Hitler's seizure of power in January 1933, in the eyes of some historians, was the culmination of an unstoppable march. Yet the final months of the Weimar Republic saw the Nazis sliding into ever deeper trouble. In particular, the Sturmabteilung or SA - activist heart of the Nazi movement was showing signs of breakage. The stormtroopers who filled its ranks increasingly angered with party leadership, swerved from the party agenda, and fell to dispute and violence at odds with Hitler's cultivated image as herald of a new order. Stormtroopers and Crisis in the Nazi Movement casts fresh light on the crisis that beset Nazism during the final months of Germany's first republic. The book scrutinizes two sets of hitherto understudied records. SA morale reports in the US National Archive show what Nazi leaders themselves knew about their radical paramilitary wing. Police reports on the stormtroopers, from the former DDR state archive in Potsdam, show what Republican authorities knew.

This book should be of interest to advanced students and researchers of Modern European History, Modern German History and Nazism.