Sturmabteilung
Based on Wikipedia: Sturmabteilung
In the summer of 1934, Adolf Hitler ordered the murder of one of his oldest friends. Ernst Röhm had been there from the beginning—had helped Hitler when the Nazi Party was just a handful of angry men in Munich beer halls, had built the street-fighting force that cleared the path to power. Now Röhm was shot in his prison cell, and with him died the last check on Hitler's absolute authority. The organization Röhm had built, the Sturmabteilung, would never recover. But to understand why Hitler felt compelled to destroy his own creation, you have to understand what the Sturmabteilung was—and what it threatened to become.
The Brown Shirts
The Sturmabteilung—the name translates roughly as "Storm Division" or "assault detachment"—was the original Nazi paramilitary force. Its members were colloquially known as Brownshirts, the same way Mussolini's Italian fascist paramilitaries were called Blackshirts. The color choice was almost accidental: in 1921, someone found a large shipment of khaki-brown shirts that had been manufactured for German colonial troops in East Africa but never delivered because of wartime naval blockades. The shirts were cheap. They became the uniform.
But the organization itself was anything but accidental. The Sturmabteilung existed to do the Nazi Party's dirty work: protecting Nazi rallies, disrupting the meetings of rival political parties, intimidating Jews and trade unionists and anyone else who got in the way. In the chaotic streets of Weimar Germany, where the Communist Party and the Social Democrats had their own paramilitary wings, political violence was a kind of ongoing civil war fought with rubber truncheons and brass knuckles and, occasionally, guns.
The Sturmabteilung was very good at this kind of violence.
Origins in the Beer Halls
The story begins in Munich in 1919, in the aftermath of Germany's catastrophic defeat in World War One. A small group of disgruntled nationalists founded the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei—the German Workers' Party—and a young army veteran named Adolf Hitler joined them that September. Hitler had a gift for public speaking, for propaganda, for turning a roomful of angry men into a weapon.
The party advertised a mass meeting at the Hofbräuhaus, one of Munich's famous beer halls, for October 1919. About seventy people showed up. A month later, a second meeting drew 130 people—including hecklers. Hitler's army friends threw them down the stairs.
This was the pattern from the beginning. Nazi meetings attracted opponents. Opponents had to be removed. And removing them required men who enjoyed that kind of work.
By February 1920, when Hitler announced the party's platform to a crowd of two thousand at the Hofbräuhaus, he had a core group of loyalists who served as what was delicately called the "meeting hall protection detachment." They were also called the "Stewards Troop." Later, perhaps to avoid government scrutiny, the group was renamed the "Gymnastic and Sports Division."
Nobody was fooled.
By September 1921, the name Sturmabteilung had come into informal use. The organization was led first by Emil Maurice, then by Hans Ulrich Klintzsch, a former naval officer who had participated in a failed right-wing coup attempt called the Kapp Putsch. The Nazis were becoming more professional, more organized, more dangerous.
The Name Itself
The term "Sturmabteilung" had a history that predated the Nazi Party. During World War One, the German military had developed specialized assault troops—stormtroopers—trained in infiltration tactics. Rather than the suicidal mass charges that had characterized early trench warfare, these small squads would probe for weak points in enemy lines, bypass strongpoints, and create confusion in the rear.
The first official German stormtrooper unit was authorized in March 1915 on the Western Front. By October 1916, the army was ordering all its western forces to form stormtrooper battalions. They were used with devastating effect in the German spring offensive of 1918, pushing Allied lines back tens of kilometers before the advance finally stalled.
The Nazis appropriated this name deliberately. They wanted the association with military prowess, with aggressive action, with men who charged forward while others cowered in trenches. The Sturmabteilung saw itself as continuing a glorious German military tradition, not simply as a gang of street brawlers.
