I

The Nazi movement as it had developed by the late 1920s was dependent on the energy and fanaticism of its active members. Without them, it would have been just another political party. The Third Reich was created not least by the ordinary, street-level members of the brownshirts and the Nazi Party. What was it, then, that bound young men to the Nazi movement with such a terrifyingly single-minded sense of commitment? Where did the wellsprings of brownshirt violence lie? Hitler’s charisma obviously played a part; yet much of the Party, especially in north Germany, came into being virtually without him. The dynamism of the movement had deeper roots. The autobiographies and diaries of a variety of leading Nazis provide some clues. And there is an excellent contemporary source that allows us some unique insights into the mindset of the Nazi activist. In 1934 the sociologist Theodore Abel, a professor at New York’s Columbia University, obtained the co-operation of the Nazi Party for an essay competition in which people who had joined the Party or the brownshirts before 1 March 1933 were asked to write brief testimonies. Several hundred were sent in, and although both the Party and the respondents saw this as an opportunity to impress Americans with the sincerity and commitment of their movement, Abel’s insistence that the prize would go to the most honest and trustworthy account seems to have ensured a reasonable degree of accuracy, at least as far as the testimonies could be checked.¹³⁰

For the grass-roots Party activist, the elaborate theories of men like Rosenberg, Chamberlain, Spengler and other intellectuals were a closed book. Even popular writers such as Lagarde and Langbehn appealed mainly to the educated middle classes. Far more important were durable popular antisemitic propagandists such as Theodor Fritsch, whose Handbook on the Jewish Question, published in 1888, reached its fortieth edition in 1933. Fritsch’s publishing house, the Hammer Verlag, survived the First World War, and continued to produce a lot of popular pamphlets and tracts which were quite widely read amongst rank-and-file Nazis.¹³¹ As one stormtrooper wrote in 1934:

After the war, I became very much interested in politics, and eagerly studied newspapers of all political shadings. In 1920 for the first time I read in a right-wing newspaper an advertisement for an antisemitic periodical and became a subscriber of the Hammer of Theodor Fritsch. With the help of this periodical, I got to know the devastating influence of the Jews on people, state and economy. I must still admit today that this periodical was for me really the bridge to the great movement of Adolf Hitler.¹³²

More significant still, however, was the inspiration provided by the basic elements of Nazi propaganda - the speeches by Hitler and Goebbels, the marches, the banners, the parades. At this level, ideas were more likely to be acquired through organs such as the Nazi press, election pamphlets and wall-posters than through serious ideological tracts. Among ordinary Party activists in the 1920s and early 1930s, the most important aspect of Nazi ideology was its emphasis on social solidarity - the concept of the organic racial community of all Germans - followed at some distance by extreme nationalism and the cult of Hitler. Antisemitism, by contrast, was of significance only for a minority, and for a good proportion of these it was only incidental. The younger they were, the less important ideology was at all, and the more significant were features such as the emphasis on Germanic culture and the leadership role of Hitler. By contrast, ideological antisemitism was strongest amongst the older generation of Nazis, testifying to the latent influence of antisemitic groups active before the war, and the nationalistic families in which many of them had grown up.¹³³

Men often came to the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party after serving at the front in 1914-18, then becoming involved in far-right organizations such as the Thule Society or the Free Corps.¹³⁴ Young Rudolf Höss, for example, the future commandant of Auschwitz, came to the Party this way. Born in 1901 in Baden-Baden, he grew up in south-west Germany in a Catholic family. His father, a salesman, intended him for the priesthood, and, according to Höss, instilled in him a strong sense of duty and obedience; but he also intoxicated him with tales of his own past days as a soldier in Africa and the selflessness and heroism of the missionaries. Höss lost his faith as the result, he later wrote, of the betrayal of a secret he had confided in his confessor. When the war broke out, he enrolled in the Red Cross and then in his father’s old regiment in 1916, serving in the Middle East. At the end of the war, his parents both dead, he enlisted in a Free Corps unit in the Baltic, where he experienced the brutality of civil war at first hand.

Back in Germany, Höss enrolled in a clandestine successor organization to his Free Corps, and in 1922 he joined in the brutal murder of a man he and his comrades believed was a Communist spy in their ranks, beating him into a bloody mess with clubs, slitting his throat with a knife, and finishing him off with a revolver. Höss was arrested and imprisoned in the Brandenburg penitentiary, where he learned, he later reported, the incorrigible nature of the criminal mind. He was shocked by the ‘filthy, insolent language’ of his fellow-prisoners, and appalled at the way in which the prison had become a school for criminals instead of a place to reform them. Clean, neat and tidy, and accustomed to discipline, Hoss quickly became a model prisoner. The crude bullying and corruption of some of the warders suggested to him that a more honest and more humane approach towards the prisoners might have had a good effect. But quite a few of his fellow-inmates were, he concluded, absolutely beyond redemption.¹³⁵ A few months before his arrest, he had become a member of the Nazi Party. He was to spend most of the rest of the 1920s in gaol, though, like many such men, he was released well before completing his sentence as a result of an agreement between the far left and far right deputies in the Reichstag to vote through a general amnesty for political prisoners.¹³⁶ Clearly, however, when he was not in prison, the Nazi Party provided him with the discipline, order and commitment he so obviously needed in life.

