Ernst Röhm

Born in Munich in 1887, Ernst Röhm joined the German army as a teenager and served in World War I. He became acquainted with Adolf Hitler in 1919. Hitler shrewdly took note of Röhm's intensely militaristic nature, his experience in the war and the fact that he was the leader of an extreme right-wing paramilitary organization called the Frontbann--one of many such units, called "freikorps", that existed in Germany at the time--and he persuaded Röhm to join his fledgling Nazi party. Röhm, along with Hitler, was among the Nazi participants in the abortive "Beer Hall Putsch" in Munich in 1923, and within a few years he took on a major role in the development of the Nazi party. He formed a group called the Sturmabteilung, or SA--the notorious "Storm Troopers", comprised mainly of street thugs, brawlers, ex-convicts and fanatical right-wing German nationalists. Röhm turned them into a tough, disciplined military unit, fanatically devoted to Hitler and Naziism. The SA took part in many violent clashes with Nazi opponents on both the left and the right, and were responsible for the deaths of quite a few, whether as the result of street fights or outright political murders. The unit soon gained a fearsome reputation, which eventually proved to be Röhm's undoing. As the SA began to become more widely known and feared, Röhm wanted it to be independent of the Nazi party's political arm and also wanted to be able to act on his own. Hitler, in his desire to exercise complete control over all facets of the party's structure, expressly forbade this, and soon began to suspect Röhm of plotting a coup against him, especially when he discovered that most of the senior SA leadership was more devoted to Röhm than they were to him. Hitler also had instructed Röhm to tone down the increasingly radical behavior of his "brownshirts", which were beginning to give the Nazi party a bad name (one of the reasons the party usually did so poorly in elections was the public's revulsion at and distrust of the SA's tactics). The situation resulted in Röhm's resigning from the party and taking a job in South America training the Bolivian army. However, although Hitler placed men more to his liking in charge of the SA, the unit began getting more and more out of control, finally incurring the enmity of the German army, which demanded that Hitler clamp down on the SA or it would do so. Desperate to avoid any confrontation with the army--whose support he knew he would need when it came time for him to grab power--Hitler re-installed Röhm as head of the SA to bring it back under control. However, not only did the SA grow even more violent and unpredictable under Röhm, but he managed to mollify the army and even secured use of military facilities at which to train his men, whose numbers were now increased by Röhm's absorption of several independent paramilitary groups into the SA. By this time the Nazi party was beginning to accumulate some political power in Germany, and the SA's continuing violence and brutal tactics were threatening to undermine that power. By 1934 it had grown to more than two million members--more than 20 times the strength of the regular German army, which now looked upon it in alarm as both a rival for power and a threat to Germany itself. In addition, Röhm's ardent socialism alienated many of the wealthy businessmen and industrialists who bankrolled the Nazi party, and his blatant homosexuality--and that of many of the SA's top leaders--were beginning to cost Hitler support among conservative religious and political groups, which up to then had backed him strongly. Hitler also again suspected that Röhm and the SA were planning a coup against him now that they believed they were stronger than Hitler and his colleagues. On the night of June 29, 1934, the leadership of the SA held an important meeting in Munich, which Hitler promised to attend. Instead, he sent several carloads of SS troops there, and they arrested Röhm and the other top leaders of the SA. Other arrests of SA leaders took place in cities around the country, and many others were simply shot as soon as they were located. Röhm and much of the SA leadership were thrown into prison, and Röhm himself was shot by two SS executioners in his cell when he refused to commit suicide. It is estimated that several hundred SA officials were killed that night and in the following several days, a period that has become known as the "Night of the Long Knives", although the real numbers will never be known. The SA was disbanded, with some of its members being absorbed into the SS, and one more threat to Hitler's grab for absolute power in Germany was eliminated.