic claims of the Nazis while emphasizing shared cultural content that could ease the transition of Nazis to communism. On the cover of one issue, uniformed storm troopers, hard-jawed and masculine, looked warily but respectfully at a heavily muscled and determined worker, who called out to them, “Her zu Uns!” (“Here to us!”).Footnote ⁴⁶ Manliness, heroism, comradeship—the “virtues” of the trenches of the Great War—these, the cover illustration suggested, were the real connections between fighters of left and right.

Such propaganda sheets belonged to the surface strata of Communist efforts. Hans Kippenberger's secret M-Apparat went much deeper, sending spies into the SA and creating a fake SA underground press of so-called Zersetzungschriften.Footnote ⁴⁷ These “subversion sheets” mirrored the themes of the official Communist press, offered now, however, not by the KPD but by the “Nazis” themselves. A paper titled SA-Mann Erwache! (SA Man, Awake!) was distributed in Essen by known Communist activists. “The content,” noted the authorities, “is supposed to give the impression that [the flyer] had been put out not by the KPD but by the SA and SS themselves. . . . The text . . . is completely adapted and suited to cause disintegration in the SA and SS.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Nuggets of information for these papers—styled as the product of the “Revolutionary Opposition in the NSDAP”—were obtained by Communist agents wearing the brown uniform. Nazi leaders in Berlin warned in September 1930 of attempts of these agents to “systematically and skillfully undermine the NSDAP from the inside out.” Enemy operatives were, in particular, to express the view “that the party has become ‘reactionary and is no longer revolutionary,’” to defame Nazi leaders as “Bonzen” and “reactionaries,” and to make reference to the Communist press, especially the proclamation for the “national and social liberation of the working class [sic].”Footnote ⁴⁹ The SA leadership called attention a year later to the presence of KPD agents in the SA, giving numbers of agents by city and noting that the agents possessed official NSDAP documents, stamps, and other forgery materials.Footnote ⁵⁰

Reports from Communist operatives appeared in “NSDAP Weekly Reports” published by the KPD for internal use. The reports were aimed at assessing the effects of Communist propaganda and determining prospects for future work. Detailed inside information appeared in sections titled “From within the SA” and “Signs of Disintegration.” Using these reports, Communist propagandists could learn, for example, that in summer 1932, storm troopers of Sturms 44 and 45 in Berlin were openly talking among themselves of going over to the KPD: “the least we could do,” one storm trooper is quoted as saying to his comrades, “would be if we threw in our lot with the KPD and first cleaned house in Germany and solved the economic question—the rest can be discussed once everyone has work and bread again. Only the revolutionary KPD can help us in this.”Footnote ⁵¹

Zersetzungschriften such as Der Freiheitskämpfer (Frankfurt) and Die Sturmfahne (Hamburg) were produced with the help of SA junior officers using positions of authority to carry out Communist agitation.Footnote ⁵²Der Freiheitskämpfer was distributed in an SA barracks in Düsseldorf by a uniformed Sturmführer who, after being expelled from the SA, became a star performer at Communist meetings organized to win over Nazi militants to communism.Footnote ⁵³ A concerned Nazi official reported that the Sturmführer in question had later been seen in the company of another SA man entering a Communist printing house.Footnote ⁵⁴Die Sturmfahne was produced at the initiative of the treasurer of a Hamburg SA formation who was active, simultaneously, in a fake opposition group working at the behest of the Communist M-Apparat (the so-called Sturmfahne group) and a genuine Nazi opposition group that called itself the “League of National Socialist Front Soldiers” [!]. The latter group, made up of former and active-duty SA and SS men, included supporters of both Walter Stennes and General Ludendorff, as well as a spy who reported to the NSDAP on the group's meetings. The spy was well aware of the presence of the operative from the Sturmfahne group, whom he reported as possessing “the most intimate connections to the KPD.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Responsibility for carrying out the ideological struggle among the storm troopers was laid on the Rotfrontkämpferbund and its successor organization, the Kampfbund gegen den Faschismus, the same formations charged with the responsibility of combating Nazis in the streets. On the very eve of the Nazi seizure of power, the RFB was urging activists to seek out Reichsbanner and SA fighters in their pubs and hostels, to carry out personal discussions, and hand-deliver Zersetzungsschriften.Footnote ⁵⁶ Activists of the KgdF were engaged in this work as well. “Guidelines for Discussions with Comrades of the SA” instructed militants on how to approach and debate with storm troopers. “Widespread agitation [in the SA] over the ‘treason of the leadership’” was to be exploited to carry out “‘offensive’ discussions with the working members [Werktätigen] of the SA.” Communists were urged to take account of the special character of the SA: “We know from experience that in political questions, the SA is very unclear and poorly informed; therefore present the issues . . . as primitively as possible. Link up with their feelings and sensitivities.” This political missionary work was the task of every Communist: “Every comrade must be ready to pursue the ideological campaign among the SA and party proletarians with intensified vigor.” The weight placed on this activity—and the startling lack of realism behind it—comes out clearly in the tag line “For us it depends not on the defection of single individuals but the subversion of entire [units].”Footnote ⁵⁷

