After the fiasco of the Beer Hall Putsch, most people treated Hitler as a laughingstock. Nevertheless, there were ominous undercurrents of the convulsions to come. On March 21, 1927, a band of six hundred Nazi brownshirt storm troopers of the Sturmabteilung , the SA, beat up a group of Communists in eastern Berlin and marched into the center of the city, attacking anyone on the Kurfürstendamm who looked Jewish. The city authorities responded by banning Nazi activity from Berlin for a year.
