Episode 82 -- Project 1933, Part IV: June 1 to June 30

Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobb.

And I'm Laura Donnegan.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

So, Adrienne, today we have another installment of what might be the most depressing series in podcasting, our Project 1933.

What are we doing with Project 1933 for those of us who are just tuning in?

And then, where are we right now?

Yeah, so Project 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.

This 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.

Now, we're not going to get to the collaborators because I started writing the notes for this and I'm like, oh, fuck.

Like the collaborators will have to wait.

You guys are pieces of shit and we'll get to you eventually, but not in the June episode.

This one's for different pieces of shit who were a lot more committed to the cause, let's say, namely mostly the SA, the Stomap Teidung, so the Nazi muscle.

This is our episode on the brown shirts, right?

Yep.

It's our episode on dudes hanging out in the worst possible fucking way.

Is the cure to male loneliness, starting a fascist militia

and enforcing our autocracy.

So this is interesting because I think for American listeners, the idea that there are politically motivated militias is not crazy, right?

Like 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?

But when we're talking about 1933 in Germany, this is a tradition that has existed across the political spectrum, right?

This 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.

What makes the SA, this brown shirt Nazi militia, different

from other kinds of political militias in sort of like the 1930s in Germany?

Yeah, that's a really good question.

And it's honestly one that I had kind of going into the research.

We'll see that basically initially not very much.

The SA was certainly more brutal and more radical than some of the other groups.

But in the end, it seems like the Nazis largely modeled it on other things.

As you say, the Freiko after the immediate end of World War I,

they were analogues.

And probably by 1928, you wouldn't have been able to say that there's something about this group that is totally distinctive.

What did make them distinctive and what made them a problem, frankly, first for the Weimar Republic, but then also for the Nazis, was the fact that they were very clearly driving towards an overturning of the state.

The SA was unique among the militia groups of the Weimar period in having actually attempted to overthrow the government.

And it was in fact outlawed twice.

But other than that, it is important to note that this isn't a group that, other than its sheer brutality, wasn't totally unprecedented.

So 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?

They'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, right?

And that sort of tension is what we're going to be looking at today.

I want to plug the rest of this series.

We 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.

I also want to plug our Patreon before we get too deep into this.

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We've been having a blast with it.

We put out two of those episodes every month, and it's just really kind of sillier, nerdier, a little more off the cuff.

and I love it.

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Please do.

So with that said, let's open the curtain on June 1st, 1933.

Yeah.

Or are we actually talking about two different years on this episode?

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 Kupenik Blood Week, which is this

set of SA-perpetrated outrages.

It's called Kupenik Blood Week.

Yeah, it does not sound great.

This is really like the happiest podcast in America.

Tell me about Blood Week.

Well, we'll get to Blood Week, and we'll get to Kupenik as well, but it's basically Kupenik is part of Berlin.

In the eastern part of the city, it was sort of a separate town until the 19th century, then became kind of part of Berlin in the 20th, and had a fairly active local SA chapter.

And in late June of 1933, these guys just go on a rampage and start arresting, detaining, torturing, and murdering people that they have beef with, mostly socialists, social democrats, communists.

but also the first Jews, the first confirmed cases where people are arrested and murdered just for being Jewish in Berlin.

We mentioned earlier like the ambivalent SA relationship to the Nazi regime.

To what extent were those SA arrests and I presume beatings

of Jews as Jews directed from up top?

Is this something that you've got these kind of local loosely organized thugs doing of their own volition, or is this something they're being told to do?

So it's really unclear, but in this case, it does not seem to have come from very high above.

What you probably got was a level of toleration.

And what you certainly got, and we'll get to that when we get to the denouement of the Kupenik Blood Week, is basically impunity, right?

It's not that the government was necessarily encouraging, well, they were encouraging it.

They weren't saying do it, but they then didn't punish people for doing it.

So, well, you know, you do the math.

Certainly, the regime did not have a problem with what happened in Kupenik in June of 1933 and what happened in other parts of Germany at around the same time.

They would eventually have a massive problem with the SA.

And this is again why we're talking about the SA for our June episode because the story of the SA then culminates in a very famous night in June 1934.

So we're briefly leaving our year of 1933 because on June 30th, 1934 is the beginning of an event that I think Americans will be quite familiar with.

Is this what we call the night of the long knives?

This is the Night of the Long Knives.

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.

This 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?

And 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.

Aaron Powell, yeah, 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.

But in some way, this was a problem for a revolutionary party because there were definitely elements in it, and the SA was one of them, that sort of said, well, let's keep going, let's keep going, let's keep pushing.

And the others were like, well, no, we took over what we wanted to take over.

Why would we do that?

So there's also a structural problem that rears its head in and through the SA.

Or another way of putting this is just that the SA were, in the end, not necessarily particularly political.

They were a bunch of psychos.

And the thing about psychos is that like they'll keep going, right?

For this episode, I looked at quite a few.

So the first one is one that is a white whale for this podcast because we still have to do an episode on it, which is...

Are you talking about Klaus?

I'm talking about Klaus.

You got to talk about klaus klaus

i'm gonna i'm gonna butcher this name it's tievaleit there's the th is just a tieleit yeah so klaus tieveleit's famous book male fantasies uh which is a study of

right-wing male paramilitary literature and the kind of gendered politics that made the nazis possible total stone cold classic not totally uncontroversial but definitely something i couldn't leave out in thinking through this episode.

The other texts I looked at was two by Daniel Siemens, The Stormtrooper, A New History, and the biography Horst Wessel, Turtun Verkelehrun and des Nationalisten.

So this is his study of this SA member Horst Wessel, who is this kind of important martyr figure.

And then the final one I should mention is Andrew Wackerfluss' book, Stormtrooper Families, Homosexuality and Community in the Early Nazi Movement.

We should mention, that's the other thing.

This is kind of a gay episode in the sense that famously after the Night of the Long Knives, one of the many justifications that the new regime gives for having

just slaughtered a bunch of its own henchmen, basically, is, hey, these were a bunch of gay dudes.

They were destroying our popular spirit with gayness, right?

And so the question of homosexuality and, you know, how much dudes just hanging out with other dudes you can do before someone starts talking about that is very much part of this episode as well.

So maybe briefly, we should talk about the two people that we've had guide us through 1933 so far, just so that they make an appearance here.

They'll come into it a little bit at the end, but not very much.

Victor Klemper, our literature professor in Dresden, notes in his diary in mid-June, quote, I wait from one day to the next, nothing stirs, sometimes I lose all heart and believe that this regime will last after all and outlive me.

So Victor, our diarist,

who's an ethnically Jewish professor, observing with some distress the rise of the Nazis, is descending into dread.

Yeah, I think it's starting to sink in for people that this is the new normal, right?

It had been a few months and there was sort of a feeling that like, hey, maybe something will shift, something will change, or there'll be just at least a sign of instability.

And they all knew enough and they were reading enough of the news coming out of Germany to see that the development was very much in the opposite direction.

They know that this is going to be probably for the long haul.

What about the second Virgil in this hell?

Our boy Thomas Mann.

Where is he?

Yeah, so Thomas Mann is now in southern France.

He's left Switzerland and has gone to Bondoil, 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.

But some of this is, I think, pragmatic.

There's a real worry.

I think his passport was about to expire.

And he's like, what happens if they don't renew this thing for me?

Can I actually leave?

Where can I go?

So he notes in his diary in mid-June that the big kids, that'll be Klaus and Erika Mann, are in Paris.

His youngest son Golo is trying to get those families money from Germany that the Nazis have frozen.

And they're all starting to get worried about their German passports.

He notes, quote, economic hardship and desolation are supposed to justify every pessimism.

Inflation and bread rations are expected.

This might be the exiles' wishful thinking, but that the wicked corruptors of the country should receive the terrible punishment they deserve is a truly human and natural wish.

They're hoping that this whole thing will lead to a massive withdrawal of funds from Nazi Germany.

This will lead to people no longer going to a disinvestment campaign and hoping that will sort of stir something in ways that we might recognize from 2025.

And he's now also starting to realize at the end of this entire diary entry, he says, well, I'm not sure it's happening.

Seems like they might get through with this.

They might actually succeed in all of this.

So now that we've checked in with our somewhat older protagonists, I do want to have us meet two new ones.

First, I want to introduce you to Anton Schmaus,

born in 1910 in Munich.

So he's just turned 23 in April of 1933.