This “street-level,” person-to-person missionary work was integrated into the larger Communist propaganda apparatus. Storm troopers were to be urged to create resolutions and declarations of support for the KPD, which activists were then to submit for publication in the Communist press. Questions for discussion were to include “Is Hitler leading a fight against this system, against [reparations], and the emergency decree?” Reference was to be made to Hitler's positive comments to the foreign press regarding reparations as proof that he was “prepared to be the slave of German and international finance capital.” These points were summarized in a propaganda sheet published by the Kampfbund for distribution to SA men. The sheet also took up the case of Richard Scheringer—who only days before had been sentenced to a renewed prison term of two and a half years for treason (now for his propaganda on behalf of the KPD)—and contrasted his revolutionary martyrdom with Hitler's betrayal. Asking rhetorically why Scheringer had been sentenced to more prison time, the leaflet answered, because “Scheringer is really an enemy of the system. He is serious about the fight for the social and national liberation of the working people.” The leaflet invited SA men who agreed with this assessment to join in the real struggle on the side of the KPD.Footnote ⁵⁸

Papers appearing throughout Germany relied on a more or less standard set of claims and rhetorical techniques.Footnote ⁵⁹ Their main focus was on unmasking the socialist claims of the Nazi leadership. This unmasking was closely tied with criticism of Bonzen, employing the concepts of symbolic social class to make the style of bourgeois Bonzentum associated with the party leadership synonymous with that represented by the system. “Not only we revolutionary SA men,” claimed an article in Die Sturmfahne, “have recognized that our movement, according to the will of our Führer, is an instrument for the protection of the existing system of goldsacks and corrupt Bonzen.” The government, it continued, had nothing to fear from Hitler because he had proven himself willing to suppress “all true revolutionaries” in the Nazi movement.Footnote ⁶⁰ They focused heavily on corruption, which allowed them, simultaneously, to play on and intensify local grievances (e.g., between local SA and party leaders) and to play into the sense of moral outrage against the system, Bonzen, and so on.

The Sturmfahne came closer than any of the KPD's other Zersetzungsschriften to making explicit its Communist affiliations, calling on dissatisfied Nazi storm troopers to vote for the KPD's Ernst Thälmann in the presidential election of March 1932. “Our opposition group will vote for the candidate . . . who will fight against the system—the candidate of the commune! We are not completely in agreement with the commune, but we nevertheless see in this candidacy the (only) truly active fight against the system.”Footnote ⁶¹ In a rather bizarre application of the United Front from Below strategy, Die Sturmfahne appealed directly to the rank and file: “to you, and not to Adolf Hitler, we swear our oath of loyalty, to remain with you until the day when we can [unfurl] our banner [over] the united front of all revolutionary workers.” Die Sturmfahne urged storm troopers not to leave the Nazi movement but rather to fight for the revolution from within the SA.

Here, the KPD clearly intended not merely to sow discord in the SA but also to transform the SA from within into a sort of “Red SA,” a goal it continued to pursue well after January 1933.

The depictions of social class in Die Sturmfahne were heavily gendered. Adolf Hitler was depicted in a pose both effeminate and vaguely “bourgeois” (with a sagging belly and prominent rump, implying lack of physical fitness and life behind a desk), suggesting the opposite of the “revolutionary,” who had by definition to be both “manly” and “proletarian.” The southern German flourishes were meant to call to mind Hitler's alien, “Catholic” (i.e., south German) nature, playing into one of the key complaints against Hitler in north German opposition circles. Hitler as “effeminate bourgeois Catholic” was, the image was meant to suggest, unfit to lead revolutionaries in struggle against the system. Der SA Kamerad, published in Cologne, complained about a “gay Sturm” in the local SA, asking, “what business do SA workers have with this gay riffraff?”Footnote ⁶³

Communist Zersetzungschriften also used the stereotyping, essentializing language of the Nazis to demonize enemies. Papers such as Der Freiheitskämpfer tried to turn the antisemitism of the storm troopers against the party by printing bizarre rumors about the NSDAP's involvement with “the Jews.” The authors wondered whether “the Jews” had used their “financial control” over the movement to dampen its revolutionary spirit, alleging that “the Jews” had so little to fear from the NSDAP that Jewish merchants even capitalized off of the movement by selling Hitler postcards.Footnote ⁶⁴Die Sturmfahne printed antisemitic caricatures such as a bizarre image of the “Nazi Jew”—a caricatured Jewish profile in Nazi uniform—meant no doubt at one level to suggest that “the Jews” were in control of the Nazi movement, and in this sense, making up some of the same “unmasking” strategy used by both sides.Footnote ⁶⁵Das Sprachrohr from Berlin, in the process of appealing to storm troopers unhinged from the NSDAP in the wake of the Stennes revolt, complained about the Jewish influence in film and journalism. Das Sprachrohr criticized the newspapers of Nazi fellow traveler Alfred Hugenberg, which employed Jewish editors yet hypocritically dabbled in antisemitism when it fit their political purposes.Footnote ⁶⁶ The clear implication was that the Nazis and their conservative allies—conservative allies who were in any case overwhelmingly rejected by the SA as insufficiently radical—were not “really” antisemitic and therefore not really “revolutionary.” Antisemitism functioned in this instance as a mark of authenticity for the true revolutionary, defined in Nazi terms. Here again, the Communists were disputing, at one semiotic remove, the right of the Nazi Party to speak for the storm troopers.

