Outlines of the Storm-Trooper Myth

At least twenty-one novels written by or about storm troopers appeared between 1933 and 1939, a brief but productive period of storm-trooper literary output that rose and fell in connection to the SA's own struggles to find an enduring role in the Nazi state. Works in this sub-genre followed the adventures of an anonymous or pseudonymous storm trooper as he attempted to navigate the chaotic and violent world of Weimar street politics. While each separate version of the unknown storm trooper's story offered a variation on the main theme, the twenty-one novels that directly fit this category generally followed the same basic plot structure.

The unknown storm trooper's story begins in a domestic setting, usually in an urban environment. If the hero is not already a storm trooper, the opening chapters portray his discovery of National Socialism through his early encounters with the songs and symbols of the movement. He simultaneously confronts poverty and crime in his native city—social problems that the novels blame on the Nazis' political enemies. The unknown storm trooper then meets a friendly, slightly older SA man who impresses the hero with his morality and courage. This surrogate older brother encourages the hero to follow his convictions and join the SA. In many cases, the unknown storm trooper's father is either a Social Democrat or Communist—a political and generational domestic conflict that the women of the family try to mediate. The novel's middle developments positively associate the storm trooper with the family, the state, and the Christian church—symbols that demonstrate his commitment to the foundational institutions of German society. These sources of support conflict with increasing pressures to leave the SA, which most often come from his father, from teachers, from Communist-dominated work environments, from girlfriends worried about his safety, and from a constant threat of physical danger that periodically develops into outright violence. The storm trooper therefore faces many dangers. In typical Nazi fashion, however, these perils do not dissuade the storm trooper but instead only further solidify his commitment to the cause. Furthermore, the plot structure credits such episodes of violence with spreading support for the movement beyond the storm troopers themselves, as each combat causes the citizens of the town to distrust the SA's political enemies and flock to its banners. Indeed, during the story's climax when these enemies often succeed in striking down the storm trooper, his death brings the final victory of the Nazi movement and its takeover of the German state. His blood sacrifice also solidifies his family's personal loyalty to Nazism and converts the oppositional father into a loyal storm trooper who takes up his son's place in the ranks.

Given this basic narrative, the unknown storm-trooper genre belonged to a thematic family that contained some of Germany's most powerful founding myths. In its general outlines, it belonged to the category Hayden White has described as a romance:

Narratives with this form described the journey of a hero whose innocence is, through a series of bested trials and overcome adversaries, transformed into maturity, strength, and an eventual, transcendent triumph. Preexisting German myths of this type included the Parsifal story, in both Wolfram von Eschenbach's original epic poem and in the Wagner opera that was so popular within the SA, and in wider circles of German society. The storm-trooper romance also tracked the predominant strain of nineteenth-century German historical writing, the historicism of von Ranke and his disciplines. This influential “Prussian school” of history told the tale of the German Empire as the culmination of a centuries-long historical, moral, and spiritual process.Footnote ³² One of the most vivid sub-myths in this tradition can be found in Treitschke's account of the Teutonic knights, in which the brotherhood's blood sacrifice hallowed the Baltic lands for the German people and their future state. Myths in the romantic mode often feature such sacrifices.Footnote ³³ As Treitschke wrote, “A spell rises from the ground which was drenched with the noblest German blood in the fight on behalf of the name of Germany and the most sublime gifts of mankind.”Footnote ³⁴ The similarities of all these myths with that of the storm troopers is clear.Footnote ³⁵

Stories of the unknown storm trooper thus recalled a much deeper German historical and mythic tradition. They portrayed the storm troopers' struggle as the latest chapter of an eternal spiritual-historical crusade fought by such luminaries as the Teutonic Knights, Parsifal, and even Christ himself. It was not necessarily a cynical or calculated choice, since most SA men firmly believed in this self-imagery. Their difficulty, during the Kampfzeit and after the takeover, was to convince the larger public of their heroism. Novels starring an unknown storm trooper promised to be quite useful in this endeavor, as they allowed the SA to mobilize the universal power of an already accepted narrative in a way that seemed grounded in an immediate, everyday reality.