Oh, he's a baby.

Yeah, he's a baby.

An apprentice.

His dad was a secretary of a trade union and a member of the Reichsbanne.

So that's the SPD's paramilitary wing.

Oh, so he's from a socialist family.

Yes, a long, long-standing socialist family, lives in Kupinik.

That's going to be important.

And he himself has joined the youth org of the Reichsbahner in 1931, but I think it's not a member of the big kids table yet.

What's the Reichsbahner, remind us?

So that's the SPD's muscle.

They are there to defend the Constitution and the Republic.

And the SPD and the Reichsbahner, at this point in, as our curtain draws up in 1933, those are still legal.

The Reichsbahner is probably illegal, but the SPD is still legal.

It will be made illegal, in fact, during the events of the Blood Week on June 22nd.

And then let's meet Herbert Gierke,

also born in 1910.

He's two months younger than Schmaus.

Okay.

He's born in Lichtenberg, which is in eastern Berlin, just north basically of Köppen, or northwest of it, I suppose.

He left school at 17 to apprentice as a bricklayer.

He became an independent bricklayer and took various odd jobs for the next couple of years.

This is post-1929.

So basically, his trajectory after that is punctuated by periods of unemployment, but when he's working as a bricklayer.

So Anton, our young socialist, has a pretty steady job.

He's apprenticing, he's working, right?

Yeah, although no one at that age in 1933, I think, is swimming in cash.

I think they're all bouncing from job to job.

But the main difference between these two young men, two months apart in terms of age, is that while Schmaus is as you say social democrat Gieke had joined the Hitler youth in 1927 so right as he left school and in 1928 he also joined the NSDAP which so the Nazi party which at that time you know this was not that big a party so he's a pretty early joiner he got in on the ground floor yeah young Herbert yeah okay it occurs to me these guys have like pretty similar biographies right they grew up in adjoining neighborhoods or very close-by neighborhoods in berlin yeah they're almost exactly the same age they're both from what sound like blue collar backgrounds they could have known each other or known people in common yeah and they're going to i understand it find themselves on opposite sides of this violence that's erupting exactly so gika had joined the sa i think a particular troop of it in 1930 and starting in the early 30s he rose through the ranks of the sa

in a way that i think means means that being in the SA was his main job.

I don't think it was his full-time job, but it was his main job.

He became a protégé of Wilhelm Zanda, who was a big guy in the SA.

He was born in 1895, so much older than either of these guys.

Different generation.

He's a World War I vet, right?

So there still are those in the SA.

Not everyone is sort of like these kids, but there are this older generation in it too.

He's an ex-cop, which gave him a lot of clout when he joined the SA in 1930.

So he joined actually after Giecko, but because of all this background in law enforcement, he had a great deal of pull among the SA.

And 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, Carl Gustav Anst.

We don't have to get into it, but basically what happens to Gieka 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 Gieka up, right?

So there's always something getting vacated, and he moves up one level.

Basically, as his sugar daddies keep rising through the ranks, he kept getting their jobs, right?

So before long, he was in charge of the SA and Kupinik, which would, I think, have put about 3,000 SA men under his command at 23.

You know, that's a model of a lot of careers on the MAGA, right?

You 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.

Aaron Powell, one thing I want to just talk about and starting with ESA,

do you remember something we talked about, the role of pubs and hotels?

Yeah.

You said that like the brown shirts, ESA, they were like taking over local bars and using them as headquarters and as ad hoc prisons.

And I think it's really worth dwelling on why that is.

These are essentially local chapters.

These are guys that hang out at a bar together.

and then do paramilitary shit, right?

It also occurs to me that like they must know the local guys they're persecuting, right?

Like 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.

Like these, these are not strangers to them.

Exactly.

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?

That's to say, a lot of the upper ranks were sons of officers.

They were born on bases or in the army and had moved around the country according to stationings and deployments, right?

So like to be in the Wehrmacht, to be in the German army, really meant

not having a local connection.

You had a connection to the nation, ideologically.

but 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.

It'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.

Aaron Powell, yeah.

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?

That'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?

Is because I can't imagine that this is a very strictly regimented military body.

It 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.

It seems like it's like a really malignant fraternity.

Yeah, exactly.

Who is like the average SA member?

Are these like guys in their early 20s or are they guys in their 30s?

Are they working in, you know, about as regular a way as somebody in 1933 in Germany can work?

Or are they like largely unemployed?

And like crucially, like, do they know any women?

Do they have wives?

Do they have girlfriends?

Do they have families or kids at home that they're neglecting when they're going out drinking?

Or are these like single men?

Are these like more traditional soldiers?

So my impression is that they were disproportionately young and they were disproportionately unmarried.

The typical member, as you're saying, is not someone who has a wife at home being like, make sure you get home at eight.

Like if you can spend most of your time at a bar with your friends, and then get into fights, right?

Like you might have a girlfriend or you might have someone you see from time to time and and you might have a mom, frankly, and might go home to her, but it's unclear whether or not a lot of them really had very meaningful attachments to women at all.

We have anecdotal evidence of quite a bit of street harassment of women from these guys, right?

Which doesn't mean anything, but it does mean that there's a kind of like more free-floating kind of sexual aggressiveness coming from them.

None of this strikes me as particularly unique to 1930s Germany.

Like a large group of young or young-ish drunk guys are going to be yelling at a woman who walks by.

Like, I can tell you that from having been a 25-year-old woman at one point, like, that's what they do.

Right.

And they don't particularly need a political agenda to do so.

However, I imagine that we're going to get more into the overlap between the politics that these guys are marinating in in these right-wing militia organizations and their approach to women.

Yeah.

The SA actually predates the NSDAP.

It was used by the predecessor party to the Nazi Party.

The first members were indeed Freiko members and recent warvets who acted as what was called Zahschutz.

So they were a security detail for nationalist gatherings.

The name Stohmabteilung, which is what SA is short for, was first used in 1921.

What does that mean?

Stulmabteilung?

Yeah.

Well, storm division.

So 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.

So this was already kind of a displaced, like we're going to continue fighting the war, right?

Like Stormabteilung 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.

It doesn't have any parodic quality the way Storm Division does in English.

Because Storm Division almost sounds like silly.

It sounds like made up.

It sounds like maybe something from like space balls, you know.

Yeah, the Nazis, as a rule, did not have a great sense of irony, I think, about these things.

No, this is, I think, meant to be deadly serious.

Of course, people made fun of it.

And it really contained this kind of playing at war, right?

In the end, these war guys were getting loaded and shooting at other people, right?

Like, I mean, they did get hurt, they did maim, they did kill, they did try to overthrow the government, all that.

But, 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.

And I think they did too, right?

It had the rhetoric of continuing the war or fighting a new war.

But in the end, it's like, well, you did just piss yourself, man.

The Strumab Teilung, when they started in 1921, that's just like three years after the armistice, right?

So 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.

I 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.

By 1933,

those guys have got to be like in their 40s, they've got to be aging out, right?

So when we get to 1933, I'm imagining it's somewhat of a different demographic.

Like the old, 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 like great pass he threw in high school.

But there's got to be younger recruits coming in below them, right?

Absolutely.

The connection between the SA and the Freiko and veterans would become less and less tight over the years, right?

The SA membership tended to be quite young.

We'll go over the numbers in a minute, but like SA grew explosively after 1929.

My 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?

Like it's very likely that a lot of that membership was fairly or very young.

But there was, of course, a certain gendered esprit de corps that persisted.

And 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?

These were people still smarting over this loss in World War I that they hadn't even been part of in that case.

And this was their chance to kind of do better.

So 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.

I imagine after 1929, you're probably getting a lot of guys who have had their career ambitions completely crushed by the global depression, right?

Yeah.

And that's like a little echo in miniature of the previous humiliation a decade prior.

And 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.

Yeah, at the same time, the question of discipline is strangely persistent.

I mean, I don't want to give the impression that this was just like a bunch of Yahoos going around making asses of themselves.

The fact that it was initially dominated by veterans, I think, did kind of shape.

how this organization operated.

This is where we get to Tivolite and to male fantasies, which isn't so much about the SA, but really much more about these Freikor veteran groups in the immediate aftermath of the defeat in World War I.

But I think the reason Tivaleit dwells on that stuff is that he clearly thinks, and I think the literature basically agrees with him on this,

that 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 clearly looks up to, as we saw with Giacke, to that earlier generation.

