Heinrich Himmler : A Life (23 page)

At the end of 1930, only a few months after the Stennes crisis, it did look very much as if Himmler would succeed in removing the SS from their position of subordination to the SA. In an SS order of December 1930 he stated: ‘The complete separation of the SS from the SA in terms of both organization and functions has been accomplished.’ In fact, this ‘complete separation’ was to occur only after 30 June 1934; until then Himmler remained subordinate to the SA leadership, which Hitler reorganized towards the end of the year.
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After Hitler had taken over personal command of both the SA and the SS at the beginning of September 1930, the day-today running of the SA was carried out by von Pfeffer’s chief of staff, Otto Wagener.
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At a meeting of SA leaders in Munich on 30 November 1930 Hitler announced the appointment of a new SA chief: Ernst Röhm, who had returned from a lengthy stay in Bolivia.

This appointment came as a surprise. It is true that Röhm had become a kind of patron of the SA during the years 1920 to 1923 when, as a captain
in the Reichswehr, he was endeavouring to coordinate the activities of the various paramilitary leagues, and had been closely connected with the history of this organization. However, from the very beginning his interest had been focused on the SA’s military potential. He saw it as a paramilitary league and not, as Hitler did, a unit whose main function was to serve the party. By integrating the SA into a military alliance, the Kampfbund, in the autumn of 1923, he had effectively put Hitler under pressure to launch the putsch of 9 November. Nevertheless, after his arrest Hitler had assigned Röhm the task of reorganizing the SA, and during 1924 the latter had once more tried to incorporate it into a large unified paramilitary organization, the Frontbann. When Hitler left Landsberg prison at the end of 1924 the irreconcilable differences between the two men came to the fore. Hitler had learnt from the experience of November 1923 that a militarization of the SA, as Röhm had pursued and continued to pursue it, was politically a cul-de-sac. Röhm had then left the SA and taken employment as a military adviser in Bolivia. There was no evidence that Röhm had revised his views on the role of SA in the meantime. Thus, even after his appointment he continued to hold views diametrically opposed to those of Hitler.
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It is therefore difficult to understand why Hitler chose Röhm. Basically, it was a concession to the rebelliously minded SA leaders, who, being mostly former army officers and Free Corps fighters like the old warrior Röhm himself, did not believe that the SA should be ‘in the hands of a politician’. Instead, it should be ‘in the hands of the leaders of its own units’, as a participant in a meeting of SA leaders on 30 November 1930 put it in a memorandum.
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In Röhm’s favour was also the fact that, as a result of his absence abroad, he had not been involved in the factional struggles and, despite their differences of opinion, he maintained a good relationship with Hitler. Röhm took up his post at the beginning of 1931 under the ‘Supreme SA Leader, Adolf Hitler’.

Contrary to the assumption that Himmler had expressed at the end of 1930, the SS remained subordinated to the SA. This was made unmistakably clear in the Order No. 1 signed by Röhm on 16 January 1931: ‘On 14 January 1931, the Supreme SA Leader ordered that the Reichsführer of the SS should be subordinate to the Chief of Staff [of the SA].’
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As we have seen, Himmler was an old acquaintance and comrade of Röhm’s. The standard-bearer of the Reichskriegsflagge, Röhm’s own paramilitary league, on 9 November 1923, had not let anything stop him from visiting
Röhm in Stadelheim prison after the abortive putsch. Also, Himmler had corresponded with Röhm during his Bolivian exile and had encouraged him in his decision to return to Germany.
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Full of pride, he had kept his old mentor in touch with the development of the SS and had not omitted to emphasize his earlier role in the Reichskriegsflagge: ‘Many an SS leader has felt the benefit of the training I got from you’, he wrote in November 1929. ‘The boss has set us quite a target of recruiting several thousand men by the spring and so we’ve got to meet it.’
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Röhm replied in March 1930: ‘I would like to congratulate you above all for increasing the size of the SS. Knowing you as I do, I had no doubt that it was being led in the old spirit and along the lines of our old RKF.’
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It is unclear whether Himmler was yet aware of Röhm’s homosexuality. He must have heard rumours about it, but may have rejected them as opposition propaganda. It was not until the summer of 1931 that the opposition press supplied clear evidence of his homosexual orientation. The publication of private letters of Röhm in March 1932 finally provided irrefutable proof.
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At this point, however, Himmler probably calculated that he could exploit his superior’s sexual orientation and the loose living of many SA men by contrasting it with the virtue and discipline characteristic of the SS. This is a point to which we shall return.

