IMHO no.

The brown shirts started in ~1920 as a party owned security force to ‚defend‘ public speeches of the Nazi party (almost every political party had those back in that time). They then also agitated and tried to disturb other parties‘ speeches. And they all brawled in the streets. Most fiercely of all were the rights between the brown and red shirts (the communist party guys). They were banned in 1923. For reasons, they were allowed to reform in 1925. They went straight away back to agitation and looking for brawls against literally anyone from Christian groups, Jews, Jehovah’s witnesses to unions, leftists of all variants, but also wrong right-wingers, pro democratic people, pro monarchy types, literally anyone. Until the Nazi takeover of power in January 1933 they had (obviously) no official job or task. They were kinda like the proud boys but actually competent in what they did and in the second half of 1932 roughly 0.5M strong.

A month after the takeover, a new section of police was founded – and here it gets interesting. The so called Hilfspolizei literally the auxiliary police. Those dudes were mainly recruited from SA cadres and were used to ‚aide‘ police work as arresting regime critics and stuff. But that didn’t go down well with the normal police as well as the people (even NSDAP voters) and the biggest federal state (Prussia) the Hilfspolizei was dissolved after less than half a year. In the other states they were put to desk work.

When Hitler was undoubted in his position in early 1934 he got afraid of what the SA (with roughly half a million dudes) might do if they got bored. So, tl;dr night of the long knifes occurred and after that the brown shirts didn’t really do anything any more. The populace had no interaction with them basically.

As I laid out, you cannot really compare the brown shirts with ice except for a very brief period of time of about a couple of months in 1933. They had not the opportunities and freedoms that ice now has. They did not have the backing of the population or even like half the population like ice has. Of course, it doesn’t make a difference to the hundreds of leftists and Jews who got their skulls cracked during that time. And the death toll of Brown shirt violence during that time lies in the couple of hundreds BUT, by my own conservative approximation, at least 90% of those deaths were still your standard political violence brawls between red shirts and brown shirts on Hindenburg Square or wherever. Jews, homosexuals and member other ‚undesirable‘ groups would also perish in the first iteration of camps in 1933, but those weren’t operated nor ‚filled‘ by the brown shirts.

At some point I have to check this rundown from my memory against the established sources, but that moment is not today.

xoxo brech