Night of The Long Knives - Hitler and The Sturmabteilung (SA)

Hitler and The Sturmabteilung (SA)

President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor on January 30 1933. Over the next few months, during the so-called Gleichschaltung, Hitler dispensed with the need for the Reichstag as a legislative body and eliminated all rival political parties in Germany, so that by the middle of 1933 the country had become a one-party state under his direction and control. Hitler did not exercise absolute power, however, despite his swift consolidation of political authority. As chancellor, Hitler did not command the army, which remained under the formal leadership of Hindenburg, a highly respected veteran field marshal. While many officers were impressed by Hitler's promises of an expanded army, a return to conscription, and a more aggressive foreign policy, the army continued to guard its traditions of independence during the early years of the Nazi regime.

To a lesser extent, the Sturmabteilung (SA), a Nazi paramilitary organisation, remained somewhat autonomous within the party itself. The SA evolved out of the remnants of the Freikorps movement of the post-World War I years. The Freikorps were nationalistic organisations primarily composed of disaffected, disenchanted, and angry German combat veterans founded by the government in January 1919 to deal with the threat of a Communist revolution when it appeared that there was a lack of loyal troops. A very large number of the Freikorps believed that the November Revolution had betrayed them when Germany was alleged to be on the verge of victory in 1918. Hence, the Freikorps were in opposition to the new Weimar Republic, which was born as a result of the November Revolution, and whose founders were contemptuously called "November criminals". Captain Ernst Röhm of the Reichswehr served as the liaison with the Bavarian Freikorps. Röhm was given the nickname "The Machine Gun King of Bavaria" in the early 1920s, since he was responsible for storing and issuing illegal machine guns to the Bavarian Freikorps units. Röhm left the Reichswehr in 1923 and later became commander of the SA. During the 1920s and 1930s, the SA functioned as a private militia used by Hitler to intimidate rivals and disrupt the meetings of competing political parties, especially those of the Social Democrats and the Communists. Also known as the "brownshirts" or "stormtroopers", the SA became notorious for their street battles with the Communists. The violent confrontations between the two contributed to the destabilisation of Germany's inter-war experiment with democracy, the Weimar Republic. In June 1932, one of the worst months of political violence, there were more than 400 street battles, resulting in 82 deaths. This destabilisation had been crucial in Hitler's rise to power, however, not least because it convinced many Germans that once Hitler became chancellor, the endemic street violence would end.

Hitler's appointment as chancellor, followed by the suppression of all political parties except the Nazis, did not end the violence of the stormtroopers. Deprived of Communist party meetings to disrupt, the stormtroopers would sometimes run riot in the streets after a night of drinking. They would attack passers-by, and then attack the police who were called to stop them. Complaints of "overbearing and loutish" behaviour by stormtroopers became common by the middle of 1933. The Foreign Office even complained of instances where brownshirts manhandled foreign diplomats. The stormtroopers' behaviour disturbed the German middle classes and other conservative elements in society, such as the army.

Hitler's move would be to strengthen his position with the army by moving against its nemesis, the SA. On July 6 1933, at a gathering of high-ranking Nazi officials, Hitler declared the success of the National Socialist, or Nazi, brown revolution. Now that the NSDAP had seized the reins of power in Germany, he said, it was time to consolidate its control. Hitler told the gathered officials, "The stream of revolution has been undammed, but it must be channelled into the secure bed of evolution."

Hitler's speech signalled his intention to rein in the SA, whose ranks had grown rapidly in the early 1930s. This would not prove to be simple, however, as the SA made up a large part of Nazism's most devoted followers. The SA traced its dramatic rise in numbers in part to the onset of the Great Depression, when many German citizens lost both their jobs and their faith in traditional institutions. While Nazism was not exclusively – or even primarily – a working class phenomenon, the SA fulfilled the yearning of many unemployed workers for class solidarity and nationalist fervour. Many stormtroopers believed in the socialist promise of National Socialism and expected the Nazi regime to take more radical economic action, such as breaking up the vast landed estates of the aristocracy. When the Nazi regime did not take such steps, those who expected an economic as well as a political revolution were disillusioned.