00:00:28.820Yeah, so Project 1933 is us moving month by month through the year 2025, telling the story of the year 1933 for reasons. I don't know. Figure it out why we might be doing this.
00:00:45.380This is our June episode. We always try to focus on particular issues. If you recall, I had promised people at the end of the last episode two big topics. So the question of how did the Nazi repressive apparatus work? How did the paramilitary sort of intersect with this new regime that was establishing itself? And then I promised the question of collaboration and collaborators.
00:01:07.460Now, we're not going to get to the collaborators because I started writing the notes for this and I'm like, oh, fuck.0.98
00:01:13.440Like, the collaborators will have to wait.1.00
00:01:15.020You guys are pieces of shit and we'll get to you eventually.0.99
00:01:19.060This one's for different pieces of shit who were a lot more committed to the cause, let's say, namely mostly the SA, the Sturmabteilung, so the Nazi muscle.0.98
00:01:28.500This is our episode on the brown shirts, right?0.99
00:01:32.120It's our episode on dudes hanging out in the worst possible fucking way.0.99
00:01:36.140Is the cure to male loneliness starting a fascist militia and enforcing autocracy? So this is interesting because I think for American listeners, the idea that there are politically motivated militias is not crazy, right?0.96
00:01:53.880Like, we have the Three Percenters, we have the Proud Boys. These are groups of men with right-wing political commitments who go out and commit quasi-organized violence towards their political ends, right?
00:02:06.700But when we're talking about 1933 in Germany, this is a tradition that has existed across the political spectrum, right?
00:02:13.540This is something that was really facilitated and accelerated on the right by these large groups of post-World War I veterans who had just never disarmed and were wandering around providing strongman muscle and enforcement to, like, right-wing and nationalist causes.
00:02:31.700What makes the SA, this brown shirt Nazi militia, different from other kinds of political militias in sort of like the 1930s in Germany?
00:03:40.580But other than that, it is important to note that this isn't a group that, other than its sheer brutality, wasn't totally unprecedented.
00:03:50.160So today we're going to talk about the role of the SA in 1933, after the Nazis have come to power, they've consolidated their regime, they've begun persecuting their political enemies, outlawing other parties, establishing their claim to these vast powers beyond what was outlined in the Weimar Constitution, right?
00:04:12.760They're instituting a new authoritarian regime and they've got this sort of extra party, extra state armed apparatus that is at their disposal and which Hitler and his allies will be looking both to instrumentalize and also to control.
00:04:29.800Right. And that sort of tension is what we're going to be looking at today.0.65
00:04:32.860I want to plug the rest of this series.
00:04:35.740We have three previous parts of Project 1933 that I think are really useful in giving background to what we're going to be talking about today when we go into June of that year.
00:04:46.940I also want to plug our Patreon before we get too deep into this.
00:05:49.000Or are we actually talking about two different years?
00:05:52.720Yes. So we could have talked about the SA in February. We could have talked about it in March. The reason we're doing it in June is twofold, as you say. On June 21st, 1933 is the beginning of the so-called Köpenick Blood Week, which is this set of SA-perpetrated outrages.
00:08:01.400They would eventually have a massive problem
00:08:03.940with the essay. And this is, again, why we're talking about the essay for our June episode,
00:08:09.580because the story of the essay then culminates in a very famous night in June 1934. So we're
00:08:17.540briefly leaving our year of 1933, because on June 30th, 1934 is the beginning of an event that I
00:08:25.700think Americans will be quite familiar with. Is this what we call the Night of the Long Knives?
00:08:29.820This is the night of the long lives. So we have the rare pleasure of finding out that a bunch of the bad guys of this episode in June 1933 will meet an early and ignominious end in June 1934. You take your victories when you can get them.
00:08:45.400This notion, I think, is very instructive, which is the Nazis are not a monolith, right? They have a lot of internal contention. They have rivalries. They have competing factions, right? And that doesn't necessarily inhibit their effectiveness towards their terrible goal. But it is something to keep in mind as we try and demystify the Nazi regime, right?
00:09:06.380And look at how it worked in practice, which is that these are a lot of guys who are not all very smart, who have big egos and sometimes competing projects even underneath their far right agenda that does unify them.0.69
00:09:19.660Yeah. And it's kind of the question of the Nazi party's relationship to the state. What we charted in April and in May was really the way the party was able to take over through synchronization more and more of the German state. There was very little to oppose them at this point. Really, the only element was the army that they still had to worry about a little bit.
00:09:44.240But in some way, this was a problem for a revolutionary party
00:09:48.120because there were definitely elements in it,
00:09:49.780and the SA was one of them, that sort of said,
00:11:09.080Tod und Verklärung eines Nationalsozialisten.
00:11:11.240So this is his study of this SA member, Horst Wessel,
00:11:16.200who is this kind of important martyr figure.
00:11:19.980And then the final one I should mention is Andrew Wackerfuss' book,
00:11:23.520Stormtrooper Families, Homosexuality and Community in the Early Nazi Movement.
00:11:29.880We should mention, that's the other thing.0.64
00:11:31.460This is kind of a gay episode in the sense that famously,0.60
00:11:34.520after the Night of the Long Knives,0.98
00:11:36.060one of the many justifications that the new regime gives for having just slaughtered a bunch of its0.98
00:11:45.460own henchmen, basically, is, hey, these were a bunch of gay dudes. They were destroying our0.99
00:11:51.260popular spirit with gayness, right? And so the question of homosexuality and, you know,1.00
00:11:57.500how much dudes just hanging out with other dudes you can do before someone starts talking about
00:12:02.640that is very much part of this episode as well. So maybe briefly, we should talk about the two
00:12:10.620people that we've had guide us through 1933 so far, just so that they make an appearance here.
00:12:15.220They'll come into it a little bit at the end, but not very much. Victor Klemperer, our literature
00:12:21.640professor in Dresden, notes in his diary in mid-June, quote, I wait from one day to the next,
00:12:27.560nothing stirs. Sometimes I lose all heart and believe that this regime will last after all
00:12:33.720and outlive me. So Viktor, our diarist, who's a ethnically Jewish professor observing with some
00:12:43.380distress the rise of the Nazis, is descending into dread. Yeah, I think it's starting to sink
00:12:49.740in for people that this is the new normal, right? It had been a few months and there was sort of a
00:12:54.700feeling that, like, hey, maybe something will shift, something will change, or there'll be
00:12:58.140just at least a sign of instability. And they all knew enough and they were reading enough
00:13:03.100of the news coming out of Germany to see that the development was very much in the opposite
00:13:08.400direction. They know that this is going to be probably for the long haul.
00:13:13.180What about the second Virgil in this hell? Our boy Thomas Mann, where is he?