There's a kind of particular ethos that's being passed down, and that ethos really does emerge in 1919, 1920, 21.

So maybe we should say a little bit about Tivolite's famous book.

It's a two-volume book, about 1,200, 1,300 pages long, published first in 1977 and 78.

And he describes it basically as an attempt to describe a type of masculinity that made fascism possible.

Tieverland argues that the specific Freikohr masculinity didn't ignore women.

It was rather in some ways fixated on their exclusion.

And one reason that I thought it was very interesting that he proposes is that after 1918, there were these attempts to establish Soviet republics basically in Germany.

And the Freiko were first sort of formed and unleashed in trying to get these kind of left-wing movements under control in 1919.

Yeah, I think for American listeners, this might be crucial context, right?

Because the Red Scare in the U.S.,

Red Scare-ish plural in the U.S., were largely matters of like right-wing fantasy, right?

Yeah.

The 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.

As part of the German Revolution, there were Soviets that seized power in various cities and states.

And then more moderate forces used the Freiko

to basically crush those movements.

And those movements, part of it was demobilized troops, decided to band together and tried to establish these Soviet republics.

But women were quite visibly represented among them, as by the way were Jews.

So the face of what these men were supposed to crush would have looked unusually female to them,

They 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.

And here they were having to deal with the fact that their enemy now were these women.

And they had this experience of having basically women scream in their faces, fuck you, I'm a communist, right?

The question that I think emerges for them, according to Tivolite, is that how to do violence to women without accepting them as combatants, right?

Right, they kill them, sure, they beat them, they whip them, but all the while they push them out of the combat zone.

They're like, well, I had to do it because she was coming at me.

Oh, I had to whip some good sense into her because she's not really a revolutionary.

She's not really a soldier.

They're able to mete out extreme violence in these novels and reports and memoirs that Tivolite studies.

against women, but they have a funny way of not describing it as combat, being like, well, you can't fight a woman, so I didn't fight her, but I whipped her or beat her or I punched her in the face or tore her clothes or whatever it is.

But it becomes this very strange way of kind of celebrating violence while also being like, well, it doesn't really count.

It's not real.

Aaron Powell, there'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?

Like 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, political actors is something that I imagine a lot of men with like nationalist sympathies would bristle at.

The 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.

Here are the women of Germany being like, fuck you, I want a Soviet republic.

That's also messaging that inculcates a fair bit of misogynist resentment, right?

I am here suffering in this fucking trench so that the women don't have to be.

And this is something you see a lot in

right-wing conceptions of violence against women, which is this perception that women are hypocrites who claim a dual status, right?

Yeah.

They want privileged exemption 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.

You know, it gets pitched to men as chivalry, but I think it gets experienced by men as like a burdensome obligation that they don't particularly love doing on behalf of women.

So this is when like, when men are like, okay, if women are equal, why can't I hit you?

There's also, of course, the idea that we had buddies die face down in the muck out there, and now you are, you know, desecrating their memory by, right?

Like, this is the origin of the original stab in the back myth, right?

That like the German army was undefeated in the field, but then politicians sold them out.

And Tivola points out that the face of that to a lot of them were not these famous politicians whom they never met.

It was often women.

And the other thing to point out is that the idea that communism was coming at German men in this this distinctly feminine guise, there are certain metaphors that carry and that are very common in the literature of these Freiko.

You get this persistent image of a, quote, red flood.

Oh, what?

Yeah.

Yeah, you don't have to be a psychoanalyst to go, huh, on that one.

Like the idea that communism is like an infiltration.

I mean, you get that in the United States, right?

Like, we've done an entire episode on precious bodily fluids, but like the idea that like men might be scared of a red flood, you're like, oh, okay.

So I guess we're

not doing subtexts anymore, are we?

This idea that the body might not be solid and boundary and identifiable, but in fact, liquid and dare I say, permeable and

shifting and

penetrable and all these, you know, we could do this all day.

Yeah, yeah.

Exactly.

There are two things contained in that image of the red flood.

There's disgust with the feminine body, and as you say, a horror at the dissolubility of bodies.

There is this idea that like if you give bodies half a chance, they'll just dissolve into goo.

Tevolat calls this sort of the body as carapace or the body as armor, right?

The armor isn't there to defend the body towards the outside, but to keep it from dissolving into just like puddle form, basically.

This idea that they're like, there needs to be these boundaries policed against this sort of feminized flood is everywhere in Freiquo masculinity.

We'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 Theleweit here, are both kind of formless and permeable and like always collapsing, right?

But they're also very, very threatening, right?

Yeah.

It's the flood that's going to seep into all of your precious institutions or your national character.

its formlessness also makes it kind of worse in a way.

Yeah, that's right.

And it's contagious, it seems, right?

You're going to be made feminized by this

influence of communism, the influence of these terrible women who are aspiring to political participation for this definition-destroying enterprise that is the left.

Aaron Ross Powell, exactly.

Tivalet 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 Zalomo,

you aren't allowed to plant your fist in their visages just like that.

I 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.

Yeah, 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?

Like the 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.

Exactly.

And I definitely think you see that in a lot of our current backlash politics, right?

Yeah, that's right.

It'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.

I think that's right.

The exact same thing happens, basically, in this early Freikor literature.

The books that Tevulat 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.

It 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.

He'd be like, under these very specific conditions, would that make incest okay?

I feel like your reasoning is a bit motivated.

Yeah, go fuck your cousin, dude.

What if it's a nuclear bomb?

And it's like, oh, let me stop you right there.

In this case, it's mostly implicit self-defense, right?

I just had to kill the woman because she was going to kill me first.

But that's important because self-defense is essentially the organizing fantasy of DSA.

Well, 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.

At the same time, I would say there's also an odd passivity to it, right?

These men are pushed to the breaking point in this literature.

And I think Tivalite is exactly right, and this is why I'm bringing it up for 1933, that the SA was able to mete out just awful.

cataclysmic violence and 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, which like this is an abuse narrative, right?

This is Darvo, which they basically made into their operating principle.

And I think it's easy to miss the gendered nature of that because it's so pervasive in their thinking.

And we see it in so many right-wing groups.

But it is important that like, if Tivolite is right, that that is originally.

This kind of Darvo logic does have its origins in their relationship to women.

Women sort of come after you and people won't let you hit back, but then they push you far enough and finally you can let go, right?

And the finally letting go, that is what we get, according to the SS's own sort of self-reckoning or self-understanding in 1933.

We're finally off the leash.

We're finally letting go.

We're finally doing the thing that they pushed us into, right?

Everyone else saw just like a bunch of drunk psychos going absolutely apeshit.

But to them, this was this catharsis that they'd been promised and that really was sort of part of the psychic constitution of this entire community.

So 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?

Right.

So in 1921, the DAP, which was the party that the SA was allied with, became the NSDAP and Hitler basically took it over.

This is also the moment when Hitler starts introducing what's called the Führer Princip, right?

So the idea that there has to be one leader who is going to lead this whole thing.

And the SA became the muscle behind that takeover.

There were alternate power sources within the NSDAP, such as it was.

I 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.

Hitler is able to consolidate his power over the Nazi party.

in part because he has this militia backing him up, that he can enforce his intra-party preferences with violence.

That's right.

And 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.

And the early leader was actually Hermann Göring.

He eventually hands it over, specifically in 1923, because November 23rd, 1923 is the Hitler-Ludendorff coup.

So this is Hitler's first attempt to seize power.

It is an absolute fiasco.

Goering has to flee to Austria.

And basically, the SA is outlawed following this coup.

The organization is slowly being rebuilt underground or through alternative channels by this guy, Anstrühm.

Rühm is a World War I veteran, a veteran of the Freiko,

and will sort of become identified with the SA.

Also

a gay man.

Also,

very much believes in his fascism as an expression of a perfected homosexuality.

Or maybe vice versa, homosexuality as an expression of his his perfected fascism yeah right so we have a lot of sort of freiqua members joining the esa who probably have a feeling that they want to hang out with other dudes and victimize women ruhm is the

kind of dude who's just happy hanging out with other dudes with no chicks around right right he writes about women as being sort of a contaminating influence not just on the political realm but on like sort of the masculine spirit that's right the first leather fetishist possibly this guy who's got this kind of masculine maximalism being both a political commitment and a sex thing.

And from the beginning, Rühm is a problem for the Nazis, but not really for the reason you'd think.

Why is he a problem?

