The SA were colloquially calledBrownshirts (Braunhemden) because of the colour of theiruniform's shirts, similar toBenito Mussolini'sBlackshirts. The official SA uniform was a brown shirt with a brown tie. The colour came about because a large shipment ofLettow-shirts, originally intended for the Germancolonial troops inGermany's former East Africa colony but which never reached its destination because of naval blockades,[3] was purchased in 1921 byGerhard Roßbach for use by hisFreikorps paramilitary unit. They were later used for hisSchill Youth organization in Salzburg, and in 1924 were adopted by the Schill Youth in Germany.[4] The "Schill Sportversand" then became the main supplier for the SA's brown shirts. The SA developed pseudo-military titles for its members, withranks that were later adopted by several other Nazi Party groups.
After Hitler rose to Nazi Party leadership in 1921, he formalized the party's militant supporters into the SA as a group that was to protect party gatherings. In 1923, owing to his growing distrust of the SA, Hitler ordered the creation ofa bodyguard unit, which was abolished after the failedBeer Hall Putsch later that year. Not long after Hitler's release from prison, he ordered the creation of another bodyguard unit in 1925 that ultimately became theSchutzstaffel (SS). During theNight of the Long Knives (die Nacht der langen Messer) purge in 1934, the SA's then-leaderErnst Röhm was arrested and executed. The SA continued to exist but lost almost all its influence and was effectively superseded by the SS, which took part in the purge. The SA remained in existence until afterNazi Germany's final capitulation to theAllies in 1945, after which it was disbanded and outlawed by theAllied Control Council.
The termSturmabteilung predates the founding of theNazi Party in 1919. Originally it was applied to the specialized assault troops ofImperial Germany inWorld War I who usedinfiltration tactics based on being organized into small squads of a few soldiers each. The first official Germanstormtrooper unit was authorized on March 2, 1915, on the Western Front. The German high command ordered theVIII Corps to form a detachment to test experimental weapons and develop tactics that could break the deadlock on theWestern Front. On October 2, 1916,GeneralquartiermeisterErich Ludendorff ordered all German armies in the west to form a battalion of stormtroopers.[5][page needed] They were first used during the8th Army'ssiege ofRiga, and again at theBattle of Caporetto. Wider use followed on the Western Front in theGerman spring offensive in March 1918, when Allied lines were successfully pushed back tens of kilometers.
The DAP (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei,German Workers' Party) was formed inMunich in January 1919, and Adolf Hitler joined it in September of that year. His talents for speaking, publicity andpropaganda were quickly recognized.[a] By early 1920 he had gained authority in the party, which changed its name to the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or National Socialist German Workers' Party) in February 1920.[7] The party's executive committee added "Socialist" to the name over Hitler's objections, to help the party appeal to left-wing workers.[8]
The precursor to theSturmabteilung had acted informally and on anad hoc basis for some time before this. Hitler, with an eye to helping the party to grow through propaganda, convinced the leadership committee to invest in an advertisement in theMünchener Beobachter (later renamed theVölkischer Beobachter) for a mass meeting in theHofbräuhaus, to be held in Munich on October 16, 1919. Some 70 people attended, and a second such meeting was advertised for November 13 in theEberl-Bräu beer hall, also in Munich. About 130 people attended; there were hecklers, but Hitler's military friends promptly ejected them by force, and the agitators "flew down the stairs with gashed heads". The next year on February 24, he announced the party'sTwenty-Five Point program at a mass meeting of some 2,000 people at the Hofbräuhaus. Protesters tried to shout Hitler down, but his former army companions, armed with rubbertruncheons, ejected the dissenters. The basis for the SA had been formed.[9]
A permanent group of party members, who would serve as theSaalschutzabteilung (meeting hall protection detachment) for the DAP, gathered aroundEmil Maurice after the February 1920 incident at the Hofbräuhaus. There was little organization or structure to this group. The group was also called the "Stewards Troop" (Ordnertruppen) around this time.[10] More than a year later, on August 3, 1921, Hitler redefined the group as the "Gymnastic and Sports Division" of the party (Turn- und Sportabteilung), perhaps to avoid trouble with the government.[11][12] It was by now well recognized as an appropriate, even necessary, function or organ of the party. The future SA developed by organizing and formalizing the groups of ex-soldiers and beer-hall brawlers who were to protect gatherings of the Nazi Party from disruptions fromSocial Democrats (SPD) andCommunists (KPD), and to disrupt meetings of the other political parties. By September 1921 the nameSturmabteilung (SA) was being used informally for the group.[13] Hitler was the official head of the Nazi Party by this time.[b]
The leadership of the SA passed from Maurice to the youngHans Ulrich Klintzsch in this period. He had been a naval officer and a member of theEhrhardt Brigade, which had taken part in the failedKapp Putsch attempted coup. When he took over command of the SA, he was a member of the notoriousOrganisation Consul (OC).[c] The Nazis under Hitler began to adopt the more professional management techniques of the military.[13]
In 1922, the Nazi Party created a youth section, theJugendbund, for young men between the ages of 14 and 18 years. Its successor, theHitler Youth (Hitlerjugend or HJ), remained under SA command until May 1932.Hermann Göring joined the Nazi Party in 1922 after hearing a speech by Hitler. He was given command of the SA as theOberster SA-Führer in 1923.[15] He was later appointed an SA-Obergruppenführer (general) and held this rank on the SA rolls until 1945.
