Adolf Hitler and Ernst Röhm served in the German military during WWI (1914-1918). They both survived the mass layoffs of war veterans caused by the Treaty of Versailles, which limited the multi-million-man-strong German army to a cap of 100,000 men in 1919. In the post-war environment, Hitler and Röhm were both employed by the military to interact with political parties and paramilitary organizations. Specifically, in 1919, Hitler worked as an army spy and infiltrated the German Workers’ Party, of which Röhm was already a member. Hitler left the army in 1920 to devote himself to the party, which was rebranded to the Nazi Party that year. Röhm, meanwhile, remained as an officer in the army, and had a role in overseeing financial and administrative aid to a patchwork of independent paramilitary groups known as the Freikorps (Free Corps), which had swelled in numbers due to the mass layoff of military veterans.
At the time, the military saw the Freikorps militias as a necessity to offset national vulnerabilities caused by the Treaty of Versailles’ military cap. The German military of the time—the Reichswehr—supported the idea of having paramilitary militias patrolling border regions and acting as an informal military reserve. Some of the militias were directly controlled by the military—this was the so-called Black Reichswehr, a shadow branch of the military—but many other paramilitaries received aid from the government that had fewer strings attached. In that capacity, Ernst Röhm used all of the power of his military post to help Hitler recruit, develop, equip, and train the Sturm Abteilung (the SA, or Storm Troopers), which was founded in 1921. Like the other Freikorps organizations, the SA was a paramilitary unit, but this one was attached to a political party—the Nazi Party. The Storm Troopers were the Nazi Party’s early security force, deployed to guard party functions and to intimidate (or brawl with) party foes in the streets. Ernst Röhm, from the beginning, was an influential leader of the SA, but he kept his ties informal, due to his role as an active military officer. That changed in 1923, however, when Röhm joined Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch insurrection. Hitler, Röhm, and other leaders of the revolt were arrested, albeit for a short period of time. Consequently, Röhm was kicked out of the military, at which point he no longer worried about openly associating with the SA.
Hitler, from early on in his Nazi career, had worries and reservations about the SA—namely about the organization’s loyalty and discipline (or lack thereof on both matters). By the time of the Beer Hall Putsch, he founded a second paramilitary force, one loyal only to him. This Stosstrupp Hitler (Shock Troop Hitler) later morphed into the infamous Shutz Staffel (SS, or Security Staff). Even so, the SS was also technically a subsection of the SA, which eventually caused tension between the two groups and their leadership.
Hitler, after being briefly imprisoned for the failed Beer Hall Putsch, believed that a façade of legitimacy was key to his authoritarian ambitions, so he strove to gain high office democratically through the parliamentary process of the Weimar Republic. To shape up his rebellious and lawless image, Hitler realized he needed to rein in the violent, brutish SA horde that was tarnishing the fledgling Nazi Party’s public image. In 1925, Hitler placed the SA paramilitary under the control of the Nazi Party Political Organization, and he also disarmed the SA of its firearms. Ernst Röhm was strongly against this, as he wanted the SA to be a paramilitary strong enough to rival (and absorb) the Reichswehr. Röhm, in protest of Hitler’s restrictions on the SA, chose to distance himself from the Nazi Party and the SA after the 1925 reform. He eventually left Germany and became a military advisor in Bolivia.
During Röhm’s absence, Hitler continued his efforts to consolidate power over the SA and also began building up the SS. Hitler, despite resistance from regional SA leaders, declared he was the supreme leader of the Storm Troopers in 1930, but he still delegated SA management to lieutenants. Around that time, Hitler invited Ernst Röhm back from Bolivia and he placed Röhm in charge of the SA in 1931. Röhm, meanwhile, still dreamed of turning the SA into a militant force that could overtake the German military, but he played along with the party leader as Hitler schemed to gain power through the parliamentary process.
In 1932, Hitler ran for president. He did not win, but he used the election as leverage to negotiate for a government position. After obtaining the support of the former chancellor, Franz von Papen (r. 1932)—a fellow advocate of authoritarianism—Hitler was appointed as chancellor under President Paul von Hindenburg in 1933. Franz von Papen (then Hitler’s vice-chancellor) came to regret his role in facilitating Hitler’s rise to power, for the Nazis began quickly gathering totalitarian control at a rate that alarmed even the pro-authoritarian Papen. In a speech at Dresden in July of 1933, von Papen ironically lamented, “Who among us would have imagined it possible that within four months the National Socialists [Nazis] would have taken over the entire German Reich, that all the middle-class political parties would have disappeared, that our democratic institutions would have been eliminated as with one stroke of the pen, that the new chancellor would have assumed a degree of power that no German emperor ever possessed” (Franz von Papen, Der Wahrheit eine Gasse, 1952, trans. in David Clay Large’s Between Two Fires, 1990). Of course, Papen’s speeches would later be censored by Hitler’s chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels. At that point, Ernst Röhm was eager for Hitler to launch a final coup to seize the last vestiges of power from President von Hindenburg and the Reichswehr military leadership. Hitler, however, was still playing the long game, reining in the Nazis’ worst behavior while also cultivating a relationship with Hindenburg and the Reichswehr generals. Hitler had his eye on the presidential powers of elderly Paul von Hindenburg, and he wanted an orderly and passably legitimate transfer of power, just as he had obtained with the chancellorship. An SA coup d’état against the president and military did not align with that vision. Hitler wanted power to be handed to him freely, and with an air of legitimacy.