00:13:18.620Yeah. So Thomas Mann is now in southern France. He's left Switzerland and has gone to Bandeuil, which is an hour, I think, east of Marseille. And he's just kind of hanging out at the beach, it seems like. This will become the beginning of kind of a period of silence for him. He notes a lot of things. He stays very much in touch with people in Germany, but he's still hesitant to really pick a fight with the rulers.
00:13:44.780But some of this is, I think, pragmatic.
00:18:33.040But because of all this background in law enforcement, he had a great deal of pull among the SA.
00:18:40.360And Sander, in turn, was part of a very influential circle around another sort of big SA member and a guy who actually sat in the Reichstag, Karl Gustav Ernst.
00:18:50.760We don't have to get into it, but basically what happens to Gierke once the Nazis attain power is that these guys that he's allied with keep rising in the ranks as the regime is starting to replace people in the security apparatus, which pulls Gierke up, right?
00:19:10.620So there's always something getting vacated and he moves up one level.
00:19:13.840Basically, as his sugar daddies keep rising through the ranks, he kept getting their jobs, right?0.61
00:19:18.400So before long, he was in charge of the S.A. and Kubinik, which would, I think, put about 3,000 S.A. men under his command at 23.
00:19:26.100You know, that's a model of a lot of careers on the MAGA, right? You know, there's these figures who are somehow downstream of Donald Trump or connected to somebody with a lot of money or a lot of pull in the regime. And therefore, you can often trace the career of some odious little congressman or right wing influencer through a bunch of different satellites of these like major players who they used to orbit at younger stages of their careers.
00:19:53.180One thing I want to just talk about in starting with the SA, do you remember something we talked about the role of pubs and hotels?
00:20:02.740Yeah. You said that like the brown shirts, the SA, they were like taking over local bars and using them as headquarters and as ad hoc prisons.0.99
00:20:14.280And I think it's really worth dwelling on why that is.0.91
00:20:17.500These are intensely local chapters.0.99
00:20:20.280These are guys that hang out at a bar together and then do paramilitary shit, right?0.97
00:20:26.260It also occurs to me that, like, they must know the local guys they're persecuting, right?0.99
00:20:31.520Like, the local communists or socialists who the SA is getting wasted at this bar and then going out into the street to beat up, those are guys they would have known from the neighborhood or from fucking high school or whatever.0.66
00:20:44.460It's like these are not strangers to them.0.84
00:20:47.140Exactly. They're not policing so much as they're kind of settling these old scores. They're intensely entangled with the people that they're persecuting right now. It's basically an institutionalization, such as it is, of neighborhood social structures, it appears, right? Which is important because that's very different from the army, which in Germany was truly a national institution, right?
00:21:10.180That's to say a lot of the upper ranks were sons of officers.
00:21:13.580They were born on bases or in the army and had moved around the country according to stationings and deployments, right?
00:21:20.520So like to be in the Wehrmacht, to be in the German army really meant like not having a local connection.
00:21:27.480You had the connection to the nation ideologically.
00:21:30.500But the SA in many cases used its national supposed mission to mostly meet up on people on the other side of the street, it seems.
00:21:38.920It's like very provincial in a way. It's got this like national pretext that might make the SA members feel like they're part of something larger and grander. But in practice, it's an incredibly local concern at this point.
00:21:54.000Yeah, that's probably obvious, but I do want to point it out that if you are making your headquarters a bar, like a place where alcohol is being served, I'm not sure the discipline is like huge, right?
00:22:06.980That's part of why I wanted to ask when we get to Blood Week, are these guys carrying out orders they've gotten from top down or are they sort of impulsively committing this violence?
00:22:18.720It's because I can't imagine that this is a very strictly regimented military body.0.96
00:22:23.900It seems like it's a bunch of guys who are like little shits and they're all friends and they get wasted and they go out to beat up people they don't like for political as well as personal reasons.0.98
00:22:33.940it seems like it's like a really malignant fraternity.0.99
00:24:53.300So it's like the whole thing, don't quote me on this, but I think it was based on some kind of strategy that was never implemented in World War I.
00:25:01.620So this was already kind of a displaced, like we're going to continue fighting the war, right?
00:25:05.620Like, Sturmabteilung in German really sounds like, oh, shit, like these are the guys who are going over the hill and like going out of the trench and like running across no man's land or whatever.0.84
00:25:14.720It doesn't have any parodic quality the way Storm Division does in English, because Storm Division almost sounds like silly.0.95
00:25:21.180It sounds like made up. It sounds like maybe something from, like, space balls, you know?0.86
00:25:25.260Yeah, the Nazis, as a rule, did not have a great sense of irony, I think, about these things.
00:25:30.140No, this is, I think, they meant to be deadly serious.
00:25:32.340Of course, people made fun of it and really contained this kind of playing at war, right?
00:25:39.040In the end, these war guys were getting loaded and shooting at other people, right?
00:25:43.000Like, I mean, they did get hurt. They did maim. They did kill.
00:25:46.480They did try to overthrow the government, all that.0.97
00:25:48.920But, you know, we all know from our present moment that one can do all those things and still come across as deeply shambolic and ludicrous.0.89
00:25:59.320It had the rhetoric of continuing the war or fighting a new war.
00:26:03.640But in the end, it's like, well, you did just piss yourself, man.
00:26:07.260The Strum of Tai Lung, when they started in 1921, that's just like three years after the armistice, right?
00:26:14.000So I bet that's a lot of guys who had been in the German army in World War I, had experienced that defeat, had been under terrible conditions, watched a lot of their friends die, come home to this, like, great national humiliation.
00:26:29.760I imagine the playing at war, the continuing the war, the trying to, like, give the war a different ending by retaining your own commitments to this militaristic lifestyle.
00:26:38.360Well, by 1933, those guys have got to be like in their 40s.
00:26:46.640So when we get to 1933, I'm imagining it's somewhat of a different demographic.
00:26:52.740Like, I'm sure some of the old heads are still around reliving their glory days, like the guy who won't move on from that great pass he threw in high school.
00:27:01.100But there's got to be younger recruits coming in below them, right?
00:27:06.200The connection between the SA and the Freikorps and veterans would become less and less tight over the years, right?
00:27:13.140The SA membership tended to be quite young.
00:27:16.420We'll go over the numbers in a minute, but like SA grew explosively after 1929.
00:27:22.580My guess would be that those that, you know, as you say, there's no man in his mid to late 30s being like, oh, yes, my joint pain makes me now want to really beat people up for a living, right?
00:27:33.200Like, it's very likely that a lot of that membership was fairly or very young.
00:27:39.160But there was, of course, a certain gendered esprit de corps that persisted.
