Army of Evil: A History of the SS by Adrian Weale Read Free Book Online

argued that “the idea” was greater than “the leader.” Leaders, he said, were fallible and temporary, while the idea was eternal. Not surprisingly, Hitler thought this was nonsense: “For us, the Leader is the Idea, and each party member has only to obey the Leader.” 9 He was equally dismissive of Strasser’s claim that the NSDAP’s strategy oflegality and cooperation with the bourgeois right would hinder the “Social Revolution” that they both espoused. In Hitler’s view, this was “Nothing but Marxism.” 10
    Despite the frosty nature of this meeting, Hitler typically hesitated before deciding to act against Strasser’s clique. In fact, he took so long that he was pre-empted by Strasser and his supporters, who in early July announced that they were leaving the NSDAP to create their own radical National Socialist organisation: the Union of Revolutionary National Socialists, later known as the Black Front. This proved to be political suicide: very few National Socialists followed Strasser, and his departure signalled the end of any serious “socialist” strand within the NSDAP. It also allowed Goebbels’ elevation to National Propaganda Chief.
    The second internal party crisis—which also began in 1930, although it only came to a head the following year—had a profound effect on the position of the SS within the movement.
    As we have seen, the chief of the SA, Pfeffer von Salomon, recruited a number of ex-officers from the German armed forces, the Free Corps and the
Frontbann
in a bid to instil some military-style discipline into a corrupt and brutal gang. One of these new recruits was a former police captain, Walter Stennes, who became
SA-Oberführer Ost
(SA-Senior Leader East)—responsible for Berlin and eastern Germany. However, this appointment effectively supplanted the man who had created and built up the Berlin SA into a force of over five hundred men: Kurt Daluege—a tall, burly building engineer. Born in Kreuzberg in 1897, Daluege had joined the NSDAP in 1922 11 and had swiftly gained a reputation as a vicious and effective operator in Berlin street politics (where his limited intelligence earned him the nickname “DummiDummi” 12 ). Unsurprisingly, he was far from happy when Stennes was brought in to run “his” unit.
    Stennes, for his part, seems to have been in sympathy with Otto Strasser. Certainly, both he and the men of the Berlin SA shared Strasser’s frustration at the slow pace of the National Socialist “revolution.”Their unrest grew when the party leadership refused to nominate Stennes and several other leading SA officers as candidates for the Reichstag. But this was just the tip of an iceberg of disquiet in Berlin and throughout the SA. Stennes was by no means alone in disagreeing with Hitler’s legal route to power, and the economic crisis that followed the Wall Street Crash threw this dispute into sharp focus.
    The SA benefited greatly from the crisis, with its membership increasing in 1930 to between “60,000 and 100,000.” 13 But most of these were not hard-core National Socialists; rather, they were unemployed and distressed, and had turned to the SA simply as a source of food and support. Stennes himself reported: “In some Berlin units 67% of the men are unemployed.” 14 Meanwhile, the central party organisation—administrators who were widely derided within the SA as “civilians”—kept the SA on a tight financial rein. Resentment grew at the traffic of cash from SA street collections and membership dues to party headquarters, with little coming back the other way. SA commanders wanted to hang on to their new recruits, and felt the need to spend some money on them in order to do so, but all of that money—which they had collected—was being channelled into the election campaign.
    Notwithstanding the SA’s lack of cash, its huge increase in membership, combined with its increased activity in the run-up to the September election, had the potential to