In November 1926, Hitler reformed the S.A. and found a new commander in Captain Pfeffer von Salomon, but the ex-officers still thought only in military terms. The S.A. was to be a training ground for the Army and the height of their ambition was to hand it over lock, stock, and barrel to the Army, with jobs for themselves in the higher ranks. Both the Berlin and Munich S.A. leadership had to be purged. The Munich S.A. had become notorious for the homosexual habits of Lieutenant Edmund Heines and his friends: it was not for his morals, however, or his record as a murderer, that Hitler threw him out in May 1927, but for lack of discipline and insubordination. Such was the elite of the new Germany.

Whatever steps Hitler took, however, the S.A. continued to follow its own independent course. Pfeffer held as obstinately as Röhm to the view that the military leadership should be on equal terms with, not subordinate to, the political leadership. He refused to admit Hitler's right to give orders to his Stormtroops. So long as the S.A. was recruited from the ex-service and ex-Freikorps men who had so far provided both its officers and rank and file, Hitler had to tolerate this state of affairs. These men were not interested in politics; what they lived for was precisely this "playing at soldiers" Hitler condemned - going on manoeuvres, marching in uniform, brawling, sitting up half the night singing camp songs and drinking themselves into a stupor, trying to recapture the lost comradeship and exhilaration of 1914-18. In time Hitler was to find an answer in the black-shirted S.S., a hand-picked corps d'elite (sworn to absolute obedience) very different from the ill-disciplined S.A. mob of camp followers.

Having seen off volkisch challengers, Hitler was confronted by north-south tensions within the Party. In northern and western Germany, dynamic leaders such as Gregor Strasser and the Elberfeld journalist Joseph Goebbels wanted to concentrate on breaking into the urban socialist vote. They were both sceptical of Hitler's strategic talents, and antagonistic to the clique surrounding him in Munich. These men espoused a Prussian socialism. Whereas Hitler had recently vented his animosity towards Russia, they regarded it "as the socialist nationalist state for which consciously or unconsciously the younger generation in all countries long". Their socialism may have brought them into the same orbit as Othmar Spann or Oswald Spengler, but it does not mean that they forfeited every commonality with socialist parties, whose own heterogeneous historical roots included artisanal-utopian and statist tendencies.

At a hastily convened conference in Bamberg in early 1926, Hitler quashed plans to support SPD and KPD initiatives to expropriate the holdings of Germany's former ruling dynasties, and forbade any further discussion of first principles. Having reasserted his grip, Hitler appointed Gregor Strasser to the Party leadership with responsibility for propaganda, with Heinrich Himmler as his factotum, and promoted his new admirer Goebbels as Gauleiter of "Red" Berlin. Having created something which was more than a volkisch sect or a conventional political party, Hitler also checked the independence of the movement's paramilitary wing. In mid-1926, he replaced Ernst Röhm as SA chief by Franz Felix Pfeffer von Salomon, whose brief was to check its aspirations to quasi-military status by firmly subordinating it to the Party's political and propaganda goals. The SA was to perform two functions: to rough up opponents during elections, a practice Hitler seems to have admired across the Atlantic, and to assert the Nazi presence on the streets...

The SA continued to have attitudinal problems. These would eventually be corrected, with their blood on cell walls, by a smaller force that multiplied under their aegis but grew apart from them in terms of their focused fanaticism: Hitler's SS (Schutzstaffeln) praetorian guard consisted of men who were better educated, leaner, taller and older than the eighteen-year-olds, if not the pot-bellied middle-aged bullies, who comprised the SA. The SS included bullies too, but they were superior, academically educated examples of the type.

He might have thrown half of the S.A. after him. While Röhm peddled his books or sat around with his friends, the S.A. was led by a man who at heart was no National Socialist at all, Captain Pfeffer von Salomon. He used his power like a hired captain in the Renaissance; he had exacted the condition that Hitler should have no right to interfere. Pfeffer knew that he could not, on Sundays and Saturday afternoons, make a serviceable military troop out of these students, white-collar workers, and sons of peasants. But the S.A. could be a Preparatory school for the army; as many S.A. men as possible should enter the Reichswehr and flood it with rebellion. Hitler trembled at the slightest thought of illegality; they would deport him at once, of that he was certain. Pfeffer ordered the S.A. to engage in military manoeuvres; Hitler issued counter-orders. Pfeffer's orders were not valid, he declared, unless countersigned by him, Hitler. Violent scenes ensued; mask-like and immobile behind his pince-nez, Pfeffer listened to Hitler's violent outbreaks. Afterwards he said to others, "You can't take orders from this slovenly, terrified Austrian!" It was impossible to make those S.A. captains understand that the purpose of the S.A. was expressly not military. They held to a statement Hitler had once made himself: that "An army cannot be trained and taught the highest self-respect unless the function of its existence is preparation for warfare. There are no armies for the preservation of peace, but only for the victorious waging of war."

In the eyes of these former lieutenants and captains, the storm troops were a piece of the future army "waging a victorious war". They must be ready to slip into uniform at once and shoulder arms when the Reichswehr called them. The S.A. leaders had changed their views about Seeckt's army. Rossbach, for example, who had previously been so sceptical, said: "The Reichswehr in a superhuman struggle of infinite perseverance has step by step achieved an inner elevation, as we old soldiers today can perceive with seeing eyes". Consequently, the old soldiers must forget their old rancour and revise the faulty judgments. Pfeffer desired nothing more, and would have liked best to hand over the whole S.A. to the Reichswehr, calculating that he himself would then become a general, and Hitler, if necessary, could go to the devil. He led the S.A. back to the drill-grounds of the Reichswehr and trained them to bear arms; it was beginning to be a repetition of 1923, which Hitler recalled with horror. That must not happen again. The Reichswehr must not be allowed to take "his" S.A. out of his hands, and perhaps look on smiling while the bourgeois State's attorney prosecuted Hitler for illegal military drilling and the Socialist Minister of the Interior ordered the foreigner deported. He forbade his troop any connection with the Reichswehr, on grounds amounting to high treason: "The National Socialist, and first and foremost the S.A. man, has no call to stir so much as a finger for the present State, which has no understanding of our outlook and can only perpetuate the misfortune of our people.... The coming Reich for which we are struggling alone obligates us to stake our persons."

With Röhm in South America, Hitler placed Captain Franz Pfeffer von Salomon in charge of the SA. This was a move Hitler came to regret, as Pfeffer von Salomon (like Rohm) had an independent mind, but unlike Rohm had no fealty to Hitler, who he characterized as "that flabby Austrian."

By August 1930 Hitler had reached the end of his patience with Pfeffer von Salomon. He relieved him of his command and, on an interim basis, personally assumed leadership of the SA. A telegram was dispatched from Munich to La Paz, as once again Hitler in a time of need turned to the man who had been so essential to him in past days of travail. By the end of 1930 Rohm had returned to his native Germany, and in January 1931 he was named Chief of Staff of the SA.

He immediately began the task of rebuilding and enlarging the SA, and in so doing brought his homosexual friends into leadership positions. Hitler turned aside all complaints about Röhm's morals, lifestyle, methods, and techniques, and defended the SA by saying it was "not an institute for the moral education of young ladies but a band of tough fighters." And so it was, as the ranks burgeoned to encompass the criminal element as well as sundry undesirables.