Hey guys, do you think it was necessary to the Nazis to have a security force such as the Sturmabteilung? Why couldn’t they have just used the S.S. (Schutzstaffel) as a protection force. I mean the S.A. was a branch of the S.S. but was it really necessary to go that far?
Learn about history first.
The SA was founded in the early 1920s as the militant wing of the flegling Nazi party. It consisted mostly of WW1 veterans, under the ledership of the charismatic, but openly homosexual Ernst Röhm, a former army captain.
Their main purpose was to act as a civil war militia, to protect Nazi meetings against disruptions e.g. by similar militias run by the communists and socialists (about every political party in Germany back then had a militia, often secretly armed) and to disrupt meetings and rallies of political opponents. During the economic crisis of the early to mid 1920s, many unemployed, disgrunteled workers joined the SA, if not for the fact that they got a meal and for the comradeship.
The SA leadership, which represented the revolutionary wing of the NSDAP, was often at odds with Hitler. Hitler wanted to have a security force only answerable to himself and totaly obedient and found in Himmler a person, who obeyed him blindly and would set such an organisation up as Hitler’s bodyguard. This new unit, recruited from Hitler loyalists within the SA was called the Schutzstaffel and sworn in to obey only Hitler as a person.
Himmler, being a slightly crazy former school teacher turned chicken farmer, dreamt about creating the perfect “nordic” human and slowly, with the help of Heydrich and others made the SS a powerfull force within the Nazi party, to the displeasure of the SA leaders, who saw themselves as the new army of a post Nazi revolutionary Germany, in which the socialist ideas of the Nazi ideology were incorporated.
In the late 1920s, Hitler got more and more supported by German industrialists, who told Hitler in no uncertain terms that if he wanted to keep receiving funds from them for his campaign, the NSDAP should stop talking about nationalising businesses. Hitler also realised that to fullfill his dreams about conquering eastern Europe, he would need the help of the mostly very conservative aristocrat Reichswehr generals, who didn’t like the revolutionary rabble of the SA at all. The problem with the SA was that while they had a lot of former junior officers and experienced NCOs, their ranks didn’t include any high ranking officers with staff experience.
Himmler on the other hand wanted to get rid of the only serious competition he had within the NSDAP, the revolutionary wing under Röhm.
So , just after Hindenburg died in June 1934, Hitler ordered the leaders of the SA and other dissidents within the NSDAP to be arrested and executed under the pretext that they were planning to stage a coup against him, which was a complete lie. Up to the fire command to the firing squad, Röhm believed that everything was just a mistake.
From then on the SA still continued to exist, but lost all influence in Germany.
Once this was done, the Reichswehr was very willing to let themselves be sworn to obey Hitler. Himmler was at first miffed for having been bypassed, since he hoped that the SS, especially the Verfügungstruppen from which later the Waffen-SS derived, would become the new German army, but Hitler believed in divide and rule and also permitted Himmler’s archrival Göring to start his own private army, the Fallschirmjäger and Luftwaffe Felddivisionen.
Only after the attempted coup against Hitler in June 1944, did Hitler give Himmler full powers.
Jan