AllMovie

There was nothing sly or subtle about the German S.A.-Mann Brand: The film set out to "glorify" the Third Reich, and succeeded spectacularly so far as pro-Hitlerites were concerned. S. A. stands for "Sturm-Abeling," or "Storm Troopers," the Nazi elite who are depicted as gods on earth in this 85-minute political tract. Opposing the heroic, clean-limned storm troopers are a band of scurrilous communists, every one of them a rat or a louse or both. The film's climax finds a 14-year-old Hitler Jugend nobly taking a bullet to save a comrade, thereby providing the story with a "Horst Wessel"-style martyr. For American consumption, the more virulent anti-Semitic sequences in S.A.-Mann Brand were removed, but the bitter taste still remained.