Sturmabteilung

• 1. Introduction

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  The Sturmabteilung, or SA, was the first paramilitary force of Hitler's Nazi Party, and its name loosely means stormtroopers. On the 2nd of October 1933, its chief of staff, Ernst Röhm, sent a letter to General Walter von Reichenau of the German Army. Röhm wrote: "I regard the Reichswehr 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." Nothing about that letter was modest. A militia of brown-shirted street fighters was telling the country's professional soldiers that their army was now little more than a school. How did men who began by guarding speeches in beer halls grow bold enough to say such a thing? Why did so many of its recruits come from the political left? And what became of Röhm?

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• 2. Name And Uniform

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  On the 2nd of March 1915, the first official German stormtrooper unit was authorized on the Western Front. The word Sturmabteilung was therefore a military term years before any political party claimed it. The German high command had told the VIII Corps to form a detachment for testing experimental weapons. Its other task was to develop tactics that could break the deadlock in the west. These assault troops worked in squads of just a few soldiers each and relied on infiltration. On the 2nd of October 1916, Generalquartiermeister Erich Ludendorff ordered every German army in the west to form a stormtrooper battalion. Such troops were first used during the 8th Army's siege of Riga, and again at the Battle of Caporetto. Their widest use came in the German spring offensive of March 1918, when Allied lines were pushed back by tens of kilometers.

  The famous brown shirt came from a shipment that never reached its intended wearers. In 1921, Gerhard Roßbach bought a large lot of so-called Lettow-shirts for his Freikorps paramilitary unit. They had been meant for German colonial troops in the former colony of East Africa, but naval blockades kept them from arriving. Roßbach later used the shirts for his organization in Salzburg. In 1924 the Schill Youth in Germany adopted them, and its supplier, the Schill Sportversand, became the main source of the SA's shirts. The official uniform paired the brown shirt with a brown tie. Members were nicknamed Brownshirts, or Braunhemden, a look that echoed the Blackshirts of Benito Mussolini. The SA also invented pseudo-military titles for its members, and several other Nazi Party groups later adopted those ranks. Soon those titles would sit on the shoulders of men numbering in the hundreds of thousands.

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• 3. Beer Hall Guards

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  In January 1919, the German Workers' Party, known as the DAP, was formed in Munich, and Adolf Hitler joined it that September. His gifts for speaking, publicity and propaganda were noticed quickly. By early 1920 he held real authority, and in February the party renamed itself the NSDAP, the National Socialist German Workers' Party. The executive committee added the word Socialist over Hitler's objections, hoping to attract left-wing workers.

  Hitler believed that growth would come from publicity. He persuaded the leadership committee to pay for an advertisement in the Münchener Beobachter, later renamed the Völkischer Beobachter. It announced a mass meeting at the Hofbräuhaus in Munich on the 16th of October 1919, and about 70 people attended. A second meeting followed on the 13th of November at the Eberl-Bräu beer hall, and about 130 people came. There were hecklers, and Hitler's military friends threw them out by force. One description says the agitators "flew down the stairs with gashed heads".

  On the 24th of February 1920, some 2,000 people gathered at the Hofbräuhaus to hear Hitler announce the party's Twenty-Five Point program. Protesters tried to shout him down. His former army companions, armed with rubber truncheons, drove them out. That night supplied the seed of the future SA.

  Afterward, a permanent group of party members gathered around Emil Maurice to guard meetings. They were called the Saalschutzabteilung, meaning the meeting hall protection detachment, and sometimes the Stewards Troop, or Ordnertruppen. The group had little structure. On the 3rd of August 1921, Hitler redefined it as the Gymnastic and Sports Division, or Turn- und Sportabteilung, perhaps to avoid trouble with the government. By September 1921 people were informally using the name Sturmabteilung, and Hitler was by then the official head of the Nazi Party.

  The real test came on the 4th of November 1921, at a large Hofbräuhaus meeting that drew many Communists and other enemies of the Nazis. After Hitler had spoken for some time, the hall erupted into a brawl. A small company of SA men thrashed the opposition. The Nazis called the fight the Saalschlacht, and it grew to legendary size in SA lore. From then on, the group was officially known as the Sturmabteilung.

