Stalwarts (Harry Turtledove)

The Stalwarts are members of the Freedom Party in Harry Turtledove's series of books dealing with a Confederate States of America surviving past World War I and experiencing a bout of fascism.

The Freedom Party stalwarts are an analog to the "Sturmabteilung" of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party; instead of wearing brown shirts they wear white shirts and butternut pants, which become an unofficial Freedom Party uniform. And just like their stormtrooper counterparts the stalwarts are headbreakers and balls-kickers, rampaging through the opposition rallies and mixing it up with anybody who disagrees with Jake Featherston and his militantly racist views.

While the stalwarts are obviously the stormtrooper analog, the Freedom Party guards are the SS in this world, although they keep a relatively lower profile than the brown shirts did in real life.

After Vice President Willy Knight's unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Featherston in his motorcade using three disillusioned stalwarts, the stalwart organization was given less importance in place of the more reliable Freedom Party guards. (An analog to the downfall of the SA in the Night of the Long Knives, only in that case Ernst Röhm was the leader of the SA, whereas Knight merely used a couple of stalwarts he had found). The stalwarts continued to be employed as auxiliary police and concentration camp guards, but no longer enjoyed the benefits and comforts of being the Freedom Party's chief bully-boys.

The one difference in an other-wise near-complete analog, the Freedom Party stalwarts seem to be regular rank-and-file, due-paying Party members who regularly attend weekly meetings and every so often venture out to attack the political opposition; the SA was thought of as being a separate branch of the NSDAP, useful as thugs and bullyboys but who left the job of normal Party business to regular Nazi Party members.