Nazi methods of winning support and the role of the SA

What the specification asks for

“Nazi methods to win support. The role of the SA.” — examined through causation and significance. Incandio is aligned to specification 4HI1; it is not published by, endorsed by or affiliated with Pearson.

1 · Understand it

Propaganda as a technique rather than a message

Goebbels, appointed Reich propaganda leader in 1930, treated campaigning as an industrial process. The party used the same simple, repeated themes — work and bread, the Versailles Diktat, the November criminals, national revival — and varied the emphasis by audience: land prices and foreclosure to farmers, order and property to the Mittelstand, jobs to the young, anti-Marxism to employers.

The methods were new in Germany at that scale. In the presidential campaign of 1932 Hitler chartered an aircraft and flew to as many as five cities a day in the Hitler over Germany campaign, so that a man could appear in person across the country in a week. Rallies were designed with searchlights, standards, music and arrival timing; the party used gramophone records, mass leafleting, its own newsreels and posters by professional designers. Party membership doubled and doubled again, giving it activists to canvass door to door.

The message was deliberately negative-plus-vague. It said with certainty what was wrong and who was responsible, and offered national renewal without a detailed programme, because a detailed programme is a thing voters can disagree with.

The SA's double function

By 1932 the SA had over 400,000 men, larger than the army the Versailles treaty permitted, and by early 1933 around two million. It did two opposite things and the combination is what made it effective.

It supplied violence: breaking up KPD and SPD meetings, protecting Nazi ones, controlling streets and fighting for public space. Street fighting killed hundreds in 1932 alone; in the Altona 'Bloody Sunday' of July 1932 eighteen people died in one afternoon. The violence was performative as well as instrumental — a uniformed column marching through a working-class district was a claim that the Nazis, not the government, controlled the streets.

And it supplied welfare: SA hostels, soup kitchens and informal employment for men with nothing. For an unemployed young man it offered food, a bed, a uniform, comradeship and the feeling of being on the winning side. The organisation making the streets unsafe was also the one feeding people on them.

Why disorder helped the party causing it

For the Mittelstand voter, the visible fact was chaos — communists and Nazis fighting, a government that could not stop it, a Reichstag that barely met. The party promising order was also the party generating the disorder, but the causal link was invisible to a voter who saw only that the SPD-led state could not maintain public safety and the Nazis could maintain their own.

There was a limit. Violence lost the party respectable support when it became indiscriminate, and the Potempa murder of August 1932 — five SA men killed a Communist labourer in front of his mother, were sentenced to death, and were publicly praised by Hitler — cost the Nazis middle-class votes and is one of the factors behind the November decline. So the SA was an asset with a ceiling, which is exactly what makes 'how important was the SA' a real question.

The scale of the street conflict is worth stating because it is easy to under-rate. In Prussia alone in the second half of 1932 official returns record around 300 political killings, the great majority in clashes between the SA and the Communist Rotfrontkämpferbund. Ordinary people in working-class districts of Berlin and Hamburg lived with nightly fighting between two paramilitary forces neither of which the state could disarm, and the government's response — banning the SA in April 1932 and lifting the ban in June — demonstrated only that the ban was negotiable.

2 · Learn it — the notes

The dates that earn marks

1930

Goebbels appointed Reich propaganda leader. Why this date: The professionalisation of the campaign machinery coincides with the breakthrough election.

April 1932

The 'Hitler over Germany' flying campaign in the presidential election. Why this date: Hitler lost to Hindenburg with 36.8 per cent in the run-off and gained a national campaign apparatus and a proven method.

10 August 1932

The Potempa murder; Hitler publicly supports the killers. Why this date: The clearest evidence of the SA's cost. It is also the best counter-evidence in a question about Nazi methods.

1932

SA membership passes 400,000. Why this date: Larger than the Reichswehr, which is why the army leadership in 1934 wanted it dealt with.

The figures, and how far to trust them

• Over 400,000 — SA membership in 1932, against a 100,000-man army.
• About 2 million — SA membership by early 1933.
• 36.8 per cent — Hitler's share in the April 1932 presidential run-off, losing to Hindenburg.
• 18 — Deaths in the Altona street fighting of 17 July 1932.

