SA-Führer (Hardback)

There are those chosen to lead and those who are gladly led. This series deals with the leaders. As with most dictatorships, those chosen by Hitler were seldom great leaders. But what they lacked in capability they made up for in fanaticism and the will to fulfill their Führer’s wishes, without question and regardless of cost.

In this second volume, Michael Miller and Andreas Schulz continue their exhaustive coverage of the senior leaders of Hitler’s earliest paramilitary army, the Sturmabteilung (SA, Storm Troops), examining the lives and careers of sixteen individuals who held the rank of SA-Obergruppenführer (alphabetically from Adolf Heinz Beckerle through Friedrich Karl Florian). Although some fell victim to the purge of June/July 1934, most of them continued to serve the Nazi regime in a broad range of assignments until the very end.

Here you will find men whose service to the SA was mostly honorary, such as the distinguished World War I regimental commander and head of the Reich Colonial League General Franz Ritter von Epp and the fanatical Gauleiters August Eigruber and Friedrich Karl Florian. Others, like Dr. Heinrich Bennecke, Franz Bock, and Arthur Böckenhauer, were entirely committed to their respective SA commands. Drawing on a wealth of official personnel files and other contemporary documentation, Miller and Schulz present a uniquely thorough examination of the SA leadership, superbly illustrated with over 450 photographs.