You know, when you think about how a radical
political militia funds its rise to power, your
mind probably goes straight to like the obvious
cinematic stuff. Right, like the movies. Exactly.
You picture illicit weapons deals in dark alleys
or secretive foreign backers funneling money
through shell companies. Oh, yeah. Or maybe some
high stakes bank robberies. Right. But what if
I told you that one of the most notorious paramilitary
groups in history actually funded a massive chunk
of their violent street campaigns by doing something,
well, Entirely mundane mundane. Yeah, they sold
cigarettes It really does sound like a like a
dark satirical comedy or something, but it is
a very real very unsettling piece of economic
and political history Yeah, it really is. It
is essentially a story about how everyday consumer
habits can be Literally weaponized. So today
we are taking a deep dive into the Sturm cigarette
company and Our source material for this is a
really comprehensive Wikipedia article on the
subject. It's quite the read. It is. And our
mission today is to unpack this bizarre, terrifying
intersection of consumer goods, corporate monopolies,
and paramilitary funding in 1930s Germany. Which
is just a wild combination. Truly wild. We're
going to explore the actual mechanics of how
an armed faction literally built a consumer brand
from scratch. just to bankroll their ambitions.
Yeah, and before we get into the actual mechanisms
of how they pulled this off, there is an important
note we really need to make regarding the nature
of this history. Definitely. Because our source
contains politically charged content regarding
the Nazi party and its factions, we want to be
clear that we are not taking any sides or endorsing
the viewpoints of the content. We are simply
reporting impartially on the historical ideas
and facts contained in the original source material.
Right. So to really understand how a militia
of running a tobacco empire, you have to look
at the landscape of the 1920s in the Weimar Republic.
OK, set the scene for us. So the German tobacco
industry at this time was undergoing massive,
like, ruthless changes. A lot of smaller independent
cigarette firms were shutting down. They were
pushed out. Exactly. The market was rapidly consolidating.
You had a few large, highly automated manufacturers
stepping in, buying up the little guys, and just
dominating the industry. Wow. And the Nazi Party.
at this very time was aggressively attacking
these large tobacco firms. They were out there
publicly accusing them of having foreign and
Jewish connections. So they're out in the streets
publicly railing against these corporate monopolies.
Right. Here is the massive pivot that we really
need to figure out. How does an unfunded paramilitary
group, specifically the SA, right, the storm
of Thailand transition from just complaining
about these tobacco monopolies to actually launching
a massive, highly structured corporate enterprise
of their own? The short answer. sheer unadulterated
desperation. Desperation. Oh, yeah. By 1929,
the SA had a major, major cash flow problem.
They were expanding rapidly, but they charged
no membership fees to join their ranks. Wait,
none at all? None. So financially, they were
entirely dependent on handouts from the Nazi
Party leadership. Oh, wow. Yeah. If the party
didn't cut them a check, they literally couldn't
operate. They desperately needed an independent
income source just to fund their day -to -day
operations and expand their grip. on the streets.
Okay, let's unpack this. You have a militia that
needs cash. They have zero dues coming in and
they have this massive growing restless membership
base. Yep, exactly. Enter a man named Arthur
Dressler. So in 1929, Dressler pitches what is
essentially like a venture capital deal to the
SA. That's a great way to put it. Says let's
found a cigarette manufacturer together. The
SA members will agree to smoke our cigarettes
exclusively and in return, the SA as an organization
gets a royalty. A very specific royalty too.
Right, specifically 15 to 20 fennig for every
thousand cigarettes sold. Yeah. They actually
register the operation as the cigarette fabric
dressler, but the actual consumer brand they
were building was called the Zygret and Firma
Sturm. And, you know, To put that royalty into
perspective, it was about half a percent of the
sales price, considering most of these cigarettes
sold at roughly three and a third Fennig. Which
doesn't sound like much. No, it sounds like pennies.
But in volume, it was exactly the independent
revenue stream the SA leadership was hunting
for. It is wildly comparable to what we see today
with modern influencer marketing. Oh, totally.
