These are the brownshirts, the SA.

The Last Innocent Hour, my first and only published novel, has had quite an interesting life.  As I wrote in the author’s notes, I was fascinated by Martha Dodd’s autobiography when I read it back in the late-1960’s at Cal.  She described the young SS officer crying on the sofa in her family’s sitting room sometime during the week-end of June 30, 1934, which came to be called the Night of the Long Knives. The Nazi party purged the leadership of the Sturmabteilung, the brownshirts and many other inconvenient opponents to the regime.  The officer had made friends with her father, the American ambassador to the new Third Reich, and needed to talk about what was going on.

As Lenin wrote: every revolution devours its children, which was certainly true that week-end. But the image of that young man stuck in my head.  The SS, the Schutzstaffel, began as Hitler’s bodyguards and grew under with the ambitions of Heinrich Himmler to control the police, including the Gestapo and the concentration camps. They recruited middle and upper-class, college-educated men, they were the elite, the Nazis Praetorian Guards.  So how did a young man go from being someone I’d probably know to Dr. Mengele or Reinhard Heydrich who engineered the Final Solution?

Lena & Reinhard Heydrich in 1931

Certainly anyone who knows anything about the rise of the National Socialists must question how they came about.  I would guess anyone who took a Western Civ class at some point had an essay question on the subject.

What I did was write a story about it.