The people to place

• Ernst Röhm — SA chief of staff from January 1931; expanded it enormously and expected a second revolution.
• Joseph Goebbels — Gauleiter of Berlin and Reich propaganda leader; designed the 1932 campaigns.
• Paul von Hindenburg — Defeated Hitler in the 1932 presidential election with 53 per cent in the run-off.

What students say — and what is actually the case

Not this: Nazi propaganda brainwashed the German people.

This: Propaganda worked where it matched what an audience already believed and feared. It failed with Catholic and organised working-class voters throughout, which is why the Centre Party and the SPD held their shares almost unchanged from 1928 to 1932.

Not this: The SA was Hitler's private army and always obeyed him.

This: Röhm's SA had its own leadership, its own expectations of a social revolution, and by 1934 was the largest single threat to Hitler's arrangement with the army. That is why he had its leadership killed.

Two things students merge

Blurred: The SA and the SS.

The distinction: The SA was the mass paramilitary of hundreds of thousands doing street work; the SS was a small elite bodyguard until Himmler expanded it after 1929, and it destroyed the SA leadership in 1934.

Blurred: Propaganda and organisation.

The distinction: Propaganda is the message and the medium; organisation is the Gau structure that delivered it into every constituency. A question about methods should distinguish them, because the second is what made the first national.

What a Grade 9 answer holds here

A Grade 9 answer explains the paradox rather than describing it: the SA created the disorder that made the promise of order attractive, and the causal loop was invisible to the voters who responded to it. It also knows where the mechanism broke — Potempa — and can therefore say that the SA was an asset with a limit rather than simply an asset.

3 · How it is examined

This strand is genuinely set through: Paper 1 (a) (6 marks — “What impression does the author give about …? You must use Extract A to explain your answer.”); Paper 1 (b) (8 marks — “Explain two effects of … on ….”); Paper 1 (c)(i) or (c)(ii) (16 marks — “'[A statement about the period.]' You may use the following in your answer: • [prompt] • [prompt]. You must also use information of your own. How far do you agree? Explain your answer.”).

What earns marks: The double function of the SA, stated as one idea with two pieces of evidence. And the Potempa counter-example, which shows a candidate who can argue against their own case.

4 · Prove it — the questions

Answered inside Incandio, where a marker checks what a correct answer must contain and tells you which half was missing. The marking stays in the app; the questions are here.

1. Explain two methods the Nazis used to win support in the years 1929–32. [8 marks · Paper 1 (b)]
2. Explain two effects of the SA on the Nazi Party's electoral position. [8 marks · Paper 1 (b)]
3. What impression does the author give about the SA in the years 1930–32? You must use Extract A to explain your answer. [6 marks · Paper 1 (a)]
4. 'Propaganda was the main reason for the growth in Nazi support in the years 1929–32.' How far do you agree? Explain your answer. [16 marks · Paper 1 (c)(i) or (c)(ii)]
5. 'The SA was more of a liability than an asset to the Nazi Party before 1933.' How far do you agree? Explain your answer. [16 marks · Paper 1 (c)(i) or (c)(ii)]

Decide it

This lesson feeds a Decide History judgement — a position you commit to, an objection you answer, a criterion you name: Who put Hitler in power?.

Carry on through the option

• Previous lesson: The impact of the Great Depression
• Next lesson: 1932 to January 1933: Papen, Schleicher and Hindenburg
• Also in this key topic: The German Workers' Party and the changes of 1920–22 · The Munich Putsch: causes, events and results · Reorganisation of the party, 1924–28
• Key topic 3 · The rise of Hitler and the Nazis to January 1933 · Germany: development of dictatorship, 1918–45 · the option's timeline · Incandio History
• The other key topics of Germany: The establishment of the Weimar Republic and its early problems · The recovery of Germany, 1924–29 · Nazi Germany 1933–39 · Germany and the occupied territories during the Second World War