This is how the brownshirts operated. Just thugs, power trippin’, and attracting the absolute worst people who WANT to wear balaclavas and have the excuse to be intimidating assholes and have the power to bundle people into vans (or railcars).
They were like football fans with knives, and their communist opponents kinda similar. So in part yes.
In part there was that nuance, that they were the approved kind of hooligans with knives, and their communist opponents those the government feared more. But neither wore balaklavas, and mostly they were on equal grounds, just Nazis were able to attract more support eventually.
In a poor depressed morally shaken environment communist ideas morph into Nazi ideas very quickly. Look not even at these people, but at (sincere, not official spoilers) communist groups in Russia, even the official CPRF has almost gone Nazi.
This is how the brownshirts operated. Just thugs, power trippin’, and attracting the absolute worst people who WANT to wear balaclavas and have the excuse to be intimidating assholes and have the power to bundle people into vans (or railcars).
Brownshirts, I think, didn’t wear balaklavas.
They were probably less cowardly
They were like football fans with knives, and their communist opponents kinda similar. So in part yes.
In part there was that nuance, that they were the approved kind of hooligans with knives, and their communist opponents those the government feared more. But neither wore balaklavas, and mostly they were on equal grounds, just Nazis were able to attract more support eventually.
In a poor depressed morally shaken environment communist ideas morph into Nazi ideas very quickly. Look not even at these people, but at (sincere, not official spoilers) communist groups in Russia, even the official CPRF has almost gone Nazi.