One of Höss’s associates in the murder was another member of the Rossbach Free Corps, Martin Bormann, born in 1900, son of a post office clerk and trained as a farm manager. During the war he enrolled in the army but was assigned to a garrison and saw no active service. However, like Hoss, he found it impossible to fit into civilian life. He came into contact with the Free Corps through providing them with a base on the estate where he worked in Mecklenburg. As well as joining the Free Corps, he also enrolled in an ‘Association Against the Arrogance of the Jews’, another tiny and otherwise insignificant fringe group on the far right. Bormann was not as closely involved in the murder as Höss, and only had to serve a year in gaol. In February 1925 he was released, and by the end of 1926 he had become a full-time employee of the Nazi Party, carrying out myriad administrative tasks, first in Weimar, then in Munich. A hopelessly incompetent speaker and, unlike Höss, not constitutionally inclined to physical violence, Bormann became an expert on insurance for the Party and its members, organized financial and other kinds of relief for brownshirts in distress and slowly began to make himself indispensable to the movement. But the fact that he was above all an administrator cannot disguise the fanatical nature of his political commitment. Like Hoss and so many others, he reacted to the defeat of Germany in the First World War by turning to the most extreme forms of resentful nationalism, rabid antisemitism and hatred of parliamentary democracy. Quickly coming into contact with Hitler, he fell totally under his spell, and soon began to impress the Nazi leader with his boundless, unconditional admiration and loyalty. To others in the Party hierarchy, especially lower down the ranks, he could show an entirely different side, revealing in the process a brutal ambition that was eventually to make him one of the key figures in the Third Reich, above all in its later stages during the war.¹³⁷

With men such as these, even more with slightly older figures who had gained their military experience through active service in the central battlefields of the war, it was clear that the Free Corps were indeed, as has been said, the ‘vanguard of Nazism’, providing a good part of the leadership cadre of the Party in the mid-1920s.¹³⁸ Yet already by this time a younger generation was entering the Party, the postwar generation, eager to emulate the now legendary exploits of the front-line soldiers. A few drifted over from the Communists, attracted by political extremism, activism and violence irrespective of ideology. ‘I quit the party in 1929’, reported one, ‘because I could no longer agree with the orders from the Soviet Union.’ For this particular activist, however, violence was a way of life. He continued to attend Party rallies of all descriptions and to throw himself into street fighting alongside his old comrades until a local Nazi leader offered him a position.¹³⁹ Violence was like a drug for such men, as it clearly was for Rudolf Höss, too. Often, they had only the haziest notion of what they were fighting for. One young Nazi reported that witnessing opponents trying to break up a Nazi meeting ‘made me instinctively a National Socialist’ even before he became acquainted with the Party’s goals.¹⁴⁰ Another, joining the Nazi movement in 1923, lived a life of almost incessantly violent activism, suffering beatings, stabbings and arrests for the best part of a decade, as he recounted in detail in his autobiographical essay; these clashes, rather than the actual ideas of the movement, were what gave his life significance. For one young man, born in 1906 into a Social Democratic family, hostility to the Communists was at the core of his commitment. The times he experienced in the unit of the stormtroopers known as the ‘murderers’ storm’ were, he later said, ‘too wonderful and perhaps also too hard to write about’.¹⁴¹

A particularly graphic, though by no means untypical account of stormtrooper activities was provided by a schoolteacher, born in 1898, who had fought in the war and, after far-right activities in the early 1920s, joined the Nazis in 1929. He was called up one evening with his brownshirt group to defend a Nazi rally in a nearby town against the ‘reds’:

We all gathered at the entrance of the town and put on white armbands, and then you could hear the thundering marching of our column of about 250 men. Without weapons, without sticks, but with clenched fists, we marched in strict order and iron discipline into the catcalls and screaming of the crowds before the meeting-hall. They had sticks and fence-boards in their hands. It was 10 o‘clock at night. With a few manoeuvres in the middle of the street, we pushed the crowd against the walls to clear the street. Just at that moment, a carpenter drove through with a small truck and a black coffin in it. As he went by, one of us said: ‘Well, let’s see whom we can put in there.’ The screams, cries, whistles and howls grew ever more intense.

The two rows of our column stood still, charged up with energy. A signal, and we go marching into the hall, where a few hundred rioters are trying to shut up our speaker. We came just in time, marching in step along the walls until we had closed the ring around them, leaving an opening only at the entrance. A whistle sounds. We tighten the ring. Ten minutes later ... we had put them out into the fresh air. The meeting goes on while outside all hell breaks loose. We then escorted the speaker back out, cutting once more through the swirling mob in closed formation.

For this stormtrooper, the ‘Marxists’ were the enemy, as they were for many ex-soldiers fighting in what he called ‘the spirit of the frontline comradeship, risen from the smoke of the sacrificial vessels of the war, and finding its way into the hearts of the awakened German people’.¹⁴²