The massed ranks of the brownshirts (SA) were resentful at the failure of ‘their’ government to deliver a thoroughgoing populist, nationalist and anti-Semitic revolution. On the other flank of Hitler’s coalition, ex-Chancellor Franz von Papen and his aristocratic bevy were alarmed by signs of what they took to be ‘plebeian degeneration’. Most ominously of all, the SA and the army were engaged in a bitter struggle over the future of rearmament.