From April 1924 until late February 1925, the SA was reorganized into a front organization known as theFrontbann to circumventBavaria's ban on the Nazi Party and its organs. (This had been instituted after the abortiveBeer Hall Putsch of November 1923). While Hitler was in prison,Ernst Röhm helped to create theFrontbann as a legal alternative to the then-outlawed SA. In April 1924, Röhm had also been given authority by Hitler to rebuild the SA in any way he saw fit. When in April 1925 Hitler and Ludendorff disapproved of the proposals under which Röhm was prepared to integrate the 30,000-strongFrontbann into the SA, Röhm resigned from all political movements and military brigades on May 1, 1925. He felt great contempt for the "legalistic" path the party leaders wanted to follow and sought seclusion from public life.[16] Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, members of the SA were often involved in street fights, calledZusammenstöße (collisions), with members of the Communist Party (KPD). In 1929, the SA added a Motor Corps for better mobility and a faster mustering of units.[17] It also acquired an independent source of funds: royalties from its ownSturm Cigarette Company. Previously, the SA had been financially dependent on the party leadership, as it charged no membership fees;[18][19] the SA recruited particularly among the many unemployed in the economic crisis.[20] The SA used violence against shops and shopkeepers stocking competing cigarette brands; it also punished any SA member caught with non-Sturm cigarettes.[18][19] Sturm marketing was also used to make military service more appealing. Cigarettes were sold with collectible sets of images of historical German army uniforms.[21]
In September 1930, as a consequence of theStennes revolt in Berlin, Hitler assumed supreme command of the SA as its newOberster SA-Führer. He sent a personal request to Röhm, asking him to return to serve as the SA's chief of staff. Röhm accepted this offer and began his new assignment on January 5, 1931. He brought radical new ideas to the SA and appointed several close friends to its senior leadership.
Previously, the SA formations were subordinate to the Nazi Party leadership of eachGau. Röhm established newGruppen that had no regional Nazi Party oversight. Each Gruppe extended over several regions and was commanded by a SA-Gruppenführer who answered only to Röhm or Hitler. Under Röhm as its popular leader andStabschef (Staff Chief), the SA grew in importance within the Nazi power structure and expanded to have thousands of members. In the early 1930s, the Nazis expanded from an extremist fringe group to the largest political party in Germany, and the SA expanded with it. By January 1932, the SA numbered approximately 400,000.[22]
Many of these stormtroopers believed in thestrasserist promise ofnazism. They expected the Nazi regime to take more radical economic action, such as breaking up the vast landed estates of the aristocracy, once they obtained national power.[23] By the time Hitler assumed power in January 1933, SA membership had increased to approximately 2,000,000—twenty times as large as the number of troops and officers in theReichswehr (German Army).[24]
After Hitler and the Nazis obtained national power, the SA leadership also became increasingly eager for power. By the end of 1933, the SA numbered more than 3 million men, and many believed they were the replacement for the "antiquated"Reichswehr. Röhm's ideal was to absorb the army (then limited by law to no more than 100,000 men) into the SA, which would be a new "people's army". This deeply offended and alarmed the professional army leaders and threatened Hitler's goal of co-opting theReichswehr. The SA's increasing power and ambitions also posed a threat to other Nazi leaders.[25] Originally an adjunct to the SA, theSchutzstaffel (SS) was placed under the control ofHeinrich Himmler, in part to restrict the power of the SA and their leaders.[26] The younger SS had evolved to be more than a bodyguard unit for Hitler and demonstrated that it was better suited to carry out Hitler's policies, including those of a criminal nature.[27][28]
Although some of the conflicts between the SS and SA were based on personal rivalries of leaders, the mass of members had key socio-economic differences and related conflicts. SS members generally came from themiddle class, while the SA had its base among the unemployed andworking class. Politically speaking, the SA was more radical than the SS, with its leaders arguing the Nazi revolution had not ended when Hitler achieved power, but rather needed to implementStrasserism in Germany. Hitler believed that the defiant and rebellious culture encouraged before the seizure of power had to give way to using these forces for community organization. But the SA members resented tasks such as canvassing and fundraising, considering themKleinarbeit ("little work"), which had typically been performed by women before the Nazi seizure of power.[29]Rudolf Diels, the firstGestapo chief, estimated that in 1933 Berlin, 70 percent of new SA recruits were former Communists.[30]