Ernst Röhm never directly refuted Hitler publicly or to his face, but he did continue to recruit and train the SA as a militant paramilitary force, whereas Hitler wished to transition the group into more of a cultural movement. By 1934, the organization roughly numbered between 3 and 5 million men, and Röhm began to rearm the organization with guns. SA members disrupted and terrorized society, with armed Storm Troopers threatening civilians, businesses, banks, law officials and judges, often without the permission or order from Hitler. They also, of course, committed acts of prejudice-based violence and looting, based on politics, race, class, religion, and sexuality—the last point of which is ironic, as Ernst Röhm and some other prominent SA leaders were openly homosexual. Röhm did not intervene, and the multitudinous and diffuse nature of the SA organization, with its many regional units, would have made it difficult for Röhm to curtail the violence even if he wanted to (but there is no sign that he did). To make matters worse, Röhm also declared the SA exempt from police jurisdiction, which, anyway, had been placed by Hitler under the command of Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, an organization that was still a branch of the SA at that time.
Suffice it to say, Röhm and his rowdy regional SA leaders had made enemies of many powerful figures by 1934, such as Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Reinhard Heydrich and Joseph Goebbels, as well as the German military leadership (as they knew Röhm aspired to absorb the Reichswehr into the SA). Röhm’s foes used his homosexuality as a wedge to dislodge the SA leader from Adolf Hitler, as Hitler had always been uncomfortable and frustrated by Röhm’s personal life, especially when accounts of it ended up published in the tabloids. It also did not help that SA militants were known to harass and brawl against members of the military. With the tensions spiraling out of control, Hitler summoned Röhm in early June, 1934, and demanded that he suspend SA activities. Ernst Röhm dared not refuse the direct order, so he acquiesced and then retired to a spa at Bad Wiessee, Bavaria. Regional SA leaders, however, continued to hold marches and rallies. Röhm’s enemies were not placated, and they did not relent in clamoring for the SA to be dealt with. Instead, Hitler was fed an endless stream of information by the SS and Gestapo about the misdeeds of the Storm Troopers and the danger of an SA conspiracy, as well as salacious accounts of the SA leader’s hedonism. Encouraged by Röhm’s rivals and enemies, and with the approval of the increasingly ill Paul von Hindenburg and key military leaders, Hitler decided to launch a blood purge, the Night of the Long Knives. Kill lists were prepared, and the movements of SA leaders were tracked by the Gestapo and SS.
In a tragic and ironic twist of fate, anti-Hitler opposition leaders were at that very time planning to make a last-ditch effort to convince Paul von Hindenburg to eject Hitler from power. Yet, the Nazis learned of the plan and launched the Night of the Long Knives quicker than scheduled on June 30, 1934, to thwart a planned meeting between Hindenburg and Franz von Papen that was meant to occur that same day. Hitler contacted Röhm and had him gather together all of his top lieutenants in the SA at the Bad Wiessee spa facility by June 30—Röhm complied, not knowing the summit would be a trap. Hitler then raided the Bad Wiessee venue and arrested the SA leaders. It was the opening salvo of a mass-murder spree that ensued, targeting SA leadership, as well as dissidents in government and political rivals of Hitler. Rõhm was arrested at the beginning of the purge, and was held captive while his comrades were murdered.
Targets of Hitler’s kill lists were dragged off to prisons, stations and forests, and (unlike Röhm) faced prompt execution. Other targets were shot right where they were confronted, with the fabricated excuse being that they resisted arrest. This was the fate of several dissidents, including former chancellor Kurt von Schleicher (r. 1932-1933), as well as Franz von Papen’s press secretary, Herbert von Bose. Papen’s speechwriter, Edgar Jung, was also arrested by the Gestapo and executed. Papen, himself (still the vice-chancellor at that time), was placed under house arrest during the massacre and spared. Ernst Röhm, imprisoned for the multiple days of murder, was finally executed on July 1, 1934, one of around 85 people who were killed as a result of the Night of the Long Knives. With the destruction of the SA, the even worse SS gained freedom to flourish. Even worse, the public, press, parliament, and military in Germany did not condemn the executions, but instead accepted Hitler’s dangerous declaration (made on July 3rd) that such extrajudicial killings were within the legal purview of his authority.
Written by C. Keith Hansley
Picture Attribution: (Adolf Hitler followed by Ernst Rohm at Brunswick, c. 17-18 October 1931, [Public Domain] via Wikimedia Commons).
Sources:
- Between Two Fires: Europe’s Path in the 1930s, by David Clay Large. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990, 1991.
- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ernst-Rohm
- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Adolf-Hitler
- https://www.britannica.com/event/Beer-Hall-Putsch/The-Munich-Putsch
- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Heinrich-Himmler
- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Franz-von-Papen
- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kurt-von-Schleicher
