The SA were a familiar sight in interwar Germany: brown shirted men willing to fight and injure anyone to promote, and terrify people into supporting, Hitler’s Nazi Party.
SA stands for Sturmabteilungen, the German for Storm Troopers. The term was first used in late 1921 to describe the paramilitary force of the fledging Nazi Party, originally just bouncers to guard their speaking venues.
Numbering around three hundred at this point the SA were – like many Freikorps forces – comprised chiefly of embittered and extremist veterans of the First World War with some unemployed. By 1923 this had swollen to 1,500 men. Used on the streets of Germany to terrify opponents and break up their meetings, the SA were the muscle which Hitler used in his failed Beer Hall Putsch.
Once released from a brief imprisonment, Hitler decided the Nazis had to pursue a notionally legal course to take power, and Ernst Röhm - a man heavily involved in multiple paramilitaries, but a key figure in the early SA - quit in 1925. His replacement was a Freikorps man, Franz Pfeffer von Salomon. The SA wore brown shirts (inspired by the black shirts of Mussolini’s fascists) and kept skirmishing with the forces of the left as the Nazis grew in influence, soon giving Hitler a private army several hundred thousand strong. Ernst Röhm returned to Germany in 1930 and was handed command, and a rebellion of SA men wanting immediate revolution had to be crushed.
Â
As the Nazi party itself experienced a rapid growth in political support, so Ernst Röhm rapidly expanded the numbers in the SA (from 420,000 at the start of 1932 to over four million by 1934). They not only pushed Germany to the brink of civil war by brutally attacking communists and anti-Nazi forces, and used their mere presence to terrify politicians into voting for them, but Hitler and Goebbels were able to organise the SA into grand displays of pageantry and power. The battles on the streets between the SA and the communists risked triggering a full scale civil war.
Once Hitler had been appointed Chancellor, he called for new elections, and Goering merged SA members with the Prussian police force to cause the maximum intimidation of the voting public. However, the violence of the SA was now getting out of hand. Hitler had, at times, been forced to rein in the SA, such as in the year before he was appointed Chancellor, when SA forces had reacted to President Hindenburg’s reluctance by pushing their reign of terror even further, and Hitler was forced to do so again. Röhm harboured not so secret ambitions to merge the SA with the official army into a new force under his command, ideally after an anti-capitalist revolution, and as Hitler was dependant on army and industrial support, and as the SA were now just embarrassing the Nazis claims to bring order, Hitler acted. In the Night of the Long Knives  Röhm and other SA leaders were arrested by the rising force of the SS, many including Röhm were executed, and the SA bought under control.Â
The SA were now given to Viktor Lutze, and had its membership cut heavily: to just veterans and people who had come up through the Hitler Youth. By the start of World War Two SA membership was a little under one and a quarter million, and it had been turned into primarily a propaganda unit used for terrorising Jews (such as during Kristallnacht) and training people not involved in the military.
The Origins of the SA
SA stands for Sturmabteilungen, the German for Storm Troopers. The term was first used in late 1921 to describe the paramilitary force of the fledging Nazi Party, originally just bouncers to guard their speaking venues.
Numbering around three hundred at this point the SA were – like many Freikorps forces – comprised chiefly of embittered and extremist veterans of the First World War with some unemployed. By 1923 this had swollen to 1,500 men. Used on the streets of Germany to terrify opponents and break up their meetings, the SA were the muscle which Hitler used in his failed Beer Hall Putsch.
Growth of the SA
Once released from a brief imprisonment, Hitler decided the Nazis had to pursue a notionally legal course to take power, and Ernst Röhm - a man heavily involved in multiple paramilitaries, but a key figure in the early SA - quit in 1925. His replacement was a Freikorps man, Franz Pfeffer von Salomon. The SA wore brown shirts (inspired by the black shirts of Mussolini’s fascists) and kept skirmishing with the forces of the left as the Nazis grew in influence, soon giving Hitler a private army several hundred thousand strong. Ernst Röhm returned to Germany in 1930 and was handed command, and a rebellion of SA men wanting immediate revolution had to be crushed.
Â
As the Nazi party itself experienced a rapid growth in political support, so Ernst Röhm rapidly expanded the numbers in the SA (from 420,000 at the start of 1932 to over four million by 1934). They not only pushed Germany to the brink of civil war by brutally attacking communists and anti-Nazi forces, and used their mere presence to terrify politicians into voting for them, but Hitler and Goebbels were able to organise the SA into grand displays of pageantry and power. The battles on the streets between the SA and the communists risked triggering a full scale civil war.
Height and Fall of the SA
Once Hitler had been appointed Chancellor, he called for new elections, and Goering merged SA members with the Prussian police force to cause the maximum intimidation of the voting public. However, the violence of the SA was now getting out of hand. Hitler had, at times, been forced to rein in the SA, such as in the year before he was appointed Chancellor, when SA forces had reacted to President Hindenburg’s reluctance by pushing their reign of terror even further, and Hitler was forced to do so again. Röhm harboured not so secret ambitions to merge the SA with the official army into a new force under his command, ideally after an anti-capitalist revolution, and as Hitler was dependant on army and industrial support, and as the SA were now just embarrassing the Nazis claims to bring order, Hitler acted. In the Night of the Long Knives  Röhm and other SA leaders were arrested by the rising force of the SS, many including Röhm were executed, and the SA bought under control.Â
The SA were now given to Viktor Lutze, and had its membership cut heavily: to just veterans and people who had come up through the Hitler Youth. By the start of World War Two SA membership was a little under one and a quarter million, and it had been turned into primarily a propaganda unit used for terrorising Jews (such as during Kristallnacht) and training people not involved in the military.
Source...