Think about it. You have a massive internet personality
with millions of followers. They launch a snack
brand or like a hydration drink to monetize their
dedicated audience. Right, because they know
their fans will buy it just to support the brand.
Exactly. Except in this 1929 version, the audience
is an armed political militia. The influencer
is the SA leadership. And the stakes aren't just
grocery store market share, they're total national
dominance. That is a chilling parallel, honestly.
But structurally, it's exactly how mechanism
function. They realized they had a captive consumer
base. But having a loyal base and having a functional
mass producing factory are two very different
things. Right, you need actual machines and facilities.
Exactly. So Dressler approached a Saxon Nazi
party leader and eventually the SA chief of staff
Otto Wagner showed interest. But here's the big
hurdle. The Nazi party itself only offered 30
,000 Reichsmarks in startup money. Which, if
you were trying to build an automated manufacturing
operation to take on national monopolies, it's
a complete drop in the bucket. You can't build
an empire on 30 ,000 marks. Not even close. It
actually took a wealthy, independent party supporter
named Jacques Bettenhausen stepping in. OK, who's
that? He was a businessman who ended up injecting
a massive 500 ,000 Reichs marks of seed money
just to get the factory infrastructure up and
running. Half a million. Yeah, half a million
marks. That sudden influx of capital was the
real catalyst. So they get this massive seed
money and they build the infrastructure. But
creating a product is one thing, right? Actually
convincing people to buy your product, especially
in an economy completely devastated by the Great
Depression that requires a highly calculated
strategy. Oh, absolutely. And their product line
was meticulously calculated to reflect the crushing
economic reality of the 1930s. They produced
four main brands. Right. You had the premium
brand, New Front or New Front, which cost six
fenig. Then you had Sturm at five and Alarm at
four. But the real moneymaker, the one that completely
took over the market, was their absolute cheapest
brand, right? Trommler or the drummer. Yep, Trommler.
It cost just three and a third fenig. And because
the Great Depression had wiped out so much wealth,
Trommler was a runaway hit. In 1932, 80 % of
all their cigarettes sold were Trommler. And
it gets crazier. Yeah, by 1933, that number skyrocketed
to an incredible 95%. And they backed this cheap
product with surprisingly sophisticated traditional
marketing. They rolled out sound trucks in the
streets. They even hired advertising airplanes
to fly over cities. Wait, hold on. Airplanes.
You just said a minute ago that the SA was begging
for scraps, relying on party handouts, and couldn't
even afford to start a factory. How are they
suddenly funding a literal aerial ad campaign?
Well, that is exactly where Jacques Bettenhausen's
five hundred thousand mark seed money came into
play. Right. The seed money. Exactly. Once they
had that initial massive capital injection, they
didn't just build the factory. They aggressively
scaled their marketing apparatus. They had the
budget to operate like a modern corporation.
That makes sense. In their early print ads, they
heavily used Nazi party imagery and an explicitly
anti -monopoly political slogan. It was a against
the trust and the combine. corporate monopolies
and cartels of the era. Precisely. They are playing
the populist card hard, telling the average struggling
German worker, we are fighting the greedy mega
corporations. And what's fascinating here is
the underlying psychology of how they leverage
the anxieties of that exact moment. Between 1930
and 1932, during the absolute worst depths of
the economic crash, their advertisements frequently
depicted catastrophic situations. Really? Like
what? Like riots or economic ruin. They weren't
selling glamour. They were using the very real
economic terror people were feeling to sell a
vice. Why does that work, though? I mean, if
I'm terrified about losing my job or starving,
why would seeing a catastrophe in the newspaper
make me buy a cigarette? Because nicotine is
a stress reliever. And in a time of profound
societal trauma, a cigarette is a tiny, affordable
moment of relief. Oh, wow. That is dark. Very.
They were signaling to a desperate population,
the world is collapsing, everything is terrible,
but you can afford a three -feneg moment of peace.