In 1933, GeneralWerner von Blomberg, the Minister of Defence, and GeneralWalter von Reichenau, the chief of theReichswehr's Ministerial Department, became increasingly concerned about the growing power of the SA. Röhm had been given a seat on the National Defence Council and began to demand more say over military matters. On October 2, 1933, Röhm sent a letter to Reichenau that said: "I regard theReichswehr now only as a training school for the German people. The conduct of war, and therefore of mobilization as well, in the future is the task of the SA."[31]
SA knife
Blomberg and von Reichenau began to conspire with Göring and Himmler against Röhm and the SA. Himmler askedReinhard Heydrich to assemble a dossier on Röhm. Heydrich recognized that for the SS to gain full national power, the SA had to be broken.[32] He manufactured evidence to suggest that Röhm had been paid 12 million marks by French agents to overthrow Hitler. Hitler liked Röhm and initially refused to believe the dossier provided by Heydrich. Röhm had been one of his first supporters and, without his ability to obtain army funds in the early days of the movement, it is unlikely that the Nazis would have ever become established. The SA under Röhm's leadership had also played a vital role in destroying the opposition during the elections of 1932 and 1933.
Hitler had his own reasons for wanting Röhm removed. Some of his powerful supporters had been complaining about Röhm for some time. The generals opposed Röhm's desire to have the SA, a force of by then over three million men, absorb the much smaller German Army into its ranks under his leadership.[32] Since the officers had developed theReichswehr as a professional force of 100,000, they believed that it would be destroyed if merged with millions of untrained SA thugs.[33] Furthermore, the army commanders were greatly concerned about reports of a huge cache of weapons in the hands of SA members.[32] Industrialists, who had provided the funds for the Nazi victory, were unhappy with Röhm's socialistic views on the economy and his claims that the real revolution had still to take place.President Hindenburg informed Hitler in June 1934 that if a move to curb the SA was not forthcoming, he would dissolve the government and declaremartial law.[34]
Hitler was also concerned that Röhm and the SA had the power to remove him as leader. Göring and Himmler played on this fear by constantly feeding Hitler with new information on Röhm's proposed coup. A masterstroke was to claim thatGregor Strasser, whom Hitler felt had betrayed him, was part of the planned conspiracy against him. With this news, Hitler ordered all the SA leaders to attend a meeting in the Hanselbauer Hotel[35] inBad Wiessee.
On June 30, 1934, Hitler, accompanied by SS units, arrived at Bad Wiessee, where he personally placed Röhm and other high-ranking SA leaders under arrest. Over the next 48 hours, 200 other senior SA officers were arrested on the way to Wiessee. Many were shot and killed as soon as they were captured, but Hitler decided to pardon Röhm because of his past services to the movement. On July 1, after much pressure from Göring and Himmler, Hitler agreed that Röhm should die. Hitler insisted that Röhm should first be allowed to commit suicide. When Röhm refused to do so, he was shot by two SS officers,Theodor Eicke andMichael Lippert.[36] Though the names of 85 victims are known, estimates place the total number killed at between 150 and 200 men, the rest of whom remain unidentified.[37]
Some Germans were shocked by the executions, but many others perceived Hitler to have restored "order" to the country. Goebbels' propaganda highlighted the "Röhm-Putsch" in the days that followed. Thehomosexuality of Röhm and other SA leaders was made public to add "shock value", although Hitler and other Nazi leaders had known for years about the sexuality of Röhm and other named SA leaders.[38]
After theNight of the Long Knives, the SA continued to operate, under the leadership ofStabschefViktor Lutze, but the group was significantly downsized. Within a year's time, the SA membership was reduced by more than 40%.[37] However, the Nazis increased attacks against Jews in the early 1930s and used the SA to carry these out.