  Command passed from Maurice to Hans Ulrich Klintzsch, a former naval officer. He had served in the Ehrhardt Brigade during the failed Kapp Putsch, and he belonged to the notorious Organisation Consul when he took charge. The Nazis began to adopt the more professional management techniques of the military. In 1922 the party created a youth section, the Jugendbund, for young men aged 14 to 18. Its successor, the Hitler Youth, stayed under SA command until May 1932.

  Hermann Göring joined the party in 1922 after hearing a speech by Hitler. In 1923 he took command of the SA as its Oberster SA-Führer. He was later made an SA-Obergruppenführer, a general's rank, and he stayed on the SA rolls with that rank until 1945.

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• 4. Millions In Brown

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  On the 1st of May 1925, Ernst Röhm resigned from every political movement and military brigade he belonged to. The Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923 had failed, and Bavaria had banned the Nazi Party and its organs. From April 1924 until late February 1925 the SA therefore survived as a front organization called the Frontbann. Röhm helped create it while Hitler sat in prison, and in April 1924 Hitler gave him authority to rebuild the SA however he saw fit. Röhm was prepared to fold the 30,000-strong Frontbann into the SA, but Hitler and Ludendorff disapproved of his proposals. He felt great contempt for the "legalistic" path the party leaders wanted, and he withdrew from public life.

  Franz Pfeffer von Salomon led the SA from 1926 to 1930. Otto Wagener served as chief of staff from 1929 to 1931. In 1929 the SA added a Motor Corps for better mobility and faster mustering of units. It also gained an independent source of money, the royalties from its own Sturm Cigarette Company. Until then the SA had depended on party leaders for funds, because it charged no membership fees. It recruited especially among the many unemployed during the economic crisis. The SA used violence against shops that stocked rival cigarette brands, and it punished any member caught with a non-Sturm pack. The cigarettes came with collectible sets of images of historical German army uniforms, a device meant to make military service more appealing.

  In September 1930, the Stennes revolt in Berlin pushed Hitler to take supreme command of the SA himself as Oberster SA-Führer. He also sent Röhm a personal request to return as chief of staff, and Röhm began on the 5th of January 1931. Röhm brought radical new ideas and appointed several close friends to senior posts. Before him, SA formations answered to the Nazi Party leadership of each Gau. Röhm created new Gruppen with no regional party oversight. Each one spanned several regions, and its SA-Gruppenführer answered only to Röhm or Hitler.

  Below each Gruppe sat Brigaden, then regiment-sized Standarten that operated in every major German city. Beneath those came Sturmbanne and Stürme. At the bottom was the Rotte, a squad of four to eight men. The supreme command, the Oberste SA-Führung, was based in Stuttgart.

  The SA existed to protect Nazi rallies, to disrupt the meetings of other parties, and to fight opposing paramilitary units. Its chief enemies were the Roter Frontkämpferbund of the Communist Party and the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold of the Social Democrats. It also intimidated Romani, trade unionists and, above all, Jews. Through the 1920s and into the 1930s, its men were often caught up in street fights with Communists, which they called Zusammenstöße, or collisions.

  In the early 1930s the Nazis grew from an extremist fringe into the largest political party in Germany, and the SA grew with them. By January 1932 it numbered approximately 400,000. When Hitler took power in January 1933, it had about 2,000,000 members, twenty times the number of troops and officers in the Reichswehr.

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• 5. Beefsteaks

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  The German historian Konrad Heiden wrote in his 1936 book Hitler: A Biography that the SA held large numbers of former Communists and Social Democrats. Many stormtroopers, he said, were nicknamed beefsteaks, "brown outside and red within". Inside the ranks, men joked that "In our storm troop there are three Nazis, but we shall soon have spewed them out."

  Rudolf Diels, the first Gestapo chief, estimated that 70 percent of the new SA recruits in Berlin in 1933 were former Communists. The number of beefsteaks was thought to be especially large in some northern German cities, where Gregor Strasser and Strasserism carried influence. Historians who studied youth-group backgrounds found that nearly one-third of the so-called instant stormtroopers had belonged to Free Corps units, vigilante groups or militant veterans' groups. They also came in disproportionate numbers from left-wing youth groups such as the Socialist or Communist Youth and the Red Front.

