The SA Vs the SS

The SA vs The SS vs The Gestapo

The SA

• The De-Stur mabteilung. abbreviated SA (German for "Storm detachment" or "Assault detachment" or "Assault section", usually translated as "stormtroop(er)s"), functioned as a paramilitary organization of the Nazi Party.

• 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.

• SA men were often called "brownshirts" for the colour of their uniforms; this distinguished them from the Schutzstaffel (SS), who wore black and brown uniforms (in comparison to Benito Mussolini's blackshirts). Brown-coloured shirts were chosen as the SA uniform because a large batch of them was cheaply available after World War I, having originally been ordered for German troops serving in Africa

• 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.

During the early days of the Nazi regime, the SA carried out unchecked street violence against Jews and Nazi opponents. But it was eyed with suspicion by the regular army and by the wealthy industrialists, two groups whose support Hitler was trying to secure. Against Hitler’s expressed wishes, Röhm continued to press for a “second Nazi revolution” of a socialist character, and he hoped to merge the regular army with the SA under his own leadership. On June 30, 1934, the Night of the Long Knives (die Nacht der langen Messer), Hitler, using SS forces, carried out a “Blood Purge” of the SA leadership. Röhm and dozens of SA leaders were summarily executed. Thereafter the SA, reduced in strength, continued to exist but ceased to play a major political role in Nazi affairs. From 1939 it was in charge of training all able-bodied men for Home Guard units.

Rohm:

From Munich. Fought in WWI

Met Hitler in 1919, participated in the Beer Hall Putsch and was arrested. Was kicked out of the Reichswehr as a result so he started the SA

Röhm and Hitler were so close that they addressed each other as du (the German familiar form of "you"). Besides Röhm, Hermann Göring and Joseph Goebbels were the only Nazis who used du with Hitler and only Röhm addressed Hitler as "Adolf," rather than "mein Führer."

In 1931, the Munich Post, a Socialist newspaper, obtained and published Röhm's letters to a friend in which Röhm discussed his sexual affairs with men. This resulted in a national scandal.

The SS

The Schutzstaffel, better known as the infamous SS, were established by Hitler, to act as protection force at Hitler’s mass meetings in public. Many of these meetings were violent and ugly, during the Nazis early quest for power.

As such it formed part of the Nazi militia, the brown shirted Sturmabteilung, also better known by the initials SA. Unlike the SA, however, whose origins derived from the nationalist Freikorps of the post – Great War period, the SS owed its loyalties to Hitler alone and was neither conceived as, nor permitted to become a mass movement.

Heinrich Himmler who was appointed Reichsfuhrer- SS in 1929 and from its very inception he saw the SS as an elite force, as an elite unit, the party's "Praetorian Guard," with all SS personnel selected on the principles of racial purity and unconditional loyalty to the Nazi Party

In the early days of the SS, officer candidates had to prove German ancestry to 1750. They also were required to prove that they had no Jewish ancestors. Later, when the requirements of the war made it impossible to confirm the ancestry of officer candidates, the proof of ancestry regulation was dropped.

Between 1925 and 1929, the SS was considered merely a battalion of the SA and numbered no more than 280 personnel. On January 6, 1929, Adolf Hitler appointed Heinrich Himmler as the leader of the SS, and by the end

of 1932, the SS had 52,000 members.

By the end of the next year, it had over 209,000 members. Himmler's expansion of the SS was based on models from other groups, such as the Knights Templar and the Italian Blackshirts.

Heinrich Himmler himself though, was a pale and dull, man. He was a chicken-farmer who wore glasses, with receding hair, and whose disposition was mild mannered and prim. Indeed Himmler resembled nothing like the blond Aryan superman, who featured so heavily in his outpourings of Nordic supremacy and half-baked mythology.

Himmler wanted the uniforms to be more elegant, the black uniforms looked impressive, its behaviour impeccable, its discipline more strictly enforced than those of the SA. It was an organisation that actively sought well educated men, University professors, the social elite within the Nazi Party. This perverted elitism of the SS as created by Himmler that was the core of the SS, represented by Himmler himself with curious leanings towards Nordic mysticism to such absurd lengths.

Much of how the SS was molded into a brutal and feared organization can be laid at the door of Himmler’s deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, and no history of the SS can be complete, without reference to the considerable contribution made by him, a man who clearly met the Teutonic hero vision, unlike the Reichsfuhrer himself.

Reinhard Heydrich joined the SS in 1931, he was of middle-class origin and had been a naval officer but in 1931 he had been cashiered for “conduct unbecoming a gentleman,” after compromising the virtue of a shipyard director’s daughter. During his time in the German Navy he had served for a time under Admiral Canaris, who nurtured his taste for intelligence work.

Heydrich’s personality was ice-cold, utterly ruthless - he was a first class fencer, excellent horseman and a skilled pilot and musician. First he directed his lucid intellect to the internal organization of the SS, and the creation of the Sicherheitsdient – the SS intelligence service.

Heydrich never succeeded Himmler as Reichsfuhrer-SS, as he was assassinated by Czech agents, who had been trained by the British, in Prague in June 1942. The SS carried out harsh reprisals for this act, and erased the village of Lidice, from the face of the earth, killing all the male inhabitants, the children who could not be “Germanised” and the women were incarcerated in concentration camps.

