Brownshirts, Then and Now

A Brownshirt payday might not be stopped.

Hawkeye1972

Jun 08, 2026

An SA recruitment poster, circa 1933. Source: Bundesarchiv.

There is a moment in every authoritarian playbook when street violence stops being a liability and becomes an asset. The trick is converting it cleanly - turning prosecuted rioters into persecuted patriots, turning legal exposure into fundraising fuel, turning the men who smashed windows and beat people with flagpoles into symbols of loyalty rewarded.

Germany did this in the 1920s and early 1930s. We are watching it happen again.

Germany, then

The Sturmabteilung (SA, or Storm Troopers) - the Brownshirts - began as a protection racket with political ambitions, led by Ernst Röhm. In its early years the organization had no institutional backing and funded itself the way gangs always do: dues, collections, and the kind of “donations” that arrive when armed men make clear what refusal looks like. Beer halls, small businesses, opponents who understood the message. The money was modest, but the violence was not.

That changed as the Nazi Party grew. By 1930, as the Depression hollowed out the Weimar Republic, German industrialists began writing larger checks to the party itself - Fritz Thyssen, the steel magnate; Emil Kirdorf, from coal. These men were not ideologues in any deep sense. They were businessmen who had decided that a destabilized democracy was more threatening to their interests than a stabilized fascism. The SA was the Nazi party’s paramilitary arm, and party money was SA money. What had started as a street gang collecting shake-down fees was now operating on an institutional payroll.

In 1932 the SA had 400,000 members. By 1933, nearly two million. It had become, effectively, a second army - one that operated outside the law because those writing its checks wanted it outside the law.

America, now

The January 6th networks are looser, more digital, and harder to trace through a single line of funding. But the structure is recognizable.

The Proud Boys raised money through merchandise, Telegram solicitations, and a web of smaller donors organized around the fantasy of defending civilization from the left. The Oath Keepers operated similarly - a patriot-adjacent membership organization with dues and a leadership that knew exactly what it was building toward.

Trump’s political confidant Roger Stone’s connections to both groups have been documented in federal court filings and confirmed by the January 6th Select Committee: an encrypted group chat called “Friends of Stone” included Stone, Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio, Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, and Stop the Steal organizer Ali Alexander. Stone was guarded on January 5th and 6th by Oath Keepers members who were subsequently indicted for seditious conspiracy.

After January 6th, a new funding stream opened: legal defense. Crowdfunding campaigns proliferated within days of the arrests. Trump’s “Patriot Legal Defense Fund” raised more than $1.5 million - but the bulk of its spending went to the firm Brand Woodward Law, which represented Trump-orbit figures including Peter Navarro and Walt Nauta, not the rank-and-file defendants doing time.

This year, the “Victims of Weaponization” fund - nearly $1.8 billion in taxpayer money - formalized the arrangement. Hundreds of pardoned rioters are now seeking individual payouts of $1 million to $10 million from the federal government.

Two days ago, Republicans in the Senate blocked an amendment that would have prevented those convicted of assaulting law enforcement from collecting.

The pardons are where the two eras rhyme most clearly.

The pardons are not justice. They are recruitment.

When Hitler assumed the chancellorship in January 1933, one of his earliest acts was to push through amnesty provisions for SA members who had committed violence in the political struggle. The legal exposure evaporated. The signal to those who remained was unmistakable: loyalty is protected. The risk calculus had changed.

Trump’s mass pardons of January 6th defendants - including those convicted of seditious conspiracy, assault on law enforcement, destruction of property - function identically. Not as justice. As recruitment. As a demonstration, for anyone watching, that violence in service of this movement carries no permanent consequence.

The Brownshirt leadership understood this. Röhm built his organization on the knowledge that the party would cover for its soldiers. The January 6th defendants who have since appeared at Trump events, been invited to the White House, posed for photographs - they understand it too.

There is one notable difference, and it matters.

Hitler purged the SA in 1934. On “The Night of the Long Knives” Hitler had Röhm and the senior leadership assassinated, demobilized the mass membership, and transferred power to the more disciplined SS. The Brownshirts had been useful until they threatened to become too powerful, at which point they were eliminated.

But Trump has not purged his loyalists. He has elevated them. The pardoned rioters are not being managed out; they are being kept close, kept visible, kept available. This is either because the movement lacks the organizational discipline of the Nazi apparatus, or because the threat calculus is different, or because we have not yet reached the moment when the shock troops outlive their usefulness.

None of those explanations are reassuring.

What the SA and the January 6th networks share is not incidental. In both cases, a leader cultivated violence he could credibly deny authorizing. In both cases, legal exposure became a loyalty test and a fundraising mechanism. In both cases, impunity was the payment - the thing that made future violence rational for future participants.

The money trail matters, but it is not the whole story. The story is that every system of accountability that fails to hold these people responsible is, in effect, writing them a check. It is telling the next group who are watching, and calculating, that the math works out.

It worked out in the 1930s. We know how that ended.

Note: The behavior of ICE and Vance’s statements about ICE immunity raise the same comparison - but that is a discussion for another time.

Quislings@Substack

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