Why would I think?

And then why is he a problem?

Well, 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, et cetera, et cetera, right?

He's quite openly, yeah.

He's not like in the closet.

Although, surprisingly, I believe Hitler and Goebbels were unaware.

They do find out in 1932, but the reason they had problems with him had to do with the fact that in February 1925, the SA prohibition is lifted, big mistake, and Ruhm decides to reconstitute the group as a paramilitary.

And Hitler apparently didn't want this.

He wanted them to be his security detail, right?

Basically, Hitler leaves the Landsberg prison, which he's been in for the coup, and more or less says this has to be at least semi-legal.

We can't try a coup again.

We're going to get murdered.

Not trying to go back to prison, even though he was in a pretty like cushy prison.

It was pretty cushy, but in terms of attaining power, this was about as big a fiasco as you can imagine.

And 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?

It seems like you're up to your old tricks.

And so Rome is pretty disillusioned and leaves.

Actually, he goes to South America to become a foreign legion guy.

I mean, he just really loves killing people and like hanging out with other men.

And ironically, while he's gone, the ASA basically grows into the role that Rhoem had envisioned for it.

It becomes a paramilitary unit that disrupts the opposition's organizations.

It engages in street fights with leftists, with Christian, Jewish, communist youth groups, and paramilitaries.

It imposes a violence tax on not being right-wing, right?

If 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.

If you're trying to 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.

And they're quite successful, although one should say there are not that many of them.

At this point, I would say the neighborhood-based character, basically, if you were unlucky enough to live near one of these dudes, it sucked.

But there were like, I think there were like 40, 50,000 of these guys Germany-wide.

So still kind of stochastic violence at best.

I think you could still have a union meeting pretty easily without these dudes showing up.

Still, the mix between a party that is trying to attain power by semi-democratic means and this group of ruffians out for blood proves quite combustible.

right?

The SA increasingly wants to control the party.

Specifically, they demand a place on the parliamentary list for their top brass.

Basically, we are fighting.

We're dying.

I mean, people were dying, right?

We're dying for the movement.

You should reward us with spots on that list.

So you mean that they want SA officers to represent the Nazis in parliament?

Like, what are you talking about?

In the Weimar Constitution, as in the modern German constitution, a lot of seats in parliament are not assigned directly.

Like, you don't win them outright by winning a district.

Your party is allowed to put certain people into into parliament by drawing them from a list, right?

Depending on how many votes you get, you get to go down.

I don't know, if you're having a good election, you go down to spot 100 on your list.

But if you're having a terrible one, you go down to spot six on the list.

So this is a way for party apparatuses to ensure that their top brass remains in parliament, whether or not they win or lose their specific districts, if they even have any.

This basically is the question of who is going to be the face of the party.

And the SAA say, well, obviously, like we're the ones taking the beatings out here.

That should be us.

And everyone else is like, great, we're going to get your drunk uncle who broke a dude's nose just last week to be our parliamentary speaker.

I don't fucking think so.

I don't think anyone's going to vote for us if we do that.

That makes us seem like we're hell's angels and not a serious political party, right?

This is the time when Hitler is starting to curry favors with kind of more traditional conservative elites, with the Krupp dynasty and other sort of big industrialists.

And like, obviously, this is not the thing he wants out of that party.

The Nazis are trying to consolidate some mainstream appeal, and they're maybe a little embarrassed of these guys who are ruffians.

I mean, the SA, I think, was pretty explicit in wanting to try for another coup, right?

Which Hitler had ruled out.

It was like, we tried that.

We're going to do something else.

And so what ended up happening was actually an attempted coup within the NSDP.

Basically, the SA wanted to seize power from Hitler and wanted to drag the party closer to the workers' movement.

And I believe it's mostly the Weimar police that breaks that up.

It's this really combustible mixture from the beginning.

And then in 1930, Ernst Rühm returns from Bolivia.

All 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.

Exactly.

And under him,

we start getting this like extremely turbocharged growth of the SA.

This is not because of Wem 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.

But Rome is there to take the credit and reap the benefits.

That's right.

And then the other thing that happens in early 1930 is the death of Host Wessel.

Now, who is Host Wessel?

So Horst Wessel was an SA member, born in 1907.

So again, another person too young to fight in World War I.

Yeah, this is still a pretty young guy.

Yeah.

A different family background from the guys we've met so far.

Very bourgeois, kind of unusual for the SA.

He moved to Berlin in 1913.

He was part of the DNVPs, so the more sort of traditional right-wing party's youth organization.

He got into paramilitarism very, very early.

He joined the SA in 1926 and then very quickly rose through the ranks.

He studied for about two years, was going to be a lawyer, but he dropped out.

Aaron Powell, so this is not like a disaffected young man from the working classes.

This is a bougie kid who had opportunities to do other things

and chose to be in a Nazi militia.

Yeah, exactly.

And drops out in kind of a bigger way, too.

Like he shacks up with this woman who appears to have been a prostitute, whom he is very unclear.

I don't know if he tried to get her to go straight or he was sort of like her pimp.

It was very, very strange.

So he clearly also sort of like, there's a little bit of a descent down the class ladder.

This is the kind of thing where if it was happening in my era, I'd be like, okay, maybe this guy got into drugs.

Maybe, you know, he's downwardly mobile.

He's sort of living hard.

Yeah.

He is sort of legendary within the SA for being this kind of provocateur and troll, right?

He would bait other paramilitaries to get into fights.

Yeah,

very classic right-wing move.

Yeah, he's like, I'm a bougie kid and my signature move is

making lefties angry by being so outre.

I'm like, what do you have a fucking sub stack?

Like, I just, I hate this guy.

Well, I mean, he, what he did was, this was at a time when the Nazi Party's presence in Berlin was paltry

and, right, and the strength of the KPD and the SPD was overwhelming.

It was a pinko town.

Berlin is a lefty town.

Yeah.

And he probably feels like a part of an aggrieved minority as a Nazi in this like largely communist town.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And the Berlin police was still pretty lefty, or I mean, lefty, but they were affiliated mostly with the SPD, right?

So had no compunction about being like, you Nazis, get your asses into jail, right?

And in 1930, the SPD is still the majority party, right?

Yeah, that's right.

And he basically would sort of like go into these areas that no one else dared and get into these fights.

Like, that was what he was famous for.

He also wrote poetry because, of course he did, and it sucked.

Jesus Christ, a poet.

Yeah, just a...

You're like,

I can forgive him many things.

This is too much.

He's a fucking poet?

Any good news?

He got shot in the head.

He's going, shoot me, shoot me.

I'm daring you all to beat me up.

And then somebody finally takes him up on his offer, shoots him in the head.

Is it communists who do that?

Socialists?

Well, 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.

It might have been a rent dispute.

It's very unclear.

Anyway, he gets shot in the head.

He dies from his wounds in February of 1930 and he becomes this massive martyr figure for the SA.

Yeah.

Right.

The Horace Wessel Leed becomes the official anthem basically of the movement, right?

They name a song after him.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, wow.

Who wrote it?

I'm not even sure.

Maybe one of his terrible poems.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Which is important because it does mean that the SA sort of becomes in the final years of the Nazis' rise to power or the sort of final ascent, the SA becomes a very visible kind of escutcheon for this party in a way that I think the top brass of the party wasn't always altogether happy with, right?

So because of Horst Vessel, like sort of the idea that the SA is the vanguard of this party is now pretty ensconced.

It's pretty obvious to everyone else.

And you can sort of like push these guys aside.

They have a claim to the sort of like, they're the ones who are dying for the party, right?

They're the ones who are becoming victimized by...

well, either rent disputes or communist paramilitaries, take your pick.

They become the objects of a cult in a way that other parts of the party really really don't.

His sister, Ingeborg, writes a bunch of books about him.

He becomes the center of this bizarre memorial cult.

I think like Goebbels attends his funeral.

And there's like all this stuff around him.

So he becomes a symbol.

He becomes a tool of propaganda that the SA uses to entrench their position within the Nazi party.

And then, you know, probably they rally a lot of more recruits

around the sort of like bloody shirt of Ustwessel.

We should do an episode on like women who make their dead male relative their whole career, because 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 it's a type.

Oh, you're gonna love this part.

You know what Ingeborg did in her day job?

What did she do in her day job?

Doctor.

Oh,

she's an actual achiever, and her dead fucking brother becomes like my douchebag troll of a brother becomes her whole life.