00:27:43.640And maybe, I'm wondering about this, whether these newcomers basically felt this kind of ersatz quality of this fight that they could be part of, right?
00:27:54.340These were people still smarting over this loss in World War I that they hadn't even been part of in that case.
00:28:00.040And this was their chance to kind of do better.
00:28:03.400So I think there is a continuity here, even though there's little evidence of like lots of continuity in personnel, except for the very top, I suppose.
00:28:12.580I imagine after 1929, you're probably getting a lot of guys who have had their career ambitions completely crushed by the global depression, right?
00:28:22.020And that's like a little echo in miniature of the previous humiliation a decade prior.
00:28:26.880And both of them, like in sequence, turn to this sort of like masculinity cult in which they're seeking lost glory by also sort of indulging their impulses and getting drunk with their boys.
00:28:40.160Yeah, at the same time, the question of discipline is strangely persistent.0.99
00:28:44.420I mean, I don't want to give the impression that this was just like a bunch of yahoos going around making asses of themselves.0.99
00:28:50.100The fact that it was initially dominated by veterans, I think, did kind of shape how this organization operated.0.88
00:28:57.400This is where we get to Tevelite and to Male Fantasies, which isn't so much about the SA, but really much more about these Freikorps veteran groups in the immediate aftermath of the defeat in World War I.
00:29:11.240But I think the reason Tevelite dwells on that stuff is that he clearly thinks, and I think the literature basically agrees with him on this.
00:29:20.100That sort of spirit was retained and then carried forward into the new generation that, as you say, comes out of a totally different set of adverse circumstances, but that like clearly looks up to, as we saw with Geerke, to that earlier generation.
00:29:35.660There's a kind of particular ethos that's being passed down, and that ethos really does emerge in 1919, 1920, and 21.
00:29:44.100So maybe we should say a little bit about Tiewerleit's famous book.
00:29:48.440It's a two-volume book, about 1,200, 1,300 pages long, published first in 1977 and 78.
00:29:56.360And he describes it basically as an attempt to describe a type of masculinity that made fascism possible.
00:30:03.560Tivelein argues that the specific Freikorps masculinity didn't ignore women.
00:30:09.540It was rather, in some ways, fixated on their exclusion.
00:30:12.940And one reason that I thought is very interesting that he proposes is that after 1918, there were these attempts to establish Soviet republics, basically, in Germany.
00:30:25.580And the Freikorps were first sort of formed and unleashed in trying to get these kind of left-wing movements under control in 1919.
00:30:33.980Yeah, I think for American listeners, this might be crucial context, right? Because the red scare in the U.S., red scare is plural in the U.S., were largely matters of like right-wing fantasy, right?
00:30:46.080The Communist Party in America was never an actual threat and never at risk of actually establishing an American Soviet, right? That was not true in Germany.
00:30:56.220As part of the German Revolution, there were Soviets that seized power in various cities and states. And then more moderate forces used the Freikorps to basically crush those movements. And those movements, part of it was demobilized troops decided to band together and try to establish the Soviet republics.
00:31:16.460But women were quite visibly represented among them, as, by the way, were Jews.
00:31:23.000So the face of what these men were supposed to crush would have looked unusually female to them, right?
00:31:30.200They had just come home from a war where they had mostly been, at least for the last three years of the war, been shooting at other men.0.58
00:31:37.160And here they were having to deal with the fact that, like, their enemy now were these women.1.00
00:31:43.640And they had this experience of having basically women screaming in their faces, fuck you, I'm a communist, right?0.99
00:31:50.240The question that I think emerges for them, according to Tivolite, is that how to do violence to women without accepting them as combatants, right?1.00
00:32:46.180There's a way in which violence against women in public, as opposed to like the violence you commit against your wife in the private home to discipline her and maintain your authority there, is sort of degrading to the dignity of a soldier, right?
00:33:02.340Like this is supposed to be something men do as men, you know, as a duty of and expression of their like masculine status and women aspiring to politics, to political violence, to a status as political subjects and political actors is something that I imagine a lot of men with like nationalist sympathies would bristle at.
00:33:25.720The other thing, of course, is that every soldier in every war ever is being told he's fighting it for women to protect the women of Germany.0.99
00:33:32.420Here were the women of Germany being like, fuck you, I want a Soviet republic.0.99
00:33:35.760That's also messaging that that inculcates a fair bit of misogynist resentment.1.00
00:33:39.400Right. I am here suffering in this fucking trench so that the women don't have to be.1.00
00:33:44.220Exactly. And this is something you see a lot in like right wing conceptions of violence against women, which is this perception that women are hypocrites who claim a dual status.1.00
00:33:54.780Right. Yeah. They want privileged exception from violence, but they also want the dignity, the rights, the status and citizenship that men get by making themselves subject to violence through military service.0.82
00:34:10.540You know, it gets pitched to men as chivalry, but it gets experienced by men as like a burdensome obligation that they don't particularly love doing on behalf of women.
00:34:21.680So this is when, like, when men are like, okay, if women are equal, why can't I hit you?
00:34:25.680There's also, of course, the idea that we had buddies die face down in the muck out there.
00:34:30.700And now you are, you know, desecrating their memory by, right?
00:34:35.360Like, this is the origin of the original stab in the back myth, right?
00:34:38.820That, like, the German army was undefeated in the field, but then politicians sold them out.
00:34:44.580And Tivillat points out that the face of that, to a lot of them, were not these famous politicians whom they never met.
00:34:51.540it was often women and the other thing to point out is that the idea that communism was coming
00:34:58.720at german men in this distinctly feminine guise there are certain metaphors that carry and that
00:35:04.160are very common in the literature of these freikorps you get this persistent image of a quote
00:35:09.400red flood oh what yeah yeah you don't have to be a psychoanalyst to go huh on that one like the idea
00:35:17.800that communism is like an infiltration.
00:35:20.400I mean, you get that in the United States, right?
00:35:53.320There are two things contained in that image of the Red Flood.1.00
00:35:55.520There's disgust with the feminine body.1.00
00:35:58.640And as you say, a horror at the dissolubility of bodies.0.99
00:36:02.480There is this idea that like, if you give bodies half a chance, they'll just dissolve into goo.
00:36:07.620Tevalad calls this sort of the body as carapace or the body as armor, right?
00:36:12.060The armor isn't there to defend the body towards the outside, but to keep it from dissolving into just like puddle form, basically.0.55
00:36:21.800This idea that there needs to be these boundaries policed against this sort of feminized flood is everywhere in Freikorps masculinity.
00:36:30.380We're getting a little abstracted here, but I want to point out this contradiction that communism and women, which are sort of psychically linked in this, like, right-wing German nationalist imagination that we're tracing with Thelevite here, are both, like, kind of formless and permeable and, like, always collapsing, right?
