page_title: Sturm Cigarette Company
section_title: Profits
hierarchical_section_title: Sturm Cigarette Company / Profits
caption_attribution_description: For documentary purposes the German Federal Archive often retained the original image captions, which may be erroneous, biased, obsolete or politically extreme. Arbeitslose SA-Männer auf einer Tiergartenbank.
context_page_description: The Sturm Cigarette Company was a cigarette company created by the Nazi Party's Sturmabteilung. The sale of its cigarettes provided the SA with operating funds and a channel for political messaging. Coercion and violence were used to increase sales.
context_section_description: Through this scheme, a typical SA unit earned hundreds of reichsmarks each month. A hundred marks would be the SA earnings from the sale of 500,000 cigarettes, at 20 pfennig per thousand. A typical German smoker smoked around 15 cigarettes a day (similar to modern rates), so this would be income from just over a thousand smokers.
  At the time, an average-intensity "Trommler" smoker paid the average wage would spend around a tenth of his gross income on cigarettes. Many did not have a regular wage: this was the time of the Great Depression, and unemployment peaked at over 30% (see graph). The SA recruited particularly among the unemployed and underemployed.
  The firm first paid dividends to the SA in 1930. By 1932, it had a turnover of 36 million reichsmarks (equivalent to €125 million in 2009), and the SA made considerable profits; 1933 saw even higher returns. Money went to buy new buildings, factories, and advertising.
caption: Unemployed SA men, at least three of them smoking, in 1932, three years after the SA began manufacturing cigarettes
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