Army of Evil: A History of the SS (5 page)

And so it proved. Some sort of deal seems to have been offered by von Kahr to ensure the defendants’ discretion. Certainly, the Bavarian government lobbied hard to move the trial from the Reich Court in Leipzig to the People’s Court in Munich, where the presiding judge, Georg Neithardt, showed extraordinary bias towards Hitler and his co-defendants.
⁵
The trial was a piece of political theatre. Ludendorff, Hitler’s senior co-defendant, who had acted as “patron” of the
Putsch
but had not been intimately involved in its planning or execution (although he had marched on 9 November), arrived every day in a limousine dressed in full uniform with his decorations. Hitler was permitted to wear his own clothes, including his Iron Cross, rather than a prison uniform, and he was given unprecedented latitude to interrogate witnesses and harangue the court.
⁶

Given these circumstances, the final result was hardly unexpected, although “the judgement was scandalous, even by the biased standards of the Weimar judiciary.”
⁷
Ludendorff, much to his annoyance, was acquitted. Hitler and three others received five years’ “fortress incarceration”—a
lenient form of imprisonment usually reserved for those who had acted with supposedly “honourable” motives.
⁸
This verdict caused nearly as much outrage on the conservative right as it did on the left. It was not difficult to see through the court’s claim that the defendants had been moved to act by “a pure patriotic spirit and the most noble will.”
⁹
It was an obvious fix.

Hitler was returned to Landsberg, where he lived in a bright, comfortable and airy cell, hitherto occupied by Count Arco-Valley, the murderer of Eisner. He had the company of some forty fellow inmates, some of whom had volunteered to share his incarceration. All enjoyed “almost all the comforts of normal daily life,”
¹⁰
as well as many gifts and messages of goodwill.

Hitler’s conviction drew a line under the first phase of National Socialism. In some respects, the movement appeared shattered: the party had been suppressed, the SA banned and largely disarmed, and the nationalist-racist coalition was in a state of disintegration. But incarceration gave Hitler a chance to concentrate on his future and crystallise his political views. He was already an extreme anti-Semite with a passionate desire to overturn the terms of the Versailles Treaty, but the rest of his political outlook was far from focused. In Landsberg, at the urging of Max Amann, his platoon sergeant in the war, and with the assistance of Rudolf Hess and Emil Maurice, he set down his thoughts in detail for the first time. These writings would eventually be published under the title
Mein Kampf
(
My Struggle
). Although in no sense a manifesto or blueprint for his future actions as German dictator, this provided a basic framework of the philosophy that lay behind them.
¹¹
It is a turgid, almost unreadable tract with no literary merit, but it is useful in revealing an author obsessed with race and imbued with a startlingly visceral, murderous anti-Semitism, combined with a strong desire to acquire “living space” for the German race in the East. Of course, SS activity would later be dictated by these obsessions.

Imprisonment also gave Hitler the opportunity to plot his ascent to
power. It was abundantly clear that the paramilitary route was no longer a realistic option for a relatively small movement whose centre of gravity was still in Bavaria. While the NSDAP would continue to position itself as the political party of the combat veterans of the Great War, Hitler began to realise that he would need to mobilise the wider masses to gain power, so a tighter and more disciplined organisation would be needed. He concluded that he should take on the full mantle of leadership of the National Socialist movement, rather than merely acting as its propagandist, or “drummer,” as he had previously described himself.
¹²
His destiny was no longer to place a figure like Ludendorff in power, but to rule Germany himself.