00:36:51.300But they're also very, very threatening, right?0.72
00:37:05.800And it's contagious, it seems, right?1.00
00:37:07.700You're going to be made feminized by this influence of communism, the influence of these terrible women who are like aspiring to political participation for this definition destroying enterprise that is the left.1.00
00:37:22.120Exactly. Teveline points out that sort of proto-Nazi literature expresses this persistent frustration that you can't kill women quite as much as you want to. He quotes the novelist Ernst von Salomon. You aren't allowed to plant your fist in their visages just like that.0.94
00:37:39.280I have a correction. There's plenty of violence that men inflict on women. I don't think they need to be worried that there's an insufficient amount.
00:37:47.940Yeah, I think the translation makes it sound a little bit more un-nuanced than it is. It's basically you're not supposed to. It's supposed to make you weaker if you do it. And they're not just saying I want to do it, which you're absolutely right to point out they did. It's I don't want to even get blamed for it. I don't want to be I don't want people to then sort of tell me that that was wrong. Right.
00:38:11.480The taboo of violence against women, the notion that violence against women is less honorable than violence against men is experienced as a kind of indignity.
00:38:22.360And I definitely think you see that in a lot of our current backlash politics, right?
00:38:26.720It's like the pretext that women should be or are a special class against whom violence is less permissible is considered by these male fraternity groups as an insult to masculine dignity.0.91
00:38:42.420I think that's right. The exact same thing happens basically in this early Freikorps literature. The books that TV Light is talking about keep finding scenarios where basically men overcome this inner resistance against the supposed inner resistance against hitting women. The moment when men finally find it in themselves to basically brutalize women.
00:39:04.420It reminds me of how there was a guy I went to college with who, in seminar, kept bringing up, like, far-fetched examples in which incest would be ethically permissible.
00:39:25.140Like, what if it's a nuclear bomb?1.00
00:39:27.160And it's like, oh, let me stop you right there.
00:39:28.600In this case, it's mostly implicit self-defense, right?0.99
00:39:31.320I just had to kill the woman because she was going to kill me first.
00:39:35.140But that's important because self-defense is essentially the organizing fantasy of DSA.0.95
00:39:41.780Well, self-defense also has an appeal to, like, realism in it, right? Like, let's dispense with these polite fictions or constraining morality in order to deal with what's really important, which is self-preservation, which is the reality that these women are monsters, etc.0.59
00:40:03.720At the same time, I would say there's also an odd passivity to it, right?
00:40:08.280These men are pushed to the breaking point in this literature.
00:40:11.820And I think Tiveleit is exactly right.
00:40:14.040And this is why I'm bringing it up for 1933, that the SA was able to mete out just awful, cataclysmic violence.0.52
00:40:22.380And at the same time kept insisting that it was actually victimized and that it was actually only acting in self-defense and that people had pushed them to it.
00:40:30.860Which, like, this is an abuse narrative, right?
00:40:33.340This is Darvo, which they basically made into their operating principle.
00:40:37.860And I think it's easy to miss the gendered nature of that because it's so pervasive in their thinking.
00:40:45.300And we see it in so many right-wing groups.
00:40:48.380But it is important that, like, if TV Light is right, that that is originally.0.95
00:40:53.240This kind of Darvo logic does have its origins in their relationship to women.0.98
00:40:59.060Women sort of come after you and people won't let you hit back.0.97
00:41:01.800But then they push you far enough and finally you can let go, right?0.55
00:41:05.900And the finally letting go, that is what we get, according to the SS's own sort of self-reckoning or self-understanding, in 1933.
00:41:17.380We're finally doing the thing that they pushed us into, right?0.97
00:41:20.780Everyone else saw just like a bunch of drunk psychos going absolutely apeshit.
00:41:25.260But to them, this was this catharsis that they'd been promised.0.51
00:41:29.920And that really was sort of part of the psychic constitution of this entire community.0.72
00:41:34.300So all of these sort of malignant little seeds of gender ideology have already been planted in the SA from its origins, which is substantially before the Nazis come to power, right?0.72
00:41:46.180Right. So in 1921, the DAP, which was the party that the SA was allied with, became the NSDAP and Hitler basically took it over.0.53
00:41:54.840This is also the moment when Hitler starts introducing what's called the Führerprinzip, right?0.57
00:41:59.340So the idea that there has to be one leader who is going to lead this whole thing.0.70
00:42:03.320And the SA became the muscle behind that takeover.
00:42:07.300There were alternate power sources within the NSDAP, such as it was.
00:42:11.280I mean, it wasn't a whole bunch of people, but the SA would sort of reliably show up and beat up anyone whose last name wasn't Hitler.0.67
00:42:17.140Hitler is able to consolidate his power over the Nazi party, in part because he has this militia backing him up.0.68
00:42:24.440He can enforce his intraparty preferences with violence.0.82
00:42:28.280And so the first victims of the SA, I mean, the very first victims were communists, but then right after that, it was other Nazis or other right wingers, at least.
00:42:37.320And the early leader was actually Hermann Göring.0.51
00:42:39.920He eventually hands it over, specifically in 1923, because November 23rd, 1923, is the Hitler-Ludendorf coup.0.53
00:42:50.360So this is Hitler's first attempt to seize power.0.71
00:44:16.340Well, you'd think, because the Nazis are not the most queer-friendly organization, here's a dude very clearly using the ranks for his own cruising, etc., etc., right?0.80
00:44:26.160Quite openly, yeah. He's not, like, in the closet.
00:44:29.760Although, surprisingly, I believe Hitler and Goebbels were unaware. They do find out in 1932.
00:44:35.760But the reason they had problems with him had to do with the fact that in February 1925, the SA prohibition is lifted. Big mistake.
00:44:44.040and Röhm decides to reconstitute the group as a paramilitary.
00:44:49.120And Hitler apparently didn't want this.
00:44:51.160He wanted them to be his security detail, right?
00:44:54.360Basically, Hitler leaves the Landsberg prison, which he's been in for the coup,0.64
00:44:59.380and more or less says this has to be at least semi-legal.0.74
00:45:10.880But in terms of attaining power, this was about as big a fiasco as you can imagine.
00:45:16.360And so he's like, no, we have to do this electorally, in which case having a paramilitary is just kind of a weird look, right?
00:45:23.760It seems like you're up to your old tricks.
00:45:25.820And so Röhm is pretty disillusioned and leaves, actually goes to South America to become a foreign legion guy.0.91
00:45:33.920I mean, he just really loves killing people and like hanging out with other men.
00:45:37.100And ironically, while he's gone, the SA basically grows into the role that William had envisioned for it.
