Franz Pfeffer von Salomon

When the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) became the second strongest party in the Reichstag elections of 14 September 1930, the political career of Franz Pfeffer von Salomon was already over. Two weeks prior, he had resigned from the supreme leadership of the Nazi stormtroopers (SA), a position he had occupied between late 1926 and the summer of 1930. During these years, Pfeffer had led the central SA leadership office in Munich, the OSAF, and had reorganized the SA from a number of regional splinter groups into a powerful paramilitary organization with more than 60,000 members. Later historians, however, have tended to downplay his organizational skills and achievements. They accredited instead Ernst Röhm, Pfeffer’s predecessor and also one of his successors, with the decisive built-up of the stormtroopers, maybe also because, after his demission, Pfeffer never returned to a position of power or influence. Precisely because of his ambivalent lifetime achievements, there are good reasons to take a closer look at the biographies of Nazi leaders of the second rank, as Mark Fraschka’s book of Pfeffer, based on his Ph.D. dissertation defended at Julius-Maximilians Universität Würzburg in 2014, makes clear. If one was to look for a quintessential figure that impersonated the lasting consequences of the ‘brutalization’ that occurred in Central Europe at the latest stages of the First World War and—arguably—contributed to the at times ferocious forms of (political) violence in the early years of the Republic, then one does not need to go further. Born as the first child of seven into an upper-middle-class family in Düsseldorf in 1888, Pfeffer grew up in the Westphalian city of Münster. Like many young men of his class and education, he later studied law and then opted for a career with the Prussian military, in which he was promoted to the rank of Hauptmann or captain. In line with the narrative cultivated in the Pfeffer family until today, Fraschka describes Pfeffer’s childhood as a particularly happy one, free of material sorrows and filled with sentiments of national pride and self-esteem. Consequently, Fraschka interprets the military disaster at the end of the First World War as the great transformation in Pfeffer’s life, though he does not fail to mention the many pre- und post-1918 continuities, such as the rampant anti-Semitism among the Prussian troops. A biographical detail merits particular attention: three of Pfeffer’s brothers lost their lives while in military service, a forth was severely injured and became a chronic invalid and both of his parents had died in close succession in the winter of 1918/19. Thus, in the January of 1919, when Germany had lost the war, Franz Pfeffer von Salomon had nearly lost his entire family.

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