The class analysis underlying the production of Das Sprachrohr came out clearly in the way in which the paper tried to exploit class sensitivities, linking them to broader suspicion of the party. Rank-and-file SA men, it was argued, took it as a given that they would be treated poorly by party bureaucrats in the Gau or party offices, especially—it was taken pains to point out—if they appeared dressed in working-class garb. This contempt for the workers in the movement was part of a larger contempt of the party for the SA, as demonstrated by the “feudal” relations between them.Footnote ⁶⁷ A new, successful revolution of the SA, argued Das Sprachrohr, must come from “the simple SA men in the Sturms and the [party] activists in the sections.”Footnote ⁶⁸ In an “appeal to the expellees” kicked out in the wake of the Stennes revolt, Das Sprachrohr invoked, in the language of soldierly pathos, the masculine, proletarian self-image of the storm troopers.

Appealing to the pride of self-proclaimed revolutionaries, the authors continued, “We activists in the SA and party . . . call you to work together with us. We see in you not renegades and criminals. For us you are revolutionary freedom fighters who have taken the first step on the path of decision.”Footnote ⁶⁹

These Zersetzungschriften represented an attempt at semiotic trickery that tried to blend Nazi and Communist concerns, drawing simultaneously on the very real cultural elements they had in common. Attempting to erase the boundary between the proletarian militancy of Communist supporters on the one hand, and (as it was hoped, the proto-Communist) proletarian militancy of Hitler supporters on the other, they performed identities that made sense to both sides, blurring the distinctions between the radicalism of left and right. The charges in these papers were delivered using language that everyone understood—the language of soldierly virtue and revolutionary honor. Faithful, honest (ehrliche) revolutionaries, willing to suffer and die for a cause, were contrasted with greedy and insincere “civilian” party leaders who paid lip service to the revolution while scrambling to position themselves for material benefits. “We would be traitors and cowards,” read a characteristic passage, “if we left you comrades in the lurch and gave you away to the demagogy of our leaders.”Footnote ⁷⁰ The gulf between the manly and virtuous “soldiers” and the effeminate and corrupt “civilians” was summed up succinctly in the rhetorical question posed in another paper: “Or is one supposed to deny that there are, in Hamburg, fat bankers in the party?”Footnote ⁷¹

Communist cell activity and the production of Zersetzungsblätter were not very successful in terms of provoking mass defections to the KPD, but there does appear to have been a significant degree of dovetailing between Communist and Nazi radicalism at the rank-and-file level. Conan Fischer relates, for example, that members of Standarte 76 in Hamburg were taken to task by Nazi officials for singing a slightly altered version of the Internationale as a marching song, prompting orders prohibiting the singing of “forbidden songs.”Footnote ⁷² It was this same unit—Standarte 76—that was home to the “circle of oppositional SA comrades” that claimed responsibility for publishing Die Sturmfahne.Footnote ⁷³ As Pamela Swett has shown in her work on Berlin, the picture of a rigid separation between extremist opponents is no longer tenable; at least where large cities such as Berlin were concerned, the radical scene was characterized by a familiarity verging on intimacy, by political discussion rather than just fighting, and by the not infrequent switching of members from one side to the other.Footnote ⁷⁴

Evidence from other cities suggests a similar pattern. In Cologne, for example, police authorities noted in October 1932 that “countless members [of the Nazi movement] have gone over to the KPD.”Footnote ⁷⁵ National Socialist opposition groups also actively recruited from the SA. One of them, calling itself the Revolutionäre Freiheitsbewegung, was led by the former leader of the Hitler Youth and Otto Strasser's youth wing, Wilhelm Kayser.Footnote ⁷⁶ Kayser represented the “Nazi” cause at a number of meetings organized by the Kampfbund gegen den Faschismus in autumn 1931.Footnote ⁷⁷ His opposite number at one of these meetings was a former SA Sturmführer—the very one expelled from the SA for distributing Der Freiheitskämpfer that summer—who had gone over to the KPD and was making the rounds of KgdF meetings aimed at winning over Nazis.Footnote ⁷⁸ Bans on fraternization of the kind described by Swett in Berlin were imposed in Cologne and other Rheinland cities. Storm troopers were warned especially against the Kayser movement, which was accused of “attempting in every way imaginable to get at the SA [and] party organization.” Forbidden to take part in either meetings or “discussions” with members of the opposition, SA men were reminded that “the SA does not debate with mutineers and undisciplined elements.”Footnote ⁷⁹

In this context, it is unsurprising that papers such as Die Sturmfahne were read with interest by rank-and-file Nazis. Writing during the same period when Die Sturmfahne was being published in Hamburg, the police president in Cologne called attention to orders prohibiting the “reading [of] any kind of enemy newspapers,” which accompanied the expulsion of numerous individuals from the NSDAP and SA. “In the recent period,” Nazi leaders in Cologne were quoted as saying, “the KPD has . . . again expanded the Z-schrift ‘Der SA Kamerad’ and now publishes Z-schriften in the individual city districts. SA leaders have to work immediately against these activities. The papers are to be confiscated, the identity of the disseminators is to be ascertained.” Junior SA leaders were called upon to dispute the “lies” contained in these papers at meetings with the rank and file.Footnote ⁸⁰ Even after 1933, the Gestapo reported a good reception of Communist Zersetzungsblätter in parts of the SA.Footnote ⁸¹

