Hitler and his God

Mayhem and Murder

In post-war Munich one of the very first necessities for the propagation of an idea in public was protection from the rowdy beer hall mores, intensified by a nervous, explosive political situation. One of the traits of the Bavarian character, besides a maudlin sentimentality when in a romantic mood or drunk, is its physical exuberance often bordering on violence. In the time under consideration violence was in the air everywhere in Germany. The thousands of battle-hardened soldiers had brought the atmosphere of the front into the fatherland, with violence and death still marching by their side. Nothing could be more alien and despicable to them than the bourgeois world of civil “decency”. This was a generation of nihilists, whether the exalted, literary nihilism of an Ernst Jünger or the crude, physical nihilism of the street fighter whose only loyalty was to his comrades-in-desperation.

Moreover, Germany was a divided country where the tension of a possible civil war was almost palpable and where it ignited at times in the revolutionary bids for power mentioned before. It was impossible to take a public stand, and still more to propagate a new political party, without the physical force to confront any opposition. Hitler’s awareness of this fact from the very beginning may be ascribed to the obvious circumstances, but behind his stress on the necessity of physical force there was something more profound, something “metaphysical”. “While the programme of the ordinary political parties is nothing but the recipe for cooking up favourable results out of the next general elections”, he wrote in Mein Kampf, “the programme of a Weltanschauung [like his] represents a declaration of war against an existing order of things, against present conditions, in short, against the established Weltanschauung … In order to carry a Weltanschauung into practical effect it must be incorporated in a fighting movement … Any Weltanschauung, though a thousand times right and supremely beneficial to humanity, will be of no practical service for the maintenance of a people as long as its principles have not yet become the rallying point of a militant movement”. 175

From the beginning this man was convinced that he was bringing a new “Weltanschauung”, a new world vision, and still more a new Faith to Germany and the world; he had seen at once that the insignificant DAP might be used as the seed-bed of a mass party to dominate all of society; and he knew that only physical force, in other words violence, was able to bring about the realization of his aspirations. “Since the first day of our foundation”, he wrote, “we were resolved to secure the future of the movement by fighting our way forward in a spirit of blind faith and reckless determination … We, by our aggressive policy, are setting up a new Weltanschauung which we shall defend with indomitable devotion … Terror cannot be overcome with the weapons of the mind, but only by counter-terror”. 176 Here is the origin of the barbarism, terror and cruelty which will be the hallmarks of the Third Reich. “Though these were violent times, this was from its inception an exceptionally violent movement”, observes Laurence Rees. 177 Konrad Heiden heard Hitler shout: “We may be inhuman! But if we save Germany, we have accomplished the greatest deed in the world. We may do wrong. But if we save Germany, we have ended the greatest wrong in the world. We may be immoral. But if our people is saved, we have reopened the road for morality!” 178

The need for a gang of muscular bodyguards was obvious from the first occasions on which the NSDAP stepped into the open. Just like the Socialist and Communists, and like their rightist rivals, the Nazis needed at their meetings a Saalschutz, a trained guard to silence the hecklers or throw them into the street, if need be with bloody harshness. The use of beer mugs and table and chair legs was part of the political customs of that period. In this the Nazis were as industrious as their opponents, and Hitler himself received a prison sentence for breaking up, with the assistance of his cronies, a meeting of Bavarian monarchists at the Löwenbräukeller.

Many years later Hitler will reminisce in his monologues: “I could use only people who knew how to brawl. It was the same everywhere: people who were not ready to use their fists, but could only make plans, were of no use. I needed people who were ready to do what had to be done” 179 – which may mean anything. “What we needed and need”, he wrote in Mein Kampf, “were and are not a hundred or two hundred hot-headed conspirators, but hundreds of thousands and more hundreds of thousands fanatical fighters for our ideology. It is not in secret circles that one should work, but in gigantic mass manifestations, and the road of the movement cannot be cleared by dagger or pistol, but by the conquest of the street. We must teach Marxism that the future lord of the street is National Socialism, just as one day it will be the lord of the nation.” 180