Novels starring unknown storm troopers thus claimed to be more than myth, adventure stories, or fictional tales. Instead, they gained argumentative power by positioning themselves as true accounts of actual events. Many of the works claimed, either in their subtitles or in dedication pages, to be “tales of great events as told by one who lived it.”Footnote ³⁶ Advertising copy for Gerhard Pantel's Germany Commands: A Diary of the Battle for Berlin proclaimed that it “breathes the spirit of days gone by, which it conveys to future generations.”Footnote ³⁷ The “anonymous authors” (ungenannte Mitarbeiter) of The Unknown Storm Trooper: A Good Comrade of Hitler's Soldiers were said to have infused every sentence with the “manly defiance and holy beliefs” they had formerly brought to the political struggle.Footnote ³⁸ Both these works, according to Nazi advertising, were “Written by men who have nothing in common with the dried-out wisdom of cloistered attic-learning, by men who have stood and yet stand as members of the Sturmabteilungen on the front lines of the daily political battle.”Footnote ³⁹ Their resulting books thus remained true to “the fighting spirit of the SA.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Some titles proclaimed their reliability as works of history by presenting themselves as actual storm-trooper diaries. Such products included the aforementioned Germany Commands, as well as Standarte X: Diary Pages from a Rural SA-Standard, Willi Dickkopp: Out of the Diary of an Unknown SA Man, and—in the only version from a woman's perspective—With Death so Near: Diary Pages from an SA Man's Bride. Other works quoted letters supposedly sent between the hero and his family members. Gotthard Kraft, Julius Witthuhn's colorfully titled storm-trooper myth, reproduced one such exchange between the eponymous hero and his loyal girlfriend, an epistolary approach with deep roots in modern literature as a technique to enhance a sense of reality. The pseudo-documentary base made fiction seem more like reality.

As can be seen from the titles already listed, the novels' claims to truth existed alongside an impulse to universalize the story through the lens of an anonymous everyman. Rather than a specific SA-Standarte, readers followed “Standarte X.” Rather than an actual Hamburg storm trooper, Willi Dickkopp starred an SA man with a charming and evocative name. Prolific storm-trooper author Hans Zöberlein presented his autobiographical account of coming to the SA, Command of Conscience, through an idealized authorial surrogate named “Hans Kraft.”Footnote ⁴¹ Witthuhn, the self-styled “poet” who wrote Gotthard Kraft, began his story with a dedication to a specific SA-Mann whom Communists had killed in 1931. But Witthuhn denied writing a straight biography and said instead that he intended to show not how this one storm trooper had “bled for the movement,” but how people like him had done the same.Footnote ⁴²

For this reason Witthuhn also refused to ground his story in a specific location. Instead, his action took place in a “big city” made anonymous as H ____.Footnote ⁴³ Gotthard's SA-unit, “Sturm Nr. __,” marched to “the friendly Kreisstadt W___,” not to a specific town.Footnote ⁴⁴ With this approach, readers from any number of towns could imagine that the story took place in their own backyard. Heinz Lohmann's SA räumt auf took the storm trooper's anonymity to a higher level. Lohmann often rejected first-person narration altogether, which would have limited the story to mere autobiography. Instead he used the collective “we” to speak of SA activities. Lohmann claimed in the introduction that “I did not write this book of my own will alone,” and that “I speak for every comrade. Even when I speak of myself, there lies within the feelings of thousands upon thousands of Adolf Hitler's unknown soldiers.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Visuals included in these mythic accounts also reflected a shift over time away from identifiable, historical individuals. Bade's SA erobert Berlin contained a frontispiece photograph allegedly of its hero, an “SA-Mann Shultz.” Yet Schulz was Bade's invented everyman. The photograph so confused readers that Bade had to answer correspondence addressed to his character; he also had to battle legal threats when a real SA-Mann Schultz turned up claiming to have inspired the story.Footnote ⁴⁶ Bade's next work, Trommlerbub unterm Hakenkreuz, a novel of the Hitler Youth in which unknown storm troopers played key supporting roles as surrogate older brothers, avoided this problem by illustrating with drawings rather than photographs. Moreover, the visuals now usually obscured the young heroes' faces—by showing them from behind, hiding their features under caps, or inking deep shadows over their features. Nine of fifteen illustrations in Trommlerbub concealed the heroes' faces in this way.Footnote ⁴⁷ The remaining six all depicted an argument, confrontation, or dispute: almost as if these young men could gain identities only through struggle. SA men themselves appeared in none of the illustrations despite their prominence in the narrative, and they therefore retained a double anonymity—without names and without faces.

This technique reinforced the novels' emphasis on universal characters, an approach also seen in the lack of specific physical descriptions of the anonymous hero. The Ehrenbuch der SA, a kind of collective biography of unknown storm troopers that featured many different examples of the type, wrote of one Hamburg SA man:

