Sturmabteilung in the context of "Sudetendeutsches Freikorps"

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⭐ Core Definition: Sturmabteilung

The Sturmabteilung ([ˈʃtʊʁmʔapˌtaɪlʊŋ] ; SA; lit.'Storm Division' or loosely 'stormtroopers') was the original paramilitary organisation under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party of Germany. It played a significant role in Hitler's rise to power in the 1920s and early 1930s. Its primary purposes were providing protection for Nazi rallies and assemblies, disrupting the meetings of opposing parties, fighting against the paramilitary units of the opposing parties, especially the Roter Frontkämpferbund of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), and intimidating Romani, trade unionists, and especially Jews.

The SA were colloquially called Brownshirts (Braunhemden) because of the colour of their uniform's shirts, similar to Benito Mussolini's Blackshirts. The official SA uniform was a brown shirt with a brown tie. The colour came about because a large shipment of Lettow-shirts, originally intended for the German colonial troops in Germany's former East Africa colony but which never reached its destination because of naval blockades, was purchased in 1921 by Gerhard Roßbach for use by his Freikorps paramilitary unit. They were later used for his Schill Youth organization in Salzburg, and in 1924 were adopted by the Schill Youth in Germany. The "Schill Sportversand" then became the main supplier for the SA's brown shirts. The SA developed pseudo-military titles for its members, with ranks that were later adopted by several other Nazi Party groups.

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👉 Sturmabteilung in the context of Sudetendeutsches Freikorps

The Sudetendeutsches Freikorps (SFK) (Sudeten German Free Corps, also known as the Freikorps Sudetenland, Freikorps Henlein and Sudetendeutsche Legion) was a paramilitary organization founded on 17 September 1938 in Germany on direct order of Adolf Hitler. The organization was composed mainly of ethnic German citizens of Czechoslovakia with pro-Nazi sympathies who were sheltered, trained and equipped by the German army and who conducted cross-border terrorist operations into Czechoslovak territory from 1938 to 1939. They played an important role in Hitler's successful effort to occupy Czechoslovakia and annex the region known as Sudetenland into the Third Reich under Nazi Germany.

The Sudetendeutsches Freikorps was a successor to Freiwilliger Schutzdienst, also known as Ordnersgruppe, an organization established by the Sudeten German Party in Czechoslovakia unofficially in 1933 and officially on 17 May 1938, following the example of the Sturmabteilung, the original paramilitary wing of the German Nazi Party. Officially registered as a promoter organization, the Freiwilliger Schutzdienst was dissolved on 16 September 1938 by the Czechoslovak authorities due to its implication in many criminal and terrorist activities. Many of its members as well as leadership, wanted for arrest by Czechoslovak authorities, had moved to Germany where they became the basis of the Sudetendeutsches Freikorps, conducting the Freikorps' first cross-border raids into Czechoslovakia only a few hours after its official establishment. Due to the smooth transition between the two organizations, similar membership, Nazi Germany's sponsorship and application of the same tactic of cross-border raids, some authors often do not particularly distinguish between the actions of Ordner (i.e. up to 16 September 1938) and Freikorps (i.e. from 17 September 1938).

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Sturmabteilung in the context of Emigration of Jews from Nazi Germany and German-occupied Europe

Between 1933 and 1945, a large number of Jews emigrated from Nazi Germany and German-occupied Europe. This exodus was triggered by the militaristic antisemitism perpetrated by the Nazi Party and by Germany's collaborators, ultimately culminating in the Holocaust. However, even before the genocide itself, which began during World War II, the Nazis had widely sponsored or enforced discriminatory practices—by legislation, in many cases—against Jewish residents, such as through the Nazi boycott of Jewish-owned businesses. Although Adolf Hitler and the German government were initially accepting of voluntary Jewish emigration from the country, it became difficult to find new host countries, particularly as the 1930s were marked by the Great Depression, as the number of Jewish migrants increased. Eventually, the Nazis forbade emigration; the Jews who remained in Germany or in German-occupied territory by this point were either murdered in the ghettos or relocated to be systematically exploited and murdered at dedicated concentration camps and extermination camps throughout the European continent.

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Sturmabteilung in the context of Kristallnacht

Kristallnacht (German pronunciation: [kʁɪsˈtalnaχt] lit.'crystal night') or the Night of Broken Glass, also called the November pogrom(s) (German: Novemberpogrome, pronounced [noˈvɛm.bɐ.poˌɡʁoːmə] ), was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party's Sturmabteilung (SA) and Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary forces along with some participation from the Hitler Youth and German civilians throughout Nazi Germany on 9–10 November 1938. The German authorities looked on without intervening. The euphemistic name Kristallnacht comes from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after the windows of Jewish-owned stores, buildings, and synagogues were smashed. The pretext for the attacks was the assassination, on 9 November 1938, of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old German-born Polish Jew living in Paris.

Jewish homes, hospitals and schools were ransacked as attackers demolished buildings with sledgehammers. Rioters destroyed over 1,400 synagogues and prayer rooms throughout Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland. Over 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps. British historian Martin Gilbert wrote that no event in the history of German Jews between 1933 and 1945 was so widely reported as it was happening, and the accounts from foreign journalists working in Germany drew worldwide attention. The Times of London observed on 11 November 1938: "No foreign propagandist bent upon blackening Germany before the world could outdo the tale of burnings and beatings, of blackguardly assaults on defenceless and innocent people, which disgraced that country yesterday."