The interest of storm troopers in Communist Zersetzungsblätter does not suggest that they stood ready to embrace communism, but rather signaled the extent to which the claims of the two radical extremes could overlap in the minds of rank-and-file activists. Indeed, the provenance of Communist Zersetzungsblätter occasionally seems to have confused not only the KPD's Nazi audience but also the police and even Communist activists themselves. In one case a Communist activist learned through a contact that an entire Hitler Youth unit had been supplied with “Hitler Youth opposition” letters. “The Hitler Youths really believe,” he noted with some astonishment, “that the letter comes from an oppositional colleague.” Not completely sure himself, he asked parenthetically, “From [our people]?” Even more significant, in terms of blurring the line between the “authentic” and the “fake,” was that the provenance of the letter did not even really matter. “In any case,” the activist concluded, “the letter is being discussed [by everyone].” The task now was to “carefully verify the mood” of the Hitler Youth and answer the original letter with new letters of Communist origin.Footnote ⁸² If Communist efforts to turn SA activism in an explicitly Communist direction could never be truly successful, bound as they were to founder on the rocks of the SA's visceral hatred for a KPD owing allegiance to Moscow and ruled by “Jewish Marxists,” the KPD's efforts to portray a blurring of Communist and Nazi radicalism at the rank-and-file level do not appear to have been entirely created out of whole cloth.Footnote ⁸³

“Brown on the Outside, Red Inside”: The SA between Gleichschaltung and Revolution

Hitler's accession to power in January 1933 provided a stringent test, both for the SA—as the alleged “victors” who would now see their revolution put into place—and for those in the KPD and radical-nationalist youth scenes who placed strong hopes in the SA's revolutionary potential. The violent wave of the first months of 1933, in which the SA unleashed all its brutality on Communist and other opponents, was only the tip of the iceberg of a spontaneous outburst of popular radicalism.Footnote ⁸⁴ Aimed in the first instance against the organizations and institutions of the working class (and targeting, where regionally appropriate, Catholic organizations and youth groups), this uprising was fueled by a fascist rank and file motivated by a vaguely defined but powerful concept of a revolutionary “national socialism,” the content of which was both unclear and evolving.

A number of contemporaries noted the widespread nature of the revolutionary hopes invested in National Socialism in general, and in the SA and Hitler Youth in particular. Ernst Erich Noth emphasized it, as did the KPD's propaganda expert, Willi Münzenberg, who argued that the Nazis had been forced to emphasize their social-revolutionary intentions by pressure from below.Footnote ⁸⁵ Herbert Crüger, one of the followers of Otto Strasser who went over to the KPD in 1931, spent the early months of the regime in a National Socialist student home in Berlin, where he was greatly impressed by the atmosphere of revolutionary excitement. The students there, members of the National Socialist German Student Association (NSDStB), some of whom Crüger knew from his Hitler Youth days, were obsessed, he wrote, “with ideas of an egalitarian Volksgemeinschaft, . . . a socialism in which the concept ‘German’ occupied a central position.”Footnote ⁸⁶

The French anarcho-Marxist Daniel Guérin, traveling in Germany during the early months of the regime, detected the same attitudes. Struck by the extent to which everyday Germans he met—on the road, in youth hostels, at meetings—invested social revolutionary hopes in the NSDAP, Guérin was shocked and frustrated by the way in which left-wing demands had become intertwined with the ethnic nationalism of the Nazis. He cited the example of a young worker, a Communist with a deep emotional attachment to Ernst Thälmann, who complained bitterly to him of the “betrayal” of the two working-class parties in the Weimar Republic. They “should have forged unity in action,” he said, “[but they] didn't want to.” He went on, “We'll have to make our revolution alone. While waiting for the International to exist, we have to think about the present. First of all, to liberate ourselves from the Diktat of Versailles, to free our oppressed comrades in Silesia, in the Saarland, in Austria, in the Sudetenland, in Memel and Danzig . . . to found a German workers' state!”Footnote ⁸⁷ Another young worker announced to Guérin that he had quit the NSDAP, explaining:

“There are thousands like him,” wrote Guérin, “mixing up their confused demands for socialism with a fanatical sentiment born of national humiliation. And it is more so among the youth than the adults.” A speech witnessed by Guérin in a working-class dance hall in Leipzig was particularly revealing. “Our Revolution, Volksgenossen, has only begun,” proclaimed a local party activist. “We haven't yet attained any of our goals. There's talk of a national government, of a national awakening. . . . What's all that about? It's the Socialist part of our program that matters. . . . We have now but one enemy to vanquish: the bourgeoisie.”Footnote ⁸⁹

Hopes and expectations such as these rather quickly began to be referred to under the rubric of the Second Revolution, a term that “came to stand for the deeply ingrained feelings in the party of anticapitalism, anticonservatism, and general radicalism.”Footnote ⁹⁰ These hopes carried with them the potential for great disappointment, a potential increased by the transformation of National Socialism into a mass movement.Footnote ⁹¹ Charges about the embourgeoisement of the movement, which had been current before 1933, became even more pronounced as bandwagon jumpers—derisively labeled Märzgefallene by Joseph Goebbels—crowded into the NSDAP. Simultaneously, the rise of what Ernst Erich Noth called a “new type of Bonzen”—even hardier and more ubiquitous than the old—gave rise to a growing anger.Footnote ⁹²