The Night of the Long Knives

From 1931 onwards Himmler and Heydrich worked tirelessly to build up the SS but it was still in the shadows of the SA, whilst the SS protected Hitler’s personal well-being, it was the SA who fought in the streets in the interests of the Nazi Party, and paved the way for its electoral success.

The SA at the time were under the command of its original founder, Ernst Rohm, he believed, as did the other SA leaders, that they had brought Adolf Hitler to power and now they expected suitable reward and recognition.

They expected that the SA who now numbered approximately four and a half million members would assume the position of the new “democratic” army of the Reich displacing the hundred thousand professional army allowed by the Treaty of Versailles.

By the time Hitler had become Chancellor the SS had grown in numbers to 50,000, which Himmler detested, he was fearful the SS might suffer the same fate as the SA.

By early 1934 the unresolved conflict between the Nationalist and Socialist elements in the Nazi Party had reached a crisis. The right led by Hermann Goring was content with securing power and now sought only to extend the Party’s appeal to the classes of tradition.

But the left represented by three million noisy and still violent brown-shirts were demanding a second and genuinely social revolution. As a first step Ernst Rohm, the leader of the SA, had called for the army’s amalgamation with the SA.

This was a crisis Hitler had long foreseen, he knew the generals loathed and feared the SA, and the generals were placated by assurances from Hitler that the SA would never challenge the Army’s supremacy.

It was not until the weekend of the 30 June 1934 when Goring and Himmler at last succeeded in convincing Hitler that Rohm was planning a coup d’etat which was quite untrue, did Hitler decide to act against his old friend.

Hitler acted characteristically on impulse and having no plan of his own gave carte blanche to Goring and Himmler, who had been secretly plotting murder over many months. The German army generals were aware and approved of this action but they refused to have soldiers fire on the SA members.

Himmler had therefore accordingly arranged for his SS to arrest the victims and when Hitler had ticked off their names had them taken out into backyards and stairwells to be shot. Rohm was arrested in a private hotel at Bad Wiessee, south of Munich, where he was enjoying a holiday with other SA leaders. He was taken to Stadelheim prison, and after refusing to commit suicide he was shot by Theodore Eicke, in his cell.

By Monday 1 July 1934 most of the SA leaders and many of Himmler’s and Goring’s personal enemies had been done away with. The “Blood Purge” which would shortly make Hitler Chancellor was the making of the SS.

The rise of the SS from this point on was assured, the great impetus was built up after the Reichstag fire on the 27 February 1933, the German Communist Party was banned and its members arrested by the police and incarcerated into the newly established concentration camps, which were run not by the police but the SS.

The Gestapo

The political police of Nazi Germany. The Gestapo ruthlessly eliminated opposition to the Nazis within Germany and its occupied territories and was responsible for the roundup of Jews throughout Europe for deportation to extermination camps.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Hermann Göring, then Prussian minister of the interior, detached the political and espionage units from the regular Prussian police, filled their ranks with thousands of Nazis, and, on April 26, 1933, reorganized them under his personal command as the Gestapo. Simultaneously, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, the Nazi paramilitary corps, together with his aide Reinhard Heydrich, similarly reorganized the police of Bavaria and the remaining German states. Himmler was given command over Göring’s Gestapo in April 1934 and on June 17, 1936, was made German chief of police with the title of Reichsführer. Nominally under the Ministry of the Interior, Germany’s police forces now were unified under Himmler as head of both the SS and the Gestapo.

In 1936 the Gestapo—led by Himmler’s subordinate, Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller—was joined with the Kriminalpolizei (German: “Criminal Police”) under the umbrella of a new organization, the Sicherheitspolizei (Sipo; “Security Police”). Under a 1939 SS reorganization, the Sipo was joined with the Sicherheitsdienst (“Security Service”), an SS intelligence department, to form the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (“Reich Security Central Office”) under Heydrich. In this bureaucratic maze, the functions of the Gestapo often overlapped with those of other security departments, with which the Gestapo had both to cooperate and compete.

The Gestapo operated without civil restraints. It had the authority of “preventative arrest,” and its actions were not subject to judicial appeal. Thousands of leftists, intellectuals, Jews, trade unionists, political clergy, and homosexuals simply disappeared into concentration camps after being arrested by the Gestapo. The political section could order prisoners to be murdered, tortured, or released. Together with the SS, the Gestapo managed the treatment of “inferior races,” such as Jews and Roma (Gypsies). During World War II the Gestapo suppressed partisan activities in the occupied territories and carried out reprisals against civilians. Gestapo members were included in the Einsatzgruppen (“deployment groups”), which were mobile death squads that followed the German regular army into Poland and Russia to kill Jews and other “undesirables.” Bureau IV B4 of the Gestapo, under Adolf Eichmann, organized the deportation of millions of Jews from other occupied countries to the extermination camps in Poland.

Goering

Commander of the Luftwaffe

Göring was brought up near Nürnberg, in the small castle of Veldenstein, whose owner was Hermann, Ritter (knight) von Epenstein, a Jew who was until 1913 the lover of Göring’s mother and the godfather of her children.

Hitler’s designated successor

WWI Pilot with 22 confirmed kills

Was shot in the groin during the Beer Hall Putsch and as a result became addicted to morphine. (went to rehab twice)

After WWII he was put on trial and Nuremburg, He committed suicide in his cell by cyanide before he could be hung. (wanted to be shot like a soldier)