Prior to his arrest, Hitler had passed control of the now banned NSDAP to Alfred Rosenberg, an Estonian German who had served in the Tsar’s army in the First World War. Rosenberg had been educated in Estonia, Latvia and Russia, but emigrated to Germany following the Bolshevik coup of 1917. There was undoubtedly a Machiavellian element in Hitler’s appointment of the uncharismatic and unpopular Rosenberg—he did not want to be challenged for leadership of the party when he was eventually released, so he picked an interim leader who was detested by everybody. However, there were also few other candidates who were not in prison themselves.
¹³

Rosenberg’s leadership proved to be catastrophic. With both the NSDAP and the SA now temporarily illegal, in January 1924 he created the
Grossdeutsche Volksgemeinschaft
(GVG—Greater German Racial Community) as a rallying point for former members. However, Walter Buch, acting head of the SA at this time, refused to accept either Rosenberg’s or the GVG’s authority over the SA, while a number of significant former NSDAP members, including the charismatic Gregor Strasser, joined alternative splinter groups. Schism and rivalry continued throughout the first half of the year. Despite this, though, the Reichstag elections on 4 May saw the nationalist-racist parties gain 6.5 per cent of the vote nationwide, with particularly good results in Bavaria and Mecklenburg, in northern Germany. This threw into
sharp relief the argument between those elements in the
völkisch
(literally “folkish,” but implying a Germanic nationalist-racist outlook) groups who favoured a legal parliamentary strategy and those who wanted to seize power by force.

The remnants of the NSDAP comprised a minority group among the thirty-two folkish deputies elected to the Reichstag, and shortly afterwards they agreed to merge, for parliamentary purposes, with their rivals. For many NSDAP supporters, this reeked of compromise and parliamentarianism, so bickering continued through the summer. This was exacerbated by Hitler’s equivocation over which route he favoured; by Ludendorff’s apparent interest in assuming the overall leadership of the folkish groups; by Hermann Esser and Julius Streicher, who ousted Rosenberg from the leadership of the GVG; and by Röhm, who attempted to unite the folkish and nationalist paramilitary groups under the title
Frontbann
.

Hitler himself withdrew from politics in June 1924 to concentrate on writing
Mein Kampf
. This was probably motivated in part by an acceptance of his inability to control events from inside the fortress, and in part by his hope for parole and an early release. Such was his self-confidence that he assumed he would be able to rejoin the cut and thrust of nationalist politics later, when he was in a better position to do so.
¹⁴

In December, there were more elections to the Reichstag. This time, the “united” folkish groups secured only 3 per cent of the vote, which meant their representation in the parliament dropped to just fourteen seats. This electoral disaster pleased Hitler greatly. As far as he was concerned, the near collapse of the nationalist-racist groups in his absence strengthened his claims for overall leadership. He may also have calculated that the Bavarian government would now view the extreme right as a spent force, which would leave him free to rebuild the movement on his release from Landsberg.
¹⁵

Hitler was freed on parole on 20 December 1924, meaning that he served just over thirteen months of his five-year sentence. Suggestions
that he should be deported to Austria were quickly quashed by the Austrian government’s refusal to accept him, which allowed him to return immediately to the political fray in Bavaria. Hitler’s parole conditions meant that, in theory, he was not permitted to speak in public in most parts of Germany until 1927 (in Prussia until 1928), but he still had sufficient influence among sympathetic officials within the Bavarian government for the NSDAP and its newspaper to be unbanned in February 1925.
¹⁶

Apart from the disintegration of the NSDAP and its blurring with the folkish groups, one of the key problems that Hitler faced was the issue of the SA, which had also been banned and had fragmented under various leaders. Prior to the
Putsch
, Hitler and Röhm had shared similar ideas about the purpose of the organisation and its allied paramilitaries: they were the armed force that would be needed to overcome both the state and political opponents and push through a National Socialist seizure of power. The failure of 9 November 1923, however, convinced Hitler that this was a ludicrous notion: the SA and the other paramilitaries had not even been able to take Munich, let alone Germany, and they had been outfought by the local police. He acknowledged that the SA, or something similar, might still be useful, but now he viewed it as only one of many tools that might bring him to power. Röhm, on the other hand, continued to insist on the primacy of the military element and lobbied for another coup. His involvement in the
Putsch
had finally led to him being cashiered from the army and placed on probation, but this had left him free to create a new organisation from the remnants of the SA and the other paramilitary groups. As Hitler had languished in Landsberg through the spring and summer of 1924, Röhm’s
Frontbann
had increased in strength to some thirty thousand members,
¹⁷
drawn from former members of the SA as well as the
Reichskriegsflagge
(Imperial War Flag), the
Stahlhelm
(Steel Helmets—a First World War veterans’ group) and other Free Corps and combat leagues. The groups in this loose coalition usually maintained loyalty to their old leaders, mostly charismatic junior officers
from the war such as Edmund Heines, Gerd Rossbach and Graf Wolf von Helldorf. They did not see either Röhm or the ostensible patron of the organisation, Ludendorff, as their new chief, but the
Frontbann
still seemed to be a significant and potentially threatening force.