After his appointment Röhm immediately set about defining the relationship between the SA and SS. The Order No. 1 of 16 January, already referred to, stated: ‘The tasks of the SA and the SS are distinct. Thus there should be no differences of opinion or friction between the two.’ In future, the SS should be no larger than 10 per cent of the complement of the SA; the SA should not recruit from the SS and vice versa. Röhm’s detailed instructions give an indication of where in practice the friction was likely to occur: ‘In the event that both the SA and the SS are engaged on party duties, overall command shall be exercised by the highest-ranking and longest-serving SA or SS leader in uniform, so long as there is a unit present of which he is in command and the number of SA and SS units involved corresponds to the ratio of 1:10.’ In the event that ‘both the SA and the SS are engaged on party duties’, the SA should be responsible for ‘protecting the meeting’; ‘the protection of the speaker, the political leaders, and the leaders present as guests shall be the responsibility of the SS’. In the case of marches the following regulation applied: ‘The main task of the SA is to carry out propaganda marches; the SS has the task of manning the barriers and maintaining security (street patrols). In the case of marches where
leaders take the salute, with the exception of those manning the barriers, the SS will march as a unit at the back of the SA column.’ And, finally: ‘All SA and SS leaders, political leaders, and party comrades are obliged to follow the orders of the SS when it is carrying out its duties.’
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The rapid growth of the SS required continual adjustments to the organization. Already in 1930 three SS Higher Command districts had been created, a kind of regional inspectorate from which the SS Abschnitte (sections or districts) would emerge.
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Order No. 25 of 12 May 1931 introduced new titles for the units. From now on the SS no longer organized itself in brigades but in ‘Standarten’; the Standarten were then divided into several ‘Sturmbanns’.
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In order to increase its flexibility, emphasis was placed on establishing ‘motorized units’.
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Moreover, Himmler professionalized the work of his staff, which by 1931 was already composed of five departments, by introducing rules of procedure.
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Whereas the SA recruited its members above all from the lower-middle and working classes, the SS mainly recruited from the ‘better class of person’. There were, however, continual complaints that the SS was trying to recruit SA members. Thus, the General Inspector of the SA, for example, complained to Röhm about its ‘uncomradely manner of recruitment’.
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The rivalry between the two Nazi mass paramilitary organizations was also exacerbated by the fact that the SS projected itself as the much more disciplined of the two, and claimed to enjoy the particular trust of the party leadership.
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According to an order issued by SS-Oberführer Sepp Dietrich in a self-confident tone, the SS had been ‘bonded together from the most active elements in the party as a particularly reliable instrument of power in the hands of the supreme leader’. It was intended ‘for those duties that go beyond the normal responsibilities and operations carried out by the SA’, in particular, ‘for the maintenance of order and security’.
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Above all, however, the SS was to be used again and again against the undisciplined SA. In particular, during the so-called second Stennes revolt of April 1931 the SS was employed as an internal party disciplinary force with which to tame the SA. Although it had apparently been settled, the conflict between the party’s political leadership and the SA leadership, which had broken out for the first time in east Germany—Stennes’s area of responsibility—in the late summer of 1930, had never really been resolved. In the winter of 1930–1, therefore, Stennes increasingly adopted an anti-parliamentary stance, which was inevitably liable to clash with Hitler’s ‘policy of legality’. Stennes’s increasingly radical rhetoric ran the risk of provoking a ban on the
party; this had been greatly facilitated by an emergency decree issued by the Reich President. In the light of this situation, Hitler dismissed Stennes at the beginning of April, which prompted the latter to declare that he was ‘taking over’ the party in Berlin and in the eastern provinces of Prussia. Stennes instructed the SA to occupy the party’s offices in Berlin (they met with physical resistance from the SS). He was able to win over a section of the SA in his area of responsibility, but there was no general SA uprising. The Berlin party leadership quickly regained control of its offices. During the following weeks the SA leadership corps in north and east Germany was systematically purged of Stennes supporters; around 500 SA men had to leave.
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Around two months later, in June 1931, Himmler gave a talk at a meeting of SS leaders on the subject of ‘The Purposes and Aims of the SS, the Relationship between the SS, the SA, and the Political Formations’. It is the only surviving document from the ‘time of struggle’ which reveals Himmler’s ideas for the future tasks and aims of the SS in a coherent manner.

