Michael D. Miller – författare

An unswervingly loyal, highly disciplined militant force is as essential to the establishment and maintenance of a dictatorship as the dictator himself. Many factors contributed to the emergence of the Third Reich, and prominent among them were the actions of Hitler’s earliest paramilitary force, the Sturmabteilungen (SA, Storm Troops), and the men chosen by the Führer to lead it. Although Hitler ultimately culled the SA of its most revolutionary elements, there remained within it and the other party-affiliated organizations a spirit of fanatical, sometimes mindless worship of its supreme leader.This first volume, based on official personnel files and other contemporary documentation, analyzes the lives and careers of the thirteen highest-ranking SA leaders—men who held the ranks of Oberster SA-Führer and SA-Stabschef.

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 twenty-three individuals who held the rank of SA-Obergruppenführer (from Adolf Heinz Beckerle through Kurt Günther). 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 master of the Nazi legal profession and infamous Generalgouverneur of occupied Poland, Dr. Hans Frank, the head of the Reich Colonial League, General Franz Ritter von Epp, and the infamous gauleiter of Upper Austria, August Eigruber. Others, like Herbert Fust, Kurt Günther, and the historian Dr. Heinrich Bennecke, 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 550 photographs.

No dictator can effectively govern a nation on his own. This was certainly the case with Adolf Hitler, who had little time for or interest in the day-to-day regional administration of the Nazi Party. For that purpose, he appointed his most loyal, charismatic, and brutal subordinates: The "Little Hitlers", officially known as Gauleiters. In this third volume of a series begun in 2012, Michael Miller and Andreas Schulz present, in meticulous detail, the lives, careers, and crimes of 37 such men. Included are several whose wartime career paths took them outside of their home provinces and led to widespread oppression and terror outside the borders of the Reich. Among these were Fritz Sauckel, who presided over the roundup of millions for slave labor in the Reich, Josef Terboven who oppressed the people of Norway with uncompromising brutality for five years, and Gustav Simon who ruthlessly "Germanized" Luxembourg. Perhaps most notorious of all was Julius Streicher, whose virulent attacks- in writing and at the podium- made him the unofficial face of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany.