FEAR VS. FREEDOM
Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler’s Brownshirts
By Daniel Siemens.
459 pages.
Yale University Press, 2017.
$32.50.
Reviewed by Brian K.
Feltman
The brown-shirted stormtroopers of the Sturmabteilungen (SA) were one of the most visible and feared symbols of Nazism before and immediately after Adolf Hitler’s ascension to power. While historians have rarely considered their significance beyond the early years of Hitler’s rule, Daniel Siemen offers the first comprehensive account of the SA by following its stormtroopers from the streets of Munich to the German settlements of Eastern Europe.
Siemens traces the stormtroopers’ early years in post–World War I Bavaria, showing how violence was key to the SA’s foundational myth even before its members first donned their infamous brown shirts in 1924. The SA relied on war veterans to shape the younger recruits who joined in search of the sense of power they gained from fighting and humiliating the Nazis’ political enemies. By April 1934 the SA’s membership had swelled to four million, yet its power was threatened when Hitler began compromising with the German elite. The murderous 1934 purge of
