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October 9th, 2007
Hitler and the Sturmabteilung (SA)
Hitler posing with SA members in the late 1920s. Hermann Göring (who would turn against the SA) is pictured beneath Hitler, wearing medals.
President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor on January 30, 1933. Over the next months, Hitler eliminated all rival political parties in Germany so that by the summer of 1933, the country had become a one-party state under his direction and control. However, despite his swift consolidation of political authority, Hitler did not exercise absolute power. As chancellor, Hitler did not command the army, which remained under the formal leadership of Hindenburg as its commander-in-chief. While many officers were impressed by Hitler’s promises of an expanded army, a return to conscription, and a more aggressive foreign policy, the army continued to guard its traditions of independence during the early years of the Nazi regime.
To a lesser extent, the Sturmabteilung (SA), a Nazi paramilitary organization, remained somewhat autonomous within the party itself. During the 1920s and 1930s, the SA functioned as a private militia that Hitler used to intimidate rivals and disrupt the meetings of competing political parties, especially those of the Social Democrats and the Communists. Also known as the "brownshirts" or "stormtroopers", the SA became notorious for their street battles with the Communists.[5] The violent confrontations between the two groups contributed to the destabilization of Germany’s inter-war experiment with democracy, the Weimar Republic.[6] In June 1932, one of the worst months of political violence, there were over 400 street battles, resulting in 82 deaths.[7] This very destabilization had been crucial in Hitler’s rise to power, however, not least because it convinced many Germans that once Hitler became chancellor, the endemic street violence would end.
Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, followed by the suppression of all political parties except the Nazis, curtailed but did not end the violence of the stormtroopers. Deprived of Communist party meetings to disrupt, but inured to — and seduced by — violence, the stormtroopers would sometimes run riot in German streets after a night of drinking. Very often they would beat up passers-by, and then attack the police who were called to stop them.[8] Complaints of "overbearing and loutish" behavior by stormtroopers were common by the summer of 1933. Even the Foreign Office complained of instances of brownshirts manhandling foreign diplomats.[9] Such behavior disturbed the German middle classes and other conservative elements in society, such as the army.
Hitler’s next move would be to strengthen his position with the army by moving against its nemesis, the SA.[10] On July 6, 1933, at a gathering of high-ranking Nazi officials, Hitler declared the success of the National Socialist, or Nazi, revolution. Now that the Nazi party had seized the reins of power in Germany, he said, it was time to consolidate its hold. As Hitler told the gathered officials, "The stream of revolution has been undammed, but it must be channeled into the secure bed of evolution."[11]
Hitler’s speech signaled his intention to rein in the SA, whose ranks had grown rapidly in the early 1930s. This would not prove to be a simple task, however, as the SA constituted a large part of the most devoted followers of Nazism. The SA traced its dramatic rise in numbers in part to the onset of the Great Depression, when many Germans lost faith in traditional institutions. While Nazism was not exclusively — or even primarily — a working class phenomenon, the SA fulfilled the yearning of many workers for both class solidarity and nationalist fervor.[12] Many stormtroopers believed in the socialist promise of National Socialism and expected the Nazi regime to take more radical economic action, such as breaking up the vast landed estates of the aristocracy. That the regime did not take such steps disillusioned those who expected an economic as well as a political revolution.[13]
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