00:45:44.100It becomes a paramilitary unit that disrupts the opposition's organizations.
00:45:49.000It engages in street fights with leftists, with Christian Jewish communist youth groups and paramilitaries.
00:45:56.500It imposes a violence tax on not being right wing, right?
00:46:00.820If you're trying to organize a union, you have to deal with the possibility that the SA is going to come and beat up your members.
00:46:08.200If you're trying to, like, be a communist and hold a communist meeting, you have to deal with the fact that your neighborhood SA has probably heard through the grapevine what you're doing.
00:46:17.500And they're quite successful, although one should say there are not that many of them.
00:46:21.380At this point, I would say the neighborhood-based character, basically, if you were unlucky enough to live near one of these dudes, it sucked.
00:46:28.040But there were like, I think there were like 40,000, 50,000 of these guys Germany-wide.
00:46:32.680So it's still kind of stochastic violence at best.
00:46:36.820I think you could still have a union meeting pretty easily without these dudes showing up.
00:46:41.120Still, the mix between a party that is trying to attain power by semi-democratic means1.00
00:46:48.040and this group of ruffians out for blood proves quite combustible, right?0.96
00:46:54.940But the SA increasingly wants to control the party.
00:46:58.000Specifically, they demand a place on the parliamentary list for their top brass.
00:48:49.880And so what ended up happening was actually an attempted coup within the NSDAP.
00:48:55.420Basically, the SA wanted to seize power from Hitler and wanted to drag the party closer to the workers' movement.
00:49:02.640And I believe it's mostly the Weimar police that breaks that up.0.65
00:49:06.560It's this really combustible mixture from the beginning.
00:49:09.740And then in 1930, Ernst Ruhm returns from Bolivia.
00:49:13.440All right. So he's done there. He's like, I've beat up enough people in Bolivia. I'm coming to beat up people in Germany again.
00:49:19.160Exactly. And under him, we start getting this like extremely turbocharged growth of the SA. This is not because of Rome necessarily. He arrives in Germany, I think, in early 1930, meaning like six weeks after the economic crisis starts. Right. And that appears to have been what turbocharges the SA.
00:49:45.280But Rome is there to take the credit and reap the benefits.
00:49:48.080That's right. And then the other thing that happened in early 1930 is the death of Horst Wessel.
00:52:58.900And then somebody finally takes him up on his offer, shoots him in the head.0.97
00:53:03.080And is it communists who do that, socialists?
00:53:06.160Well, yeah, so it is a communist, although it's very unclear whether or not it's actually ideologically motivated or it's just a bunch of guys who are in the paramilitaries and have guns.
00:54:43.640He becomes a tool of propaganda that the SA uses to entrench their position within the Nazi party.0.59
00:54:48.820And then, you know, probably they rally a lot of more recruits around the sort of like bloody shirt of Øst Vessel.0.87
00:54:58.380We should do an episode on like women who make their dead male relative their whole career.0.70
00:55:04.100Because that is like a weird trend, not only on the political right, but like Ingeborg Vessel writing all these books about him and trying to make him into this saintly figure is, it's a type.0.90
00:55:42.940I mean, you know, by the way, just in a fun aside here, Klaus Mann, Thomas Mann's son in mid 1933, 34, I think, is working on a novel manuscript about Horst Wessel.
00:56:49.240But so the important thing about Horst Wessel is just like, again, like it's the SA man as kind of a stand in for the party and stand in especially as victim.
00:56:57.320And one should say that, like, I think I've alluded to this in a previous episode.
00:57:01.220These guys do take a real beating, right?
00:57:03.340Especially when they're still outnumbered.
00:57:54.920And one has to say that the people who most visibly bore those traumas, very recent traumas, hematomas even, within the Nazi party was not the leadership, it was the SA, right? These were the guys who looked like they'd been in war. They had not been in a war, they'd been in a terrible bar fight that they started, but it's still like they're the ones who like had a black eye and like were missing a finger for unexplained reasons and like their teeth were all jacked up and whatever, right?
00:58:24.280But they're also inheriting, like, the tarnished, wounded masculinity of the Fry Corps, right?0.85
00:59:27.400So what really turbocharges DSA is the economic crisis.
00:59:31.660It's not that the Horst Vessel story somehow like spikes the membership in this group, but it happens at the time when membership starts to spike.
00:59:42.120And of course, there's also the moment when the NSDAP is really starting to rack up some serious numbers in elections.
00:59:47.800And so it's all sort of happening at the same time.
00:59:50.200This is like 1930, right? So stock markets just crashed. All these guys are coming into the SA. The Nazis are starting to win some seats, I'm guessing, in like local, like state parliaments.
01:00:04.100And like maybe a couple seats in the Reichstag. And then this guy dies.
01:00:08.880Yeah. And so basically, the real growth starts sort of in late 1930 into early 31.
01:00:17.160Röhm officially takes over the organization again in January 1931.
01:00:22.540In late 1930, the SA had about 60,000 members.
01:00:25.660By April 31, the group had doubled to 120,000.
01:00:31.160By December of 1931, it had grown to a quarter of a million members.
01:00:35.800In the summer of 1932, it was almost half a million strong, which is important, right?
01:00:40.640Like on the one hand, there's this explosive growth because the Nazis are winning election,
01:00:44.400because, you know, there is widespread disaffection with the republic and with sort of liberal democracy.
01:00:52.420But also there's just tons of unemployment.
01:00:54.680This was also a works program for people who cycled in and out of precarious employment, right?
01:01:01.300Your average member, like Mr. Geerke, who we met earlier, was no longer a Freikorps graduate with front experience, but a 22-year-old bruiser with training as a bricklayer, right, who couldn't find work and sort of used the SA to compensate for that.
01:01:17.120So, during that time, the reputation of the S.A. becomes sort of deeply problematic in two steps. One we already talked about in the first episode of our series, the so-called Boxheim documents in 1931. Basically, the S.A. had drawn up detailed documents about how they might seize power and whom they might kill along the way.
01:01:37.480Oh, right. Their literal project, 1933.
01:01:40.320Yeah. And because they're idiots, they like leave it somewhere.1.00
01:01:47.900I don't know, maybe it got leaked or whatever.
01:01:49.380But like, anyway, this gets out and, you know, not a great look.
01:01:53.660And then in 1932, a journalist called Helmut Klotz publishes these extremely frank letters from Röhm to a doctor named Karl-Gunther Heimsoth,
01:02:05.660Heimzut, which were, well, I was going to say they were homoerotic, but they're not homoerotic.
01:02:11.660They're using the language kind of being pioneered by our friend Magnus Hirschfeld
01:02:16.840to kind of say flat out, I am a gay man.0.99
01:03:18.300The closet can sometimes have like a degree of artfulness, and I'm not really detecting that.
