Are ICE agents modern-day Nazi brownshirts?

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Daniel Siemens is Professor of European History at Newcastle University and the author of Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler’s Brownshirts.

Whenever we witness paramilitary or excessive violence by state authorities, comparisons with National Socialism – Nazism – quickly come to mind. Beyond what students learn in school, and thanks to films, books and increasingly computer games, we are more comprehensively informed about the Third Reich than about almost any other period in recent history.

On the political left, historical comparisons with Nazism often serve to portray current events in a particularly negative light and as early warning signs of potentially more terrible things to come. On the political right, comparisons with National Socialism are usually downplayed, because an extreme radicalization of violence against civilians, which led to the Holocaust in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, will not be repeated and is not being sought by anyone in the present – or so the argument goes.

The comparison serves current purposes in both camps: either to delegitimize recent acts of state violence, or to relativize them. Things are either “nearly as bad” or “nowhere as bad,” if not categorically distinct.

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In recent days, I have received various inquiries from journalists, all of whom assumed that the latest brutal actions of the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents (ICE) against civilians, in particular the shooting of Renee Nicole Macklin Good on Jan. 7, bear similarities to the actions of the German SA, or stormtroopers, in the early 1930s. Would I, as a historian, agree?

Despite all the outrage, some fundamental differences should not be overlooked. At least until early 1933, the SA was not a state force acting on behalf of the government, but the paramilitary wing of the Nazi party. Their members did not receive a salary; on the contrary, they had to pay a monthly membership fee to the SA leadership.

At the same time, under its leader Ernst Röhm, the SA developed its own claim to power in the first half of the 1930s. They no longer wanted to serve merely as an extension of the Nazi Party and its leader Adolf Hitler, but instead claimed agency to reshape German society according to their militaristic ideals.

Particularly relevant were the years 1933-34, when Hitler came to power and established his dictatorship. During this period, the SA was an important instrument of the National Socialists for persecuting political opponents, enforcing the party’s claim to leadership, and humiliating minorities such as Jews, thereby symbolically excluding them from the national community. The stormtroopers deliberately adopted a martial appearance and spread fear among the many who did not belong to it or sympathized with the Nazis.

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During this early period of terror in Germany, then a country with a population of around 66 million, approximately 100,000 people were temporarily imprisoned and at least 500 people were killed. The actual number is likely to have been significantly higher. The SA was instrumental for this terror, not least thanks to a decree issued by Hermann Göring on Feb. 17, 1933, which elevated tens of thousands of SA and SS men to the rank of “auxiliary police” officers.

Overnight, former thugs and political hooligans became paid representatives of state order with police powers, firearms and the right to make arrests in co-operation with regular police units. At times, SA troops went on veritable raids and plundered Jews for their own enrichment.

The SA leaders derived their authority from these new powers. Nothing more forcefully illustrates that the SA in 1933 perceived itself as an extralegal organization that was no longer bound by the German penal code than Ernst Röhm’s secret “disciplinary decree” of July 31, 1933. For every stormtrooper killed by political opponents, Röhm authorized the regional SA leader in charge to execute up to 12 members of the enemy organization that had carried out the attack.

This order reveals the degree to which the logic of civil war determined the thinking of the SA leadership, and that the notorious Feme tradition – extrajudicial killings by Freikorps and other paramilitary groups in the immediate post-First World War years – was still alive.

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Indeed, several of the political murders committed by the regime between January, 1933, and June, 1934, targeted National Socialist “traitors” who had allegedly disclosed internal secrets or simply happened to have powerful and ruthless enemies within the Nazi camp. According to Röhm’s decree of July 31, such executions were justified as a kind of “atonement” as long as a proper SA jurisdiction had not yet been established.

What was meant by SA jurisdiction? Röhm and the SA leadership insisted that violent incidents involving SA men had to be handled in special SA disciplinary courts. To achieve this, they pushed for a “disciplinary law” that would provide the statutory basis for what would have amounted to a nearly complete exemption of SA and SS members from punishment by the regular criminal courts.

Röhm compared this to a “military justice system” and saw it as an important step in his ambition to transform the SA into a people’s militia. Sentences for most crimes that the brownshirts had committed prior to the Nazi takeover of power had already been suspended due to the amnesty of Dec. 20, 1932, except for prison terms longer than five years.

One of the regional SA leaders to challenge the criminal justice system was Heinrich Schoene. Over the summer months of 1933 he fought an intense battle with the civil and legal authorities over whether SA men from his region in the north of Germany who had organized so-called “pillory processions,” the public shaming and abusing of political opponents, had to stand trial for breaching the peace, assault, and unlawful detention.

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After a meeting with the regional state authorities had ended in disagreement, Schoene wrote to the president of the Supreme Regional Court in Kiel and to Hanns Kerrl, then Prussia’s minister of justice. As long as the new disciplinary law was not passed, Schoene noted, he would simply prohibit the SA men under his command from appearing in court. He would not accept any kind of penalty for his men, as “even if the courts are formally in the right, it was ultimately the SA who had successfully achieved the national revolution and even if misdoings had been committed during and after this period, such acts needed to be pardoned.”

In the letter to the justice minister, Schoene even proclaimed: “If we proceed according to the letter of the law, then this will lead to a sentimental humanitarianism that might have the gravest consequences.” In his view, any legal restrictions on the stormtroopers would ultimately weaken the national community: “A swine or a rascal is best served and educated by a sound flogging.”

Even though the Nazi Party, the ministries of justice, and the civil authorities ultimately never agreed on the terms of a new “disciplinary law” for the SA, their regional leaders until June, 1934, repeatedly threatened public prosecutors who dared to open proceedings against stormtroopers with physical violence and the end of their careers. Consequently, there were more than 4,000 criminal cases against members of SA and SS pending in May, 1934.

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Somehow ironically, it was only after the “Night of the Long Knives,” when Ernst Röhm, dozens of other SA leaders as well as important Nazi opponents between June 30 and July 2, 1934, were murdered, that a new SA judiciary was put in place – no longer to shield the brownshirts from prosecution, but to discipline them. In the coming years, Germany witnessed a couple of criminal court cases against stormtroopers who had allegedly violated Nazi morale and behavioural norms.

How reasonable is it to draw parallels between these historical events and the actions of ICE in recent months? And what, if anything, can be learned from such a comparative perspective regarding the present situation?

There are some disturbing parallels between the 1930s and today – for example, a government denigrating those it considers enemies and glorifying the persecution and imprisonment of these people as a service to the national cause. However, the differences outweigh the similarities, at least for now.

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Germany in 1933 was a dictatorship; the United States at the start of 2026 is not. Millions of citizens across the U.S. demonstrate against the government and document the operations of the ICE units in cities and towns with their phones and cameras. Elections are still taking place and are still often won by the candidates of the opposition. The loss of human life has been the exception so far, although 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025.

But even if the comparison shows more differences than similarities, some parallels should not be dismissed.

When political leaders and senior government officials actively interfere in police and criminal matters to thwart investigations, despite sufficient initial suspicion that warrant the opening of proceedings; when they effectively exempt officers from prosecution; when they declare the victims of state violence to be “terrorists” who deserve their fate, then these people should at least not be surprised when others – rightly or wrongly – begin to explain the present with uncomfortable historical comparisons.

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