Abstract
The National Socialist SA or Sturmabteilung is not an unknown organization. Its history and role as a front-line organization is referenced in virtually every history of the Third Reich. Founded in 1921, the ‘Brownshirts’ played a key role in the early years of the National Socialist movement and their campaigns of intimidation and savagery were notorious across Germany and, according to most accounts, they were instrumental in getting Hitler to the point where he became a plausible candidate for the chancellorship in 1933. So it might seem that any claim to have published a ‘new history’ is no more than publisher’s hype.
Yet Daniel Siemens has good reason to make the claim. His account of the SA is more comprehensive than any before and presented in such a way that makes it compelling reading: profound in argument, impeccable in research and elegantly written. Yet it is also more than that. Most previous accounts of the SA run out of steam in 1934 when Ernst Roehm, the head of the organization, and many of the other leaders were assassinated on Hitler’s orders. This apparently marked the effective end of a movement within the movement: a dynamic form of revolutionary Nazism that had developed distinctive ideas for a ‘brown revolution’ and whose leaders seemed poised to challenge Hitler himself.
As Siemens points out, however, the SA continued to exist until 1945. Indeed in 1939 it had some 1.3 million members, roughly three times the number it had in 1932. The organization had managed to permeate German society more effectively than any other National Socialist agency. In doing so it helped reinforce key aspects of the central National Socialist notion of Volksgemeinschaft: notably ‘violent mobilisation and disciplinary integration’ (p. xxxi).
Siemens organizes his book in four parts. In Part I he traces the history of the SA before 1933. Important here is the way that he situates the organization in transnational context after the end of the First World War, emphasizing its role in the street politics of the 1920s and as an agency which encouraged a cult of youth and of violence. New in Siemens’ account is his emphasis on the SA’s activities in borderlands, underlined in the introduction which gives a detailed account of the Potempa murder in 1932, the blatant assassination of a communist activist in Upper Silesia, whose five SA perpetrators were publicly defended by Hitler.
In Part II it becomes clear, however, that the energy and ambition of the SA posed a challenge to the Nazi leadership as well. It was this which prompted the trumped-up charges against Roehm and the ‘putsch’ against him, justified by his alleged homosexuality.
The essence of what is new about Siemens’ book is contained in the four chapters which comprise Part III, covering the history of the SA between 1934 and 1945. The first analyses the re-establishment and re-configuration of the SA after 1934. The second examines the plans developed by the SA for the ‘Germanization’ and settlement of the European East, illuminating a hitherto neglected role of the SA in promoting Lebensraum plans before 1939. The third chapter shows how the SA interacted with the Wehrmacht as SA members were recruited into the army and as the SA assumed the role of preliminary military training. The idea of creating a separate SA army was dropped at an early stage but Siemens suggests that instead the organization played a crucial role in ensuring that the rank and file of the Wehrmacht toed the regime’s ideological line and helped maintain the solidarity of the German forces to the end of the war. The fourth chapter shows how leading SA members played a key role as ‘diplomats’ in South-Eastern Europe, particularly in relation to coordinating the Holocaust in those areas.
The material presented in the final chapter, which comprises Part IV, is also new. The ‘legacy’ of the SA is manifest in the ways in which its former members subsequently managed to persuade the occupation authorities and the German courts that they were honest Germans who had merely followed orders and who certainly had nothing to do with the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazi regime. The success of such arguments, Siemens suggests, may well explain why historians have neglected to explore the full history of the SA for so long. Siemens has certainly remedied that deficit. His highly readable book will surely be regarded as the standard history of the SA for many years.