The picture of creeping discontent sketched out by Noth is confirmed by reports from the intelligence services of the underground KPD, the exiled SPD, and the NSDAP itself. Characteristic was the comment of an SS Sturmführer at a meeting in Krefeld in June 1934 that a Communist agent recorded: “Hitler must call for struggle against the Bonzen, then we will be with him. If he doesn't do it, then he'll be buried together with the other Bonzen. We must conquer the old Communists for our side; they are guys that you can really start something with. The washerwomen who are coming over to us now aren't worth a penny.” He concluded by calling for Germany to follow the example of the Soviet Union: “In Russia it is good. Everything there goes from the bottom up, not the way it is here where everything comes down from the Bonzen. In Germany we have to get rid of the Bonzen and create a Reich that will really show Russia something.”Footnote ⁹³

An SA man in Cologne announced to a group of SA and SS men, “We were promised that twenty-four hours after we were in power, there would be no more department stores or banks. Now you don't hear anything about it.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Another threatened, “It's not going to last much longer, then the whole splendor is going to be over. My comrades say it, too; we've been swindled. Hitler doesn't attack capital like he promised; therefore we will have to move against him.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Attitudes such as these prompted a Communist spy to note in April 1934, “The expectations that the SA men had attached to the seizure of power, and which have not been fulfilled, have allowed a very violent mood of opposition to come out among the old SA men.”Footnote ⁹⁶ A storm trooper drawn into a discussion on “the battle between capital and labor” told a Communist spy:

Agents of the SA's own intelligence service detected similar attitudes. Typical were the comments of one SA man who said, “Now as before, the capitalists have the power, and people such as Thyssen, Krupp, and so on, remain war profiteers, even if they join the NSDAP en masse. In one and a half years, the Verbonzung in the party and in the government has taken on the same form that it had in the Weimar state.” Of Göring and other Nazi leaders, he concluded, “I would take part in a Communist uprising myself, just to be able to do away with [these] people.”Footnote ⁹⁸ The reports of the Sopade, the intelligence agency of the exiled SPD, reveal a similar picture. “The proletarian SA men . . . ,” noted a report in early summer 1934, “really believed that with the carrying out of the Second Revolution, the large banks and the princes of the stock exchange, heavy industry, and the department stores would be nationalized.”Footnote ⁹⁹

Such reports were linked in the reports of the Sopade with ongoing acts of SA violence. One noted:

Assaults such as this on “capital” were accompanied by violence against reactionaries accused of watering down the movement. The Sopade noted in June 1934, “Reports from various parts of the country exist about fighting between SA men, between the SA and the SS, between the SA and the Stahlhelm, between the SA and the Labor Service, the SA and the army, etc., etc.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

Worry over attitudes in the SA led to increased surveillance from above. The head of the Berlin SA, Karl Ernst, established a sort of secret police within the SA, “Department IE,” that had the task not only of undertaking special missions against Jewish intellectuals and others targeted for revenge or extortion, but also of catching Communist infiltrators among the storm troopers.Footnote ¹⁰² The SA also established throughout the Reich its own Feldpolizei (field police), which had the task of surveilling both SA and party members.Footnote ¹⁰³ Worry about the orientation of new SA men was reflected in orders in summer 1933 that stipulated a six-month probationary period for new recruits.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ A few months later, Hitler ordered local SA leaders to conduct house searches of all storm troopers who joined the SA after January 30, 1933.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ At the beginning of 1934, the Gestapo began to observe and collect material on the SA. Observing the SA was one of the first tasks accorded to the SS security service, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD). The man responsible for the reorganization of the SD in southern Germany, Dr. Werner Best, oversaw the creation of a special department within the SD for this purpose.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

These measures took place against the backdrop of continued Communist subversive work within the SA. Zersetzungsblätter for the SA and police continued to be produced during spring 1933 and into 1934-35.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In Cologne the KPD published Der SA Kamerad. In Essen Communist operatives were able to create and distribute a number of different leaflets; one operative arrested by the Gestapo in late 1933 was found to have examples of fifteen different pieces in his apartment. Among these were flyers designed specifically for the SA and SS. One of them, the aforementioned “SA-Mann Erwache!,” contained calls for storm troopers to organize opposition cells in every Sturm, to renounce acts of terror against the workers, to demand the right to criticism of the party leadership, and to fight with the workers for real socialism. The leaflet, designed to look as if it had been created within the SA, was signed, “The leadership of the opposition group in the Ruhr.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In Franconia, where a revolt of the SA under Walter Stegmann had only recently been contained, the KPD released a flyer titled “SA Proletarians! Open Your Eyes! Finish the Job!” It sought to convince the storm troopers that they had nothing to gain by following anti-Nazi rebels but must take their revolt to its logical conclusion by joining the KPD.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In Berlin Der SA Sturmbanner (“Organ of the Mutinous Berlin SA”) tried to dampen the enthusiasm of SA men for the new Nazi government by noting the government's inclusion of conservatives such as Franz von Papen and criticizing Hitler's failure to improve the economic situation immediately.Footnote ¹¹⁰

The official Communist party press, now operating underground, continued to publicize the activity of the “SA Opposition.” “We reproduce here a call by rebellious SA [men],” read an article in Der Kämpfer, “to which we have added nothing.”

