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

cause a shift in the balance of power within the party. SA members were on the streets, fighting with their Communist and Social Democrat opponents, and this gave Stennes the opportunity to make his move. He demanded that senior SA commanders should be on the party’s electoral list for the Reichstag; an increase in funding for the SA, including payment for members who guarded party meetings; and a reduction in the power of the “civilian” regional leaders. On 23 August, just three weeks before the election, he led a delegation to Munich to put these demands directly to Hitler. The latter refused to see them, which led to a kind of strike by the Berlin SA: Stennes’ staff officers resigned and refused to carryout their propaganda or protection duties. Then, on 28 August, a group of SA men raided the Berlin party headquarters and beat up the business manager. In response to this attack, SS guards were posted at the building.
    By now, the Berlin SS was under the control of Stennes’ predecessor, Daluege. Seething with resentment at Stennes’ appointment, he had left the SA and had joined its rival organisation on 25 July (membership number 1119). He gained immediate promotion to senior leader rank and was given command of the Berlin SS * in place of the relatively ineffectual Kurt Wege. Thereafter, Daluege was specifically commissioned by Hitler to keep an eye on the manoeuvrings of Stennes and his clique, and a number of trusted former SA colleagues supplied him with information. Even so, Daluege failed to predict the Berlin SA’s next move, which came on the night of 30 August. A large group of SA men again attacked the party headquarters, where they beat up the seven SS guards (two of whom received serious head injuries) and then smashed up the furniture inside. The raid was reported to Goebbels—who had been speaking at a party meeting in Breslau—and he drove through the night to take control of the situation. Humiliatingly, the only way to get Stennes’ men out of the headquarters was to enlist the help of the much despised Berlin Police. A riot squad duly arrived and arrested twenty-five SA men.
    This infighting represented a real crisis for the NSDAP, so Goebbels quickly contacted Hitler, who was in Bayreuth, and asked him to intervene. The next day, Hitler met with Stennes at a hotel near the Anhalter railway station in Berlin. Then he toured Berlin’s SA bars and cafés, where he told the disgruntled SA men that they could trust him and that he would soon remedy their complaints.
    Hitler’s intervention papered over the cracks for the time being. Little news of the dispute reached the press and the election dulypassed off successfully. Nevertheless, Hitler was well aware that he would need to address the deep-rooted problems in the SA sooner rather than later. Before long, he dismissed Pfeffer von Salomon and took over the role of
Oberste SA Führer
(SA Commander-in-Chief) himself. He also wrote to Ernst Röhm (who was still in Bolivia) to ask him to return and become SA
Stabschef
(Chief of Staff). Röhm had kept in touch with the situation in Germany and was fully aware of the implications of the NSDAP’s success in the general election. 15
    Critically, the SS’s loyalty to the party leadership in the face of the SA unrest had not gone unnoticed, and soon it was given a new official function. In a circular sent to senior SA officers at the beginning of October 1930, the SS was described as a police organisation within the movement, with the authority to prevent illegality among party formations. This required the SS to be functionally independent of the SA in recruitment (its membership was supposedly capped at 10 per cent of total SA strength) and to perform its new policing function, even though it remained notionally subordinate to the SA.
    At the same time, the overall role of the SA was re-examined. At a meeting of the organisation’s leadership in Munich on 30 November 1930, Hitler proposed Röhm