The founding of the SA

On 5 October 1921 the “Gymnastics and Sports Section” (Turn- und Sportabteilung) of the Munich-based National Socialist German Workers’ Party was given a new name: Sturmabteilung, “Storm Detachment”, or SA for short. The change of name altered little in the organisation itself, which then numbered about three hundred men, but it captured its character well. Behind the sporting label stood a party strong-arm squad, made up largely of ex-soldiers and Freikorps members, whose task was to protect Adolf Hitler’s meetings from opponents and to break up the meetings of others. The new name harked back to the German army’s storm troops of the Great War. Within a decade this handful of men grew into an army of “brownshirts” tens of thousands strong, and later millions strong, without which the Nazis would have won neither the streets nor power.

The date and the name

Some chronologies give 5 October 1921 as the day the SA was “founded”. The organisation’s history, however, is longer and more tangled, and sources place the emphasis differently. The party had had its own “stewards’ service” since early 1920, when it began holding large meetings in Munich’s beer halls. According to the Historical Lexicon of Bavaria, on 12 November 1920 the watchmaker Emil Maurice, one of Hitler’s closest associates, set up a “Gymnastics and Sports Section” within the party. Its real expansion began in August 1921, after Hitler had taken control of the party and men from Captain Hermann Ehrhardt’s circle had taken command of the section. The name “Sturmabteilung” came into use in September, and on 5 October 1921, according to the same lexicon, the section, by then divided into groups and platoons, was formally renamed the SA. Part of the literature links the name only to the brawl in the Hofbräuhaus on 4 November 1921, after which Hitler is said to have honoured his men with it. Some accounts say that the SA was “formally registered” on 4 November. The October date is, however, the best documented.

Paramilitary squads in the Weimar Republic

Private armed units were nothing unusual in post-war Germany. After the revolution of 1918 and the disintegration of the imperial army, the Social Democratic government itself turned to the volunteer Freikorps (PL), which crushed the Spartacist uprising in Berlin and the soviet republic in Munich. The Treaty of Versailles limited the Reichswehr to a hundred thousand men, leaving tens of thousands of officers and soldiers without employment – used to weapons and violence, and hostile to a republic they blamed for defeat and the “shame of Versailles”. In March 1920 some of the Freikorps, led by the Ehrhardt Naval Brigade, backed the Kapp Putsch in Berlin; after its failure and the dissolution of their units, their members dispersed into secret organisations, veterans’ associations and nationalist parties. The parties of the left also had their own guards and stewards’ units, for they too believed that politics was decided on the street.

Bavaria was particularly hospitable to right-wing radicals. After the fall of the soviet republic in May 1919, conservative forces took power there, and in March 1920, during the Kapp Putsch, the commanders of the army and of the civic guards forced the Social Democratic government to resign. Until September 1921 Bavaria was governed by Minister-President Gustav von Kahr, who wanted to turn it into a “cell of order” (Ordnungszelle) amid a sea of republican chaos. Munich took in conspirators wanted in Prussia, and the armed civic guards (Einwohnerwehren) in Bavaria numbered several hundred thousand men until they were dissolved under Allied pressure in June 1921. Some of their members then looked for a new home. One such home was the NSDAP’s Gymnastics and Sports Section.

From hall guards to strong-arm squad

When in February 1920 the party, which had just adopted the name NSDAP, announced its 25-point programme at a meeting in the hall of the Hofbräuhaus, protesters were removed from the hall by Hitler’s former army comrades armed with rubber truncheons. From this group grew a permanent meeting guard centred on Emil Maurice. The key figure in its expansion, however, was the Reichswehr captain Ernst Röhm, a staff officer of the Bavarian division and a party member since 1919. He managed secret arms caches hidden from the Allied control commission and had contacts in every nationalist association. It was he who brought soldiers and officers into the party and made sure its strong-arm squad had men, weapons and training. In the years that followed the SA trained under the eye of Bavarian Reichswehr units, and the Bavarian authorities included it in their mobilisation plans as one of the “defence leagues”.

The turning point came in July 1921. Hitler threatened to leave the party and forced its leadership to grant him the powers of a chairman with dictatorial authority. On 29 July a members’ meeting elected him chairman. A few days later the party announced in its newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, the creation of the Gymnastics and Sports Section as its own formation – according to some authors on 3 August. The sporting name was meant to protect it from the bans that threatened paramilitary organisations. In August, probably through Röhm, Hermann Ehrhardt assumed military direction of the section, entrusting its training and command to the 22-year-old naval Lieutenant Hans Ulrich Klintzsch, a veteran of his brigade and of the Kapp Putsch. Ehrhardt was then running the secret Organisation Consul, which assassinated the republic’s politicians. On 26 August 1921 its members shot dead Matthias Erzberger, who had signed the armistice in 1918, in the Black Forest. At the beginning of September Klintzsch was arrested on suspicion of involvement in the murder, and until his release, according to some sources, the section was again led by Maurice. Ehrhardt’s men brought military organisation to the NSDAP, and a style as well: the death’s head on their caps, the cult of violence and contempt for the “system”.

Until then there had been nothing in the party’s meetings or its strong-arm squad that other nationalist groups did not have. From the start, though, Hitler wanted something more than stewards. Protecting meetings was also meant to intimidate opponents and display the movement’s strength. On 14 September 1921 Hitler and his men burst into a meeting of the separatist Bavarian League in the Löwenbräukeller and beat up its leader, the engineer Otto Ballerstedt. In January 1922 a court sentenced Hitler to a hundred days in prison for breach of the peace, of which he served just over a month, in the summer of 1922. Ballerstedt was murdered by SS men during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934.

