Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

548 DER FUEHRERhis personal friends. The police in the Rhineland was subjected to amilitary type of organization, under Police President Stieler vonHeydkamp. Despite Frick's promises to the German public, the S.S. andS.A. were only waiting for the day on which they themselves would bethe police. In order to prepare for this day, Goring had brought a helperwith him into the ministry, a man who bore the high-sounding title ofSS. Obergruppenfuhrer (chief group leader), the same type of obscureruffian who in 1925 had thrown the gau of Berlin into mutiny andconfusion: Kurt Daluege.Within a few days, several hundred leading officials of the Prussianstate changed their posts. Then the S.A. began to march. They were stilla mere private army and not yet police, but they were encouraged by theknowledge that their Leader was in the Chancellery and had given them'freedom of the streets,' sanctioned by the seal of state. They invaded thetaverns where the Communists and Social Democrats held theirmeetings; even the official police reports showed that such clashesregularly took place in the vicinity of 'Marxist' headquarters — a clearindication of who attacked whom.In their enthusiasm the S.A. men even went so far as to break upmeetings of bourgeois parties; once they prevented Bruning fromspeaking, on another occasion they knocked down ex-MinisterStegerwald. Hitler was embarrassed. These, he said, were 'provocativeelements,' out to promote disorder 'under the cloak of the party.' In truth,it was his own party, which at some points was striking too soon andgoing too far. 'The enemy,' cried Hitler in a plea to the S.A., 'whichmust be downed on March 5 is Marxism' — meaning that other enemieswould come later. 'Our entire propaganda and this whole electioncampaign must be concentrated on Marxism.' Election campaign, asdistinguished from propaganda, meant bloody street brawls; for theperiod from January 30 to March 5, the German papers report fifty-onemurders of anti-Nazis, while the National Socialists set the number oftheir own victims at eighteen. This murderous swarming of the S.A.through Germany is comparable to the march of Louis Bonaparte'sguards down the boulevards of Paris; and though the result was still no'flaring up' of the Bolshevist revolution, Goring and Daluege made themost of the murders.