The Coming of the Third Reich (40 page)

Back in Germany, Höss enrolled in a clandestine successor organization to his Free Corps, and in 1922 he joined in the brutal murder of a man he and his comrades believed was a Communist spy in their ranks, beating him into a bloody mess with clubs, slitting his throat with a knife, and finishing him off with a revolver. Höss was arrested and imprisoned in the Brandenburg penitentiary, where he learned, he later reported, the incorrigible nature of the criminal mind. He was shocked by the ‘filthy, insolent language’ of his fellow-prisoners, and appalled at the way in which the prison had become a school for criminals instead of a place to reform them. Clean, neat and tidy, and accustomed to discipline, Hoss quickly became a model prisoner. The crude bullying and corruption of some of the warders suggested to him that a more honest and more humane approach towards the prisoners might have had a good effect. But quite a few of his fellow-inmates were, he concluded, absolutely beyond redemption.
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A few months before his arrest, he had become a member of the Nazi Party. He was to spend most of the rest of the 1920s in gaol, though, like many such men, he was released well before completing his sentence as a result of an agreement between the far left and far right deputies in the Reichstag to vote through a general amnesty for political prisoners.
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Clearly, however, when he was not in prison, the Nazi Party provided him with the discipline, order and commitment he so obviously needed in life.

One of Höss’s associates in the murder was another member of the Rossbach Free Corps, Martin Bormann, born in 1900, son of a post office clerk and trained as a farm manager. During the war he enrolled in the army but was assigned to a garrison and saw no active service. However, like Hoss, he found it impossible to fit into civilian life. He came into contact with the Free Corps through providing them with a base on the estate where he worked in Mecklenburg. As well as joining the Free Corps, he also enrolled in an ‘Association Against the Arrogance of the Jews’, another tiny and otherwise insignificant fringe group on the far right. Bormann was not as closely involved in the murder as Höss, and only had to serve a year in gaol. In February 1925 he was released, and by the end of 1926 he had become a full-time employee of the Nazi Party, carrying out myriad administrative tasks, first in Weimar, then in Munich. A hopelessly incompetent speaker and, unlike Höss, not constitutionally inclined to physical violence, Bormann became an expert on insurance for the Party and its members, organized financial and other kinds of relief for brownshirts in distress and slowly began to make himself indispensable to the movement. But the fact that he was above all an administrator cannot disguise the fanatical nature of his political commitment. Like Hoss and so many others, he reacted to the defeat of Germany in the First World War by turning to the most extreme forms of resentful nationalism, rabid antisemitism and hatred of parliamentary democracy. Quickly coming into contact with Hitler, he fell totally under his spell, and soon began to impress the Nazi leader with his boundless, unconditional admiration and loyalty. To others in the Party hierarchy, especially lower down the ranks, he could show an entirely different side, revealing in the process a brutal ambition that was eventually to make him one of the key figures in the Third Reich, above all in its later stages during the war.
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With men such as these, even more with slightly older figures who had gained their military experience through active service in the central battlefields of the war, it was clear that the Free Corps were indeed, as has been said, the ‘vanguard of Nazism’, providing a good part of the leadership cadre of the Party in the mid-1920s.
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Yet already by this time a younger generation was entering the Party, the postwar generation, eager to emulate the now legendary exploits of the front-line soldiers. A few drifted over from the Communists, attracted by political extremism, activism and violence irrespective of ideology. ‘I quit the party in 1929’, reported one, ‘because I could no longer agree with the orders from the Soviet Union.’ For this particular activist, however, violence was a way of life. He continued to attend Party rallies of all descriptions and to throw himself into street fighting alongside his old comrades until a local Nazi leader offered him a position.
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Violence was like a drug for such men, as it clearly was for Rudolf Höss, too. Often, they had only the haziest notion of what they were fighting for. One young Nazi reported that witnessing opponents trying to break up a Nazi meeting ‘made me instinctively a National Socialist’ even before he became acquainted with the Party’s goals.
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Another, joining the Nazi movement in 1923, lived a life of almost incessantly violent activism, suffering beatings, stabbings and arrests for the best part of a decade, as he recounted in detail in his autobiographical essay; these clashes, rather than the actual ideas of the movement, were what gave his life significance. For one young man, born in 1906 into a Social Democratic family, hostility to the Communists was at the core of his commitment. The times he experienced in the unit of the stormtroopers known as the ‘murderers’ storm’ were, he later said, ‘too wonderful and perhaps also too hard to write about’.
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A particularly graphic, though by no means untypical account of stormtrooper activities was provided by a schoolteacher, born in 1898, who had fought in the war and, after far-right activities in the early 1920s, joined the Nazis in 1929. He was called up one evening with his brownshirt group to defend a Nazi rally in a nearby town against the ‘reds’:

We all gathered at the entrance of the town and put on white armbands, and then you could hear the thundering marching of our column of about 250 men. Without weapons, without sticks, but with clenched fists, we marched in strict order and iron discipline into the catcalls and screaming of the crowds before the meeting-hall. They had sticks and fence-boards in their hands. It was 10 o‘clock at night. With a few manoeuvres in the middle of the street, we pushed the crowd against the walls to clear the street. Just at that moment, a carpenter drove through with a small truck and a black coffin in it. As he went by, one of us said: ‘Well, let’s see whom we can put in there.’ The screams, cries, whistles and howls grew ever more intense.