In November 1938, after the assassination of German diplomatErnst vom Rath byHerschel Grynszpan (a Polish Jew), the SA was used for "demonstrations" against the act. In violent riots, members of the SA shattered the glass storefronts of about 7,500 Jewish stores and businesses. The events were referred to asKristallnacht ('Night of Broken Glass', more literally 'Crystal Night').[39] Jewish homes were ransacked throughout Germany. Thispogrom damaged, and in many cases destroyed, about 200synagogues (constituting nearly all Germany had), many Jewish cemeteries, more than 7,000 Jewish shops, and 29 department stores. Some Jews were beaten to death and more than 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and taken toconcentration camps.[40]
Thereafter, the SA became overshadowed by the SS; by 1939 it had little remaining significance in the Nazi Party, though it was never formally disbanded and continued to exist until the war ended. In January 1939, the role of the SA was officially established as a training school for the armed forces, with the establishment of the SAWehrmannschaften (SA Military Units).[41] With the start of World War II in September 1939, the SA lost most of its remaining members to military service in theWehrmacht (armed forces).[42]
In January 1941, long-standing rivalries between theAuswärtiges Amt (Foreign Office) and the SS exploded with the attempted coup d'état in Bucharest that saw SS back the coup by the Iron Guard under its leaderHoria Sima against the Prime Minister, GeneralIon Antonescu, while theAuswärtiges Amt together with the Wehrmacht backed Antonescu. In the aftermath of the coup, the Foreign MinisterJoachim von Ribbentrop made an effort to curb the power of the SS to conduct a foreign policy independent of theAuswärtiges Amt. Taking an advantage of the long-standing rivalries between the SS and the SA, in 1941, Ribbentrop appointed an assemblage of SA men to head the German embassies in Eastern Europe, withManfred Freiherr von Killinger going to Romania,Siegfried Kasche to Croatia,Adolf-Heinz Beckerle to Bulgaria,Dietrich von Jagow to Hungary, andHanns Ludin to Slovakia in order to ensure that there would be minimal co-operation with the SS.[43] The role of the SA ambassadors was that of "quasi-Reich governors" as they aggressively supervised the internal affairs of the nations they were stationed in, making them very much unlike traditional ambassadors.[44] The SA leaders ambassadors fulfilled Ribbentrop's hopes in that all had distant relations with the SS, but as a group they were notably inept as diplomats with Beckerle being so crude and vulgar in his manners that KingBoris III almost refused to allow him to present his credentials at theVrana Palace.[43] As the ambassador inBratislava, Ludin arranged the deportation of 50,000 Slovak Jews to Auschwitz in 1942.[45] On 23–24 August 1944, Killinger notably bungled the German response toKing Michael I's Coup that saw KingMichael I of Romania dismiss Antonescu, sign an armistice with the Allies, and declare war on Germany, thereby costing theReich its largest source of oil.[46] Of the SA ambassadors, Killinger and Jagow committed suicide in 1944 and 1945 respectively while Kasche and Ludin were executed for war crimes in 1947 in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia respectively. Beckerle spent 11 years in a Soviet POW camp, was released to West Germany in 1955, was charged with war crimes in 1966 for his role in the deportation of Macedonian Jews, which were dropped on grounds of ill health in 1968 and died in 1976 at a retirement home in West Germany.
In 1943, Viktor Lutze was killed in an automobile accident, andWilhelm Schepmann was appointed as leader.[47] Schepmann did his best to run the SA for the remainder of the war, attempting to restore the group as a predominant force within the Nazi Party and to mend years of distrust and bad feelings between the SA and SS. On the night of 29–30 March 1945, Austrian SA members were involved in a death march of Hungarian Jews from a work camp at Engerau (modernPetržalka,Slovakia) toBad Deutsch-Altenburg that saw 102 of the Jews being killed, being either shot or beaten to death.[48] In April 1945,Kreisstabsführer des Kremser Volkssturms (DistrictChief of Staff of theKrems Militia) andSA-Standartenführer (Colonel of the SA) Leo Pilz led a contingent ofVolkssturm militiamen during theStein Prison massacre, during which 400-500 prisoners weresummarily executed.[49]Post-war, Pilz and four others were sentenced to death by thePeople's Court ofVienna.[50]
In September 1930, to quell the Stennes Revolt and to try to ensure the personal loyalty of the SA to himself, Hitler assumed command of the entire organization and remainedOberster SA-Führer for the remainder of the group's existence until 1945. The day-to-day running of the SA was conducted by theStabschef-SA (SA Chief of Staff), a position Hitler designated for Ernst Röhm.[55] After Hitler's assumption of the supreme command of the SA, it was theStabschef-SA who was generally accepted as the Commander of the SA, acting in Hitler's name. The following personnel held the position ofStabschef-SA:
The SA was organized into several large regionalGruppen ("Groups"). The group leader answered only to theStabschef-SA or Hitler.[57] EachGruppe was made up of subordinateBrigaden ("Brigades").[58] Subordinate to theBrigaden were the smallerregiment-sizedStandarten.[58]SA-Standarten operated in every major German city and were split into even smaller units, known asSturmbanne andStürme.