The battle in the Hofbräuhaus

A few weeks after the change of name, the SA underwent a baptism of fire that Nazi legend turned into a founding myth. On 4 November 1921 the NSDAP held a rally in the festival hall of the Hofbräuhaus. Many Social Democrats and communists came, determined to break up Hitler’s speech. About an hour into it a brawl broke out in which beer mugs and chairs flew. According to Hitler’s account in Mein Kampf, a few dozen SA men threw several hundred opponents out of the hall, after which he finished his speech. His description is undoubtedly exaggerated, but the brawl did end in victory for the Nazis. From then on the party presented this “hall battle” (Saalschlacht) as the day on which the SA earned the right to its name, and commemorated it every year.

In the months that followed the SA grew and became more military. In 1922 it was divided into active units and the remaining members, and later into companies (Hundertschaften). On 16 August 1922, at a large demonstration of the nationalist leagues on Munich’s Königsplatz, it marched for the first time in closed ranks under swastika flags. On 14–15 October 1922 several hundred of its members travelled by special train to a “German Day” in Coburg, a working-class town in northern Bavaria, where, defying a ban by the authorities, they marched with a band and flags and fought street battles with workers. This outing was the first test of the method that became the SA’s trademark: bring as many men as possible to one place, provoke opponents with marches and slogans, and then show who ruled the streets. Two weeks later Benito Mussolini carried out the March on Rome, which became a model for Hitler and his men.

The road to the putsch

At the beginning of 1923 command of the SA was taken over by the former fighter pilot and holder of the Pour le Mérite Hermann Göring. He freed it from Ehrhardt’s influence and created its own high command. The year 1923 – the year of the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr and of hyperinflation – was the height of the paramilitary leagues’ fever. In February, on Röhm’s initiative, the SA joined other Bavarian leagues in a common Working Group of the Patriotic Fighting Leagues, and on 1 May 1923 several thousand of their armed members, including some 1,300 SA men, gathered outside Munich to obstruct the May Day marches of the Social Democrats and the trade unions. They backed down before the police and the army without a fight, but this did not cool tempers. In the spring of 1923 Hitler also formed a small bodyguard of his most devoted followers, from which the Stoßtrupp Adolf Hitler (Adolf Hitler Shock Troop) emerged in May. He did not fully trust the SA, whose commanders saw him as the movement’s “drummer” rather than its leader.

On 8–9 November 1923, according to the Historical Lexicon of Bavaria, some 1,500 SA men took part in the failed attempt to seize power in Munich known as the Beer Hall Putsch. Sixteen Nazis and four policemen were killed, Göring was wounded and fled abroad, and after the putsch the party and its formations were banned. While Hitler sat in prison at Landsberg, Röhm built a new organisation out of scattered SA members and other leagues, the Frontbann, some thirty thousand strong.

The brownshirts

After the party was re-founded in February 1925, Hitler and Röhm quarrelled over what the SA should be. Röhm wanted a military formation independent of the politicians; Hitler wanted a party stewards’ and propaganda service subordinate to the leader. Röhm gave way and disappeared from politics for several years, and in 1928 he went to Bolivia as an instructor in the Bolivian army. The SA, which had worn brown shirts since 1924, received a new commander in 1926, the former Freikorps leader Franz Pfeffer von Salomon, and a uniform hierarchical structure from the squad up to the district. In the years of the republic’s relative stability it was a small organisation; by estimates it had ten to fifteen thousand members in 1926.

The Great Depression turned it into a mass army of the unemployed. In November 1930 the SA had about 60,000 members, and after the return of Röhm, who from January 1931 ran it on Hitler’s behalf as chief of staff, it grew like an avalanche: by August 1932 it numbered more than 470,000 men. It fought street battles with the communist Red Front Fighters’ League and the Social Democratic Reichsbanner, attacked its opponents’ premises and Jews, and the party venerated members killed in these clashes, such as the Berlin stormtrooper Horst Wessel, as martyrs. The government banned the SA in April 1932, but in June, after the fall of Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, the ban was lifted.

The long shadow of the brownshirts

After 30 January 1933 the SA became an instrument of state terror. In Prussia Göring, as acting interior minister, made its members auxiliary police. Stormtroopers set up the first “wild” concentration camps and torture cellars, where communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists and Jews were beaten and murdered. On 1 April 1933 the SA enforced the boycott of Jewish shops. After absorbing other leagues, including the veterans of the Stahlhelm, it numbered several million members, and Röhm called for a “second revolution” and for the SA to replace the Reichswehr. The generals and the conservatives saw it as a threat, and Hitler, who needed the army, chose the army. Between 30 June and 2 July 1934, during the Night of the Long Knives, SS units murdered Röhm and other SA leaders, and with them some of Hitler’s old opponents. At least ninety people were killed, and probably 150 to 200.

The SA survived until 1945, but lost its importance to the SS. Its members took to the streets en masse once more during Kristallnacht in November 1938, when they burned synagogues, wrecked Jewish shops and homes and murdered people. After that the SA dealt mainly with pre-military training and the training of reservists, and many of its members went into the Wehrmacht. The Nuremberg tribunal, unlike in the case of the SS, did not declare the SA a criminal organisation, finding that after 1934 it no longer played a significant role, but many of its members were convicted of individual crimes.

What matters most, however, is what the SA did before 1933. The strong-arm squad born of guarding meetings in Munich beer halls taught the Nazis that violence, properly staged, was an effective form of propaganda. It offered Germans worn down by the Depression an image of strength and order while spreading the fear that paralysed opponents. It raised a generation of young men for whom beating and killing enemies was an ordinary part of politics. Without it there would have been neither the marches that filled the streets of German cities during the Depression nor the terror that destroyed the opposition within a few months in 1933. Many former SA men later carried their experience of street violence into the SS, the police and the Wehrmacht, which from 1939 waged war and ran the occupation of Europe.