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Sturmabteilung in the context of Beer Hall Putsch

The Beer Hall Putsch, also known as the Munich Putsch, was a failed coup d'état by Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler, General Erich Ludendorff and other Kampfbund leaders in Munich, Bavaria, on 8–9 November 1923, during the period of the Weimar Republic. Inspired by Benito Mussolini's March on Rome, Hitler's goal was to use Munich as a base for a march against Germany's national government in Berlin.

The putsch began on the evening of 8 November, when Hitler and a contingent of approximately six hundred Sturmabteilung (SA) members marched on the beer hall Bürgerbräukeller, where Gustav Ritter von Kahr—the Minister-President of Bavaria who had banned some of Hitler's previous planned gatherings—was delivering a speech. As the SA surrounded the hall, Hitler entered, fired a shot into the ceiling, and claimed that the Bavarian government had been overthrown and that the national revolution had begun. The following day, approximately two thousand Nazis marched on the Feldherrnhalle, in the city centre, but were confronted by a police cordon, which resulted in the deaths of 15 Nazis, four police officers, and one bystander. Hitler escaped immediate arrest and was spirited off to safety in the countryside. After two days, he was arrested and charged with treason.

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Sturmabteilung in the context of Nazi concentration camps

Nazi concentration camps were a system of concentration camps (German: Konzentrationslager) built and operated by Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945. There were more than a thousand, including subcamps in Germany and German-occupied Europe.

The first camps were established in March 1933 immediately after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Following the 1934 purge of the SA, the concentration camps were run exclusively by the SS via the Concentration Camps Inspectorate and later the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office. Initially, most prisoners were members of the Communist Party of Germany, but as time went on different groups were arrested, including "habitual criminals", "asocials", and Jews. After the beginning of World War II, people from German-occupied Europe were imprisoned in the concentration camps. About 1.65 million people were registered prisoners in the camps, of whom about a million died during their imprisonment. Most of the fatalities occurred during the second half of World War II, including at least a third of the 700,000 prisoners who were registered as of January 1945. Following Allied military victories, the camps were gradually liberated in 1944 and 1945, although hundreds of thousands of prisoners died in death marches.

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Sturmabteilung in the context of Night of the Long Knives

The Night of the Long Knives (German: Nacht der langen Messer [ˈnaxt dɛɐ̯ ˈlaŋən ˈmɛsɐ] ), also called the Röhm purge or Operation Hummingbird (German: Aktion Kolibri), was a purge that took place in Nazi Germany from 30 June to 2 July 1934. Chancellor Adolf Hitler, urged on by Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler, ordered a series of extrajudicial executions intended to consolidate his power and alleviate the German military's concerns about the role of Ernst Röhm and the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Nazis' paramilitary organization, known colloquially as "Brownshirts". Nazi propaganda presented the murders as a preventive measure against an alleged imminent coup by the SA under Röhm—the so-called Röhm Putsch.

The primary instruments of Hitler's action were the Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary force under Himmler and its Security Service (SD), and the Gestapo (secret police) under Reinhard Heydrich, which between them carried out most of the killings. Göring's personal police battalion also took part. Many of those killed in the purge were leaders of the SA, the best-known being Röhm himself, the SA's chief of staff and one of Hitler's longtime supporters and allies. Leading members of the Strasserist faction of the Nazi Party, including its leader Gregor Strasser, were also killed, as were establishment conservatives and anti-Nazis, such as former Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher and Bavarian politician Gustav Ritter von Kahr, who had helped suppress Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. The murders of SA leaders were also intended to improve the image of the Hitler government with a German public increasingly critical of thuggish SA tactics.

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Sturmabteilung in the context of Kampfbund

The Deutscher Kampfbund ("German Battle League") was a league of nationalist fighting societies and the German National Socialist Party in Bavaria, Germany, in the 1920s. It included Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party (NSDAP) and its Sturmabteilung (SA), the Oberland League and the Bund Reichskriegsflagge. Hitler was its political leader (as of 25 September 1923), while Hermann Kriebel led its militia and Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter became managing director.

The league was created on 1–2 September 1923 at Nuremberg, where Hitler joined other nationalist leaders to celebrate Sedantag, which marked the anniversary of the Prussian victory over France in 1870. The purpose was to consolidate and streamline their agendas and also prepare to take advantage of the split between Bavaria and the central government. The impetus for this consolidation was the declaration a few days earlier by the Berlin central government announcing the end to the resistance against the French occupation of the Ruhr, whose apparent capitulation infuriated the nationalists and freebooters. The Kampfbund conducted the Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923 in Munich, Germany.

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Sturmabteilung in the context of Hinrich Lohse

Hinrich Lohse (2 September 1896 – 25 February 1964) was a German Nazi Party official, politician and convicted war criminal. He served as the Gauleiter and Oberpräsident of Schleswig-Holstein and was an SA-Obergruppenführer in the Nazi paramilitary organization, the Sturmabteilung (SA). He is best known for his rule of the Reichskommissariat Ostland, during the Second World War. The Reichskommissariat comprised the modern-day states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, as well as parts of Belarus, and was the scene of Holocaust-related atrocities. Lohse was sentenced to ten years in prison in 1948 but was released in 1951.

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