The two rows of our column stood still, charged up with energy. A signal, and we go marching into the hall, where a few hundred rioters are trying to shut up our speaker. We came just in time, marching in step along the walls until we had closed the ring around them, leaving an opening only at the entrance. A whistle sounds. We tighten the ring. Ten minutes later ... we had put them out into the fresh air. The meeting goes on while outside all hell breaks loose. We then escorted the speaker back out, cutting once more through the swirling mob in closed formation.

For this stormtrooper, the ‘Marxists’ were the enemy, as they were for many ex-soldiers fighting in what he called ‘the spirit of the frontline comradeship, risen from the smoke of the sacrificial vessels of the war, and finding its way into the hearts of the awakened German people’.
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II

‘Old fighters’ such as these proudly listed the injuries and insults they had received at the hands of their opponents. The ‘persecution, harassment, scorn and ridicule’ they had to suffer only stiffened their resolve.
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At one meeting, in Idar-Oberstein, according to a Party activist, born in 1905, four hundred stormtroopers turned up, including himself:

One after the other, our four speakers had their say, interrupted by furious howling and catcalls. But when, in the ensuing discussion, an interlocutor was reprimanded for saying, ‘We don’t want the brown plague in our beautiful town’, tumult broke out. There followed a battle with beer steins, chairs, and the like, and in two minutes the hall was demolished and everyone cleared out. We had to take back seven heavily injured comrades that day and there were rocks thrown at us and occasional assaults in spite of the police protection.
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Yet the depth of hatred and resentment which Nazi stormtroopers felt against the Social Democrats as well as the Communists can only be understood in terms of their feeling that they were under constant attack not just from the Social Democrats’ paramilitary affiliate, the Reichsbanner, but also in many areas from the police, who in Prussia at least were controlled by Social Democratic ministers such as Carl Severing and Albert Grzesinski. ‘The terror of police and government against us’, as one stormtrooper put it, was another source of resentment against the Republic.
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Such men were outraged that they should be arrested for beating up or killing people they considered to be Germany’s enemies, and blamed the prison sentences they sometimes had to suffer on the ‘Marxist judicial authorities’ and the ‘corruption’ of the Weimar Republic.
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Their hatred for the ‘reds’ was almost without measure. One young Nazi still inveighed in 1934 against ’the red flood ... hordes of red mercenaries, lurking in the dark‘, or as another brownshirt put it, the ‘red murder mob ... the screaming, screeching hordes ... hate-filled, furious faces worthy of study by a criminologist’.
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Their hatred was fuelled by countless clashes, all the way up to terrifying incidents such as a notorious gun battle between Communists and brownshirts that broke out on a train in Berlin-Lichtenfels on 27 March 1927. The brownshirts contrasted Communist criminality with what they saw as their own selfless idealism. One stormtrooper reported with pride that the struggle of the late 1920s ’demanded financial as well as psychological sacrifices of every comrade. Night after night, leaflets for which we ourselves had to pay had to be distributed. Every month there was a rally ... which always gave our little local branch of 5-10 members 60 marks of debts since no innkeeper would rent us a hall without advance payment.’
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The oft-repeated claim that many brownshirts only joined the organization because it offered them free food, drink, clothing and accommodation, not to mention exciting and brutal kinds of entertainment, does scant justice to the fanaticism which motivated many of them. Only the oldest activists joined in the expectation of getting a job or receiving financial support. For the young, it did not matter so much.
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Nazi student leaders often got themselves deeply into debt by paying personally for posters and pamphlets.
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With many others it must have been the same.

Of course, testimonies such as these, addressed to an American sociologist, were bound to emphasize the self-sacrifice and dedication of their writers.
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Nevertheless, it is difficult to grasp the full extent of the stormtroopers’ fanaticism and hatred unless we accept that they often did feel they were making sacrifices for their cause. Hitler himself drew attention to this when he told an audience in January 1932 not to

forget that it is a sacrifice when today many hundreds of thousands of men of the National Socialist movement climb onto trucks every day, protect meetings, put on marches, sacrifice night after night and return only at daybreak - and then either back to the workshop and factory, or out to collect their pittance as unemployed; when they buy their uniforms, their shirts, their badges, and even pay their own transportation from what little they have - believe me, that is already a sign of the power of an ideal, a great ideal!
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The Nazi Party depended on such commitment; much of its power and dynamism came from the fact that it was not dependent on big business or bureaucratic institutions such as trade unions for its financial support, as the ‘bourgeois’ parties and the Social Democrats to varying degrees were, still less on the secret subsidies of a foreign power, along the lines of the Moscow-financed Communists.
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Many people were won over to Nazism by Hitler’s demagogy. Now presented in dramatically staged mass rallies and huge open-air meetings, Hitler’s speeches at the end of the 1920s had a power greater than ever before. One young nationalist, born in 1908, had attended meetings addressed by such luminaries of the extreme right as Hugenberg and Ludendorff before he finally found inspiration when he

heard the Leader Adolf Hitler speak in person. After this, there was only one thing for me, either to win with Adolf Hitler or to die for him. The personality of the Leader had me totally in its spell. He who gets to know Adolf Hitler with a pure and true heart will love him with all his heart. He will love him not for the sake of materialism, but for Germany.
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There are many other such testimonies, from an antisemitic metalworker, born in 1903, who discovered at a Hitler meeting in 1927 that ‘our Leader radiates a power which makes us all strong’, to another stormtrooper, born in 1907, who declared that he fell under Hitler’s spell in 1929 in Nuremberg: ‘How his blue eyes sparkled when his stormtroopers marched past him in the light of the torches, an endless sea of flames rippling through the streets of the ancient Reich capital.’
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