After some introductory rem the ‘traditions of the SS’, Himmler concluded that while the SA were the ‘regiments of the line’, the SS were ‘the guards’, ‘the Führer’s last reserve [. . .] Whenever it comes to the last roll of the dice, in every nation it is the guards who prove decisive.’ Since this was the role that Hitler had assigned to the SS, ‘it has been set up for this purpose and everybody must go along with this [. . .] because it is an order from our leader and every order must be obeyed’. Himmler continued: ‘The SS must become a force that includes the best human material that we still possess in Germany. The SS must be held together by the shared community of blood. It must be impossible for it to fall apart.’ It was true that there were still ‘blemishes’, but nevertheless ‘we are on the way to becoming a force that is better than a military unit, that is more disciplined than they are. Only when we can claim to compete with the best military unit shall we have earned the right to wear the death’s-head badge, only then will we be the guards.’ Only then, as Himmler put it later, would ‘the old front-line soldiers want to support us, only then will they come over to us and at that moment the “Stahlhelm”
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will be finished. There will be only one “League of Front-line Soldiers”: the SS.’

In a central passage of the speech Himmler developed the idea of a final impending conflict between the ‘Nordic nation’ on the one side and ‘Bolshevism’ on the other:

Shall we, by filtering out the valuable blood through a process of selection, once again succeed in training and breeding a nation on a grand scale, a Nordic nation? Shall we once again succeed in settling this Nordic people in surrounding territory, turning them into peasants again and from this seedbed create a nation of 200 million? Then the earth will belong to us! But if Bolshevism is victorious then this will mean the extermination of the Nordic race, of the last valuable Nordic blood, and this devastation would mean the end of the earth.

According to Himmler, the SS would have a pioneering role to play in this final struggle:

We have been given the greatest and most magnificent task that a nation can be faced with. As far as the value of our blood and the numbers of our population are concerned we are dying out. We are called upon to establish foundations so that the next generation can make history, and if we create the right foundations it will be a great one. The best soldiers, the best Germans will come to us of their own accord, we will not need to seek them, if they see that the SS has been set up correctly, that the SS is really good.

What is remarkable about this major speech is the fact that Himmler assumed that his fantasy of the final struggle between ‘the Nordic nation’ and ‘Bolshevism’ would take place only in the ‘next generation’, and that he saw his own task as being above all to create the basis for this struggle for existence. Himmler saw the key to creating such an elite organization as being the selection of the ‘racially best people’:

An SSF [SS leader] will never keep someone with a typical Slav face in his unit for very long because so long as that person is in the troop or storm (
Sturm
), he will never get the troop or storm into a proper order. He will soon notice that there is no community of blood with the other comrades, who are of more Nordic descent. The passport photos that have to be submitted together with the application forms ensure that Reich headquarters can inspect the heads of the SS candidates. One only needs to try the experiment of admitting a Mongol to the SS; it’s certain that he would be thrown out during the trial period. But so long as this Mongol is in the SS it will be impossible to create the spirit which is essential for the SS. The breaking-point will come when the racially pure person will stay the course whereas the racially impure will fall by the wayside.