01:03:22.480I'm imagining Armstrong like lying belly down on the shag carpet with his, you know, heels kicking up behind him as he twirls a phone cord.
01:03:31.220Like that's kind of what I'm imagining.
01:03:32.460No, you hang up. Yeah. Okay, so that's got to be a blow to the reputation, right? This is when Goebbels reads this in the newspaper and it's like, I don't know, like, he's like, Ernst Drome is into guys.
01:03:56.000It's especially, right, a problem for any kind of overtures to, let's say, more traditionalist parties.
01:04:02.180Within the Nazi party, it's not a gigantic problem, but like it does sort of create real problems with the more traditional conservatives.
01:04:11.300But this is interesting because famously the Nazis are going to put gay men and particularly gay men, seemingly much more so than lesbians, on their list of persecuted groups.
01:04:22.380They're going to send them to like gay men as gay men are going to get sent to concentration camps, right?0.71
01:04:27.540But at the time, the notion that you have a gay man leading your paramilitary, which is no small part of your political front, that's not really seen as a problem.
01:04:42.000I mean, part of the answer is sequence.
01:04:44.940Like Goebbels appears to have been just a rabid homophobe.
01:04:47.640With Hitler, I think we're not so sure.
01:04:49.500He may not have cared that much one way or the other.
01:04:53.160It really is because of Röhm that they kind of have to crack down on this stuff.
01:04:57.560And they feel like they're getting associated with it.
01:05:00.280So this is where their own homophobia comes through.
01:05:03.260But they have room for it somewhere and somehow still at this early stage.
01:05:09.160And it's really through the purge of the S.A. that they'll find a kind of homophobic party line, which at this point I think some of them have and some don't, right?
01:05:18.660It's not a big issue for them, and so they don't have a fully articulated stance on it.
01:05:24.100So homophobia is going to be something they use, right?
01:05:27.180Like when they burn all of Magnus Hirschfeld's books.
01:05:34.580By then they're going to be, you know, moving towards an ideological homophobia.
01:05:38.060By the time they're classifying gay men as undesirables later in their regime and, you know, looking to exterminate some of them, that's going to be like a quite committed ideological homophobia that hasn't quite come through, in part because there is room for a degree of homosexuality.
01:05:59.380And in part, I imagine because there's, like we see in other fascist movements, double standards as an expression of the power of the in-group, right?0.60
01:06:08.340Like those of us who are our guys get to do this.
01:06:11.160It's for you guys, the little people, the out-group, that we're going to punish this behavior.
01:06:16.100Yeah, I mean, we should do a special episode on this at some point.0.99
01:06:19.060My impression is that, right, they hated someone like Hirschfeld because they're like, well, this is Jewish homosexuality, right?0.99
01:08:47.460Okay. And then the other thing that happens in 1932, which has less to do with sex, is that there's a presidential election, right? Paul von Hindenburg against Hitler. The SA is put on high alert on election night. It's unclear what that really meant, but it's widely interpreted as, oh, shit, they're going to seize power again, right? They lost the election. Hitler lost pretty clearly to Hindenburg.
01:09:34.300This is the worst thing that could have happened to them at this point.
01:09:37.160They thought that they had the wind in their sails.
01:09:39.760And suddenly here they are with a big part of their organization being outlawed.
01:09:44.860But in a weird way, the panic then reveals just how much clout they already had on the right.
01:09:50.680People who aren't Nazis sort of start speaking up for the SA in ways that I think sort of have everything to do with the kind of vessel mythology.
01:10:00.960They put their necks out there to fight the evil communists.
01:10:04.380They're sacrificing for the fatherland.
01:10:06.600It's like, well, no, they get into fights in beer halls.
01:10:08.980I don't really know how much of a sacrifice for the fatherland that is, but like, right, like it becomes clear that the selfless SA paramilitary sort of becomes a figure well beyond just the Nazi membership, right?
01:10:24.940So members of the Imperial House of Hohenzollern, who, as you know, are still kicking around, intervene on behalf of the SA.
01:10:32.120So did the then Secretary of the Army, Kurt von Schleicher, who would later be Chancellor.
01:10:37.120Remember the name Kurt von Schleicher, by the way, because, well, there'd be no points for guessing why.
01:10:43.240It's kind of ironic that he stood up for the SA in 1932.
01:10:46.520Uh-oh. Things are not going to go good for Kurt.
01:10:49.240That's right. The Nazis will kill him in 1934. So, you know, great stuff.0.99
01:10:53.280Always stand up for the rights of the far right.
01:11:46.680And the SA is obviously responsible for most of those, though not all. This is sort of the beginning of the end for the Weimar Republic. This is the beginning of the beginning for the Nazi party in power. Within months, they'll be in power and do all the things that we've been chronicling throughout this series.0.75
01:12:06.040And with them comes, you know, the SA off the leash, right? Like once the Nazis are in power, these guys who feel that they've been suffering for the movement all this time just can't wait to get their revenge.
01:12:21.280And they start just like indiscriminately terrorizing people they don't like, communists, social democrats, you know, their neighbor who looked at them funny that one time.
01:12:34.340And as we said, increasingly also just people who happen to be Jewish.
01:12:39.260And so that's maybe where we should return to June 1933, finally, and to our two new protagonists, Anton Schmaus and Herbert Gierke.
01:12:50.060So on June 21st, 1933, the SA, led by Geerke, starts ransacking apartments of known political enemies throughout Köpenick.
01:13:01.780So throughout this area of East Berlin.
01:13:21.320It was members of now dissolved paramilitary groups, all that stuff, right?
01:13:28.020Most of them were somehow politically active, but not all.
01:13:31.800There are some people who are just, you know, who happen to be the wrong kind of people.
01:13:37.100And among the dwellings they target is the Schmaus family home, right?
01:13:41.480You know that both father and son basically were active in the SPD and were part of the Reichspanne, so a now outlawed group meant to defend the Republic, which obviously was being dismantled sort of at this time.
01:13:57.060I have a picture of the Schmaas family home in our dock, by the way, in case you want to have a look at it.
01:14:03.600It's cute. It looks like one large building with maybe like four or five single-family, like two or three-story units in it. It's like clearly workers' housing, and it looks just like a simple working-class neighborhood.
01:14:18.560Yeah. So there's a couple of things that are remarkable about this. These are row homes. In the UK, this would not be totally out of the ordinary. In Berlin, which is almost entirely an apartment city, it's kind of remarkable that these are single family dwellings, although row homes.
01:14:36.500The Schmaus family lived in the second one from the left, I believe.
01:14:40.240And that's pretty important, actually, for our story, that they lived not in an apartment.