Yeah, I know this chick.

Isn't that insane?

She's like, well, I mean, I could cure people or I could, you know, write PNs to my, you know,

my piece of shit, brother.

Yeah.

I 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 Vessel.

Really?

Yeah, sort of in reply to Ingeborg's Hey Geography.

It was the first project that

Klaus Mann undertook in exile, and he never completed it.

And there's a colleague of mine at the University of Hanover, Matthias Lovens, who is working on an edition of this work right now.

It's apparently not that great from what I've heard, but the overall thrust of the book was, hey, Horst Vessel was super gay, y'all.

Oh my God.

Not shockingly, Klaus Mann is like, I think this guy was gay.

I don't know if we know one way or the other.

Klaus Mann would say that, though, from what we've talked about, Klaus Mann, the playwright, right?

Who is

like just making a lot of gay plays before the rise of the Nazis and now in exile is continuing on his prior themes.

Yeah.

But so the important thing about Horse Vessel 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.

And one should say that like, I think I've alluded to this in a previous episode.

These guys do take a real beating, right?

Especially when they're still outnumbered.

Like, people die, people get maimed, like, you know, okay, but it's also like, it reminds me a little bit of like the MAGA hagiographies of like Ashley Babbitt.

It's like,

yeah, you know, I understand it's tragic for her family that she died.

It's a waste of a life.

On the other hand, what the fuck was she doing there?

Right, right.

And it's like the thing about Ernst Vessel is like,

I can understand the feelings that will lead people to see his death as a tragedy.

On the other hand,

adults have to be responsible for their own actions.

You don't have to be like, oh, these poor brown shirts are suffering violence.

It's like they're going out and they're starting the violence.

Right.

But I guess all I'm saying is that like.

This was a society obsessed with trauma, with injury.

It was a traumatized society, right?

And 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 DSA, right?

These were the guys who looked like they'd been in war.

They had not been in a war.

They had 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 like but they're in also inheriting like the tarnished wounded masculinity of the freikorp right exactly Exactly.

And of the just of the veteran.

Yeah.

This like the legacy of the veterans, their moral credibility.

That's now being inherited by these guys who are taking on the violence and experiencing the pain and the risk.

That's a great way of putting it.

Vessel's funeral is that of a war hero, right?

They're saying, this is our war, our substitute war.

We're starting it, but still, like, we're still going to wail and wail over our dead.

But you say, like, Goebbels went to the funeral.

I'm guessing they kind of knew what they had, right?

They're like, we're going to make him a martyr.

We're going to make him a symbol.

Oh, yeah.

Like, this guy may have gotten shot because he wasn't paying his rent, or he was demanding rent from somebody who didn't want to pay it.

I'm actually not sure which one.

I think it's the former.

I'm not quite sure either.

But, you know, we're going to make him a martyr to our cause.

Yeah.

This seems like a pretty...

deliberate or even, dare I say, cynical appropriation of this guy's death.

Absolutely.

So what really turbocharges DSA is the economic crisis.

It's not that the horse vessel story somehow like spikes the membership in this group, but it happens at the time when membership starts to spike.

Right.

And of course, it's also the moment when the NSDAP is really starting to rack up some serious numbers in elections.

And so it's all sort of happening at the same time.

This 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.

Right.

And like maybe a couple seats in the Reichstag.

And then this guy dies.

Yeah.

And so basically the real growth starts sort of in late 1930 into early 31.

Rum officially takes over the organization again in January 1931.

In late 1930, the SA had about 60,000 members.

By April 1931, the group had doubled to 120,000.

By December of 1931 it had grown to a quarter of a million members.

In the summer of 1932 it was almost half a million strong.

Which is important right like on the one hand there's this explosive growth because the Nazis are winning election because you know there is widespread disaffection with the republic and with sort of liberal democracy, but also there is just tons of unemployment.

This was also a works program for people who cycled in and out of precarious employment, right?

Yeah.

Your average member, like Mr.

Giecker, who we met earlier, was no longer a Freikorp 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.

That makes sense.

So during that time, the reputation of the SA 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 ESA had drawn up detailed documents about how they might seize power and whom they might kill along the way.

Oh, right, their literal project 1933.

Yeah.

And because they're idiots, they like leave it somewhere.

And someone's like, oh, let's publish this.

I don't know, maybe it got leaked or whatever.

But like, anyway, this gets out.

And, you know, not a great look.

And then in 1932, a journalist called Hermut Klutz publishes these extremely frank letters from Rühm

to a doctor named Carl Gunter Heimsot,

which were, well, I was going to say they were homoerotic, but they're not homoerotic.

They're using the language kind of being pioneered by our friend Magnus Hirschfeld to kind of say flat out, I am a gay man.

So Rome is sexing a doctor.

Yeah, it's a little bit more high-minded than that, but like there's definitely no gray area.

I don't think he's even coming onto him.

I think he's just kind of being like, he's being open-hearted about it.

He's just confiding in him about how gay he is.

I don't know.

I'm detecting some flirtation.

It's just two right-wing dudes hanging out.

Talking about how great it is to be gay men.

Yeah.

Okay.

Perfectly innocent.

I'm not hearing it.

I'm sorry, Amora.

I'm not hearing it.

So Magnus Hirschfeld, who they are going to persecute, they are also sort of cribbing his language, right?

Exactly.

I mean, he his own way, sort of right-wing way of couching it, but it's pretty remarkable.

And

more importantly, this was a time when a lot of this stuff still had to come with a certain degree of deniability.

And Stonehenge had completely evacuated any possible deniability.

It was just out there.

The closet can sometimes have like a degree of artfulness, and I'm not really detecting that.

I'm imagining Arnstrom like lying belly down on the shag carpet with his, you know, heels kicking up behind him as he twirls a phone cord.

That's right.

Like, that's kind of what I'm imagining.

No, 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 is like, I don't know.

Like, he's like, Ernst Jerome is into guys.

He always seems so virile.

Yeah, it's not a good look.

It's especially, right, a problem for any kind of overtures to, let's say, more traditionalist parties.

Within the Nazi Party, it's not a gigantic problem, but like it does sort of create real problems with the more traditional conservatives.

But 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.

They're going to send them to, like, gay men as gay men are going to get sent to concentration camps, right?

That's right.

But 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.

How do they square that circle?

Aaron Powell, it's really interesting.

I mean, part of the answer is sequence.

Goebbels appears to have been just a rabid homophobe.

With Hitler, I think we're not so sure.

He may not have cared that much one way or the other.

It really is because of Ruhm that they kind of have to crack down on this stuff, and they feel like they're getting associated with with it.

So this is where their own homophobia comes through.

But they have room for it somewhere and somehow still in this early stage.

And it's really through the purge of the SA 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?

It's not a big issue for them.

And so they don't have a fully articulated stance on it.

Trevor Burrus: So homophobia is going to be something they use, right?

Like when they burn all of Magnus Hirschfeld's books.

Yeah.

which they did in like, what is it, May 1933, they do that?

May 1933, that's right.

By then, they're going to be, you know, moving towards an ideological homophobia.

By the time they're classifying gay men as undesirables later in the 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, and 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?

Like those of us who are our guys get to do this.

It's through you guys, the little people, the out-group, that we're going to punish this behavior.

Yeah, I mean, we should do a special episode on this at some point.

My impression is that...

right they hated someone like hirschfeld because they're like well this is jewish homosexuality right like they're really gay but we're not really gay that's not you know we are just dudes fucking other dudes, but in a Freiko kind of way, right?

Like in a Germanic way or whatever, right?

Well, like the homosexuality is in service to the nation as opposed to in service to

this like cosmopolitan decadence, maybe?

Is that how they rationalized it?

No, I mean, like, they thought it was an excess of virile virtue as opposed to feminization, a self-feminization.

I just have so much virility that I need to stick it in my friends.

Yeah.

From the essay.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah, no, that totally makes sense.

Yeah.

Again, I'm not, I don't understand where the problem is.

This is

no, but I mean, like, yeah, so like they basically, you're absolutely right.

They thought that, you know, that there was a kind of sort of sex-obsessed Freudian version of this that is pathological.

And then there's the sort of healthy things, just dudes hanging out and cuddling a little bit.

Is there part of this where like there's the very old school taboo on certain homosexual acts and not on others?

That's right.

Which you can take back to like, you know, literally Athens and Sparta.

