The Formation of the Nazi Constituency 1919-1933 (RLE Nazi Germany Holocaust) by Thomas Childers

Author:Thomas Childers [Childers, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Germany, Historiography
ISBN: 9781317625803
Google: V42QBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-09-19T01:24:27+00:00

6

VIOLENCE AS PROPAGANDA: THE ROLE OF THE STORM TROOPERS IN THE RISE OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM

Richard Bessel

There can be little doubt that violence played an important role in the rise of the Nazi movement. The Nazi press proudly reported the violent confrontations between Hitler’s supporters and their political opponents; Nazi leaders made a point of presenting themselves as tough characters who — in contrast to the men leading other political parties — were not afraid to back up words with deeds; and the Nazi movement attracted hundreds of thousands of young men into an organisation — the Sturmabteilungen (‘storm sections’, or SA) — whose primary task lay in providing the muscle for the violent propaganda campaigns of the NSDAP. The public face of National Socialism during the ‘struggle for power’ was openly aggressive, and representatives of the Nazi movement made a point of asserting their willingness to engage in violence. Here at last, so the impression was cultivated, was a nationalist political movement prepared to take its message on to Germany’s streets.

Examples of violent and aggressive posturing abound in the literature which emanated from the Nazi movement and in the speeches of Nazi leaders during their campaign to seize power. ‘Struggle’ was indeed the key word used to describe the Nazis’ assault on German politics. Military metaphors permeated the Nazis’ accounts of their own activities. Thus Hitler’s much-publicised airborne propaganda tours during 1932 were described as a ‘combat flight’ (Kampfflug);1 and the competition for the votes of the German electorate often was viewed in terms of war.2 The activities of the storm troopers were described in particularly aggressive language, of ‘offensives’ and the ‘annihilating assaults of our armies’ upon the enemies of National Socialism.3 Goebbels, in his account of the struggle for power on the streets of Berlin, portrayed the brown-shirted defenders of the Nazi faith in the following terms:

The SA man wants to fight, and he also has a right to be led into battle. Without a fighting tendency the SA is absurd and pointless.4

And the official Nazi historian of the Berlin SA described the spirit of Nazi politics succinctly when he wrote that the ‘battling brownshirts of Berlin-Brandenburg’ wrote their history ‘not with the pen but with the fist’.5

The violent image which the Nazi movement wanted to present to its supporters and to the public at large was expressed clearly in the following description of a confrontation near the small Schleswig-Holstein town of Eutin in March 1929, when ‘reds’ threw stones and bottles at a van full of SA men after a Nazi rally:

As the vehicle was leaving the village it suddenly was pelted with stones and bottles. It halted immediately, in order to catch the perpetrators. These fell into a house. The SA now faced … the decisive question: Should we here and now, without any hesitation — and contrary to the principles of bourgeois law — set an example of how we apply the law of action? … After a short time the SA decided to follow

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