An unknown storm trooper thus had little personality or character of his own. In his deeds, he often possessed a quality akin to a Zelig or Forrest Gump.Footnote ⁴⁹ His story often placed him at the center of the most important events of local party history, and it associated him with all the party's brightest stars. Bade, for instance, portrayed his SA-Mann Schulz as being the first to defend Goebbels's honor in “the Battle of Pharus Hall”—a brawl in 1927 with Communists who had mocked the Little Doctor during a speech.Footnote ⁵⁰ Schulz's alleged role in this fight thus assigned him agency in one of the key events in the history of the Berlin NSDAP, a tavern brawl that caused a consequent Parteiverbot.Footnote ⁵¹ The unknown storm trooper of 10 Jahre unbekannter SA Mann was even more tightly integrated into the highlight reel of Nazism's greatest moments. He began his story in Frankfurt as a participant in the passive resistance against the French occupation in 1923—at the time, the central front of the nationalist struggle. He then moved to Berlin just as Goebbels took over as Gauleiter.Footnote ⁵² From here, the unknown storm trooper attended all major Hitler rallies and party events, formed a close working relationship with Goebbels (“Our Doktor”), and became intimate friends with a series of famous SA martyrs—Hans Maikowski, Herbert Gatschke, Peter Geminder, and, most importantly, both Horst and Werner Wessel. The relationships were so intimate that these luminaries shared with the unknown storm trooper their personal as well as their political lives. Horst Wessel, unsurprisingly, proved of particular importance to unknown storm-trooper stories no matter the setting: Lohmann's SA räumf auf! placed him in Vienna, while other versions conjured Wessel in a variety of towns in which he personally instructed local SA troops in his party anthem.Footnote ⁵³ In the Rhineland, nationalist martyr Albert Leo Schlageter appeared with similar frequency. Some of the descriptions proved simply impossible, as with an episode in Lohmann's story where Goebbels rallies a small band of storm troopers—at a date before he had even joined the party.Footnote ⁵⁴ Even when technically possible, the connection to so many famous party figures and events was unlikely for any real person. They were standard, however, for an unknown storm trooper.

Some stories of the unknown storm trooper stated explicitly the agenda served by summoning nationalist legends in this way. Such figures, according to Lohmann's SA räumt auf, served as mythic, ever-living examples of virtue. As Lohmann's unknown storm trooper observed concerning Schlageter, “We youth then cared nothing for the whole Iliad and Odyssey stuff. Our pantheon was the Freikorps fighters. They were the daily bread of our hearts. Often the names—of men, of units—were already legends.”Footnote ⁵⁵ These Freikorps men had become nationalist legends in part because of their own literary output, a mostly autobiographical genre that Werner Best described in 1930 as “heroic realism.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Best first used the phrase to refer to Ernst Jünger's War and Warriors, itself not strictly a Freikorps-story but still firmly within the “heroic realist” tradition, which valorized an author's experiences of World War I and the postwar border skirmishes as part of a long heritage of productive violence.Footnote ⁵⁷ The tradition reached back from Jünger to Nietzsche, and further back into the most traditional mythic stories. What tied them all together was a “joy in adventure” (Abenteuerfreudigkeit) that welcomed conflict as an opportunity to achieve personal transcendence.Footnote ⁵⁸

The unknown storm trooper now took his place as the latest member of a pantheon of legendary heroes. Yet he remained as distant in some ways as these ancient idols. Achilles in his rage or Odysseus with his schemes in fact had more psychological depth than the unknown storm trooper. Unknown storm-trooper novels seemed intimate, but were ultimately impersonal. By filtering the narrative through a single heroic cipher, they invented credible details to distract from their improbability and therefore to fulfill their real purpose, which was to immunize the Nazis' historical claims against refutation by competing facts.

Nazi Publishing's Shift from History to Myth

Novels about the unknown storm trooper must therefore be seen as part of the Nazis' ongoing historiographical project. An unknown storm-trooper story shared many traits with traditional histories, with cynical works of propaganda, and with adventure fiction. Yet it transcended them all in its political utility. Its ideological claims were more plausible for being integrated into the personal story of a recognizable everyman, while its use of traditional heroic tropes encouraged readers to interpret storm troopers as the latest representative of a respected lineage. By casting Nazi ideological themes in the traditional form of the heroic narrative, SA novelists connected National Socialism to the respected institutions of German society: family, religion, and the state. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, an unknown storm trooper's story was more difficult to undermine than fact-based narrative. Indeed, the problems encountered by several early Nazi efforts at history and biography explain the origins of this genre, and its rapid growth as a subset of Nazi publishing in the first few years after the takeover of power.

The political utility of the myth of the unknown storm trooper was based on a fundamental difference between evidence-based histories and accounts that eschewed such intellectual honesty. Simply put, claims made by the former were open to scholarly and popular debate, while the mythic assertions of the latter were not. More straightforward Nazi histories were, of course, also attempts at mythmaking. Generally speaking, both histories and myths served the same purpose: to provide a foundational legend that legitimized the present—in this case, the new regime—by rooting it in a momentous past.Footnote ⁵⁹ Yet myths, as opposed to histories, are irrefutable. They take place in a zone that Mircea Eliade, the famous mid-century scholar of myth and religion who was himself linked to Romania's fascist Iron Guard movement, has called illud tempus: primordial time, a time outside and immune to historical analysis or refutation.Footnote ⁶⁰ The Nazis' use of myth therefore reflected a flight from fact itself, different even from biased and ideological histories. The influential precursor of fascism, Georges Sorel, agreed. Sorel emphasized the transformative power of myth, and he claimed that myths should not be judged on their truth or accuracy, but on their power to motivate action.Footnote ⁶¹

