Writing the History of the SA at the International Military Tribunal: Legal Strategies and Long-term Historiographical Consequences

Abstract

This article explores the importance of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg for modern historiography using the example of the proceedings against the National Socialist Sturmabteilungen (SA). The tribunal’s verdict from 1946 that acquitted the SA from the charge of having been a «criminal organisation» did not only influence the legal handling of stormtroopers’ crimes in the immediate post war years, but also contributed to the image of the post-1934 SA as a relatively unimportant National Socialist mass organisation, prevalent in the historiography of the Third Reich until this very day. This article demonstrates in detail to what extent this view buys into the former defence strategy of the lawyers for the SA. Not least because of the misrepresentation resulting from such partisan perspectives, historians until recently downplayed the structural elements of the SA’s violence, underestimated its importance in scale and relevance and neglected many of the actual crimes committed by the SA in the late 1930s and during the Second World War. It thus demonstrates that historians are well advised to pay more attention than hitherto both to the narratives produced in court and to their legacies.