  Most SA members came from working-class families or were unemployed, and historians argue that this made them open to Marxist-leaning socialism. They expected Hitler to carry out the 25-point National Socialist Program. Many believed the strasserist promise of bolder economic action, such as breaking up the vast landed estates of the aristocracy once the Nazis held national power.

  Yet the historian Thomas Friedrich argues that the Communist Party's repeated appeals to these men were "doomed to failure". Most SA men were absorbed in the nationalistic cult of Hitler and in destroying the "Marxist enemy", a label that covered both the Communists and the Social Democrats.

  After the seizure of power, Hitler believed the defiant, rebellious culture encouraged beforehand had to give way to community organization. SA members resented canvassing and fundraising, which they dismissed as Kleinarbeit, or "legwork". Before the Nazis took power, such work had typically been done by women.

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• 6. Night Of Long Knives

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  In 1923, Hitler grew distrustful of the SA and ordered the creation of a bodyguard unit, which was abolished after the failed putsch later that year. Soon after his release from prison, in 1925, he ordered another bodyguard unit. It ultimately became the Schutzstaffel, the SS.

  By the end of 1933 the SA numbered more than 3 million men, and many believed they should replace the "antiquated" Reichswehr. Röhm wanted to absorb the army, which the law limited to 100,000 men, into a new "people's army". This alarmed the professional army leaders and threatened Hitler's goal of co-opting the Reichswehr. Röhm had won a seat on the National Defence Council and demanded more say over military matters. Defence Minister Werner von Blomberg and Reichenau grew worried, and they began to conspire with Göring and Himmler against Röhm.

  Heinrich Himmler had been given control of the SS, in part to restrain the SA. The younger SS had become more than a bodyguard unit and proved better suited to carrying out Hitler's policies, including criminal ones. SS members generally came from the middle class, while the SA drew on the unemployed and working class. SA leaders also argued that the Nazi revolution had not ended with Hitler's rise to power and still needed to bring Strasserism to Germany.

  Himmler asked Reinhard Heydrich to assemble a dossier on Röhm. Heydrich understood that the SA had to be broken if the SS was to gain full national power. He manufactured evidence suggesting that French agents had paid Röhm 12 million marks to overthrow Hitler. Hitler liked Röhm and at first refused to believe the dossier. Röhm had been one of his first supporters, and his ability to obtain army funds in the early days made the Nazi movement possible. The SA under Röhm had also played a vital role in crushing the opposition during the elections of 1932 and 1933.

  Hitler had his own reasons for wanting Röhm removed. The generals feared that untrained SA thugs would destroy the professional force they had built. They were also alarmed by reports of a huge cache of weapons in SA hands. Industrialists who had funded the Nazi victory disliked Röhm's socialistic views on the economy. In June 1934, President Hindenburg informed Hitler that he would dissolve the government and declare martial law unless the SA was curbed. Hitler also feared that Röhm and the SA could remove him.

  Göring and Himmler played on that fear with a steady stream of reports about a coup. A masterstroke was to claim that Gregor Strasser, whom Hitler felt had betrayed him, belonged to the plot. Hitler then ordered all SA leaders to attend a meeting at the Hanselbauer Hotel in Bad Wiessee.

  On the 30th of June 1934, Hitler arrived at Bad Wiessee with SS units and personally arrested Röhm and other high-ranking SA leaders. Over the next 48 hours, 200 other senior SA officers were arrested on the way to Wiessee. Many were shot as soon as they were captured. Hitler first decided to pardon Röhm because of his past services to the movement. On the 1st of July, after much pressure from Göring and Himmler, he agreed that Röhm should die. Hitler insisted that Röhm first be allowed to take his own life. Röhm refused, and two SS officers, Theodor Eicke and Michael Lippert, shot him. The names of 85 victims are known, and estimates put the total killed between 150 and 200 men.

  Some Germans were shocked by the killings, but many believed Hitler had restored order to the country. Goebbels' propaganda in the following days stressed a so-called Röhm-Putsch. The homosexuality of Röhm and other SA leaders was made public for shock value, although Hitler and other Nazi leaders had known about it for years.

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• 7. After The Purge

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  Within a year of the purge, SA membership had fallen by more than 40 percent. Viktor Lutze, who now held the post of chief of staff, led a much smaller organization. The Nazis nonetheless kept using the SA for attacks on Jews, which they had stepped up in the early 1930s.