Trends in early Nazi publishing illustrate the differing political utility of history and myth. Additionally, the Nazis' struggles with historical writing show why they saw such promise in the storm-trooper myth. At first, official Nazi histories of the party's struggle for power seemed to be written according to a more or less traditional method. While they were ideologically slanted, they documented real political events in an urban environment: elections, rallies, and the most lethal incidents of political violence. Histories of local party and SA chapters sometimes reproduced the documents on which they were based, in an attempt to establish their objectivity. But this reliance on documentation was problematic—especially since the Nazis shared with their Stalinist adversaries a tendency to edit, falsify, and even forge documentary evidence. Histories of the Hamburg SA showed this tendency with some extremity: they retouched photographs to add more storm troopers in an image, increase the size of an audience, or intensify the flames of an SA bonfire.Footnote ⁶² The publishers seemed unable to resist these additions, which they may have hoped their audiences would accept as literary flourishes. Yet if audiences considered the alterations forgeries, or if they somehow discovered alterations in the documents, it would undermine the political message of the work as a whole.

The Nazis experienced this problem early on with the reception of works that venerated the two most prominent members of the SA, its leader Ernst Röhm and its greatest martyr Horst Wessel. Röhm's autobiography, Geschichte eines Hochverräters, underwent several revisions resulting from the Eher Verlag's desire to coordinate each new edition's content with the party's shifting messages. Few contemporaries would have compared the editions and noticed the contradictions.Footnote ⁶³ But Röhm's public image nevertheless experienced an unpleasant exposure to documentary evidence in April 1931 and March 1932 when the Munich Post published a series of his personal letters that outed him as a homosexual. In the Röhm case, the SA saw how quickly its assertions—in this case, its hypermasculine self-stylings—could quickly come under attack through the discovery of a few documents.

Nazi attempts to enshrine Horst Wessel as the prototypical storm-trooper martyr were similarly problematic. In some respects, these efforts were far more effective and comprehensive than those surrounding any other figure in the party, aside from Hitler himself.Footnote ⁶⁴ In 1932, the first two Wessel biographies appeared, followed after the takeover of power by at least thirteen more, including two authored by Wessel's sister.Footnote ⁶⁵ Yet none of these accounts could establish beyond doubt the party's official version of his life and death.Footnote ⁶⁶ The Nazis' Wessel story was widespread and effective, but it was nevertheless flawed because it was based on a historical person and dealt with facts that could be challenged, undermined, or refuted. The Nazis solved this problem by retreating from the historical itself, a development that can be seen in both literature and film—consider, for instance, the 1933 film's modification of Horst Wessel's story into the pseudonymous Hans Westmar. With a translation of real figures into mythic ones, the story became irrefutable: no letters could emerge to sully the hero's public image, no newspapers could offer contrary versions of the same event.

The Mythic Style of Argumentation

Instead of flawed factual accounts, storm-trooper myths made symbolic claims that, like all myths, aligned their heroes with an assumed natural and social order. Weather imagery, for example, linked the storm troopers to the land itself, a romantic technique of projecting a hero's inner turmoil onto the physical landscape. In many versions of the storm-trooper myth, storms—“Hitler weather,” in Gotthard Kraft—preceded or accompanied moments of recognition by the hero of his place in the Nazi fighting pantheon.Footnote ⁶⁷ The young boys of Bade's Trommlerbub first met their new Nazi friends when they were driven into an SA tavern to take shelter from a sudden violent storm.Footnote ⁶⁸ But as frighteningly as the novels portrayed dangerous weather, they emphasized its quality as a source of energy like that within the storm trooper himself. As the anonymous hero of 10 Jahre unbekannter SA Mann stated, “The raging of the elements matched us well. It was akin to the excitement in our hearts.”Footnote ⁶⁹ But if weather imagery proved the storm troopers' primal connection to the German land, their myth also linked the hero to the German soul. This, the storm troopers believed, reflected three main pillars of German society: the Christian religion, the state, and the family. In all cases, the myth implied that the National Socialists and their SA had earned their hold on power through their commitment to defending these vital spheres of German life from internal and external enemies.

The vast majority of Germans defined German spirituality in Christian terms; most Nazi propaganda therefore sought to associate the movement with Christianity. This association was not, as is often assumed, propaganda calculated to mask fact. As recent studies have shown, Nazi rhetoric claimed strong roots in Christianity, and many National Socialists were dedicated Christians.Footnote ⁷⁰ Despite the regime's later growing comfort with paganism, it was in the Christian God that many National Socialists trusted—if not in church institutions.Footnote ⁷¹ The unknown storm-trooper myth evoked this connection through three techniques. It focused on Sundays as a day of community and missionary work; it alluded to biblical episodes that cast the storm troopers as Christlike figures; and it highlighted Christian storm troopers or allies while painting the Communists as enemies of religion.