Is it like the Hirschfeld guys are doing stuff that the SA guys aren't doing?

I mean, this might be like, this is a little more than Ernst Rome, then maybe I want to know.

Maybe more than our listeners want to know.

Yeah, I don't know.

I don't know.

That would probably be harder to document.

Like, are we asking, well, did Ernst bottom?

Yeah, I don't know.

We'd have to have someone on to really look into this.

Call in listeners if you happen to know.

Yeah.

I mean, I'm sure someone's looked into this, but I don't know if they extended it to specific practices.

I, my impression is that it's the derivation of where it comes from, right?

Like one is sort of neurasthenic and hysterical, and the other thing is just like.

You know, I mean, these are also readers of Nietzsche.

They're like, this is just nature.

This is just my blonde beast energy finding its issue.

And it happens to find its issue by, you know, 69ing another dude.

And like.

I just wish listeners could see the face I'm making.

Normally it's Adrian's face, but I just saw my own face in the camera and I was like, oh dear.

This should have gone in the Patreon.

I didn't realize it was going to get this blue.

It's not, well, it's not the destination.

It's the route they take to get there that they're seeing as most important.

I think so.

Okay.

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.

In April.

Now they're just going to do a January 6th.

And so the chancellor at the time, Brüning, outlaws the SA.

And it's like, you guys were told in no uncertain terms, no more coups.

You couped again.

You don't get the devil coup.

You can't get couped again, is the point.

And so, yeah, they're outlawed.

And the NSDAP reacts in a total panic.

This is the worst thing that could have happened to them at this point.

They thought that they had the wind in their sails, and suddenly here they are with a big part of their organization being outlawed.

But in a weird way, the panic then reveals just how much clout they already had on the right.

People 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.

They're like, these are good lads.

They put their necks out there to fight the evil communists.

They're sacrificing for the fatherland.

It's like, well, no, they get into fights and beer holes.

I 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?

So members of the Imperial House of Hohenzollern, who, as you know, are still kicking around, intervene on behalf of the SA.

So did the then Secretary of the Army, Kurt von Schleicher, who would later be Chancellor.

Remember the name Kurt von Schleicher, by the way, because,

well, there'd be no points for guessing why.

It's kind of ironic that he stood up for the SA in 1932.

Uh-oh.

Things are not going to go good for Kurt.

That's right.

The Nazis will kill him in 34.

So, you know, great stuff.

Always stand up for the rights of the far right.

It will never come back to hurt you.

It will always be rewarded in good faith.

Yeah.

As Kurt found out.

A great lesson from Kurt von Schleitzer.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So anyway, and then the government basically falls.

Von Papam, whom we've already met, is named chancellor for the first time.

And von Papm sort of makes this deal and says, let's do new elections on July 31st of 1932.

But before that, let's lift the prohibition on the SA, which happens on June 14th, 1932.

So they were outlawed for all of like two months.

So they lift the prohibition on the SA just in time for an electoral campaign.

What could possibly go wrong?

And so that campaign basically turns into a civil war.

There's paramilitary fighting everywhere and violence everywhere.

There are 300 people dead by election day.

Yikes.

Thousands wounded.

Wow.

And 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.

And 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.

And 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, and as we said, increasingly also just people who happen to be Jewish.

And so that's maybe where we should return to June 1933, finally, and to our two new protagonists, Anton Schmaus and Habet Giacke.

So on June 21st, 1933, the SA, led by Giacke, starts ransacking apartments of known political political enemies throughout Küpenik, so throughout this area of East Berlin.

Known political enemies.

We're talking about like the communists who haven't fled?

Are we talking about like some people who are trade union leaders?

Like who are we talking about?

Yeah.

Remember unions got outlawed in May, so that would be a pretty easy one.

It was members of the SPD.

It was members.

of now dissolved paramilitary groups, all that stuff, right?

Most of them were somehow politically active, but not all.

There are some people who are just, you know, who happen to be the wrong kind of people.

And among the dwellings they target is the Schmaus family home, right?

You know that both father and son basically were active in the SPD

and were part of the Reispane, so a now outlawed group meant to defend the Republic, which obviously was being dismantled sort of at this time.

I have a picture of the Schmaus family home in our dock, by the way, in case you want to have a look at it.

It's still around.

It's cute.

It looks like one large building with maybe like four or five single-family, like two or three-story units in it.

Yeah.

It's like clearly workers' housing and it looks just like a simple working class neighborhood.

Yeah.

So there's a couple of things that are remarkable about this.

These are sort of, well, these are row homes.

In the UK, this would not be totally out of the ordinary.

In Berlin, which is almost entirely an apartment apartment city, it's kind of remarkable that these are single-family dwellings, although row homes.

The Schmaus family lived in the second one from the left, I believe.

And that's pretty important, actually, for our story, that they lived not in an apartment.

Like most of the people that we've talked about who got picked up lived in, you know, walk-up apartments somewhere.

These guys have a small front yard.

have a small backyard and live in this new build.

These buildings would have gone up in the 1920s, a project of kind of social democratic governments, right?

Like nice, affordable homes for workers, basically.

So when the SA show up at this house, Schmaus was at his trade school, you know, doing his training, basically, because, you know, he, unlike the SA, had a real job.

And when he left, basically the training, someone warned him about the searches and says, like, maybe don't go home.

And he, it's a little unclear exactly what he said, but he basically says, like, I'm not, what am I going to do?

Like, there's been enough running around.

I'm going home.

And by the time he got home, the SA had left.

The same night, though, the SA returns once more, right?

They seem to have just roved the streets.

They go from address to address and they just return after a while and beat down the door to the home.

No reason.

They're just doing it.

And Shmao, his parents are freaking out.

Shmao says, like, I have a gun.

Get out or I'll shoot.

They don't get out, so he shoots.

He kills two of the SA men in self-defense.

I think a third one is shot by another SA officer or something like that.

And that person also later dies.

And then, you know, this is where it's important that he's not like a lot of these guys in the KPD and the SPD who get arrested living on like a fourth floor apartment somewhere in, you know, in Kreuzberg or in Prenzlauberg or something like that, right?

Like where you can't jump out the window.

He's living on this fairly modest little row home.

He can jump out the second floor window, which is what he does.

And he flees on foot, dressed apparently only in his swim trunks.

This has not been explained to me why that happened.

Okay.

I mean, it's June in Berlin.

It might be a hot night.

Yeah.

All right.

I'll take it.

So this was a kind of neighborhood built for lower middle class to working class families into an area that had been a park.

The 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.

So he got away.

The 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.

So 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.

Yeah, like a commuter rail.

Yeah.

Two tracks, you know, little building,

usually a kiosk that sells newspapers or whatever.

And what he does is kind of interesting.

This is why I'm telling you all this in such detail.

He runs up to an official from the Berlin S-Bahn, right, a station agent or something along those lines, and says, I need help.

I'm being chased by the ESA.

And 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.

They're still thinking there's like an apparatus to protect this guy from the right-wing militias.

Well, in an interesting way, though, there is, right?

Like, that's the funny part.

You know, I would have thought they'd be like, you're on your own, bozo, but like, no, they, they're like, let's get you to the police.

So they seem to think there is, and so does Anton.

So he basically wants due process and protection, right?

He wants protection against the SA.

He's like, I'll surrender to the cops, but I won't be set upon by these fuckers.

So he gets to the police station, and the police basically have to beat back this SA mob trying to grab Anton Schmaus right there and then.

And the police do that.

They do kind of tell them that they have to leave.

And I think there are blows exchanged.

And 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, eastern part of the center of the city, for those of you who are not familiar with Berlin.

And the transport then gets waylaid by the SA, who demands basically that the police surrender Anton Schmaus.

And the police escort just flat out refuses and says, like, no, we're bringing him to this police station.

And the SA ends up following the police to the headquarters, storm into police headquarters, Gierke at his head, and they open fire on Schmaouse in a cell.

They open fire on him and he's hit in the spine, survives, but is badly injured and has to go to the hospital.

And then eventually the SA men are ejected from the station.

But to me, this is a really interesting kind of inciting incident because it really shows you that there's still kind of fluidity in who gets to exercise authority and violence in early Nazi Germany.

This is not fully settled yet.

The SA, they're spending a lot of time kind of running into doors and being told to leave in a way that I think is not true for the SS in the later 30s.

It's really, really kind of interesting that there is still kind of a perception of legitimacy around certain organs of the state and that the Nazis sort of can't walk all over those.

