1887 Birthday of a loyal Nazi
Ernst Julius Günther Röhm was born in Bavaria in 1887. During Word War I he fought on the western front, took part in the battle for Verdun, was wounded on a number of occasions and won the Iron Cross. He ended the war as a captain and remained with the army during the first few years of peace. He participated in the suppression of a Communist rising in Münich in 1919 as a member of the voluntary paramilitary Freikorps. That same year he joined the German Workers’ Party which, under Adolf Hitler, another army veteran, became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or Nazis). When Röhm took part in the attempted Nazi coup in Münich in 1923, he was imprisoned briefly and resigned from the army. Nonetheless he was elected to the Reichstag as a member for a right-wing group and was instrumental in building up a militia to replace the banned Nazi paramilitary. After a quarrel with Hitler he migrated to Bolivia where he served as an army officer until 1930 when Hitler summoned him back to Germany.
Röhm became head of the Sturmabteilung (the SA), the Nazi party’s massive private army of Brownshirts, a force that would grow to 3,000,000 men. In the run-up to the elections of 1933 that brought Hitler to power, the SA fought street wars against the Social Democrats, Communists and those who were deemed opponents of Nazi ambitions. They broke up political meetings, attacked Jews and opposition newspapers, and aided workers in their strikes against big business.
When Hitler became Chancellor, the SA expected to reap the benefits in terms of power and personal rewards but they were to be disappointed. Röhm and many of his followers were genuine socialists and opponents of capitalism; they were dismayed to find Hitler cozying up to industrialists, officers of the regular army, and members of the ruling class that the Nazi revolution was supposed to be rid of. Hitler feared the army of street-fighters that he no longer needed and whose brutishness was embarrassing. Other Nazi leaders had pointed to Röhm’s open homosexuality as a public relations liability and fed the Führer false stories of a coup that was being planned by the Brownshirts. In 1934 Hitler met secretly, on the battleship Deutschland, with army and navy leaders who dreaded being submerged into the SA (Röhm had demanded being made Minister of Defence); in return for their pledge of loyalty they persuaded Hitler to reduce the power of the SA and dismiss Röhm.
The dismissal was a brutal one. On June 30, 1934, in the “Night of the Long Knives”, Hitler’s personal security force, the black-clad SS, rounded up Röhm and other SA leaders, as well as a gaggle of politicians Hitler wanted to eliminate. They were executed without trial, dumbfounded by this turn of events which they thought the Chancellor knew nothing about, many of them dying with “Heil Hitler” on their lips. Röhm, in his cell, was given the option of suicide but he refused, saying, “If I am to be killed, let Adolf do it himself.” He was shot to death by an SS officer.