Background
Ernst Rohm was born in Munich on 28 November 1887, the son of an old Bavarian family of civil servants.
Ernst Rohm was born in Munich on 28 November 1887, the son of an old Bavarian family of civil servants.
Rohm became a professional freebooter and swashbuckler after 1918, with boundless contempt for the pharisaism and hypocrisy of normal civilian life. His association with Hitler began in 1919 and they became close comrades - Rohm was one of the few people whom the Führer addressed as du in conversation - marching together on the Felderrnhalle in 1923.
In these early years of the Nazi movement, the Reichswehr Captain - one of a number of ambitious officers in Munich who had been involved in the plot led by von Epp against the left-wing government in Bavaria - was an indispensable organizer who brought many new recruits into the NSDAP. He had also become the master of a secret cache of weapons in Bavaria, which he hoped to use in a frontal assault on the State. But the failure of the Beer-Hall putsch led to his dismissal from the Reichswehr and his temporary withdrawal from political life. Disoriented, he took a number of temporary jobs w hich frustrated and bored him, before setting off for Bolivia where he spent two years as a military instructor.
Recalled by Hitler after the spectacular Nazi electoral successes of 14 September 1930 to take command of the SA (storm troopers), Rohm rapidly expanded it into a popular army of street fighters, gangsters and toughs. From 70,000 in 1930, the SA increased to 170,000 in 1931, swelled by the growing numbers of unemployed and social déclassés. Rohm regarded this plebeian army of desperadoes as the core of the Nazi movement, the embodiment and guarantee of ‘permanent revolution’, of the barracks socialism and blind dynamism he had absorbed during the war. The SA fulfilled an indispensable role in Hitler’s rise to power between 1930 and 1933, by winning the battle of the streets against the communists and intimidating political opposition. By the end of 1933, however, the SA, which now numbered almost four-and-a-half million men and was seemingly more powerful than the Reichswehr itself, had become disillusioned by the results of the Nazi ‘revolution’. It felt cheated of the spoils of office, and the growing bureaucratization of the Nazi movement angered those like Rohm who still dreamed of a Soldatenstaat (Soldiers’ State) and the primacy of the soldier over the politician. Rohm envisaged a duumvirate with Hitler as political leader and himself as the generalissimo of a vast armed force to be created by absorbing his SA into the regular army.
As SA Chief of Staff, Reich Minister without Portfolio and Minister of the Bavarian State government, Rohm was still in a strong position at the end of 1933 but fatally misplayed his hand. Failing to understand Hitler’s concept of a gradual revolution carried out under the cloak of legality, Rohm united opposition against his plans by his insistence on maintaining momentum in a socialist direction and talking openly about a revolution¬ary conquest of the State. His populist demagogy alienated the middle classes, the conservative Junkers and the Rhineland industrialists, whose support Hitler still needed. Rdhm’s demands that the SA become a fully- fledged people’s army under his own leadership particularly alarmed the Reichswehr generals, who were no less indispensable to Hitler’s long-term plans. Moreover, Rohm had antagonized two dangerous rivals, Goering and Himmler, to the point where they considered him Enemy No. 1 and were constantly pressuring Hitler to cut him down to size, utilizing the SS and the Gestapo to this end. Rohm’s own conduct and that of his entourage, given to dissolute homosexual orgies and drinking bouts, loutish behaviour and wildly indiscreet remarks, made the task of his enemies easier. Nevertheless, Hitler hesitated to eliminate his oldest comrade-in¬arms, a man to whom he felt a debt of gratitude and a certain warmth, even though he had become a liability and even a danger to his régime.
After warning Rohm not to start a ‘second revolution' and after ordering the SA to take a month's leave beginning in July 1934, the decision was taken to liquidate its leader and his closest followers. The guileless Rohm, who suspected nothing, was surprised on 30 June 1934 in a private hotel at Bad Wiessee, a small Bavarian spa south of Munich, where he was taking a holiday with other SA leaders. He was awoken by Hitler and a detachment of SS troops and taken to Stadelheim prison, where he was executed two days later after refusing to take his own life. The Blood Purge, also known as the Night of the Long Knives, led to the deaths of seventy-seven leading Nazis and at least one hundred others, including General von Schleicher and his wife.
Rohm was posthumously branded a traitor and accused of having fomented a nationwide plot to overthrow the government. The Nazi régime professed to be scandalized by the homosexual goings-on in his entourage, although this had been well known and tolerated for years. He and his followers were charged with having wanted ‘revolution for the sake of revolution', an accusation which came closer to the real reason for his death. By the end of 1934 the SA had lost any political function in the new Nazi State and, with Rohm gone, Hitler no longer had to choose between the nationalist and ‘socialist’ wings of his movement.
Rohm was the prototype of the lost generation that sought to eternalize the values of the trenches, the camaraderie of the front-line soldiers in World War I with their restlessness, adventurism and latent criminality masquerading as nationalism.
Physical Characteristics: A fat, stocky, red-faced little man who had been wounded three times in the war with half his nose shot away.