Street Warfare
Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, the Sturmabteilung and the paramilitary wings of the Communist Party fought what amounted to a low-grade civil war in German streets. The fights were called "Zusammenstöße"—collisions. Men were beaten. Men were killed. The violence served multiple purposes: it eliminated opponents, it demonstrated Nazi strength, and it created a sense of crisis that benefited extremists on both ends of the political spectrum.
The Sturmabteilung recruited heavily among the unemployed. Germany's economy had been shattered by war reparations, hyperinflation, and then the Great Depression. Young men with no jobs and no prospects found in the Sturmabteilung a sense of purpose, a community, and a target for their rage.
The organization charged no membership fees, which meant it was financially dependent on the Nazi Party leadership. But in 1929, the Sturmabteilung found a creative solution: it started its own cigarette company. The Sturm Cigarette Company paid royalties to the Sturmabteilung, giving it an independent revenue stream. Members who were caught smoking competing brands were punished. Shops that stocked other cigarettes faced intimidation. The cigarettes were marketed with collectible cards featuring German military uniforms—a clever appeal to nationalist sentiment and to the desire for a strong army.
Röhm Takes Command
Ernst Röhm was a career military officer with a gift for organization and a talent for building paramilitary forces. He had helped Hitler in the early days, had served as an intermediary between the Nazi Party and the military establishment, and had run the Sturmabteilung before resigning in 1925 over disagreements about the organization's direction.
In 1930, Hitler personally asked Röhm to return. The Nazi Party was growing rapidly, and the Sturmabteilung needed professional leadership. Röhm accepted and began reshaping the organization.
Under Röhm, the Sturmabteilung grew from hundreds of thousands to millions. By January 1932, it numbered approximately 400,000 men. By January 1933, when Hitler became Chancellor, it had reached two million—twenty times larger than the German Army, which was limited by the Treaty of Versailles to 100,000 soldiers. By the end of 1933, the Sturmabteilung numbered more than three million.
Three million men in brown shirts, answering to Ernst Röhm.
The Problem with Success
Many of these stormtroopers had joined the Nazis because they expected radical change. They believed in what was called Strasserism—named after Gregor and Otto Strasser, Nazi leaders who emphasized the "socialist" part of "National Socialist." They wanted the vast landed estates of the aristocracy broken up. They wanted economic revolution, not just political power.
Röhm shared some of these views. More importantly, he had ambitions for the Sturmabteilung itself. He wanted the German Army absorbed into the Sturmabteilung, with himself at the head of a new "people's army" of millions. "I regard the Reichswehr now only as a training school for the German people," he wrote in a letter to the army leadership. "The conduct of war, and therefore of mobilization as well, in the future is the task of the SA."
This was an existential threat to multiple powerful groups.
The army officer corps was appalled. They had spent years building the Reichswehr into a professional force, a nucleus around which German military power could eventually be rebuilt. The idea of merging with millions of untrained street fighters—thugs, in their view—was unthinkable.
German industrialists, who had financed Hitler's rise to power, were alarmed by Röhm's socialist rhetoric. They hadn't backed the Nazis to see their factories nationalized.
And Hitler himself was worried. The Sturmabteilung was a tool for seizing power, not for governing. Now that the Nazis controlled the state, they needed the cooperation of the army, of industry, of the traditional elites. Röhm and his millions of increasingly restless stormtroopers were becoming a liability.
The SS Alternative
There was another factor: the Schutzstaffel, known as the SS.
The SS had originally been created as Hitler's personal bodyguard unit, a small elite force separate from the mass membership of the Sturmabteilung. In 1929, Hitler appointed Heinrich Himmler to lead it. Under Himmler, the SS grew and took on new functions. It was smaller than the Sturmabteilung, more selective, more disciplined.
The two organizations had different characters. The SS recruited primarily from the middle class; the Sturmabteilung drew from the unemployed and working class. The SS saw itself as an elite, bound by absolute loyalty to Hitler personally; the Sturmabteilung was a mass movement with its own internal culture and its own ideas about what the Nazi revolution should accomplish.
