Hitler

forced as early as 3 February 1931 to refute attacks on ‘things that are purely in the private sphere’, and to stress that the SA was not a ‘moral establishment’ but ‘a band of rough fighters’.
    Röhm’s moral standards were not the real point at issue. Hitler’s action the previous summer had defused the immediate crisis. But it was papering over the cracks. The tension remained. Neither the precise role nor degree of autonomy of the SA had been fully clarified. Given the character of the Nazi Movement and the way the SA had emerged withinit, the structural problem was insoluble. And the putschist strain, always present in the SA, was resurfacing. The advocacy of taking power by force, advanced in articles in February 1931 in the Berlin party newspaper
Der Angriff
by Walter Stennes, the SA leader in the eastern regions of Germany and the chief instigator of the 1930 SA rebellion, was increasingly alarming to the Nazi leadership. Such noises flatly contradicted, and directly placed in question, the commitment to legality that Hitler had made, most publicly and on oath, following the Reichswehr trial in Leipzig the previous September, and had stressed on numerous occasions since then. The spectre of a ban on the party loomed very much larger with the promulgation of an emergency decree on 28 March, giving the Bruning government wide-ranging powers to combat political ‘excesses’. ‘The party, above all the SA, seems to be facing a ban,’ wrote Goebbels in his diary. Hitler ordered the strictest compliance with the emergency decree by all members of the party, SA, and SS. But Stennes was not prepared to yield. ‘It is the most serious crisis the party has had to go through,’ commented Goebbels.
    When the Berlin SA occupied party headquarters in the city then directly attacked Hitler’s leadership, it was high time to take action. Stennes was deposed as SA leader in eastern Germany. Hitler and Goebbels worked hard to ensure declarations of loyalty from all the Gaue. Stennes, increasingly revolutionary in tone, succeeded in winning support from parts of the SA in Berlin, Schleswig-Holstein, Silesia, and Pomerania. But his success was short-lived. A full-scale rebellion did not occur. On 4 April, Hitler published in the
Völkischer Beobachter
a lengthy and cleverly constructed denunciation of Stennes and an emotional appeal to the loyalty of SA men. Even before he wrote, the revolt was crumbling. Support for Stennes evaporated. About 500 SA men in north and eastern Germany were purged. The rest came back into line.
    The crisis was over. The SA had been put back on the leash. It would be kept there with difficulty until the ‘seizure of power’. Then, the pent-up violence would only be fully released in the first months of 1933. Under Röhm’s hand, nevertheless, the SA was returning to its character as a paramilitary formation – and now a much more formidable one than it had been in the early 1920s. Röhm had behaved with exemplary loyalty to Hitler during the Stennes crisis. But his own emphasis on the ‘primacy of the soldier’, and his ambitions, suppressed as they were in 1931, for the transformation of the SA into a popularmilitia, bore the seeds of conflict still to come. It prefigured the course of events which would reach their denouement only in June 1934.
    VII
    Not only political, but personal crisis beset Hitler in 1931. On moving in 1929 into his spacious new apartment in Prinzregentenplatz, his niece, Geli Raubal, who had been living with her mother in Haus Wachenfeld on the Obersalzberg, had come to join him. During the following two years she was frequently seen in public with Hitler. Rumours already abounded about the nature of her relations with ‘Uncle Alf ’, as she called him. On the morning of 19 September 1931, aged twenty-three, she was found dead in Hitler’s flat, shot with his pistol.
    Hitler’s relations with women, as we have already remarked, were in some respects abnormal. He liked the company of women, especially pretty ones, best of all young ones. He flattered them, sometimes flirted with them, called them – in his patronizing Viennese petty-bourgeois manner – ‘my little princess’, or ‘my little countess’. In the mid-1920s, he encouraged the infatuation of a lovestruck young girl, Maria (Mizzi or Mimi) Reiter. But the devotion was entirely one-sided. For Hitler, Mimi was no more than a passing flirtation. Occasionally, if the stories are to be