And so it was that the Sturmabteilung (literally “attack section”), SA for short, came into being. At first these desperados were recruited under the cover of a sports club, but things changed when professionals took matters in hand, more specifically the Ehrhardt Brigade. The full name of this notorious Free Corps, which fought after the war in Brunswick, Munich and Silesia, was “Marine Brigade Ehrhardt”, after its founder and leader, Korvettenkapitän (equivalent to Commander) Hermann Ehrhardt. “At the time of the mutiny in Kiel”, the event which at the beginning of November 1918 sparked off the German revolution, “the spade-bearded Ehrhardt had begun mobilizing antirevolutionary soldiers into a five-thousand man brigade, which one impartial expert later called the best combat unit he had ever seen.” 181

Still, this Free Corps was only one of many “which sprang up like mushrooms after the rain”, and who numbered in the whole of Germany about 400 000 men. (Germany had demobilized six million soldiers.) “The Free Corps were latter-day condotierri”, writes Burleigh, “consisting of former shock troops, junior and temporary officers, university students who had missed the war experience and anyone still spoiling for blood or incapable of psychological demobilization”. 182 “Like the old mercenaries, they were possessed with an ‘insatiable restlessness, a determination to burn themselves out; they felt the primeval male urge permanently to court danger. As soldiers of fortune, they accepted the disdain of the corpulent sedentary bourgeoisie and returned it in full measure round their camp fires and in their quarters, in battle or on the march’”, writes Heinz Höhne, quoting Ernst Jünger. 183 Konrad Heiden called them “the armed human scum of five destructive years”. 184

The link between the Ehrhardt Brigade and the Hitler movement was Captain Ernst Röhm, one of those, with Mayr and Eckart, who made Hitler possible. Longerich calls him the “foster father” of the SA. “His conceptions of society were dominated by military categories; he shared the contempt of everything civil and looked with expectation for the outbreak of a war.” 185 The military and the war, in which he had been wounded several times – part of his nose was shot away – were his life, and his mentality was that of the Free Corps toughs, with this difference that he was an officer in the legal Reichswehr, according to the Treaty of Versailles reduced to 100 000 men. Röhm was an amazingly influential officer, considering his captain’s grade. He could take decisions on a political level over the heads of his superiors, in the first place because he was the lynchpin in the movement of illegal stocks of weapons in Bavaria, so much so that he was called “machine-gun king”. “Röhm possessed the key to the weapons arsenal.” 186 Like Captain Mayr, Röhm had connections in many organizations, overt and covert. He was himself the head of the Reichkriegsflagge, the War Banner of the Reich, and played a dominant role in the Eiserne Faust, the Iron Fist. And there was, in addition, the homosexual boys’ network, an at the time most scandalous eruption of the latent homoeroticism in the youth movement and the Männerbünde, the men’s leagues, including Army and Free Corps.

Röhm had become a member of the DAP shortly after Hitler. Again the jovial Eckart played a role in attracting this powerful and capable officer who would organize the fighting troops of the Party and provide them with arms when the situation so required. In fact, officer Ernst Röhm will never unreservedly submit to ex-corporal Hitler, even if for a time they addressed each other with the familiar du; between them there remained an unresolved conflict which will lead ultimately to Röhm’s physical elimination. “Though Röhm had great hopes in the NSDAP leader, he felt in no way inclined to submit to Hitler unconditionally. On the contrary, to him Hitler, as the ‘political’ leader of the Kampfbund [a temporary coalition of nationalist organizations], was in the first place the publicly active ‘drummer’, who within the movement had to take his stand behind the military men. To the extremely self-conscious Röhm it was, in the relation between army and politics, always the soldier who took precedence over the politician.” 187