Rudolf Diels, the first chief of the Gestapo—the secret police—estimated that in Berlin in 1933, seventy percent of new Sturmabteilung recruits were former Communists. They had switched sides for practical reasons, but they hadn't necessarily abandoned their radical economic views. They had simply found a different vehicle for their revolutionary energy.
Himmler and Hermann Göring, another powerful Nazi leader, began feeding Hitler warnings about Röhm. They compiled dossiers. They manufactured evidence suggesting that Röhm was planning a coup, that French agents had paid him twelve million marks to overthrow Hitler.
Hitler initially refused to believe the accusations. Röhm was one of his oldest associates. But the pressure was relentless. President Hindenburg warned Hitler that if he didn't curb the Sturmabteilung, the government would be dissolved and martial law declared.
The Night of the Long Knives
On the night of June 30, 1934, Hitler struck.
The operation was called "die Nacht der langen Messer"—the Night of the Long Knives. SS units and Gestapo agents fanned out across Germany, arresting Sturmabteilung leaders. Röhm was taken at a resort hotel where he had been meeting with his senior commanders. He was offered a pistol and the chance to kill himself. When he refused, an SS officer shot him.
The purge lasted three days. The exact death toll is uncertain—estimates range from dozens to hundreds. Many of the victims had nothing to do with the Sturmabteilung; Hitler and his allies used the chaos to eliminate other enemies, including former Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher and Gregor Strasser himself.
The Sturmabteilung survived, technically. It continued to exist until 1945. But it never recovered its power or influence. The SS had won. Himmler's organization would grow into the apparatus of terror that operated the concentration camps, ran the security services, and eventually fielded its own military divisions.
The Sturmabteilung was reduced to organizing community events and collecting donations. The men who had beaten their way through the streets of Weimar Germany found themselves doing what they contemptuously called "Kleinarbeit"—legwork, the kind of tedious organizing work that women had typically performed before the Nazis took power.
The Paradox of Revolutionary Movements
The story of the Sturmabteilung illustrates a recurring pattern in revolutionary movements. The skills and temperaments needed to seize power are different from those needed to hold it. The street fighters who clear the path often become liabilities once their leaders reach the summit.
Hitler understood this instinctively. He had always viewed the Sturmabteilung as a tool, not as a partner. When the tool threatened to become the master, he destroyed it—or rather, he had the SS destroy it for him, which served the additional purpose of demonstrating which organization now held his favor.
Röhm never quite grasped this dynamic. He believed his loyalty and his years of service entitled him to a share of real power. He believed the Nazi revolution was still unfinished, that the radical transformation his men expected was still to come. He was wrong on both counts.
The men in brown shirts had served their purpose. They had intimidated opponents, disrupted enemy meetings, created the atmosphere of chaos and violence that helped bring Hitler to power. Now they were an embarrassment—too radical, too uncontrollable, too much a reminder of the street-fighting origins that the newly respectable Nazi regime wanted to forget.
What Remains
After Germany's defeat in 1945, the Allied occupation authorities disbanded the Sturmabteilung and outlawed it. The brown shirts disappeared from the streets.
But the pattern the Sturmabteilung established—a paramilitary force of true believers, used for political violence and intimidation, eventually discarded when it threatens to become too powerful—has repeated itself in authoritarian movements around the world. The specific tactics may vary, but the underlying dynamic remains: revolutionary violence serves to capture the state, and then the state must contain its own revolutionaries.
The Sturmabteilung's rise and fall offers a case study in the mechanics of political violence—how it is organized, how it is funded, how it is directed, and ultimately how it is controlled. The men in brown shirts thought they were building a new Germany. In the end, they were building the scaffolding for a regime that would discard them the moment they became inconvenient.
Ernst Röhm died believing he had been betrayed by a man he had helped to power. In a sense, he was right. But betrayal was built into the structure of the relationship from the beginning. The Sturmabteilung was always a weapon, never a partner. And weapons, once the battle is won, go back in the armory—or they are broken.