Franz Pfeffer Von Salomon

1) Franz Pfeffer von Salomon, ‘Breeding: A demand in relation to the Party program’ (1925)

The Author

Franz Pfeffer von Salomon was member of the Prussian army, and the first commander of the SA (Sturmabteilung) from its re-establishment in 1926 until 1931, when he was replaced by Ernst Röhm. While under Pfeffer von Salomon’s leadership, the SA played an important role in the rise of the Nazi Party. The SA (also known as the Brownshirts or Stormtroopers) was a Nazi paramilitary organisation that utilised violent methods of intimidation to disrupt political opponents and protect the rallies of the Nazi party (NSDAP). Prior to 1926, the SA was in disarray, and was primarily used as a power base by regional leaders. Pfeffer von Salomon provided

During the 1920’s, Germany was weak and had been economically devastated by the First World War and the reparations it was required to submit to by the Treaty of Versailles.

The leader of the revolutionary group the NSDAP, Adolf Hitler, was released from a nine-month prison sentence in late December 1924 for his participation in the failed Nazi revolution (Beer Hall Putsch) of 1923. Hitler spent his time in prison ruminating about his failure, and during this time wrote his book, Mein Kampf.

Mein Kampf was published in the same year as this document. In Mein Kampf, Hitler speaks strongly about his desire to establish a great German society through appropriate and selected breeding. He speaks of ‘natural laws’ that compel animals to only mate with a member of the same species, and subsequently applies these laws to humans, implying that those who are not regarded as ‘pure’ should be refused the ability to propagate.

The breeding selection process was designed to ensure that Germans were genetically

While he agrees with him on many aspects, he is critical of his views and argues that Strasser utilises a ‘basic mentality’ and has ‘far too many arguments’ that could be considered ‘socialist’. The document then progresses into a spiel about the necessary inequality of the German people.

The author begins his argument by appealing to the German people who are suffering from economic disaster in Germany in the 1920’s. The document mentions that ‘misery and ruin are suffered by the wrong people’. The Nazis rose to power on the promise that they would return Germany to its former glory. This greatly appealed to the downtrodden German people, many of whom lived in desperate poverty. The Nazi party often preached that the German people were unfairly targeted by the Versailles treaty, and much of their party propaganda focused on transferring the burden of the reparations to other groups of society, especially onto the group that Hitler despised the most, the Jewish