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Ernst Röhm
(November 28, 1887 - July 3, 1934) Germany

Ernst Rohm

Leader of the Nazi Brown Shirt

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Ernst Röhm, (or Roehm) was born in Munich. He joined the Imperial German Army in 1906, and served with distinction in WWI, reaching the rank of Captain and receiving severe facial wounds at Verdun in June 1916. After the war, while still an Army intelligence officer, he returned to Bavaria and was an early member of German Workers Party, which became the Nazi Party.

Ernst RohmHe secretly directed Army funds to the party and became a close associate of its leader, Adolf Hitler. He organised the party's paramilitary wing, the Sturmabteilung (SA) or Brown Shirt. Following the failure of the 1924 Nazi "Beerhall Putsch", Röhm fell out with Hitler and went to Bolivia where he worked as a military adviser.

In 1931 he was asked by Hitler to return to Germany and become SA Cief-of-Staff. For the next three years he was one of the most powerful men in the Nazi Party. When Hitler became Chacellor in January 1933, Röhm became a minister in both the national and Bavarian governments, but he mantained his independent base in the SA.

He took seriously the "socialist" component of National Socialism, and saw the SA, a largely working-class organisation, as a mean of "completing the revolution" by taking over the Army.

This made Röhm a threat to both the Army and to Hitler's alliance with the industrualists and financers who supported the Nazis but had no intention of allowing a "revolution" of any kind in Germany. Through 1933 his relationship with Hitler, once very close, deteriorated as other Nazi leaders such as Göring, Himmler and Goebbels plotted against him.

The Army leaders demanded that the undisciplined SA (now 2.5 million strong) be brought under control as their price for supporting Hitler's regime. In early 1934 Hitler was persuaded by Himmler and others that the power of the SA and Röhm had to be broken. The Gestapo was directed to collect inriminating evidence on Röhm's personal life, of which there was plenty.

Röm was warned that his position was under threat, but he did not believe it. He thought his long association with Hitler and the political debt that Hitler owed him from the 1920s would protect him. In fact Hitler resented this debt, and saw Röhm and the SA as a threat to his personal authority.

On 30 June Himmler's SS was launched against Röhm, who was arrested and shot along with dozen of others in the "Night of the Long Knives".

Ernst RohmRöhm was the only Nazi of any seniority who was homosexual. He did promote a homosexual circle in the SA, but this proved a weakness, not a strenght, when the other Nazi leaders began plotting against him.

Himmler was a virulent anti-homosexual, and prescribed ferocious penalties for homosexuals in the SS. The Nazi regime mantained all Germany's existing anti-homosexual laws, and added more of their own. And they enforced them: thousands of homosexual men died in police cells or concentration camps.

Röhm was not murdered because he was homosexual, but the fact that he was so gave his enemies a means of turning Hitler against him and securing his destruction.

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Source: excerpts from: Aldrich R. & Wotherspoon G., Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian History, from Antiquity to WWII, Routledge, London, 2001

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