Two other Sturms had been dissolved, the flyer continued,

In cities where the KPD had been strong before January 1933, surviving Communist functionaries were able to rebuild some of the party organization and continue their activity under cover.Footnote ¹¹² To an even greater extent than before 1933, the KPD continued to focus on its strategy of infiltration.Footnote ¹¹³ The size of the Communist presence in the SA, SS, Nationalsozialistische Betriebszellenorganisation (National Socialist Factory Cell Organization, NSBO), and other Nazi organizations has, for obvious reasons, been difficult to quantify. As far as the SA is concerned, a significant portion of new recruits was known to have previously belonged to the KPD.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Rudolf Diels, the first head of the Gestapo, estimated that in Berlin, seventy percent of new SA recruits after January 30 were former Communists. In some cases, wrote Diels, entire units of the RFB went over to the SA en masse.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Peter Longerich has questioned Diels's frequently cited seventy-percent figure as exaggerated, and although he must certainly be right that the figure is too high, he appears himself to have erred in the other direction.Footnote ¹¹⁶ According to Diels's subordinate Gisevius, at least a third of the post-1933 SA was made up of former Communists for whom “the popular phrase . . . was ‘Beefsteak Nazis’—Brown on the outside, red inside.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ A leading functionary in the KPD's Red Sport organization gave a figure of twenty percent.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The SA itself gave a figure of fifty-five percent.Footnote ¹¹⁹

Internal SA memoranda, the surviving files of the Gestapo, and reports from the KPD's own intelligence apparatus all contain evidence of a significant Communist presence in the SA.Footnote ¹²⁰ Reports from individual SA units in spring and summer 1933 even listed the names of individual Communists.Footnote ¹²¹ At least one activist appears in the sources who had retained membership in the KPD while serving as an agent in the SA intelligence service.Footnote ¹²² In a number of cases, Communists occupied mid-level leadership positions in the SA and SS. In an SS intelligence platoon in the Altona district of Hamburg, thirty to thirty-five out of fifty members were former Communists, including the unit commander's right-hand man. A Communist functionary in contact with members of the unit noted, “The comrades report unanimously that the tone of the SS men is ‘rosy,’ and each one assumes the other is a ‘Beefsteak’ (brown on the outside, red on the inside).”Footnote ¹²³ The presence of former Communists in the SA was sufficiently taken for granted that Rudolf Hess could write to Ernst Röhm in September looking for storm troopers willing to testify against their former comrades in the Reichstag fire trial.Footnote ¹²⁴

The idea of the Second Revolution supplied a ready myth for a continuation of the United Front from Below of the Weimar years.Footnote ¹²⁵ Herbert Crüger, a former Strasser supporter who had gone over to the KPD before 1933, was recruited by the KPD's M-Apparat to agitate on behalf of the KPD in a succession of National Socialist student homes to which he belonged. Crüger joined in frequent debates about the nature of the coming Second Revolution, in which he urged his fellows to take “a critical posture toward the Nazi leadership, which in its practical politics had backed away from much of what it had up until then promised.”Footnote ¹²⁶ Crüger distributed papers designed for the SA with the help of some of the SA men in the home.Footnote ¹²⁷ The articles in these papers, wrote Crüger, “picked up on current opinion in the SA, . . . asked what the goals of the second wave of National Socialist revolution must be, and demanded to know who the real enemy was, the Communist workers, or the big capitalists.”Footnote ¹²⁸ Another Communist, a member of an SA Sturm in Berlin, reported in April 1934:

Even after the purge of June 30, 1934, some KPD leaders were hopeful. As during the Stennes revolt of 1931, unrest in the SA was interpreted in terms of impending revolution. “In the SA . . . ,” wrote one Communist official, “revolutionary, antifascist, and Communist propaganda is more and more widely noticeable. The entire SA seems to be contaminated.”Footnote ¹³⁰

Even the purge of the SA that began on June 30 was interpreted as a hopeful sign. The KPD distributed a flyer titled “The Revolutionary SA Man,” which read, “SA Comrades! The SA has been sent on leave because it is no longer needed, the SA leadership hit from behind. We revolutionary SA men had nothing in common with Röhm, but we don't want to have anything in common with Hitler and Göring, either. Hitler has betrayed the SA and delivered it to its enemies.”Footnote ¹³¹ Some in the KPD appear to have deluded themselves into believing that the party's agitation had caused the events of June 30. “Under the pressure of our revolutionary work among the masses before the 30th of June,” argued the Reichsleitung, “the disintegration in the SA has grown. . . . In recent weeks there have been new examples every day where SA men and NSBO members, together with our comrades, have taken up the fight against their employers and been fired; a portion has been sent to concentration camps.” To take advantage of the situation, the party was to intensify its efforts at building cells and producing Zersetzungsblätter. A list of demands for revolutionary SA men was drawn up and subsequently published in an “SA opposition sheet.” They included:

Guidelines advised Communists how to calm the fears of prospective recruits in the SA in the event of the coming Communist takeover [!]. In an article titled “SA Man Schulze Asks, We Answer Him,” propaganda guidelines were provided in the form of a hypothetical conversation between a Communist and an SA man. “SA man Schulze,” whose hunger has given him second thoughts about the Nazi regime, says:

Agents of the Sopade and the nonsectarian left-wing group Neu Beginnen (New Beginnings), less prone to wishful thinking and revolutionary inflationism than the Communists, were quick to point out the dangers of false hopes.Footnote ¹³⁴ A report from Neu Beginnen from spring 1934 criticized what it called the “strong overestimation of the amount and worth of opposition voices . . . characteristic of Communist or Communist splinter groups and sects.” The Communists, it continued, are constantly speaking “of a ‘new beginning’ or a ‘revolutionary uprising’ in a moment where . . . more than forty million people have been brought into line behind Hitler.”Footnote ¹³⁵ Neu Beginnen warned in particular of false hopes in the wake of the Night of the Long Knives, an event heralded by the KPD as presaging the immiment “true” revolution.Footnote ¹³⁶ “It is not true,” read one report, “that the Nazi Party no longer exists, as has been said. On the contrary, it is stronger than ever.”Footnote ¹³⁷

Yet the belief that Hitler was temporary and revolution imminent was widely shared. The National Revolutionary Ernst Niekisch, as early as 1933, noted the discontent in the Nazi movement and attached great meaning to what he saw as the beginning of a mass exodus from the NSDAP.Footnote ¹³⁸ Even an informed observer such as Ernst Erich Noth, writing on the eve of the purge of the SA in June of the following year, saw the growing tension in the NSDAP as a sign that the “true fighters” were beginning their revolt, a revolt in which the KPD would “yet play a role.”Footnote ¹³⁹ Otto Strasser took a similar position. “Hitler is only a transition,” he argued; “after Hitler comes not bolshevism but German Socialism.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰

Like the KPD, Strasser's Black Front emphasized the importance of infiltrating the SA to carry on revolutionary work from within.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Black Front propaganda guidelines urged activists to collect enemy addresses for direct-mail campaigns, a tactic actively pursued by both the Black Front and the KPD, and one that reflected the united front tactic: “Especially desirable are the addresses of SA, NSBO, and Stahlhelm members, as well as those of decent former Marxists.” As the emphasis on address collecting suggests, the chief focus of Black Front activity in the NSDAP was intelligence gathering and the distribution of propaganda. Both were supported by the forging of personal contacts and the attempted building of cells.Footnote ¹⁴² The interrogation records of Black Front activists captured and tried for treason provide a view into this work. Wilhelm Zander belonged briefly to the NSDAP in 1932 before quitting to join the Revolutionäre Freiheitsbewegung led by the former Hitler Youth leader Wilhelm Kayser, which affiliated itself with the Strasser movement in December 1932. Zander seems to have felt, as his codefendant Hans Bauer put it, that the NSDAP was “not adequately using the socialist momentum” of Nazism and would, “in the event of an eventual seizure of power, [sell out] to big business.”Footnote ¹⁴³

In April 1933 Zander joined the SA in hopes of “strengthen[ing its] fighting spirit.” As Wehrsportreferant for Sturmbann I/240 in Cologne, he was responsible for training some eighty junior officers of the unit. According to the Gestapo, “Zander reported regularly to . . . Kayser and other members of the Cologne group of the Black Front about events in the SA, the SS, the Stahlhelm, and other organizations of the National Socialist state.” He was able “repeatedly to give . . . Kayser SA Gruppenbefehle that had to do with the affairs of the SA and its relationship with other organizations, as well as disagreements within these organizations.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Material gained in this way was used in the creation of a series of propaganda flyers produced between June 1933 and July 1935. The flyers created from this material were duplicated for the most part in Zander's apartment on a hectograph machine that he obtained for use in his SA service. Kayser, Zander, and the others produced ten to twelve different propaganda flyers. These included multiple issues of the Antifaschistischer Rundbrief, as well as titles such as “Differences between Chief of Staff Röhm and Hitler,” “Against Alarmists and Fault-Finders!?,” and Der Sozialistische Stoßtrupp. Each flyer was produced in an edition of five hundred and mailed to addresses in Cologne, Elberfeld, Remscheid, Solingen, Düsseldorf, Duisberg, and Essen.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ In addition to producing flyers, the group around Kayser compiled its own intelligence reports, which were dutifully smuggled to Strasser in exile abroad. Information from these reports was used in Strasser's publications, which were sent into Germany, passed hand to hand among activists, and then distributed as propaganda.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

Another Strasser activist, Erwin Simon, had been a member of the KPD from December 1931 through May 1932. Attracted to communism by the example of Richard Scheringer, Simon became disenchanted with the KPD and joined the Black Front in November 1932. In April of the following year, he joined the SA, assuming the rank of Rottenführer in Sturm 52/36 in Halle. Simon reasoned that since every other party or group fighting for “German socialism” had been banned, the NSDAP was now the only party “out of which something could develop.” In a letter to a friend (used in evidence against him at his trial), Simon wrote, “The work continues underground. . . . Much has changed, but the goal remains the same. . . . The socialist longing lives, even in the SA. I can testify to that because I'm hiding right in the middle of it. The only thing that has changed is [the composition of] the boss strata, the owners of the gravy train.” Explaining his decision to join the SA, he continued, “Everything is gleichgeschaltet, including the socialists. [Therefore,] everything today must be achieved through the SA, the SS, and the Labor Front. What counts today is alertness and personal connections, and in addition, attaining positions of leadership in the SA. Every revolutionary must become at least a Sturmführer.” Giving voice to a widely held view, Simon concluded, “The revolution will come from the inside out, from within the party.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷

Such hopes proved dangerous, especially for the Communists, who were forced to grapple with the fact that activists who allowed themselves to be swallowed up by the brown tide were often quickly lost to the KPD. There had been defections even before 1933. The Communist propagandist Willi Münzenberg wrote of meeting, in fall 1932, old Communists who had already gone over to the SA: “You Communists are taking too long,” they told him; “Adolf will do it faster. If he betrays us, we'll hang him. We are the SA, and . . . we'll be able to create the socialism Adolf promised us.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ There were a variety of motives for defections after 1933. Many Communists joined the SA to avoid arrest. One of these was Peter Kramer, the former leader of the KPD Ortsgruppe in the Ruhr, who made the mistake of gloating to a Gestapo spy, “If they only knew who I was.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ For every Communist or other previously anti-Nazi militant who kept the faith and continued to agitate for his old party after 1933—or, in contrast, embraced National Socialism—there were many others for whom old and new identities coexisted. As one SA man put it in 1935, in a moment of drunken candor that got him in a lot of trouble, “I'm no SA man; I've been a member of the Communist Party for thirteen years and I wear the brown uniform only for appearances.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰

The chaotic transition to dictatorship made possible all sorts of ambiguities, lines becoming blurred when criminal elements from the SA and the Red Front converged under the cover of the National Socialist revolution. A landlord in Düsseldorf-Gerresheim experienced this fact personally in summer 1933, when he was confronted in his home by several dozen SA men who demanded that they conduct a house search. When he refused to let them in, he recounted, the storm troopers broke down the door and ascended the stairs with drawn revolvers. Once inside, they began to beat the occupants brutally, shouting, “We are the commune, we are in power.” They smashed the apartment's furnishings, roughed up all the occupants, and beat the landlord and his friend with their fists, boots, cudgels, and rubber truncheons. This “action” only came to an end when a police official appeared more than an hour later and explained to the storm troopers that independent initiative of this sort was no longer allowed. In his letter of complaint to the SA leadership, the landlord noted that the storm troopers were frequent associates of some of his renters, “ill-tempered” men whom he knew to be Communists. “As far as I could find out,” he wrote, “the greater portion of the SA men who took part belonged as recently as March 5 to the KPD. For weeks a lively traffic between SA men and these renters has been noticeable.” Both the renters and the SA men were actively involved in party work, he added, noting indignantly that “an SA man in uniform even distributed flyers for the Communist Party.” These storm troopers, the landlord concluded melodramatically, were “Communists in the truest sense of the word and only crept into the SA . . . to be able to continue carrying out their dark intrigues.”Footnote ¹⁵¹

The anticommunist hysteria and denunciatory self-policing of this account aside, there is little doubt that the lawless atmosphere of spring and summer 1933 allowed formerly competing conceptions of “revolution” to dovetail. An SA man in Duisberg-Hamborn, Adolf Hess, had formerly been a member of the KPD and the Kampfbund gegen den Faschismus. Hess joined the SA at the beginning of March 1933 with a number of other Communists from his neighborhood. Once in the brown uniform, according to the Gestapo, Hess and his comrades

Despite his zealous persecution of his former comrades, Hess failed to win the trust of his fellow storm troopers. “In the legal period,” another report noted, “Hess was the greatest agitator against the NSDAP, then [he] suddenly gives in to the NSDAP the day after the seizure of power, puts on the SA uniform, and behaves like the most zealous defender of the National Socialist idea.”Footnote ¹⁵³

Even principled Communists who joined the National Socialist organizations for purposes of infiltration were at risk. The so-called Scheringer groups, formed from members of the Berlin “Young Workers” organization for purposes of subversion of the SA, are a case in point. They possessed only weak connections to the KPD, and their activities were discouraged as too dangerous for young activists in any case.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ The police president in Hannover noted, “The KPD is attempting by all possible means to penetrate the National Socialist organizations, especially the SA. . . . The party has shown success, however, in only a few individual cases, because the vast majority of people entrusted with this task take the ideals of the [Nazi formations] as their own and refuse any further activity for the KPD.” The situation was so bad that young Communists who entered the SA for purposes of subversion were charged with the task of not only winning over the storm troopers but also winning back Communists who had preceded them into the SA. “Repeatedly this tactic has worked out to the detriment of the KPD,” the police president continued, because the defecting agents passed their knowledge of KPD organization along to their new comrades.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ A Communist activist who belonged to the SS in Hamburg complained that the connections he had painstakingly forged had been ignored by the Altona party organization, which, in his opinion, “placed no worth on a systematic cultivation of the enemy in his mass organizations.” He added indignantly that a young Communist whom he had advised to follow him into the SS had accused him of “strengthening fascism.”Footnote ¹⁵⁶

Nevertheless, the functionary continued, the local party possessed good and many-sided connections in the SA and SS, although most of these activists had joined these formations on their own accord. The party's unwillingness or inability to take advantage of the situation was especially frustrating, he noted, because “in almost every . . . Sturm there are individual comrades I spoke to who are ready to work with and for us.” Although this functionary maintained excellent connections within a recently formed SS intelligence platoon, which he estimated was made up of sixty to seventy percent former Communists, he was unable to turn the situation to advantage. His main contact, the “right-hand man” of the unit commander, kept in regular contact with him personally, because the party never used the reports it received. Acknowledging that activists such as these could easily be lost to the KPD, he concluded revealingly, “I only uphold this contact so as to keep the people from ‘swimming away.’”Footnote ¹⁵⁷