01:14:45.340Like most of the people that we've talked about who got picked up lived in, you know, walk up apartments somewhere.
01:14:50.900These guys have a small front yard, have a small backyard and live in this new build.
01:14:56.820These buildings would have gone up in the 1920s, a project of kind of social democratic governments, right?
01:15:02.580Like nice, affordable homes for workers, basically.
01:15:07.220So when the S.A. show up at this house, Schmaus was at his trade school, you know, doing his training, basically, because, you know, he, unlike the S.A., had a real job.
01:15:19.960And when he left, basically, the training, someone warned him about the searches and says, like, maybe don't go home.
01:15:27.300And he, it's a little unclear exactly what he said, but he basically says, like, I'm not, what am I going to do?
01:15:33.940Like, there's been enough running around, I'm going home.
01:15:36.740And by the time he got home, the SA had left.
01:15:39.800The same night, though, the SA returns once more, right?
01:15:43.080They seem to have just roved the streets.
01:15:45.040They go from address to address, and they just return after a while and beat down the door to the home.
01:16:48.660So this was a kind of neighborhood built for lower middle class to working class families into an area that had been a park.
01:16:57.240The park is, in fact, still there, and it's fairly large, meaning that once Schmaus makes it across one row of houses, he would have been in what was, for all intents and purposes, a forest.
01:17:09.860The other thing about this particular neighborhood was that it was built right by one of Berlin's main S-Bahn lines, so a local rail line.
01:17:18.100So cutting through the forest, he gets to the nearest S-Bahn station, which if you want to picture it as like sort of a suburban style regional rail station.
01:17:48.100And to me, this is really kind of interesting that in June 1933, the station personnel says, like, all right, let's get you to a nearby police station.
01:17:57.520They're still thinking there's, like, an apparatus to protect this guy from the right-wing militias.
01:18:03.300Well, in an interesting way, though, there is, right?
01:18:14.780So he basically wants due process and protection, right?
01:18:17.800He wants protection against the S.A.1.00
01:18:19.020He's like, I'll surrender to the cops, but I won't be set upon by these fuckers.0.99
01:18:24.380So he gets to the police station and the police basically have to beat back this S.A. mob trying to grab Anton Schmaus right there and then.0.99
01:18:40.080And basically, they're like, well, we have to get this guy to police headquarters at Alexanderplatz, which is sort of in the center of the city, the eastern part of the center of the city, for those of you who are not familiar with Berlin.
01:18:52.180And the transport then gets waylaid by the SA, who demands basically that the police surrender Anton Schmaus.
01:19:00.680And the police escort just flat out refuses and says, no, we're bringing him to this police station.
01:19:07.640And the DSA ends up following the police to the headquarters,
01:21:17.520And the other thing that's important is that while the Nazi elite is sort of like using this Darvo logic to sort of recast these people currently victimizing this poor family as the actual victims of that family, the violence continues unabated.
01:21:37.240So that's the other important thing, that it's not like an incident that is over and now we're all wrangling over the interpretation of it.
01:21:47.140They know that the violence is still continuing unabated.
01:21:50.500So, for instance, on June 22nd, also, the SA shows up again at the Schmaus residence.
01:21:56.320Anton's father is later found dangling off a lamppost.
01:21:59.800They declared a suicide. It's obviously not a suicide.
01:22:02.560And his mother and 13-year-old sister are abducted and tortured by the SA.
01:22:06.240So their capacity for revenge or for casting their own sadism as revenge is just inexhaustible.
01:22:16.320They're just always the victims, always only reacting.0.98
01:22:20.560Abducting a 13-year-old is pretty much as low as you can fucking go, but it's always only reactive.0.98
01:22:27.360It's only due to the nefariousness or the brutality and cravenness of our enemies, etc., etc.0.99
01:22:33.660And I think I've alluded to this in previous episodes. I think that is what makes the SA such a potent myth for this first year, and that that's how a lot of Germans must have wanted to feel, right?0.75
01:22:47.900They were suddenly being put in a position by these new rulers to really victimize their fellow citizens, right?
01:22:56.760To take their jobs, to take their stuff, to denounce them to the authorities, to get them killed.
01:23:02.900They needed a story to allow themselves to say, well, I'm only doing this reactively.
01:23:11.160This kind of Darvo logic is patently absurd when applied to these fucking gun-wielding psychos, but it describes or it outlines a larger permission structures that, you know, your school teachers, your university professors, your doctors at the hospital or whatever can also buy into, right?0.98
01:23:29.700they're not going to shoot someone, but they might report someone to the authorities, right?0.98
01:23:34.500And this whole scale reversal, right? You may victimize others and then call yourself a victim.
01:23:40.700That is, I think, part of the sort of Faustian bargain that the Nazis offer to a really large
01:23:45.720swath of Germans in this entire spring of 1933. But here it really comes to a head.0.53
01:23:51.080So the same group that Geirke runs, Standarte 15, goes on a tear for several days, abducting and
01:26:37.100committed during the Nazi seizure of power.
01:26:39.300So the SA gets to purge, basically.0.57
01:26:43.380crime is now basically legal if it's committed by the SA. The two dead SA men are buried with
01:26:50.120state honors and again with Goebbels in attendance. The Nazis rename the street on which Schmaus had
01:26:56.720shot them, the Alte Dalwitzer Straße, into the Walter Appelstraße. That's one of the people that0.69
01:27:02.220he shot. Today we should note it is the Anton Schmausstraße, so he gets the last laugh, at least
01:27:07.380for now. So I just wanted to point out the weird kind of circularity of this kind of violence.
01:27:13.000This is a movement addicted to sacrifice, to trauma, to loss, and kind of weirdly obsessed with creating the conditions for martyrdom.
01:27:22.860Even when they were victimizing others relentlessly, they were always just like jonesing to kind of make more martyrs and to declare their own thugs basically victims, right?
01:27:40.100I'm not often at a loss for words.0.96
01:27:41.620I mean, luckily, luckily, a lot of these guys are going to get theirs much sooner than the rest of the Nazi state.0.79
01:27:48.740Because in the end, of course, a lot of the SA did get to enjoy the victimhood they so desperately craved, right?0.86
01:27:55.160And as we already indicated, sexuality had an odd role to play in that process as well.0.64
01:28:01.140So in closing the episode, let's jump outside of 1933 and look at the end of the SA, just about a year after the Köpenick blood week.
01:28:11.620Over that year, Röhm's position got more and more precarious within the Nazi administration.
01:28:19.600The problem was that the SA had been the paramilitary wing of an insurgent party.
01:28:26.240And now, as we've seen, that party was rapidly becoming identical with the state.
01:28:33.760And power centers were emerging all over the place.
