The dispute was finally smoothed over by the mediation of Dietrich Eckart. At a membership meeting held on July 29, 1921, the crisis was laid to rest. Once again Hitler could not refrain from vaunting his victory. Although Drexler had pounced on the chance afforded by Hitler’s resignation to purge Hermann Esser from the party, Hitler insisted that the membership meeting be chaired by Esser, his satellite. Greeted by “applause that would not cease,” Hitler gave so skilled a version of the dispute that almost everyone swung over to his side. Drexler was given the consolation prize of honorary chairmanship, and the bylaws were revised as Hitler wished. His own followers moved into the executive committee; he himself was granted the dictatorial powers he demanded. The NSDAP was in his hand.
That same evening, at the Krone Circus, Hermann Esser hailed Hitler as “our Leader”—unser Führer. It was Esser, too, who henceforth held forth with cynical sentimentality in restaurants and taverns as the most zealous preacher of the Führer myth. Simultaneously, Dietrich Eckart in the Völkische Beobachter began a well-orchestrated campaign to purvey the same myth. On August 4 he sketched a profile of Hitler as a “selfless, self-sacrificing, devoted and sincere” man, forever “purposeful and alert.” A few days later came another account, this written by Rudolf Hess, which further spiritualized the manly picture. It glorified Hitler’s “purest intent,” his strength, his oratory, his admirable fund of knowledge, and clear intellect. The fantastic growth of the Hitler cult is evidenced by another essay, written by Hess a year later, in connection with a contest on the subject: “What will be the nature of the man who will lead Germany back to the summit?” Hess’s piece took first prize and contained thoughts such as the following:
Profound knowledge in all areas of political life and history, the capacity to draw the right lessons from this knowledge, belief in the purity of his own cause and in ultimate victory, and enormous power of will give him the power of thrilling oratory which evokes joyful enthusiasm from the masses. Where the salvation of the nation is in question, he does not disdain utilizing the weapons of the adversary, demagogy, slogans, processions, etc. He himself has nothing in common with the masses; he is all personality, like every great man.
If necessity commands it, he does not shrink from shedding blood. Great questions are always decided by blood and iron…. He is concerned solely with the attainment of his goal, even if that calls for trampling over closest friends….
Thus we have the portrait of the dictator; keen of mind, clear and true, passionate and then again controlled, cold and bold, scrupulous in decision, fearless in rapid execution of his acts, ruthless toward himself and others, mercilessly hard and then again soft in his love for his people, tireless in work, with a steel fist in a velvet glove, capable ultimately of overcoming even himself.
We still do not know when he will intervene to save us—this “man.” But millions feel that he is coming.24
On August 3, 1921, immediately after Hitler’s taking full control of the party, the SA was founded. The initials originally meant Sports Division; only later did they come to stand for Sturmabteilung or storm troop. The party opposition had earlier objected to Hitler’s surrounding himself with a paid bodyguard of former Free Corps soldiers; they demanded that the group be dissolved “because they want to steal and pillage.” But the SA was not chiefly an organization of discharged soldiers seeking an outlet for their violent instincts. Nor was it principally an instrument of self-defense on the part of the Right, to be pitted against similar terrorist troops maintained by the enemy. It is true that the troops may originally have been intended for some such purpose. For militant fighting forces of the Left did exist—for example, the Social Democratic Erhard Auer Guard. There is a good deal of confirmation for the stories of deliberate riots launched against the NSDAP by the Left. “The Marxist world, which owes more to terrorism for its survival than any other contemporary phenomenon, also resorted to this method in its struggle against our movement,” Hitler once declared in explaining the reasons for creating the SA.
Nevertheless, the SA had a more far-reaching function. From the start it was conceived as an instrument of attack and conquest. According to its founding proclamation, it was to be the “battering-ram” of the movement. Its members were to be trained to obedience and to an unspecified “revolutionary will.” One of Hitler’s pet ideas was that the weakness of the bourgeois order vis-à-vis Marxism lay in its principled separation of mind and violence, ideology and terror. The bourgeois politician, he argued, was limited to exclusively intellectual weapons, while the soldier was strictly excluded from politics. The Marxists, on the other hand, “united mind and brutal violence harmoniously.” The SA was to imitate them. In the first issue of the SA’s official gazette he called the organization “not only an instrument for the protection of the movement, but also… primarily the training school for the coming struggle for freedom on the domestic front.” Similarly, the Völkische Beobachter hailed the SA’s “ready-for-action spirit.”
One motive for its creation was the disbanding of the paramilitary “citizen’s militias in June 1921 and, a month later, the dissolution of the Oberland Free Corps, just home from Upper Silesia. Many members of these organizations, who at one blow found themselves deprived of the comradeship and glamour of the soldier’s life and felt that life had lost its meaning, joined up with the adventure-hungry juveniles who had already become members of the NSDAP. Almost all of the SA members came from the numerically strong petty bourgeoisie that had long been prevented from rising socially and had attained to positions of some leadership only during the war, because of the heavy casualties in the officers’ corps. Robust and eager for action, they had expected glorious careers in the postwar period. The terms of the Versailles Treaty, quite aside from all national humiliations, had thrown them back socially. They had ended up teaching in grammar schools, standing behind store counters, at the grilled windows in government offices. Such lives seemed to them narrow, wretched, and utterly unworthy of them. The same impulse to evade normality that had led Hitler to politics now brought them to Hitler.
Hitler himself regarded these recruits, so like him in type, as ideal material for his militant advance guard. In thinking out the tactics of achieving power, he included in his reckoning the resentments, the energy, and the incipient violence of these men. It was one of his psychological adages that uniformed men showing intent of violence had an attractive as well as an intimidating effect. Terrorism could exert a special magnetism. “Cruelty impresses” was the way he once phrased this insight. “People need a good scare. They want to be afraid of something. They want someone to make them afraid, someone to whom they can submit with a shudder. Haven’t you noticed, after a brawl at a meeting, that the ones who get beaten up are the first to apply for membership in the party? What is this rot you talk about violence and how shocked you are about torture? The masses want that. They need something to dread.”25 With growing assurance, then, Hitler made brute force figure in the party’s image. It brought in members who would perhaps not be fetched by propaganda and the appeal of ceremony.