And they tied that relief directly into military
glorification. The SAA promoted themselves as
a military training program, essentially the
successors to the band Freikorps. And for anyone
unfamiliar, the Freikorps were these rogue right
-wing mercenary groups made up of angry World
War I veterans that formed after Germany lost
the war. Exactly. So the SAA is tapping into
that aggressive militarist nostalgia. They sold
these cigarettes with collectible sets of images
featuring historical German military uniforms.
Like trading cards. Right. They were making the
prospect of serving in the army look incredibly
appealing, tying patriotism and like masculine
duty directly to smoking their specific brand.
It was a brilliantly closed ecosystem of branding.
You smoke our cheap brand to cope with the depression.
You collect our patriotic trading cards. You
support the political movement. But I have to
stop you there because something in this narrative
doesn't quite add up. Okay, what's up? If the
marketing was so brilliant, if they had the airplanes,
the sound trucks, the cool collectible cards,
and the Trommler cigarettes were literally the
cheapest option available during a massive economic
depression, why did they need to resort to physical
violence to sell them? That's a very good point.
I mean, if the product is that well positioned,
it should sell itself, shouldn't it? You'd think
so. Yeah. But that is the crucial contradiction
of the Sturm brand. And it reveals the dark underlying
reality of this entire operation, because at
the end of the day, they weren't relying on the
free market. No, it was raw mafia style coercion.
SA members weren't merely expected or encouraged
to smoke Sturm cigarettes out of brand loyalty.
They were violently compelled to. The source
actually notes that there were literal bag searches.
If an SA member was caught with a rival brand
of cigarettes in their pocket, they were formally
fined by their own unit. Exactly. And that coercion
didn't stay internal. It spilled out into the
streets, targeting the wider public and specifically
the dominant market leader, this massive tobacco
monopoly called re -UMSMA. But the big guys.
The essay didn't just agitate with boycotts.
Essaymen would organize and physically attack
independent shops that dared to sell Riemsma
brands. Like actually attack them. Oh, yeah.
They smashed shop windows. They physically assaulted
the shop workers who were just, you know, trying
to make a living. So it's not a business success
story at all. It's an extortion racket. Completely.
They created a monopoly inside their own ranks
through fines and bag searches, and they suppressed
the outside competition through broken glass
and physical beatings. And the terrifying part
is it worked perfectly. It really did. This brutal
combination of cheap products, psychological
catastrophe marketing, and literal street violence
brought in rivers of cash. It did. And the immense
scale of that newly acquired wealth completely
transformed the SA while simultaneously creating
a massive ideological contradiction at the very
top of the German state. Let's break down the
math on this because we really need to understand
the sheer windfall we are talking about here.
At the time, A typical German smoker went through
about 15 cigarettes a day. Which is pretty standard.
Right. The source points out that's actually
fairly similar to modern smoking rates. But the
financial burden on the individual was entirely
different. An average intensity Trommler smoker,
making an average wage, would spend roughly a
tenth of their gross income just on cigarettes.
Think about the psychological weight of that
for a second. Ten percent of your pre -tax income.
That's massive. And remember, this is the Great
Depression. Unemployment had peaked at over 30
percent. Many of the people joining the essay
didn't even have a regular wage. The militia
actively recruited among the desperate, the unemployed
and the underemployed. So what does this all
mean? Imagine looking at your paycheck today,
whatever it is, and taking a full 10 percent
of it before rent, before groceries and literally
burning it on a coping mechanism. It's unbelievable.
That is the level of addiction and brand loyalty
we are talking about. And because the SA was
getting a cut of 15 to 20 fennig for every thousand
sold, the profits at the top were staggering.