“Röhm enrolled Ehrhardt’s soldiers in Hitler’s SA, of which they formed the real nucleus”, writes Heiden. 188 “The Ehrhardt Brigade simply turned into the Sturmabteilung Hitler”, confirms Heinz Höhne. 189 Of this fact we have an eyewitness, Ernst Hanfstängl: “Hitler worked more or less openly with the Ehrhardt Brigade people … When I first started going to the Beobachter offices, which was the headquarters of the plot, the two men on guard at Hitler’s door were not SA men at all, but members of the Organization Consul, that section of the Ehrhardt group which had been behind the murders of Erzberger and Rathenau … The SA usually marched together with the Viking Bund, who were Ehrhardt’s militarized formations.” 190 “Then there was a slightly mysterious man named Lieutenant Klintzsch”, remembers Hanfstängl, “who was one of the storm trooper leaders and had been and probably still was a member of the Organization Consul”. 191 Klintzsch, the right-hand man of Ehrhardt, was involved in the murder of Matthias Erzberger. “Organization Consul” was a secret cabal within the Ehrhardt Brigade charged with the execution of vehmic murders; “Consul” was the code name of Ehrhardt himself … Knowledgeable from personal observation about the association of the Hitler movement with this band of professional killers, journalist Konrad Heiden puts Erzberger’s murder squarely at Hitler’s door: “Erzberger was killed by Hitler’s own men.” 192

Ron Rosenbaum’s search for an explanation of “Hitler’s evil” led him back to stains of blood and brains on the walls, to the residues of death. “After immersing myself in their reportage [of the Munich Post] on Hitler and the Hitler Party”, writes Ron Rosenbaum, “I came to see that ‘political criminal’ was not an empty epithet but a carefully considered encapsulation of a larger vision: that Hitler’s evil was not generated from some malevolent higher abstraction or belief, from an ideology that descended into criminality and murder to achieve its aims; rather, his evil arose from his criminality and only garbed itself in ideological belief. One sees this in the paper day by day, not so much in the big scandals, the head-line making events, but in the daily log of murders. “Vehme Murder in Thuringia’, ‘Brown Murder in Stuttgart’, ‘S.A. Killing in Halle’, ‘Brown Terror in Magdeburg’, ‘Nazi Murders in Lippe’. Scarcely an issue went by in those final two years without one and usually two, three or four brief dispatches reporting the blatant cold-blooded murder of political opponents by Hitler Party members … What is missing from the grander explanations is what one sees on the ground, so to speak, the texture of daily terror apparent in the pages of the Munich Post, the systematic, step-by-step slaughter of Hitler’s most capable political opponents, murdered by this party of political criminals.” 193

But Captain Ehrhardt, the autocratic commander of an elite Free Corps brigade, refused, just like Röhm, to give in to a man who in his eyes was an amateurish and pretentious, if not lunatic, ex-corporal. (At that time Adolf Hitler’s name was in the ranks of his own people often mockingly abbreviated to “Ahi”.) According to Höhne’s sources, Ehrhardt not only withdrew his men from the SA, he turned against Hitler and his Party. “In close cooperation with Government circles and under nationalist cover, Captain Ehrhardt is preparing to form a [new] Free Corps; to judge from the manner in which it is being recruited and in view of Captain Ehrhardt’s former attitude, its object must be to destroy the NSDAP.” These doings will convince Hitler of the need of a bodyguard tied by oath directly to his person. He founded the “attack troop” Stosstrupp Adolf Hitler, which would be replaced later by the black Order of the Death’s Head, the SS.

(Hitler will not forget what Ehrhardt had dared to do to him, nor that he had sided with von Kahr at the time of the Munich putsch in November 1923. 194 In the “Night of the Long Knives”, in which Röhm together with the leaders of his SA power base were taken care of, “everywhere the SS robots were hunting down supposed enemies of the State … Captain Ehrhardt, Hitler’s reluctant ally in 1923, withdrew into the woods of his own estate, taking a couple of shotguns with him and, as soon as the Gestapo had left his house, got some friends to smuggle him across into Austria”. 195 He escaped with his life. Röhm and many others, including von Kahr, were not so lucky.)