That's fascinating that there's still these remnants of a non-Nazi state, even this late into 1933.

Right?

Honestly, I wasn't expecting that.

Yeah, no, it shocked me as well.

What's interesting, though, is, of course, that what the Nazi government does with this incident is totally different, right?

Like, there are all these SA outrages perpetrated that night, June 21st, 1933.

But the Nazis do what they always do when it comes to the SA.

They just declare the martyrs, right?

They don't focus on Anton.

They focus on the two dead SA men.

And on June 22nd, they use the fact that Anton was an SPD member or was in the Reichsbanner to basically outlaw the SPD nationwide.

Right.

He gets murdered and is made into the villain, right?

You talked about Darvo.

Yeah.

And this unprovoked violence violence against an SPD member is made into a reason why the SPD is dangerous and has to be outlawed.

Exactly.

When you say Anton is still alive at this point, he will unfortunately die, I think, at the end of the year.

He won't make a difference.

So he lingers after killing,

but not for long.

And 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, right?

So 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.

They know that the violence is still continuing unabated.

So for instance, on June 22nd, Also, the SA shows up again at the Schmaus residence.

Anton's father is later found dangling off a lamppost.

They declare it a suicide.

It's obviously not a suicide.

And his mother and 13-year-old sister are abducted and tortured by the ESA, right?

So

their capacity for revenge or for casting their own sadism as revenge is just

inexhaustible.

They're just always the victims, always only reacting.

You know, abducting a 13-year-old is like pretty much as low as you can fucking go, but like it's always

only reactive.

It's only due to the nefariousness or the brutality and cravenness of our enemies, et cetera, et cetera.

And 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?

They were suddenly being put in a position by these new rulers to really victimize their fellow citizens, right?

To take their jobs, to take their stuff, to denounce denounce them to the authorities, to get them killed.

They needed a story to allow themselves to say, well, I'm only doing this reactively.

I'm only doing this in response.

They started it.

This 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?

They're not going to shoot someone, but they might report someone to the authorities, right?

And this whole scale reversal, right?

You may victimize others and then call yourself a victim.

That is, I think, part of the sort of Faustian bargain that the Nazis offer to a really large swath of Germans in this entire spring of 1933, but here it really comes to a head.

So the same group that Geeker runs, Standate 15, goes on a tear for several days, abducting and torturing at least 500 people.

A bunch of them die or disappear.

The victims were mostly men, but not only.

There are entire families that are basically abducted.

The targets were members of trade unions, the SPD, but also notably Jewish families.

The chemist Georg Eppenstein, in his 60s at the time, was picked up at his house on June 21st.

and tortured for days.

Just a random old man.

Yeah, just a random old man.

Was basically tortured for days until his wife was able to get George

to release him into hospital.

And by the time she got him out, he was absolutely shattered and died of his injuries in August.

God.

Yeah.

His tormentor, a guy named Gustav Erpel, was charged with this killing by the East German authorities.

Oh, so after the war.

Yeah.

And the widow, Martha Eppenstein, was able to testify against him and describe her husband's torment.

So at least she got that satisfaction.

And Erpel was guillotined on February 21st, 1951.

Yeah, the Germans used guillotines for a lot of state executions, like through World War II and then after.

I guess so.

I was a little surprised that the East German state still used guillotines.

I assumed that after World War II, everything was a firing squad or hanging, right?

I mean, like the Nuremberg trials, I think those were

hanged, yeah.

But so what's important about Eppenstein's killing is that it's often regarded as the first explicitly anti-Semitic killing

after this this Nazi seizure of power in Berlin.

Because this guy was a chemist, by which you mean, like a university chemist or like a pharmacist?

No, he ran a chemical company, I think, like a small one.

He did like, he made some kind of chemical.

But he's not, this is to say he's not a communist.

He's not a trade union leader.

He's not a socialist.

He's not somebody out there with like an aggressive anti-Nazi agenda.

He's just a Jewish guy.

Just a Jewish guy, exactly.

Yeah.

And again, it's not the first time this has happened in the spring of 1933.

It is the first time that we know of in Berlin.

And of course, plenty of Jews had already been murdered, but there had been these other supposed factors that had motivated that.

So the aftermath of this blood week, which runs really, it runs for six days, is that on July 1st, 1933, Gierke is promoted to Über Sturmbanführer, which is one of those stupid Nazi titles.

In February 1934, he'd be promoted again.

On July 25th, 1933, the Ministry of Justice declares an amnesty for any deeds committed by the SA during the Blood Week and pretty much for any crimes committed during the Nazi seizure of power.

So the SA

gets to purge, basically.

Crime is now basically legal if it's committed by the SA.

The two dead SA men are buried with state honors and again with Goebbels in attendance.

The Nazis rename the street on which Schmaus had shot them, the Alde Dalwitzerstraße, into the Walter Appe Straße.

That's one of the people that he shot.

Today we should note it is the Anton Schmausstrasse, so he gets the last laugh, at least for now.

So I just wanted to point out the weird kind of circularity of this kind of violence.

This is a movement addicted to sacrifice, to trauma, to loss, and kind of weirdly obsessed with creating the conditions for martyrdom.

Even 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?

It's rough.

I'm grossed out.

I'm sorry.

I'm not often at a loss for words.

I mean, luckily, luckily, a lot of these guys are going to get theirs much sooner than the arrests of the Nazi state.

In the end, of course, a lot of the SA did get to enjoy the victimhood they so desperately craved, right?

And as we already indicated, sexuality had an odd role to play in that process as well.

So in closing the episode, let's jump outside of 1933 and look at the end of the SA, just about a year after the Kupenik blood week.

Over that year, Rum's position got more and more precarious within the Nazi administration.

The problem was that the SA had been the paramilitary wing of an insurgent party.

And now, as we've seen, that party was rapidly becoming identical with the state.

And power centers were emerging all over the place.

Blomberg, their new Secretary of Defense, was really starting to get somewhere with the Reichswehr, right?

Like Goebbels had his fiefdom over a propaganda, et cetera, et cetera, right?

Like it had been like, oh, here's the party and here's the muscle.

And now suddenly this party has control of the police, of the army, of the administration, et cetera, et cetera, right?

Like it becomes really hard to sort of understand, well, why the fuck do we have these guys around still, right?

Aaron Powell, so 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.

This 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.

Aaron Ross Powell, that'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?

Which always kind of involved trade-offs.

And then having these guys who were just all Nazis all the time made it harder to make concessions to these people, right?

And 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.

And 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.

But he becomes relevant one friggin' last time.

He basically gives a speech at the University of Marburg aimed at conservative elites, and it's a pretty thinly veiled call for consolidation and an attack on the idea of permanent revolution within the Nazi state, which was essentially Rome's position.

He says, quote, no nation can afford a constant revolt from below if it wants to pass the test of history.

The movement must come to a standstill someday.

At some time, a stable social structure must emerge, maintained by an impartial judiciary and by an undisputed undisputed state authority.

And 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?

So 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.

Good luck with that, dummies.

Yeah.

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 that'll work right was kind of too sick to do much of anything still the marburg speech was a wake-up call to the nazi leadership they worried that they were starting to lose parts of this coalition that they'd built right so The speech in Marburg is on June 17th, 1934.

On June 19th, the Nazi regional leaders meet and have this pretty searching conclave about whether they were, in fact, kind of losing touch.

And one of the problems that kept coming up was you can't really explain the SA to right-wing but non-Nazi Germans, right?

And 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?

And part of that likely is that

the SA just had a serious gay vibe, right?

How gay was it?

In fact, unclear.

It did attract some gay men and had this kind of inadvertently gay vibe.

And ironically, this sort of inadvertently gay vibe was all the more visible because, of course, unlike previous periods in history, people in the Weimar Republic knew what a visible gay male culture looked like.

This was a society that still had stigmas around homosexuality, but also had a very good vocabulary for talking about it.

I'm like, I don't know, guys, it

seems pretty gay to me, right?

Like they, they, they knew what a gay bar looked like, right?

Or many of them did.

And so they were like, sorry, it just feels like that's a lot of what this is.

And so the SA, yeah, it just, it also had like an uneasy place in this kind of emerging consensus between, yeah, the Nazis and sort of far-right, but more traditionally conservative constituencies.

That makes sense to me.

I mean, it's a context where homosexuality is being, you know, its stigma is being reinforced, right?