01:28:38.080Blomberg, their new secretary of defense,
01:28:40.920was really starting to get somewhere with the Reichswehr, right?
01:28:44.200Like Goebbels had his fiefdom over a propaganda, etc., etc., right?
01:28:47.860Like it had been like, oh, here's the party and here's a muscle.
01:28:51.200And now suddenly this party has control of the police,
01:28:54.640of the army, of the administration, etc., etc., right?
01:28:59.100Like it becomes really hard to sort of understand,0.98
01:29:02.720well, why the fuck do we have these guys around still, right?0.89
01:29:05.120So once the Nazis have like consolidated control over the German government, over the army, over its security apparatus, I imagine that this like sort of extra governmental quasi-military body starts to look less like a tool than it does like a threat.0.98
01:29:21.880This becomes less something that you can use to attain power and more like something that could be used to take your power away from you.0.61
01:29:27.940That's right. And we've been describing this kind of synchronization process as kind of top down. But really, of course, as I think I've indicated a couple of times now, it's really that the Nazis and local, not necessarily local in the sense of like in a particular town, but like in particular institutions, like the elites in those institutions made their peace with the Nazis, right?
01:29:50.940Which always kind of involved tradeoffs. And then having these guys who were just all Nazis all the time made it harder to make concessions to these people, right? To be like, oh, yeah, no, we can all work together. It's like, well, what about a drunk psycho over there? It's like, well, yeah, no, he is a problem. That is true, right?0.62
01:30:09.100And so the final nail in the coffin, ironically, is weirdly Franz von Papen, the man who made Hitler chancellor and had quickly become relegated and become unbelievably unimportant.0.61
01:30:22.760But he becomes relevant one freaking last time.
01:30:26.740He basically gives a speech at the University of Marburg aimed at conservative elites,
01:30:32.320and it's a pretty thinly veiled call for consolidation and an attack on the idea of
01:30:38.500permanent revolution within the Nazi state, which was essentially Rome's position.
01:30:44.220He says, quote, no nation can afford a constant revolt from below if it wants to pass the
01:30:50.380The movement must come to a standstill someday.
01:30:53.100At some time, a stable social structure must emerge, maintained by an impartial judiciary and by an undisputed state authority.0.73
01:31:01.640And there's every indication that this was supposed to be the starting gun of a Wehrmacht-led coup, basically ushering into power non-Nazi authoritarians, right?
01:31:12.340So the kind of thing that people sort of thought might have happened in February or March 1933, now they're trying for it in June 1934.0.52
01:31:22.340Yeah. But yeah, so this is sort of a very tepid attempt at a coup. And the Nazis suppress it immediately. Von Papen was just too weak and too irrelevant. Hindenburg, who, right, the idea was, oh, let's get the president who's still around, although ailing, let's get him just to dismiss Hitler. That'll work. Right. It was kind of too sick to do much of anything.
01:31:45.020Still, the Marburg speech was a wake-up call to the Nazi leadership.
01:31:49.200They worried that they were starting to lose parts of this coalition that they'd built, right?
01:31:54.300So the speech in Marburg is on June 17th, 1934.
01:31:58.220On June 19th, the Nazi regional leaders meet and have this pretty searching conclave about whether they were, in fact, kind of losing touch.
01:32:07.720And one of the problems that kept coming up was you can't really explain the SA to right-wing but non-Nazi Germans, right?
01:32:17.820And so the question of like, what do you do about this kind of increasingly anachronistic part of the state sort of emerges as a central problem in June of 1934.
01:32:29.660And part of that likely is that the SA just had a serious gay vibe, right?0.86
01:33:28.840I mean, it's a context where homosexuality is being, you know, its stigma is being reinforced, right?
01:33:36.940You had a more pervasive, though not, you know, I would say exactly gay-friendly Weimar era, particularly in, like, major cities.
01:33:46.060And then you have this, like, repressive cultural sort of movement, no small part headed by the SA, that then the SA becomes victim to.0.82
01:33:55.200That sounds, like, pretty classic to me.
01:33:56.780Yeah, yeah. And then the other thing that we can't get away from, given that we've talked a lot about their various biographies, is these guys were just losers, you know, right? The party consolidated its hold of German politics, which meant keeping a bunch of elites and voting groups happy. It also meant a bunch of new members, right?0.95
01:34:19.360But in 1933, this is where we're going to get to the collaborators next time.0.95
01:34:23.400At some point in 1933, the party had to stop accepting new members because everyone was fucking trying to join.0.56
01:34:31.380And the SA, who remember, right, think of themselves as the people who've been taking bullets for the movement since day one, right, like tended to see these people as just rank opportunists on the mere technicality that they were, in fact, rank opportunists.
01:34:44.920Yeah, but like they want the real deal that died in the wool, right-wingers.
01:34:50.020They don't want the people who are going to be kind of flabby or not as committed when it comes time to throw a punch or take a bullet.
01:34:58.920Exactly. And meanwhile, the ESA probably didn't get what it thought of as its due, right?
01:35:05.400Its members still couldn't get a real job, still could barely make rent, and their one passion in life, you know, publicly brutalizing others,
01:35:12.940were starting to get checked by the very state that they had helped take over.
01:37:06.260Yeah. And so for a while, Hitler humored the SA, possibly out of genuine worry, but more likely just to kind of make the Wehrmacht squirm, be like, oh, yeah, you're not going to go along with this? Well, what if I regularize the SA? Right. No, no, fine. We'll do it. Right.
01:38:15.160You would murder me in this Nazi party?
01:38:18.400I have been nothing but a useful tool to you up until this very moment when I have outlived my usefulness.0.67
01:38:26.640Does life mean nothing to you? Oh, wait, I'm hearing it now. I'm hearing it now.
01:38:31.600But yeah, and then we get to the Night of the Long Knives where basically Röhm and most of his upper echelon are eliminated by Hitler basically personally.
01:38:41.680the Night of the Long Knives sort of emerges out of this kind of combustible mixture rather than0.70
01:38:47.540any anti-gay sentiment but the Nazis used the purge of the SA to kind of do what I would call0.73
01:38:53.600kind of a pincers movement against the German right they emphasized the gay stuff when they
01:38:58.940explained to the German people why they had murdered their own buddies basically and by
01:39:05.540emphasizing the gay stuff I think they appealed to values conservatives right they were like we0.63
01:43:24.800I keep waiting for this project to start to seem sort of like needless or like overwrought or hysterical.
01:43:31.320And instead, it just seems like, oh, yeah, we're on we're on track in a lot of ways.
01:43:36.800Yeah. All my feedback is people being like, I just listened and now I'm so depressed that I'm like, I'm sorry, but I am having to research all this shit.0.96