Yeah, the source breaks it down nicely. All right,
it says 100 marks would be the earnings from
500 ,000 cigarettes. Because the typical SA unit
represented just over a thousand constant smokers,
an average SA unit was suddenly pulling in hundreds
of Reich's marks every single month just for
smoking. By 1930, the firm was paying dividends
directly to the SA. And by 1932, the annual turnover
for the Sturm Cigarette Company was an eye -watering
36 million Reichsmarks. 36 million. Yeah. To
put that in a modern context, that's equivalent
to roughly 148 million euros today. Wow. They
use this massive influx of cash to buy new buildings,
equip new factories and fund even more aggressive
advertising. So we have an armed militia practically
swimming in cigarette money, essentially running
their own parallel economy. But here is the glaring
hypocrisy in all of this. The leader of the Nazi
Party, Adolf Hitler, was famously rabidly anti
-smoking. Oh he despised it. He despised the
habit. He even ordered localized smoking bans
across the party. And this is where we see a
fundamental truth about how totalitarian states
operate. If we connect this to the bigger picture,
ideology almost always bows to state revenue.
Money talks. Always. Hitler's localized bans.
They were widely ignored. Why? Because the finance
ministry absolutely loved the taxes that the
tobacco industry brought in. And it wasn't just
pocket change either. The source notes that by
1941, tobacco taxes made up about a 12th of all
state revenues. The 12th? That's a massive chunk
of budget. You cannot run a government, let alone
a war machine, if you suddenly cut off 8 percent
of your total national income. Furthermore, aside
from the taxes, the advertising revenues, and
the royalties Sturm was pulling in, Nazi organizations
were accepting millions of Reichsmarks in donations
and straight -up bribes from the wider traditional
cigarette industry. The propaganda minister,
Joseph Goebbels, ended up being the decisive
voice on this, right? He did. He literally deemed
cigarettes essential. to the war effort. Yeah.
The state viewed the addictive properties as
a necessary tool for morale. They were so essential
that cigarettes were distributed for free to
soldiers as part of their regular pay. Yeah.
And that included minors who had been drafted
into service. Unbelievable. The result of all
this state sponsored top down addiction. Between
1930 and 1940, the per capita cigarette consumption
in Germany literally doubled from 500 to 1000
cigarettes a year. Tens of billions were being
sold annually. So you have this incredibly volatile
environment. The S .A. is getting incredibly
rich and powerful, operating almost as a state
within a state, and causing massive economic
disruption in the streets. Right. But the corporate
giant they had been physically attacking Aramsma
was not just going to sit back and watch their
market share get beaten out of shopkeepers' hands.
Right. Because if you are Philip Aramsma, the
CEO of this massive monopoly, you are losing
money every single day to street thugs breaking
your shop windows. And you can't just call the
police because the street thugs are quickly becoming
the state apparatus. So what is your next move?
You handle it the way massive corporations often
handle existential threats. You buy your way
out. Exactly. And this leads directly to the
ultimate corporate coup. It is June 1932. Philip
Rimsma manages to secure a direct face -to -face
meeting with Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hess, and Max
Salmon. Now, Ammann is a crucial figure here.
He was Hitler's secretary and the head of the
party's massive printing house. At this point,
Ramsma's advertisements had been completely banned
from Nazi Party publications by the SA. Which
was actually a massive tactical error by the
SA because that ad ban was bleeding the Nazi
Party dry. The party's publications were losing
a fortune without Rimsma's ad money, and the
party desperately needed cash for their upcoming
election campaigns. Right. They needed that corporate
money. So in this meeting, Hitler initially scolds
Rimsma for having Jewish partners, but the sheer
desperate need for cash wins out instantly. They
agree to an initial deal where Rimsma simply
buys half a million marks worth of advertising
space. He literally just buys his way back into
their good graces. It's that simple. But he knows
that an ad buy isn't going to stop the SA from
smashing his windows. So moving into 1933 and
1934, as the Nazis cement their power, Riemsma
escalates a strategy. He goes straight over the
SA's head to Hermann Göring, who is the highest
official in Prussia at the time. OK, taking it
to the top. Exactly. Riemsma asks Göring to do
something about the SA's street violence and
the various corruption charges the SA has drummed
up against his company. It is basically a high
stakes mafia protection racket. Ramspa is paying
the mob boss to call off his ankle breaker. That's
exactly what it is. And Goering's response is
purely transactional. In early 1934, Guring magically
calls off the court cases against Riemsma, the
price for the state protection. A massive three
million mark bribe. Three million! And it wasn't
a one -time fee. Riemsma subsequently paid Guring
an additional one million marks every single
year, on top of making substantial ongoing donations
to the party. He essentially bought the protection
of the state against the state's own paramilitary
wing. And the timing of this corporate payoff
perfectly aligns with one of the bloodiest political
purges in history. Here's where it gets really
interesting and incredibly violent. In July 1934,
the regime executes the infamous Night of the
Long Knives. Hitler and Goering purged their
own ranks, specifically wiping out the entire
leadership of the SA. These were the very men
who had built the Sturm Cigarette Company, the
ones who had profited off the royalties, the
ones who owned shares in the factories. Guy.