You had a more pervasive,

though not, you know, I would say exactly gay-friendly Weimar era, particularly in like major cities.

And then you have this like repressive cultural sort of movement, no small part headed by the SA, that then the SA becomes victim to.

That sounds like pretty classic to me.

Yeah, 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?

In 1933, this is where we're going to get to the collaborators next time.

At some point in 1933, the party had to stop accepting new members because everyone was fucking trying to join.

Just great profiles profiles and courage.

And the SA, who remember it, 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.

Yeah, but like they want the real deal, the died in the wool, right-wingers.

They 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.

Exactly.

And meanwhile, the ESA probably didn't get what it thought of as its due, right?

Its members still couldn't get a real job, still could barely make rent, and their one passion in life, you know, publicly brutalizing others, were starting to get checked by the very state that they had helped take over.

So this is a real, real problem, right?

You said earlier that the problem is also, of course, that like it's starting to look less and less like a stabilizing force and much more as an alternate power center, like one of those that the Nazis or that Hitler in 1933 was so keen to eliminate one by one.

Remember that the Treaty of Versailles kept the official size of the German army extremely small, I think around 100,000.

And the SA was gigantic by comparison.

And so Rhem's thought was: hey, wouldn't the obvious solution just be to integrate the SA into the Wehrmacht, right?

Guess who didn't like that idea?

The Wehrmacht is like, I'm sorry, you're going to have like millions of Pete Hegsets schmutzing up our military.

Like, we are trained professionals, you know?

Yeah, I worry that we like underplayed the terror of the SA when we're just talking about them as drunks, right?

Like, but they were inflicting a lot of pain, but they're not disciplined.

They're not like

people you want in your army.

Yeah, I mean, like, they're not trained in like weapon systems and that kind of thing.

Like, they probably went to a shooting range or whatever.

But, like, this is always a tricky part of regularizing militias.

And you know, the Wehrmacht, you know, which had fought a world war within recent memory, you know, thought of itself and had a long history of thinking of itself as a deeply professional army.

And you're right, the SA was terrifying and brutal and ruthless.

But you wouldn't look at that bunch and be like, the first thing I think of is professional, right?

They had a definite seat of the pants kind of quality.

Yeah, they're a little gay, they're a little drunk, they're a little hard to control, they're not entirely reliable, you know.

This all makes sense to me.

Yeah.

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?

And they're like, oh, no, fine, we'll do it.

Right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then so for most of late 1933 and early 1934, you get these stopgap measures, right?

They're trying to find stuff for the SA to do.

For instance, border protection and youth training, right?

But at the same time, Hitler tried to make it clear, like the army will remain the army, obviously.

Okay.

So that's got to make the SA feel, are they starting to feel a little nervous about their own status?

Weirdly enough, they don't seem to notice what's coming.

Delmas is, I'm sorry.

These guys are so fucking, it's like easy in retrospect to be like, they're stupid.

I would have simply learned the lessons of history that I have at a at a remove of you know 70 years or perhaps I simply would not have been a Nazi but like these guys like first rule they everybody trusts the Nazis.

It's nuts.

How many people do that?

You would murder me in this Nazi party?

I have been nothing but a useful tool to you up until this very moment when I have outlived my usefulness.

Yeah.

Does life mean nothing to you?

Oh, wait, I'm hearing it now.

I'm hearing it now.

But yeah, and then we get to the Knight of the Long Knives, where basically Rühm and most of his upper echelon are eliminated by Hitler, basically personally.

The Knight of the Long Knives sort of emerges out of this kind of combustible mixture rather than any anti-gay sentiment.

But the Nazis used the purge of the ESA to kind of do what I would call kind of a pincer's movement against the German right.

They emphasized the gay stuff when they explained to the German people why they had murdered their own buddies, basically.

And by emphasizing the gay stuff, I think they appealed to values conservatives, right?

They were like, we actually share your values.

We're not as weird as you think we are, right?

Right.

Yeah, they're trying to purge this element that's probably diminished their own credibility a little bit among this set of the like social conservative population that they need.

Right.

And so that already would be a pretty useful thing for them at this point.

But at the same time, they use the purges to then kill a bunch of conservative elites too.

They murder former Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher.

They arrest the still sitting vice-chancellor from Papman in his vice-chancellery.

The guy who wrote that speech in Marburg that made them mad, they just shoot him right there, right?

So they do both things.

They're like, by the way, we will still randomly visit violence on you and we will kill you, but we're also killing people you hate.

So, you know, those are your options here.

Yeah, yeah.

A carrot and a stick, if you will.

Yeah.

and the gay part of this sort of becomes really kind of famous, makes sort of the rounds almost immediately.

We should mention, by the way, that when Thomas Mann hears about this on July 4th, right, the purge starts on June 30th.

So he hears about it a couple of days later, and he writes in his diary, Thomas Mann himself, a gay man, quote, it is possible and seems likely that the masses of the petite bourgeoisie fall again into a morality tailored for them on the basis of a dirty psychology and that they see hitler as the savior once more right so he's like oh shit they're just gonna use homophobia now too right so he he calls it immediately on july 4th 1934 and and that's exactly what happens like the attitude towards homosexuality in their own ranks changes and the crackdown that had already begun on gay men and lesbians and the trans community within germany intensifies intensifies because of this.

So just to close up the story of the Kupenik Blood Week, when June 1934 rolls around, remember how Georgia had all these high-level friends?

Well, they all get murdered.

Karl Gustav Ernst, dead.

Wilhelm Sande apparently kept dropping to the ground before the firing squad so that they had to shoot him in the face lying down.

Well, did he think he was going to like play dead and get out of it?

Yeah, I mean, I guess, you know.

Or maybe he was scared.

I don't know.

I don't know how I would behave before firing squads.

No, me neither.

But, you know, then again, you and I are not Nazi scums.

We're not Nazis.

So that's not something we have to worry about in that context.

But it's very important that the SA, it's not that the entire SA gets eliminated.

Goke himself lived, stayed in the SA, got promoted some more, right?

The SA gets sort of folded into other things, but he kind of keeps rising through the ranks, then sort of went quiet.

He joined the Wehrmacht and then got killed in March 1945, someplace on the Eastern Front.

Kudos to whatever Soviet soldier shot that guy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He did us all a huge solid.

Jeez.

Yeah.

So that is the story of two Junes, of June 1933 and 1934.

An epic story.

The lesson is that gay men should not join the right.

Yeah.

And neither should you if you're just a fucking scumbag, right?

Yeah.

Because this is like, you can see it as like Ernst Röhm who gets killed in the night of the long knives.

But then Herbert Goerke does sort of get promoted by virtue of having been such a useful scumbag, you know?

But then he dies too.

He dies for a losing cause.

Yeah.

I don't think it pays.

I don't think being a Nazi pays.

Yeah.

I mean, for now, the people trying it again seem to be doing pretty well.

But the last time they tried this, they all got killed.

Yeah.

So let's hope that that bit of history will also repeat itself eventually.

Yeah.

I mean, top level takeaway, kids, don't be Nazis.

If you take one thing from this podcast.

Try to avoid being the baddies.

But do listen to In Bed with the Right.

Thank you for following us on this journey through 1933.

God, we're halfway through.

I guess we condensed a couple months at the beginning, but like,

it's proceeding apace.

I know.

I keep waiting for this project to start to seem sort of like needless

or like overwrought or hysterical.

And instead, it just seems like, oh,

yeah,

we're on, we're on track in a lot of ways.

Yeah, all my feedback is people being like, I just listened and now I'm so depressed.

And I'm like, I'm sorry, but I am having to research all this shit.

How do you think I feel?

Regime thugs are ringing the doorbell at your house and shooting you if you're an opposition member of the regime.

Like, you know, sometimes it's a little too on the nose.

Yeah.

But I'm glad we're doing it.

I'm really glad you're bringing me through it.

And I'm so glad to have our community here at Inbed with the Right.

Subscribe to our Patreon.

Tell all your friends.

Write and review us on iTunes.

Sometimes people do that.

And it helps people find us, especially if you give us a good rating.

If you want to give us a bad rating, please keep that to yourself.

Yeah.

And yeah.

See you next time.

See you next time on Invit with the Right.

In Bed with the Right is made possible by hundreds of listeners who support us via patreon.com.

Our episodes are produced and edited by Mark Yoshizumi and Katie Lau.

Our title music is by Katie Lau.