Röhm and Hitler were personally close—Röhm was almost unique in addressing Hitler with the familiar
du
—but he did not appreciate that Hitler now saw himself as the overall leader and strategist of the movement, rather than as an equal, ally and associate. When Hitler was released from Landsberg, he asked Röhm to re-form the SA as “propaganda troops at the beck and call of party leaders,”
¹⁸
but Röhm demurred and the issue was still not resolved by February 1925 when the SA was unbanned with the rest of the party and could be organised openly. Hitler had grasped, with a clarity that Röhm did not possess, that the route to power in Germany had to be largely legal, so the party and its peripheral groups needed to reflect this. Their reorganisation had to begin immediately, whether Röhm wanted to implement it or not.

Hitler and his associates had hoped the Munich
Putsch
would succeed given the collapse of the German economy, hyperinflation and consequent civil unrest precipitated by the French occupation of the Ruhr in January 1923. They had been proved wrong, but the occupation had still generated a great deal of international sympathy for Germany and parallel condemnation of France. Before long, an international committee was established to re-examine the question of war reparations. This resulted in the Dawes Plan of August 1924, in which it was agreed that Germany’s reparations payments would be reduced, the German central bank would be reorganised, and US loans would be made available to Germany. Foreign troops were also ordered to leave German soil, and the last French soldiers left the Ruhr almost a year later.

The Dawes Plan gave an immediate short-term boost to the German economy. Hyperinflation ended, foreign investment increased and exports began to flow, all of which ushered in a period of relative
political stability. Nevertheless, violence remained a significant part of the political scene in Bavaria and many other parts of Germany. Hitler and other senior leaders of the NSDAP were potential targets for attack, both from the left and from rivals on the far right. Consequently, in March 1925, he ordered Julius Schreck to organise a new personal security detail. As Hitler later remarked: “When I came out of Landsberg, everything was broken up and scattered in sometimes rival bands. I told myself then I needed a bodyguard, even a very restricted one, but made up of men who would be enlisted without restriction, even to march against their own brothers. Only twenty men to a city (on condition that one could count on them absolutely) rather than a suspect mass.”
¹⁹
Schreck, a stocky, coarse-featured man who wore a moustache like Hitler’s, had joined the NSDAP in 1921 via the Free Corps, having been a member of a “revolutionary” unit in 1919.
²⁰
He had been an early member of the SA and was in the small circle of tough ex-soldiers who formed Hitler’s personal entourage, acting as chauffeurs, bodyguards and even audiences for his monologues. He was also in the Headquarters Guard and was an organiser of the Raiding Squad Adolf Hitler, which had been in the vanguard during the
Putsch
. Now, in response to Hitler’s order, he mustered up to twelve of his close associates and formed the new bodyguard team.

The team—labelled the
Schutzstaffel
(Protection Squad, or SS)—included several of the “usual suspects” who had formed Hitler’s close personal entourage since the early days of the movement: Maurice, currently Hitler’s first-choice dogsbody, chauffeur and factotum; Graf; Julius Schaub, who would later become Hitler’s personal adjutant
*
and bore SS number 7;
²¹
and Erhard Heiden. Christian Weber and Rudolf Hess may have been members, too. In April 1925, eight members of the new force made their first public appearance, acting as torchbearers at the funeral of Ernst Pöhner, the former Munich Chief of Police
and a National Socialist supporter, who had been killed in a car accident.
²²
In 1942, Hitler would remark: “It was Maurice, Schreck and Heyden [sic] who formed in Munich the first group of ‘tough ’uns,’ and were thus the origin of the SS.”
²³