SA
Nazi organization
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Alternative Titles: Braunhemden, Brownshirts, Storm Troopers, Sturmabteilung, Sturmtruppen
SA, abbreviation of Sturmabteilung (German: “Assault Divisionâ€), byname Storm Troopers or Brownshirts, German Sturmtruppen or Braunhemden, in the German Nazi Party, a paramilitary organization whose methods of violent intimidation played a key role in Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.
The SA was founded in Munich by Hitler in 1921 out of various roughneck elements that had attached themselves to the fledgling Nazi movement. It drew its early membership largely from the Freikorps (Free Corps), armed freebooter groups, made up largely of ex-soldiers, that battled leftists in the streets in the early days of the Weimar Republic. Outfitted in brown uniforms after the fashion of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Blackshirts in Italy, the SA men protected party meetings, marched in Nazi rallies, and physically assaulted political opponents. Temporarily in disarray after the failure of Hitler’s Munich Putsch in 1923, the SA was reorganized in 1925 and soon resumed its violent ways, intimidating voters in national and local elections. From January 1931 it was headed by Ernst Röhm, who harboured radical anticapitalist notions and dreamed of building the SA into Germany’s main military force. Under Röhm SA membership, swelled from the ranks of the Great Depression’s unemployed, grew to 400,000 by 1932 and to perhaps 2,000,000—20 times the size of the regular army—by the time that Hitler came to power in 1933.
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