“The guarantor of unity”: Nürnberg's SA between 1924 and 1929.

Between the Beer Hall Putsch and the onset of the Depression, the Nazi movement seemed to be at the nadir of its existence. As the fortunes of the Weimar Republic improved, that of the Nazis declined. In the “Golden Twenties,” Germany enjoyed relative prosperity. Its diplomatic prestige was enhanced by the Locarno agreement and Germany's entry into the League of Nations, and only a small minority of Germans continued to support Hitler. From 1920 to 1923, his party had fed on insecurity, instability, violence, and the hopes of the losers for a better future. The party would once again exploit these factors to great advantage after 1929. For the moment, there were fewer losers in Germany, including Nürnberg. None of these developments meant a complete eclipse of the Nazi movement, and certainly not so in Nürnberg. In Germany as a whole, Nazi votes dropped from 6.5 percent in the May 1924 national elections to 2.6 percent four years later, but support for the Nazis in Bavaria remained proportionately at least twice as high. In Nürnberg, it never dropped below 10 percent of the total, and the Nazi movement thus remained a far from negligible factor in local politics, partly owing to Streicher's incessant and vitriolic attacks on the city's mayor. Both the relative decline of the Nazi movement in Germany as a whole and its comparatively high profile in Bavaria and Nürnberg influenced the development of the Nürnberg SA during these years. So, of course, did Hitler's relative neglect of the SA during the first eighteen months after the NSDAP's reestablishment in early 1925. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]