Andrew Wackerfuss. Stormtrooper Families

One autumn night in 1928, a group of stormtroopers, members of the Nazi Party militia (Sturmabteilung [SA]), met a group of their enemies, men from a pro-democracy militia. In the ensuing melee, one of the stormtroopers, a man named Gerhold, shot and killed one of the other militiamen. Gerhold’s subsequent murder trial took what might seem like a surprising turn. As it happened, the militiaman was not the first person Gerhold had shot. The stormtrooper had also shot his male Jewish lover in the head in an unrelated earlier incident. The former lover, who survived, testified at Gerhold’s murder trial. In Stormtrooper Families: Homosexuality and Community in the Early Nazi Movement, Andrew Wackerfuss argues that Gerhold’s story ought not to be surprising. The SA harbored a destructive internal contradiction. Officially it embraced the traditional family, and yet within private, all-male SA spaces, stormtroopers sought to create a “homoerotic family” (323).

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