Everyone
knows the name of Adolf Hitler, but that of Ernst Röhm is far less familiar.
However, had things worked out differently, the reverse might well have been
the case.
Ernst Röhm
was born in Munich (Bavaria ) in 1887 (making him two years older
than Hitler). Coming from an aristocratic and military background he joined the
German army in 1906 and was seriously wounded by shrapnel shortly after World
War I broke out. His facial injuries could only be repaired to the extent
allowed by the standards of plastic surgery at that time, with the result that
he remained severely scarred for the rest of his life. He returned to the front
and was wounded on two further occasions, eventually being invalided to an
office job.
Adolf Hitler,
whose origins were more middle-class, was also a soldier during World War I,
and, like Ernst Röhm, he suffered injuries at the western front, although his were
not as serious as Röhm’s.
The outcome
of the war horrified both men, who regarded the settlement imposed on Germany by the
Treaty of Versailles, in Hitler’s words, as “the greatest villainy of the
century”. They both saw a need to fight on and not let the German military
spirit die. Hitler remained a member of the Reichswehr (the much reduced German
army as permitted by the Versailles treaty) while Röhm became the commander-in-chief
of the Munich Freikorps, a loosely structured organisation consisting of
various groups, the members of which harboured a grudge against the new order
and were particularly opposed to the growing menace of Bolshevism in southern
Germany.
Both Hitler
and Röhm became members of a political organisation called the German Workers
Party (the Deutsche Arbeitspartei or DAP). Hitler had originally been sent as a
spy to infiltrate the DAP, but he found its ethos to be much to his liking and,
instead of disrupting the DAP, he joined it and left the army. He was soon to
rise to the top of the DAP and transform it into the National Socialist German
Workers Party, which the world would come to know as the Nazi Party.
The two men
probably first met towards the end of 1919, and it soon became apparent to
Hitler how useful Röhm could be to him. Röhm had all sorts of connections in
the seedy underworld of paramilitary groups that had comprised the Freikorps,
and he was able to get hold of weapons. Once armed, the Nazis could clearly
become a force to be reckoned with.
Hitler and
Röhm became close friends, as they shared a common world view and the same
hatreds, namely of Jews, Marxists and weak German politicians.
Hitler’s
skills were clearly in politicking and speech-making, whereas Röhm was a man of
action who knew how to use violence to support the politics. He recruited a
gang of thugs whom he dressed in brown shirts and gave the name
“Sturmabteilung” (Stormtroopers), generally shortened to SA. These became
Hitler’s enforcers who were adept at creating mayhem and beating up anyone who
appeared to dissent from the ranting offered by the man on the platform, namely
Adolf Hitler.
In 1923 the
Nazis attempted to seize power in Bavaria
but the “Beer Hall Putsch” failed and both Hitler and Röhm were arrested and
sentenced to jail terms in Landsberg Prison (where Hitler used his time to
write “Mein Kampf”). Both were released early, in 1924.
Hitler now
decided on a change of tactics, which was to use the political process to gain
power. This marked the first breach between Hitler and Röhm, as the latter was
much keener on using force. Hitler was afraid of further arrests as a result of
the SA’s violence and wanted to restrict it to being a recruiting agency for
the Nazi Party. That did not suit Röhm at all, and in 1925 he quit Germany altogether and spent the next five years
in South America as an advisor to the army of Bolivia .
Hitler’s strategy
of pursuing a political route to power started to pay dividends in the late
1920s as increasing numbers of Nazis won seats in the Reichstag (Germany ’s
parliament). However, he was troubled by the fact that the SA, without Röhm’s
leadership, was getting progressively out of hand. He now had another group to
act as his bodyguard, the highly disciplined Schutzstaffel (SS) led by Heinrich
Himmler, and he wanted the SA to perform a different role. Only Ernst Röhm
would have the authority to drum them into shape, so Hitler invited Röhm to
return to Germany ,
which he did in January 1931.
Hitler’s idea
was that the SA could be used to exert less than gentle pressure on people to
make them vote for the Nazis, but its image would have to change for this to
happen. Röhm accepted this new role and began cleaning up the SA, groups of
whom now went on church parades on Sundays rather than smashing up beer halls on
Saturdays. The SA also increased hugely in size, growing from 88,000 to 260,000
members within the first year of Röhm’s return. By 1934 its size exceeded three
million.
Röhm’s big
mistake was to have a different point of view from that of Adolf Hitler. He
insisted on what he called “The primacy of the soldier”, and did not want the
SA to be under political control. This was completely counter to Adolf’s
Hitler’s thinking.
However, Hitler
was slow to realise that his action of recalling his old friend from Bolivia
could have been a serious mistake on his own part. The SA was now a rapidly
growing armed force, far more disciplined than before, and its members were
loyal firstly to Ernst Röhm and only secondly to Adolf Hitler.
Röhm, for his
part, was making enemies of other powerful members of the Nazi Party, particularly
Heinrich Himmler of the SS, who had risen from nowhere during Röhm’s absence
and now saw himself as being under threat. Himmler clearly despised Röhm,
despite the latter’s aristocratic pedigree, because he regarded Röhm as the
leader of a working-class rabble of bully-boys, unlike his own elite force of
hand-picked SS guards who came from a different class of German society.
One tactic
used by Himmler, with the assistance of Hermann Göring, was to smear Ernst
Röhm’s character. There was little doubt that Röhm was a homosexual, as were
other leading members of the SA. His behaviour was far from discreet, and
rumours of gay orgies involving SA officers were rife. However, this did not
bother Hitler at first, as he still regarded Röhm as a valuable ally whose
private life was his own affair.
But Röhm went
too far by boasting that his SA was the real force in Germany and
that Hitler could not touch him. He was quoted as saying: “Hitler can’t walk
over me as he might have done a year ago. I’ve seen to that. I have three
million men, with every key position in the hands of my own people”.
Hitler was
only persuaded to turn against his old friend when he was eventually convinced
that Röhm was plotting to overthrow him. Himmler and Göring invented a story to
the effect that Röhm’s SA was going to seize power in a coup, having been
offered money by the French government. Fake dossiers were produced to provide
“evidence” against the leaders of the SA, and Hitler believed what he was told.
Hitler’s
revenge came on 30th June 1934. He had ordered the SA leaders to a
meeting at a hotel in Bavaria ,
but early in the morning of the day on which it was supposed to take place he
arrived at the hotel in person, accompanied by armed SS members, and burst into
Röhm’s room, where he was still in bed, to accuse him of treachery.
The events of
the next 24 hours have been given the name “The Night of the Long Knives”.
Suspected SA plotters were rounded up and executed, possibly as many as 200
people. Hitler’s sentence on Ernst Röhm was that he be made to take his own
life, possibly so that Hitler would be spared the personal guilt of having
ordered the killing of his old comrade-in-arms. However, Röhm refused to play along
with this ploy and, having been left alone in a room with a pistol for ten
minutes without shooting himself, was shot by the three SS guards who had been
sent by Hitler to carry out his orders.
The death of
Ernst Röhm and his fellow SA leaders made it abundantly clear that there was
only one Führer in Germany ,
and that was Adolf Hitler. With his one serious rival out of the way, albeit by
foul means rather than fair, the Hitler dictatorship was firmly entrenched. On
the other hand, there were few who mourned the passing of Ernst Röhm.
© John
Welford
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