Readers of Daniel Siemens's exhaustive new book on Hitler's Brownshirts encounter the June 30, 1934 attack on the leadership of the paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA), known in the English-language historiography as the Night of the Long Knives and in German as the “Röhm-Putsch,” at about the halfway point. This fact alone speaks to the novelty of Siemens's approach. Most scholars, even those familiar with the Nazi era, would be puzzled as to what else could be said about the SA for the remainder of the book. As Siemens decisively demonstrates, and contrary to received wisdom, the Night of the Long Knives did not mark the end of the SA's political relevance. By the end of Stormtroopers, one is far more familiar with Viktor Lutze, leader of the SA after 1934, than with the better-known Ernst Röhm.

Siemens contends that the disappearance of the post-1934 SA from historical works relates directly to the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg after the war. Although the judges acknowledged that units within the SA engaged in criminal acts after 1934, they refrained from applying the legally loaded designation “criminal” to the organization as a whole, as they had done with the SS. They instead described the SA after the Night of the Long Knives as an organization “reduced to the status of a group of unimportant Nazi hangers-on” (315). To be sure, the judges did not deaden historical interest in the SA, as is evident from numerous books that deal with the subject. Much of the literature has explored the social composition of the organization within the broader question of the SA's power to attract members. Both working-class and lower-middle-class men were drawn to the SA for practical and emotional reasons, chief among them being the prospect of a decent job, the legacy of war and revolution that fostered a desire for violence, and the excitement found in a mobilized youth culture. The origins of the SA's violence remains a topic of study, as it has for some time, with recent works like that of Andrew Wackerfuss using the lens of masculinity to explain the truly shocking level of street violence meted out by the SA. Siemens adds to this literature by highlighting how men too young to have served in World War I, but raised on heroic tales of their male relatives, sought out the culture of youth and violence offered by the SA. With the benefit of several decades of scholarship, historians can now say with certainty that German men did not typically join the SA because they were attracted to Nazi ideology.

As Siemens notes, the vast majority of the scholarship on the SA is rooted in the period from its inception in 1920 until the purge in 1934. Siemens's great contribution is to reveal that the SA after 1934 was anything but a “group of unimportant Nazi hangers-on.” While one out of every two Brownshirts permanently exited the organization between 1934 and 1938, it was nevertheless three times as large as it was in 1932, numbering more than 1.3 million men.

From the Night of the Long Knives until well into the war, the SA continued to engage in the violence for which it had become infamous, albeit now as an organization firmly under Nazi control. The Night of Broken Glass, the rampage against Jewish businesses and places of worship on November 9, 1938, which resulted in the death of hundreds of Jews and many thousands more sent off to concentration camps, was not an aberration, but rather the apex of long years of SA violence and public humiliation against Jews. Although not all of the information presented here is entirely novel—Peter Longerich has written about SA violence post-1934—the minute details Siemens presents about the sheer terror provoked by the SA on the streets of Hitler's Germany is far beyond anything in the existing literature. Moreover, his broader picture of the SA, apart from the street violence, enriches our understanding of the organization and its place in Nazi Germany. Its stability and popular acceptance grew as it absorbed many existing cultural organizations, like horseback riding societies and sports clubs. These types of organizations further boosted the SA mission to assist in the paramilitary training of German men. Given its track record of violence and paramilitary training, the SA was a logical choice to assist with Germanizing the Sudetenland and Memel, when those areas were incorporated into the Reich in 1938 and 1939, respectively. The SA presence in the borderlands was in this way a return to the early years of the organization, when SA men were deployed in Silesia as frontiersmen of the Reich.

During the war itself, the SA uniform was ubiquitous throughout Germany. Siemens carefully demonstrates that Stormtroopers were not simply impotent air-raid wardens, but flexed considerable muscle as a semiofficial police force, assisted in training the doomed Volkssturm units, rooted out relationships between Germans and slave laborers, and toward the end of the war violently attacked anyone who showed signs of defeatism. By detailing the significant role of the SA in maintaining the home front, Siemens turns the traditional historiography on its head, as captured in his memorable phrase: “Well into the Second World War, Germany remained not an ‘SS state,’ as Eugen Kogon famously put it in 1946, but an SA state” (187).

The Nazi conquest of East Europe furnished an opportunity for the SA to expand further. Its reputation for ideological firmness now solidified, SA men headed east as agricultural laborers to work the soil, always at the ready to take up arms against the Slavs. Although the 2,555 SA settlers deployed by the midpoint of the war were far fewer than the regime had envisaged, the mindset of the “defensive peasantry” was vital in contributing to the Volksgemeinschaft in the occupied territories. Siemens also forcefully argues that the five SA generals who served as ambassadors in Southeast Europe played far more of a role in expediting the Holocaust in those areas than anyone previously thought.

Given his research prowess, specialist readers might wish that Siemens had said more about the topics he purposefully leaves to others, such as the Night of the Long Knives. The traditional explanation that Germans supported Hitler's first mass murder because it prevented a takeover by the thuggish SA, repeated here by Siemens, does not account for the many innocent people without links to the SA who were shot or beaten up that night, most prominent of whom was Elisabeth von Schleicher, the wife of former chancellor Kurt von Schleicher. Siemens's promised comparisons are also less robust than expected (77). Although he indicates that he will examine the SA in the context of other paramilitary organizations in Germany and Europe, the book contains little on either of those topics. Readers are offered compelling reasons why the SA grew, but far fewer insights as to why other paramilitary organizations failed. These shortcomings detract only marginally from a book that is now the standard by which all other works on the SA must be judged.