The key to reading history of Nazi Germany, a wise professor once explained to me, is to attempt to understand the logic and mentality of those who embraced the Nazi movement without ever losing sight of what an ultimately absurd and fundamentally evil project theirs was. This is the approach readers must bring to Daniel Siemens’s Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler’s Brownshirts, a superbly detailed account of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the main paramilitary wing of the Nazi party from its inception in 1920 until the consolidation of Hitler’s power in 1934. Siemens, a professor of European history at Newcastle University, looks beyond the traditional trope of the SA, or “Brownshirts” as they were commonly known, as a group of rowdy young psychopaths looking to brawl. His book paints a far more frightening portrait of a million-member organization that flourished by promising young German men a world of hypermasculinity, camaraderie, and egalitarianism—with genocidal undertones.
While it was the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch that first propelled the SA to the national stage, Siemens notes that the group made a name for itself early on through its members’ actions as self-styled border guards in Upper Silesia, a region that saw turmoil in the Weimar years as ethnic Poles agitated for inclusion into the newly founded Second Polish Republic next door. Many early acts of SA violence were perpetrated in Upper Silesia under the guise of defending Germany’s sovereignty from Polish “infiltrators” and “traitors.”
Of course, the phenomenon of far-right militias taking up the mantle of “border defense” in the face of migrant influxes is hardly a thing of the past. Present-day groups such as the BNO Shipka in Bulgaria or any of the sundry militias in the Arizona desert similarly seek to supplant the democratic state as the protector of the “people” and the “homeland.” While there is no group of equivalent influence to the SA in America today (several European countries must contend with something much nearer), histories like Siemens’s should give pause to those who would think that the problem of far-right violence will disappear if we simply dismiss it as the actions of a few thugs.
After all, this was precisely how most Weimar conservatives treated the SA: as young hooligans excessive in their nationalist zeal. In the postwar era, many guilt-ridden Germans maintained a similar narrative of the Brownshirts that downplayed their role in the Nazi party’s rise to power. This narrative holds that, to the average German, Nazism’s appeal lay in its promises of economic rejuvenation and the communal spirit of Volksgemeinschaft; in other words, Volkswagens and Jungmaedelbund picnics as opposed to anti-Jewish boycotts and SA-orchestrated terrorism. Siemens is hardly the first historian to contest this narrative, but his new work disassembles these myths painstakingly, adding real value to the historiography of the period. He notes that not only were the Brownshirts more representative of German society than previous historians have recorded—they included a large number of students and young middle-class professionals—but that their dominance in the bloody street battles between fascists and leftists that epitomized Weimar political culture also accelerated the erosion of liberalism and delegitimization of German democracy, paving the way for Hitler’s rise. By the early 1930s, with the Weimar state manifestly incapable of maintaining its monopoly on the use of force, and with a full slate of Brownshirt “martyrs” in every major city, many Germans began to see the Nazis as the only bulwark against a communist takeover.
Siemens’s work is the first to pay sufficient attention to the role of the SA following the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, when Hitler purged SA leader Ernst Roehm and other top Brownshirts in an effort to consolidate his power and eliminate the anticapitalist Strasserite elements of the Nazi party. Previous historians had tended to treat the Night of the Long Knives as marking the end of the SA as a relevant force in Nazi politics. These historians contend that the Brownshirts played little subsequent role in the Third Reich other than a brief burst of action during Kristallnacht when they led the supposedly spontaneous pogroms across the country. While the SA was certainly overshadowed by Heinrich Himmler’s SS from 1934 on, Siemens shows that SA leaders were intimately involved in virtually all aspects of the Nazi project, including the Holocaust, until the final days of the war, when SA veterans led the ragtag Volkssturm in their defense of Berlin. Furthermore, for hundreds of thousands of Germans who would go on to serve in the war, the SA had been their introduction to both the Nazi worldview and, crucially, political violence. Many Wehrmacht soldiers would see their mission not simply as a patriotic duty but as a world-historical struggle against “Judeo-Bolshevism,” a biological contest for Lebensraum in which the rules and norms of civilized nations would not apply.
If this new history has any shortcoming it is that it is written primarily for an academic audience, so Siemens’s compelling thesis is often obscured by jargon that could dissuade a lay reader from picking up this important text. For example, Siemens describes how an SA rally served as “an aesthetic occupation of the public space,” when the term “intimidation” would better express his message to those readers not especially steeped in Derrida. In this sense, Stormtroopers does not quite match a work like Timothy Snyder’s magisterial Bloodlands in its ability to convey with nuance and lucidity the ideological underpinnings of mass killing.
Readers well-versed in the history of interwar Europe will appreciate Siemens’s valuable new research on the SA’s role in the Nazis’ rise to power as well as the group’s participation in the German war effort and Holocaust. For the general reader, Stormtroopers sheds light on the terrifying phenomena of political violence trouncing liberalism and of relatively ordinary young men getting swept up in the furor of a genocidal project. Hopefully, it will be read widely.
James H. Barnett is a Public Interest Fellow in Washington, D.C.