Gotthard Kraft began with its hero perched on his windowsill on a Sunday morning, listening to the call of church bells.Footnote ⁷² Other accounts began with Sunday marches or camping trips to the countryside, as in Bade's Trommlerbub. The unknown storm trooper did his best work on Sunday. Like his factual counterparts, he held his largest marches on this day, especially those that involved multiple SA units.Footnote ⁷³ Practical reasons lay behind this pattern: storm troopers who were employed could attend a Sunday march, not ones during the week. Yet the mythic accounts encouraged a religious understanding of these Sunday activities, which they painted with missionary tones. On Sundays, unknown storm troopers spread the good word about their movement, marching through their own cities or to small neighboring towns that had not yet been evangelized.Footnote ⁷⁴ They also sold newspapers in higher volumes on Sunday than on any other day.Footnote ⁷⁵ In all these activities, the unknown storm trooper self-consciously took up the missionary's cross of hardship and responsibility. As Willi Dickkopp reflected, “One question plagued me: should I give up this preaching and live my life in bourgeois peace, or should I take up the challenge and further pursue the truth?”Footnote ⁷⁶

Unlike many actual storm troopers, the unknown storm trooper was always careful not to appear irreligious. He regularly attended church.Footnote ⁷⁷ But he was more than a simple Christian: he was also a Christlike figure who sacrificed his blood for the renewal of the people. Willi Dickkopp resolved to bear the “jealousy and hate” of the workers' neighborhoods to bring to them the light of Nazism, and he compared the SA's forceful protection of Nazi meetings to Christ's ejection of money changers from the temple.Footnote ⁷⁸SA räumt auf emphasized the blood of a storm trooper who was wounded with a knife on Christmas night.Footnote ⁷⁹ In all these instances, holding true to how Goebbels portrayed Wessel's famous martyrdom, the storm trooper's wounds and death only sped the movement's ultimate triumph. The most powerful and extended treatment of this concept came at the end of Gotthard Kraft. Gotthard spent the novel fighting for the “holy movement,” saluting “the holy swastika-flag,” and affixing “the holy swastika-badge” to his coat.Footnote ⁸⁰ In the end, having been shot by Communists like many of the unknown storm troopers, he lay in his hospital bed “like a picture of Christ.”Footnote ⁸¹ The pastor who delivered his funeral oration invoked the words of John 15:13—“Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”Footnote ⁸²

The appearance of the pastor signified another way in which the myth associated the storm trooper with Christianity: it placed religious figures alongside him. Pastors marched in SA columns, spoke at funerals, and highlighted enemies as false or nonbelievers. Willi Dickkopp's SA troop, for example, included a theology student whom they ironically called “Rabbi.”Footnote ⁸³ Gotthard's pastor promised that his murderer “will face God's law in heaven!”Footnote ⁸⁴ The storm trooper's enemies, on the other hand, included only atheists and fraudulent clerics among their ranks. The hero of 10 Jahre unbekannter SA Mann encountered a former seminary student who had been thrown out of his seminary for chronic drunkenness. When a fight broke out at a speech by Goebbels, the SA attempted to rescue him from the melée. This “pastor”—always mentioned with quotation marks around his title—rewarded them with ingratitude and brought a lawsuit against Goebbels himself.Footnote ⁸⁵ The storm trooper's enemies mocked Christian morality, attacked the SA on Sundays, on Christmas day, and at church.Footnote ⁸⁶ In the most extreme violation of religious codes, these enemies—including, in one case, a corrupt Catholic priest—denied a Christian burial to the fallen storm trooper Peter Geminder. Geminder, a “no lip-service Christian” (“kein Lippenchrist),” had been an upright, moral, and pious figure, yet in death the enemies of the SA treated him with a blasphemous contempt that echoed Achilles's desecration of Hector's corpse.Footnote ⁸⁷ The unknown storm trooper and his comrades opposed the moral decay promoted by their enemies. Sometimes, the search for God—“for something great”—had drawn him to the SA in the first place.Footnote ⁸⁸ The unknown storm trooper spread a gospel of salvation and sacrificed his blood for national renewal, and his actions were supported by religious leaders within the ranks. In contrast to his enemies, who sought to destroy traditional religion in Germany, he heralded its renewal.