In the span of a few days, they were suddenly
either dead or imprisoned. And with the old SA
leadership entirely eliminated, the physical
and economic threat to Riemsma evaporates overnight.
The new, significantly weaker leader of the SA,
Viktor Lutsi, steps in. Yeah, one happens. Riemsma
makes a few quiet inquiries, and almost immediately,
Lutsi entirely cancels the Adar's manufacturing
contract with Sturm Cigarettes. It is the ultimate
cynical corporate irony. Truly. The SA, this
once fearsome street militia that built a multi
-million mark brand through broken windows, forced
loyalty and aggressive catastrophe marketing
strikes a new sanitized deal with the very corporate
giant they used to attack. The new SA leadership
agrees to let Riemsma produce the SA cigarettes
in exchange for a fixed sum of 250 ,000 Reichsmarks
paid annually. They went from being independent
corporate raiders to being quiet. paid contractors
for the monopoly. Meanwhile, the Ziegrand firm
of Sturm is left with warehouses full of unsellable
inventory. By 1935, the company that had effectively
armed and funded a political movement quietly
filed for bankruptcy. Wow. Corporate bribery
and backroom deals had completely and utterly
neutralized a paramilitary monopoly. So as we
wrap up this deep dive, take a moment to really
absorb the sheer whiplash of this historical
arc. We watched a broke desperate militia create
a consumer brand from scratch to solve a cash
flow problem. We saw them use psychological manipulation,
brute physical force, and extortion to enforce
brand loyalty and rake in millions. And then,
at the absolute height of their power, we watched
a massive corporate monopoly use exorbitant bribes
to buy the favor of the regime's elite, ultimately
crushing the militia's business empire and buying
their market shareback. It's a lot to take in.
It is. The big takeaway for you here is to never
ever underestimate how deeply everyday consumer
goods, something as simple, cheap, and disposable
as a pack of cigarettes, can be entangled in
the massive funding of radical political movements
and the brutal reality of crony capitalism. It
is a stark reminder of how money, politics, and
violence often balance on the exact same ledger.
Definitely. And before we go, this raises an
important question, one final deeply complex
tension from the source material that is worth
pondering on your own. Remenzma Company's Jewish
partners and employees. The source explicitly
notes that while Philipp Remenzma was actively
funneling millions of marks in bribes to figures
like Hitler and Goering to secure a corporate
monopoly, the company was simultaneously using
its vast resources to help its Jewish partners
and many Jewish employees emigrate safely out
of Germany. Wait, really? Yes. So how do we even
begin to reconcile that mechanism? A corporation
effectively funding a totalitarian regime's elite,
ensuring the regime's financial survival while
simultaneously using that exact same corporate
power to rescue its own people from the terror
of that very same regime. Wow. It is a profound,
almost paralyzing contradiction, and it is exactly
the kind of messy, uncomfortable reality that
makes history so vital to study. I couldn't agree
more. Thank you for taking the deep dive with
us today. Keep questioning the unseen stories
behind the everyday items you see on the shelves,
and we will get you on the next one.