The Nazi Stormtroopers Or Sturmabteilung

 Nadene Goldfoot                                       

    

 Stormtroopers (SA): was the original paramilitary organisation under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party of Germany. It played a significant role in Hitler's rise to power in the 1920s and early 1930s.

Hitler at an SA parade in Nuremberg in 1935

Image Credit: Keystone View Company Berlin SW 68 Zimmerstrasse 28 (Image file marked as Public domain in Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe, the National Digital Archives of Poland), CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

 

Its primary purposes were providing protection for Nazi rallies and assemblies, disrupting the meetings of opposing parties, fighting against the paramilitary units of the opposing parties, especially the Roter Frontkämpferbund of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), and intimidating Romani, trade unionists, and especially Jews.

                                           

        The architects of the purge: Hitler, Göring, Goebbels, and Hess. Only Himmler and Heydrich are absent.

Not long after Hitler's release from prison, he ordered the creation of another bodyguard unit in 1925 that ultimately became the Schutzstaffel (SS). During the Night of the Long Knives (die Nacht der langen Messer) purge in 1934, the SA's then-leader Ernst Röhm was arrested and executed.The 1934 purge, known as the Night of the Long Knives or Operation Hummingbird, was a violent series of political executions from June 30 to July 2, 1934. Hitler used the SS (Schutzstaffel) to murder Ernst Röhm and other SA (Brownshirt) leaders, eliminating internal rivals to solidify Nazi power and appease the German army. 

Many of these stormtroopers believed in the strasserist promise of nazism. They expected the Nazi regime to take more radical economic action, such as breaking up the vast landed estates of the aristocracy, once they obtained national power. By the time Hitler assumed power in January 1933, SA membership had increased to approximately 2,000,000—twenty times as large as the number of troops and officers in the Reichswehr (German Army)

The Stormtroopers (Sturmabteilung or SA), known as Brownshirts, were used by the Nazis as a primary violent force to terrorize, intimidate, and persecute Jews in Germany, particularly during the 1920s and early 1930s. They engaged in street beatings, destroyed Jewish-owned businesses, conducted raids, and established early concentration camps. 

Originally an adjunct to the SA, the Schutzstaffel (SS) was placed under the control of Heinrich Himmler, in part to restrict the power of the SA and their leaders. The younger SS had evolved to be more than a bodyguard unit for Hitler and demonstrated that it was better suited to carry out Hitler's policies, including those of a criminal nature.

On January 30, 1939, Adolf Hitler delivered a speech to the German Reichstag that contained a public threat against Europe's Jewish population. The speech, given during increasing international tensions, warned Western powers against meddling with German expansion and blamed Jewish people for a potential war. 

A significant part of the speech included a statement often referred to as the "Prophecy". This portion of the speech, along with key themes regarding a false "international Jewish" conspiracy and portraying Germany as a victim, marked a shift from persecution to a threat of physical destruction, though it did not detail operational plans for the Holocaust at that time. The speech was delivered shortly after Kristallnacht in November 1938. While initially seen by many international observers as rhetoric rather than a genocide plan, the speech was later used by the Nazi regime to justify the genocide and cited by Hitler to confirm his intentions. 

                 Below; Hitler and Grand Mufti 1941 meet in Germany                                           Mufti wants Jews eliminated