Third Reich

SA

Sturmabteilung (Storm Detachment)

Sturmabteilung, the Nazi Party’s paramilitary wing, founded in 1921 and known from its uniforms as the Brownshirts. It terrorised the Nazis’ opponents; after the Night of the Long Knives in 1934 the SS eclipsed it.

The SA was formed in 1921 to keep order at Nazi Party meetings and soon became its strong-arm squad: it broke up other parties’ rallies, fought communists and Social Democrats in the streets, and intimidated Jews and trade unionists. In the years of the Depression it drew in hundreds of thousands of unemployed men, and by 1934 it had several million members, many times the size of the Reichswehr.

Its chief of staff, Ernst Röhm, wanted the SA to absorb the army. Hitler, backed by the SS and the generals, had Röhm and the SA leadership murdered in the Night of the Long Knives on 30 June 1934. From then on the organisation was secondary, though its members took part in the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938. The Allies dissolved it in 1945, and the Nuremberg tribunal did not declare it a criminal organisation.