Stormtroopers (German: Sturmtruppen or Stoßtruppen) were the only elite shock troops of the Imperial German Army (Deutsches Heer) that specialized in commando style raids, infiltrating the trenches and wiping out the enemy quickly, maneuver warfare, reconnaissance, and shock tactics. In the last years of World War I, Stoßtruppen ("shock troopers" or "shove troopers") were trained to use infiltration tactics – part of the Germans' improved method of attack on enemy trench warfare.

The German Empire entered the war certain that the conflict would be won in the course of great military campaigns, thus relegating results obtained during individual clashes to the background; consequently the best officers, concentrated in the German General Staff, placed their attention on maneuver warfare and the rational exploitation of railways, rather than concentrating on the conduct of battles. This attitude made a direct contribution to operational victories of Germany in Russia, Romania, Serbia and Italy, but it resulted in failure in the West. Thus the German officers on the Western Front found themselves in need of resolving the static situation caused by trench warfare on the battlefield.

Two concepts can be identified with the attempt to find a solution to the problem. The first was the belief, mainly held by Erich von Falkenhayn, that tactical action alone, the mere killing of enemy soldiers, was a sufficient means to achieve the strategic goal. The second was the idea, emerging from experience of countless "limited target attacks" and forays into the trenches, that combat had become such a difficult task that operational considerations had to be subordinated to tactical ones. The promoter for this last thesis was General der Infanterie Erich Ludendorff who, having become de facto commander of the Imperial German Army after the German defeat at the Battle of Verdun, gave decisive support to the development of assault battalions as a solution to resume maneuver warfare.

The creation of these units was the first, and perhaps the most innovative, attempt by the German army to break out of the impasse of trench warfare. With the use of well-trained soldiers, commanded by NCOs with autonomous decision-making capacity, an attempt was made to traverse no man's land and to break through enemy lines in predefined points in order to allow subsequent waves to liquidate the now confused and isolated opponent, opening large gaps in its defensive systems and then resuming maneuver warfare, which would have allowed Germany to win the conflict.^{[disputed – discuss]}

Ever since the introduction of breechloaders, there had been a growing realization that the days of close-order infantry assault were coming to an end. For a time, up to the turn of the 19th century, armies tried to circumvent the problem by moving into range in dispersed formations and charging only the last meters, as the French did in the Second Italian War of Independence (1859), the Prussians in the Austro-Prussian War (1866), or the Germans against the French in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71).

The advent of the machine gun and the adoption of hydraulic-recoil artillery was a further setback for close order. The showing of the Boers against the British in the Second Boer War (1899–1902) fanned an enthusiasm for "Boer tactics": open order tactics reliant more on achieving fire superiority and moving quickly when enemy fire was ineffective than on positioning oneself for the final bayonet charge.

In the first part of the war, the standard assault on a trench line consisted of a lengthy artillery barrage all along the line, attempting to smash the enemy positions, followed by a rush forward of infantry in massed lines to overwhelm any remaining defenders. This process either failed, or at most gained only a short distance, while incurring enormous casualties, and the armies settled into trench warfare.

The first experimental pioneer assault unit of the German army formed in the spring of 1915, founded by Major Calsow and later commanded and refined by Hauptmann Willy Rohr. These methods further evolved war tactics originally developed by the Prussians, to form the basis of German infiltration tactics. The troops involved were identified as Stoßtruppen (literally: "thrust-troops"), and the term was translated as "storm troops" in English.