Stories of unknown storm troopers laid symbolic claim to secular as well as spiritual sanction. But associating the Nazis—and particularly the storm troopers—with the traditional German state was even more difficult than associating them with Christianity. The storm troopers fought not only against other paramilitary groups, but also against the police and justice system. The myth dissolved this conflict in two ways. More commonly, they linked the storm troopers to symbols of the German state other than the police and courts: particularly to soldiers, national heroes, university professors, and teachers. The myth sometimes showed university professors—who were themselves state employees—as storm troopers. When Willi Dickkopp's storm-trooper brother encountered one in a marching column, the scholar laughed off the brother's formal address to him and replied with the informal, “Du, now I'm an SA-Mann and a comrade, not doctor.”Footnote ⁸⁹ The scholar compared the situation to his own wartime experience, when he encountered a former professor of his own in the trenches, who told him, “My dear boy . . . the professor hasn't gone to war . . . He who stands before you is soldier and comrade—nothing more. Today I may pull you up out of the mud, and tomorrow you'll do the same for me. Now wipe that stupid look off your face and give me a cigarette.”Footnote ⁹⁰

To emphasize the SA's ultimate loyalty to the German state (if not the German republic), unknown storm-trooper myths also featured marches and demonstrations with veterans' associations. During a visit by Hindenburg to the Rhineland in 10 Jahre unbekannter SA Mann, storm troopers, members of the Stahlhelm and other veterans' associations, and civilians stood shoulder to shoulder to greet the war hero and new president. As Hindenburg's car drove by, he looked the unknown storm trooper in the eyes, moving the latter to exclaim spontaneously, “Oh, God, let him guide Germany's destiny so that our Führer's goal can be reached: that young, strong, German men can work openly and without shame for Germany's rebirth!”Footnote ⁹¹

Yet even the mythic genre could not deny the tension with the state—especially the SA's recurring conflicts with the police and the courts. Like all histories and newspaper accounts of the SA struggle, the myth chronicled courtroom prosecutions—which it saw as persecutions. It also alleged police favoritism for the left-wing paramilitaries. Behind the generally unfriendly face of a supposedly corrupt justice system, however, the myth of the unknown storm trooper claimed that loyal functionaries awaited the chance to help true German patriots. Sometimes, storm troopers found support among individual police officers. In Lohmann's SA räumt auf, the storm trooper, who was visiting a small Mecklenburg town, found himself accused of shooting at Communists near a church—a particularly enraging false accusation, for the irreligious Communists had in fact done the deed. Warned not to leave town while the case was being investigated, the storm trooper packed his bags but decided not to risk evading the police guards outside. Suddenly, a policeman appeared at his door, commanded him to get into a car, and helped him escape. Before parting ways, the storm trooper dared finally to clarify matters:

Such stories sought to prove that policemen had been compelled to hide their Nazi sympathies during the Weimar Republic and only waited for a chance to show their true colors.

Elsewhere, storm troopers such as Gotthard Kraft encountered policemen who could be persuaded past their stereotypes about the brownshirts. Gotthard's conversion of one such official, a relative of his girlfriend who served as a police captain in Berlin, featured one of the genre's most extended intellectual debates. Throughout the scene, the author emphasized not only the similarity in the viewpoints and arguments of storm trooper and policemen, but also their physical connection. Storm trooper and policeman looked each other in the eye, laid hands on each others' shoulders, and in the end clasped hands and swore their friendship. The policeman then declared his conversion in religious tones that echoed the spiritual, “Amazing Grace”: “I rejoice in this hour, which has taught me to see and again believe! [Ich freue mich dieser Stunde, die mich sehen und wieder glauben gelehrt hat!]”Footnote ⁹³

Among soldiers, teachers, policemen, and judges, the unknown storm trooper of myth continually discovered allies within the state system. By showing these men as no more loyal to the Weimar Republic than the storm trooper was, myth reconciled SA criminality and disloyalty: though the storm troopers had fought the law under the Weimar Republic, the republic itself violated a higher conception of the German state. The SA, the NSDAP, and the sympathetic state officials who appeared in the myth thus served true Germany, which was destined to rise again as the Third Reich.

Stories of unknown storm troopers often portrayed state officials as paternalistic. The storm trooper thus stood in a familial relationship to these men, whose approval overwrote the conflict with natural fathers who disapproved of their sons' political activism. The unknown storm trooper was often the black sheep of his family, who had defied the father's wishes to abandon politics in favor of university studies or professional advancement, or opposed his father's conservatism, communism, or socialism.Footnote ⁹⁴ The storm trooper recognized that he could be accused of placing party before family. He admitted that the SA cared for its comrades like family members, and acknowledged that time spent in party service meant time away from the family.Footnote ⁹⁵ The myth of the unknown storm trooper did not deny the strains placed on the family by party life; instead, it recast the strains as the product of noble sacrifice, a form of “silent heroism”:

These tears and divisions were very real problems for the SA in its struggles to win and retain young men for the movement—and, after the takeover, retroactively to portray themselves as loyal to the families they had torn asunder in the pursuit of power. The myth thus minimized the friction between the storm trooper and the German by depoliticizing family members' objections to the storm trooper's lifestyle. Myths provided supportive testimonials from family members, especially women, who objected less to the SA man's ideological goals than to the personal risk he assumed. For fear of Willi's safety, his wife cried half the night into her pillow upon hearing news of his recruitment.Footnote ⁹⁷ Gotthard's mother prayed to God to protect her boy, but she always supported his actions.Footnote ⁹⁸ In other cases, the storm trooper's parents tried to convince him to quit the group after his first injury in combat with the Communists.Footnote ⁹⁹ But the storm trooper usually persuaded parents, wives, and girlfriends that the reward was worth the risk. SA-Mann Brand, the hero of the film, parried his mother's concerns with just such arguments, while Lohmann's storm trooper used them to win over both his parents and his girlfriend. When the girlfriend suggested that he devote more time to his medical studies, he convinced her that selfish devotion to one's profession mattered less than exertion for the greater good:

It took the storm trooper days to think up his answer to her “clever” and “brave” arguments, but after serious thought he finally told her, “Child, you must think as if it's war. . . . And instead of the trenches, it's the SA that's the only way to save lives. It's war right now, war for our Volk.” Her reply: “Really? When you say it that way, then I start to believe it.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

Unknown storm-trooper stories emphasized the special fondness that women and children supposedly had for the SA. These two groups were the most immune to lies spread about the storm troopers by their enemies.Footnote ¹⁰² Women also at times took concrete action to support their storm-trooper kin. Women sent letters of moral support, served meals, bound wounds, and repaired uniforms.Footnote ¹⁰³ Sometimes, the wife competed with her storm-trooper husband in party activism. In one story, during the preparations for Hitler's first major speech in the Berlin Sportpalast, all party members scurried to make sure that the hall was filled. The storm trooper's wife was as busy as anyone else. She felt such deep commitment to her husband's ideals that she even neglected her duty to make him supper:

SA women performed these duties not only out of love for the storm trooper, but also out of their own ideological commitment. Indeed, myths that featured relatively equal partnerships of storm troopers and their women developed political and romantic allegiance in tandem. Zöberlein's Command of Conscience structurally connected increasing political engagement with major steps forward in the romantic relationship. In this work, Hans Kraft's engagement with his Freikorps served as a precondition for the introduction of a proper female partner. Next, the couple's encounters with sexually predatory Jews intensified their ideological and personal commitments; finally, they consummated the relationship against the backdrop of the Hitler Putsch.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

This parallel structure of political and personal union formed the major plotline of the only version of the myth with a female heroine: Dem Tod so nah . . . Tagebuchblätter einer SA-Mannes Braut. The anonymous diarist met her storm-trooper fiancée, Wolfgang, through their work for the party, and when he asked her to marry him, they both thought of the movement. As she wrote:

The bride's words proved prophetic when Wolfgang was shot and killed just before they could marry. The pastor who was to marry them helped to maintain her strength by reminding her that she was to be an SA man's bride. She thus attended the funeral in full support of the movement.

The storm troopers' women bore pain and anguish for their common movement. Yet the risk to the storm trooper, and his dependents, paled in comparison with the horrors the genre claimed awaited them should the SA's enemies triumph. The myth portrayed the threat in both economic and moral terms. Willi Dickkopp witnessed both. Having sailed to Russia while working with the Hamburg-America Line, he saw firsthand the effects of the “Soviet paradise” on young girls there, who prostituted themselves to German sailors to stave off hunger.

The storm trooper saw the economic dangers of socialism that were already occurring in Germany. The Weimar Republic had ruined the German family through unemployment and financial hardship, so storm troopers in SA Mann Brand, Gotthard Kraft, SA räumt auf, and 10 Jahre unbekannter SA Mann were the sole providers for their families, the fathers having failed in this capacity.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Yet the storm trooper concerned himself more with a gendered, moral problem. Communists in the myth sought to entice German women into participating in “Asiatic orgies.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ They physically attacked women and children, both on the street and at home.Footnote ¹¹¹ Willi Dickkopp's son and three-year-old daughter had to be taken to the hospital when they were poisoned by a Communist who gave them a tainted bottle of milk.Footnote ¹¹² His daughter woke up terrified in the middle of the night, yelling “Mommy, mommy—the Communists are coming!”Footnote ¹¹³

These attacks on women and children justified SA violence. As Willi said, “These were the tactics used against us. What were we supposed to do to counter them? Wasn't it understandable that here and there in the middle of this struggle someone transgressed [Nazi] Party discipline and got into a fight with one of these ruffians?”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Communists attacked German children in Trommlerbub as well. When the protagonists were exposed as Nazis to their working-class community, it formed a mob that sought either to reclaim them or kill them. “I am a Communist!,” one of their fathers exclaimed, “and I will not allow my son to be stolen away by those fascists! Cursed band! I'll break every bone in that boy's body! I am a Communist, and my boy is also a Communist, or I'll beat him dead!”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Fortunately for the youths in question, storm troopers protected them. But the Communists in other stories were so unscrupulous that they used a storm trooper's chivalry against him. Communists instructed their own women to cry out in distress from dark alleys while they lay in hiding to ambush storm troopers who came to her rescue.Footnote ¹¹⁶ To the threatened German family of unknown storm trooper stories, the party offered the best solution. In Willi's case, it helped his family move out of the Communist neighborhood. But it also presented a more lasting solution: like most works in this genre, Willi's story ended with Hitler's appointment as chancellor and the founding of the Third Reich.Footnote ¹¹⁷