  In November 1938, a Polish Jew named Herschel Grynszpan assassinated the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath. The SA was then used for violent "demonstrations" against the killing. Its members shattered the glass storefronts of about 7,500 Jewish stores and businesses. The riots became known as Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, or more literally Crystal Night. Jewish homes were ransacked across Germany. About 200 synagogues were damaged or destroyed, along with many Jewish cemeteries and 29 department stores. Some Jews were beaten to death, and more than 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and taken to concentration camps.

  After that, the SS overshadowed the SA. By 1939 the SA had little significance in the Nazi Party, though it was never formally disbanded. In January 1939, its role was officially set as a training school for the armed forces, through the SA Wehrmannschaften, or SA Military Units. When World War II began in September 1939, the SA lost most of its remaining members to service in the Wehrmacht.

  Some military branches persisted. The largest SA training unit, the SA-Marine, acted as an auxiliary to the Kriegsmarine, the German Navy, and carried out search and rescue operations and harbor defense. An army-style wing called Feldherrnhalle grew from regimental size in 1940 into a full armored corps, the Panzerkorps Feldherrnhalle, by 1945. After the invasion of Poland in 1939, a unit called "Great Government" was formed outside Germany. In 1942 such units were renamed SA Wehrschützen-Bereitschaften, later shortened to SA Wehrbereitschaften.

  In January 1941, a coup attempt in Bucharest set the Auswärtiges Amt, the German Foreign Office, against the SS. The SS backed the Iron Guard under Horia Sima, while the Foreign Office and the Wehrmacht backed Prime Minister General Ion Antonescu. Afterward, Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop tried to curb the SS's ability to run its own foreign policy. Exploiting the old rivalry between the SS and the SA, he named a group of SA men to head German embassies in Eastern Europe in 1941.

  Manfred Freiherr von Killinger went to Romania, Siegfried Kasche to Croatia, and Adolf-Heinz Beckerle to Bulgaria. Dietrich von Jagow went to Hungary, and Hanns Ludin to Slovakia. They acted as quasi-Reich governors, aggressively supervising the internal affairs of the countries where they were stationed. As a group they proved inept diplomats. Beckerle was so crude that King Boris III almost refused to let him present his credentials at the Vrana Palace.

  As ambassador in Bratislava, Ludin arranged the deportation of 50,000 Slovak Jews to Auschwitz in 1942. On the 23rd and the 24th of August 1944, Killinger bungled the German response to King Michael I's coup. Michael dismissed Antonescu, signed an armistice with the Allies and declared war on Germany, which cost the Reich its largest source of oil. Killinger and Jagow killed themselves, in 1944 and 1945 respectively. Kasche and Ludin were executed for war crimes in 1947, in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia respectively.

  Beckerle spent 11 years in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp and was released to West Germany in 1955. He was charged with war crimes in 1966 over the deportation of Macedonian Jews. The charges were dropped in 1968 because of ill health, and he died in 1976 at a retirement home in West Germany.

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• 8. Disbanded And Outlawed

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  In 1943, Viktor Lutze was killed in an automobile accident. Max Jüttner served as acting chief of staff from May to August of that year, and Wilhelm Schepmann was then appointed leader. Schepmann did his best to run the SA for the rest of the war. He tried to restore it as a predominant force within the Nazi Party and to mend years of distrust and bad feeling between the SA and the SS.

  On the night of the 29th to the 30th of March 1945, Austrian SA members took part in a death march of Hungarian Jews. The prisoners were driven from a work camp at Engerau, now Petržalka in Slovakia, to Bad Deutsch-Altenburg. Of those Jews, 102 were killed, either shot or beaten to death.

  In April 1945, Leo Pilz, a colonel of the SA and the district chief of staff of the Krems militia, led a contingent of Volkssturm militiamen during the Stein Prison massacre. Between 400 and 500 prisoners were summarily executed. After the war, Pilz and four others were sentenced to death by the People's Court of Vienna.

  The SA ceased to exist in May 1945, when Nazi Germany collapsed. On the 10th of October 1945, the Allied Control Council formally disbanded and outlawed it by enacting Control Council Law No. 2. In 1946 the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg ruled that the SA was not a criminal organization.

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