The command nexus for the entire SA was theOberste SA-Führung, located inStuttgart. The SA supreme command had many sub-offices to handle supply, finance and recruiting.
An SA-Sturmmann of the Marine-Sturmabteilung. His collar denotes that he is part ofSturm 22 /Standarte 1.
The SA also had several military training units. The largest was theSA-Marine, which served as an auxiliary to theKriegsmarine (German Navy) and performedsearch and rescue operations as well as harbor defense. The SA also had an "army" wing, similar to theWaffen-SS, known asFeldherrnhalle. This formation expanded from regimental size in 1940 to a fully-fledged armored corps (Panzerkorps Feldherrnhalle) in 1945. As for units formed outside of Germany, after the success of theinvasion of Poland in 1939, an SA unit, "Great Government" was formed. The units were renamed SAWehrschützen-Bereitschaften in 1942. The title was abbreviated to SAWehrbereitschaften, thereafter.[59]
In his 1936Hitler: A Biography, German historianKonrad Heiden remarked that within the SA ranks, there were "large numbers of former Communists and Social Democrats" and that "many of the storm troops were called 'beefsteaks' – brown outside and red within."[60] The influx of non-Nazis into theSturmabteilung membership was so prevalent that SA men would joke that "In our storm troop there are three Nazis, but we shall soon have spewed them out."[60]
The number of "beefsteaks" was estimated to be large in some cities, especially in northern Germany, where the influence ofGregor Strasser andStrasserism was significant.[61] The head of the Gestapo from 1933 to 1934,Rudolf Diels, reported that "70 percent" of the new SA recruits in the city of Berlin had been communists.[30] This is evidenced further by historians, "As for the prior youth group memberships, nearly half of the SS members and nearly one-third of the instant stormtroopers were with the Free Corps, vigilantes, or militant veterans' groups during their first 25 years of life. They also came in disproportionate numbers from left-wing youth groups such as the Socialist or Communist Youth or the Red Front (RFB)."[62]
Historians have argued that since most SA members came from working-class families or were unemployed, they were more amenable toMarxist-leaning socialism, expecting Hitler to fulfill the 25-pointNational Socialist Program.[63] HistorianThomas Friedrich states that the repeated efforts by theCommunist Party of Germany (KPD) to appeal to the working-class backgrounds of the SA were "doomed to failure", because most SA men were focused on the nationalistic cult of Hitler and destroying the "Marxist enemy", a term that was used to identify both the KPD and theSocial Democratic Party of Germany (SPD).[64]
The "beefsteak" name also referred to party-switching between Nazi and Communist party members, particularly involving those within the SA ranks.
Freikorps - independent paramilitary organizations of ex-German Army soldiers and unemployed workers who fought against Communist uprisings after World War I
^Before the end of 1919, Hitler had already been appointed head of propaganda for the party, with party founderAnton Drexler's backing.[6]
^At a special party congress held July 29, 1921, Hitler was appointed chairman. He announced that the party would stay headquartered in Munich and that those who did not like his leadership should just leave; he would not entertain debate on such matters. The vote was 543 for Hitler, and 1 against.[14]
^The OC's most infamous action was probably the brazen daylight assassination of the foreign ministerWalther Rathenau, in early 1922. Klintzsch was also a member of the somewhat more reputableViking League (Bund Wiking).
^The NSDAP and its organs and instruments (including theVölkischer Beobachter and the SA) were banned in Bavaria (and other parts of Germany) following Hitler's abortive attempt to overthrow theWeimar Republic in theBeer Hall Putsch in November 1923. The Bavarian ban was lifted in February 1925 after Hitler pledged to adhere to legal and constitutional means in his quest for political power.SeeVerbotzeit.
^The SA-Brigade was also designated asSA-Untergruppe (SA-Subgroup).[58]
^"What Was the Sturmabteilung?".The Collector. February 7, 2024.In September 1923, during the Deutsche Tag (German Day) in Nuremberg, the SA became part of the Deutsche Bund, an alliance of several far-right, nationalist groups.
^"The SA".United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia. RetrievedNovember 23, 2024.
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