The case for the storm trooper as protector of the German family, state, and religion could be made in mythic form far better than through reference to facts. As discussed in turn, each of these associations carried problematic aspects, and a historical or evidentiary assertion of the link could have been weakened with countering facts and anecdotes. In the myth, on the other hand, the storm troopers could be trusted to protect and defend these institutions from internal and external enemies. Unknown storm-trooper stories thus implanted the idea that the storm troopers were, despite popular images of their violence and brutality, simply fervent defenders of all that Germans held dear.

The Decline of the Storm-Trooper Myth

This collection of powerful symbols combined to form a persuasive and appealing product. The relationship between storm-trooper novels and the SA itself was therefore quite close—emotionally as well as financially and politically. But astute observers would have questioned whether this loud support in the public sphere served to distract from the growing resentment many storm troopers held that the Nazi Party was failing to provide them direct, material support commensurate with the SA's deeds in pursuit of Nazi power. Given the great tensions between the party and SA concerning how the spoils of victory should be distributed, party support of storm-trooper myths represented an important way in which the party could reward the victorious storm trooper with prestige, fame, and honor—without running afoul of the military and economic factions whose interests a reformist SA would threaten. If, as the storm troopers increasingly complained, the party could not or would not reward its oldest fighters with jobs and social welfare, it could at least celebrate their struggle and burnish their image in the public eye. Stories of unknown storm troopers accomplished this task quite well, but they could not solve the lingering tensions between the party and the SA. Indeed, disagreements over the future role of the SA in the Nazi state led to violent conflict in June 1934, which saw Röhm's murder, the purge of the SA leadership, and the end of its hopes for a major role in military affairs. After the purge, storm-trooper myths retained their importance as a way for the party to show its debt without having to deliver any concrete rewards. Ironically, therefore, half of the unknown storm-trooper novels appeared after the SA's decimation. Though many of the “old fighters” had been pushed aside and the “political soldiers” demobilized, the literary trend continued. If anything, it became even more mythic in its setting of Weimar street fights and tavern living, which now portrayed a lost world, an Urzeit, that the storm troopers had long ago lived but that now belonged to an age of legend. This continued literary affection shown to the hobbled organization was akin to the attention American culture paid to American Indians only after their defeat, or the British adoption of Scottish cultural trappings only once that northern threat had been tamed. As European and American audiences then and now appreciate, lost worlds can be inherently more interesting and romantic than present-day settings. They can also serve surprisingly effective and popular political purposes.

Storm-trooper novels thus lived on even after the purge. Their time, however, faded as the Third Reich focused its attention on the war it planned soon to begin. All the authors of storm-trooper novels who continued to write after 1937 switched to more straightforward war stories, either from World War I or, once it began, World War II. Eventually, even war stories became difficult to publish. When paper rationing grew stricter after 1941, man power further shifted into the armaments industry, and material shortages across the economy grew extreme, literary production of all types increasingly shut down.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Some storm-trooper authors thereafter signed on with SS units as battlefield reporters, where they found the heroic death whose merits they had long advocated.

The rise and fall of storm-trooper mythic literature therefore mirrors the place of the SA in the Nazi regime itself. Early on, the Nazi Party strongly supported the use of storm-trooper experiences and perspectives to win converts through the appropriation of heroic tropes held dear by many Germans who otherwise might not have sympathized with Nazi claims. After 1934, the works contributed to the continued public honors given to the otherwise-unrewarded SA. In the conduct of war, SA novels, like the SA itself, retained the essential function of inculcating in young German men a psychological readiness for violent defense of a threatened homeland. As the Nazi state stepped up its military training in the late 1930s, the SA story again found a prominent role. On the eve of the war, tales from the Kampfzeit gave young soldiers perspective on the larger struggle in which they were engaged. Their struggle, like that of any myth, was timeless: they were merely the most recent generation to rise to its challenge. Eventually, however, as the war machine absorbed the storm troopers, their literary outputs then transferred to that experience. They therefore left behind many elements that had previously been so important to their story: a sense of locality, an immersion in the rituals and support systems of daily urban life, and a grounding in family that had justified their violent adventures. If these themes continued into war literature, they appeared only as distant objects of longing or vague justifications for a larger war beyond their control. That war therefore eventually destroyed SA literature as a separate genre, just as surely as it slaughtered many of the remaining former storm troopers. In every chapter of its development, SA literature was exactly what its storm-trooper authors had always proclaimed: true to their experiences and fates in the service of the Nazi Party. The myth, however, proved tragic rather than transcendent—not only for their many victims, but also for themselves.