The Only Nazi Hitler Feared
Ernst Röhm was not a distant rival or a late convert. He was one of the men who built Adolf Hitler’s movement from the beer halls of Munich, a wartime captain who treated the future dictator as a comrade rather than a prophet. For more than a decade that closeness served Hitler. By the summer of 1934 it had become a threat. Röhm commanded the largest armed force in Germany that was not the regular army. He still used Hitler’s first name. He talked of a “second revolution.” And he was the one senior Nazi who never fully submitted to the Führer cult. That combination is why Hitler decided he could not let him live.
Röhm was born in Munich on 28 November 1887. He entered the Bavarian army in 1906 and fought on the Western Front in the First World War, where he was wounded several times and earned the Iron Cross. Defeat in 1918 did not send him home to civilian life. Like many officers of his generation, he drifted into the world of right-wing paramilitary leagues that sprang up after the armistice. He helped Hitler take over the small German Workers’ Party and organised the first stormtroopers who protected Nazi meetings and smashed opponents in the streets. When the Beer Hall Putsch collapsed in November 1923, both men were convicted of high treason. Hitler used the trial as a platform. Röhm served a short sentence and then watched the party rebuild itself as a legal organisation.
The partnership cracked in the mid-1920s. Röhm wanted a military-style movement. Hitler wanted a political party that could win elections and bargain with the army and industrialists. Röhm resigned and left for Bolivia in 1928, working as a military adviser and staff officer. It was not exile in the romantic sense, but it removed him from the daily struggle in Germany. In late 1930 Hitler called him back. The SA had grown restless. A revolt in Berlin had shown that the brownshirts needed a tough organiser who could still command personal loyalty. Röhm arrived in Munich in November 1930 and was appointed SA chief of staff in January 1931. Hitler kept the title of supreme SA leader for himself. Röhm ran the organisation day to day.
That arrangement revealed the oddity of their relationship. Röhm was the only leading Nazi who continued to address Hitler as “Adolf” or “Adi” and used the familiar German “du.” Most others had already switched to “Mein Führer.” Hitler knew about Röhm’s homosexuality and tolerated it for years, even after private letters were leaked and used against the party. The reason was practical. Röhm could mobilise men. After Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, the SA exploded in size. Estimates vary, but by mid-1934 the organisation numbered between three and four and a half million, far larger than the 100,000-man Reichswehr allowed under the Treaty of Versailles. Many new members were opportunists. Many others were veterans of street fighting who expected jobs, land reform and a social upheaval once the Nazis held power.
Röhm gave those expectations a voice. He spoke of a second revolution that would complete what 1933 had only begun. He wanted the SA treated as the true national army, with the professional officer corps reduced to a training school. Army leaders heard those remarks and drew the obvious conclusion. So did Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler, both of whom stood to gain if the SA was cut down. Conservatives around President Paul von Hindenburg warned that the brownshirts were becoming a lawless state within the state. Industrialists who had funded Hitler disliked Röhm’s talk of social revolution. The SA’s public brawling, once useful for intimidation, now looked like a liability for a government that wanted order and rearmament.
Hitler delayed. Röhm had stood with him before the Munich court. Killing an old comrade was politically messy and personally uncomfortable. Pressure mounted in June 1934. Hindenburg was dying. The army wanted a guarantee that it would remain the sole bearer of arms. Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich assembled a dossier claiming Röhm was planning a coup, financed by France. There is no convincing evidence that such a putsch was imminent. What existed was a large, poorly disciplined force whose leader would not accept a subordinate role.
Hitler summoned the SA leadership to a meeting at the Hotel Hanselbauer in the Bavarian spa town of Bad Wiessee. In the early hours of 30 June he arrived himself, burst into Röhm’s room and placed him under arrest. Other SA commanders were seized on the roads into town or at railway stations. Executions began that evening. In Munich’s Stadelheim prison, in the SS barracks at Lichterfelde in Berlin, and at sites across the country, SS and police units shot SA leaders and a mixed list of other enemies: former chancellor Kurt von Schleicher and his wife, Gregor Strasser, aides of Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen, and people killed by mistake or because they knew too much.
Röhm was held overnight. Hitler still hesitated. On 1 July, under pressure from Göring and Himmler, he ordered the killing. SS officers Theodor Eicke and Michael Lippert entered the cell, left a pistol, and told Röhm to shoot himself. He refused. They shot him. Hitler later told the Reichstag that 74 people had died in a necessary cleansing. Named victims number about 85 to 90. Some historians put the total near 150 or 200. On 3 July a law declared the killings legal acts of state self-defence. When Hindenburg died on 2 August, the army swore a personal oath to Hitler. The offices of president and chancellor were merged. The SA survived as a hollow organisation. The SS became the regime’s preferred instrument of terror.
The purge was not only about homosexuality or corruption, though Nazi propaganda used both as cover. It was about monopoly of force. Hitler could work with criminals, fanatics and incompetents so long as they accepted that his word was final. Röhm never quite did. He still thought of the movement as something he had helped create, not a vehicle that existed only through Hitler. That made him unique in the inner circle and, in the end, intolerable.
The Night of the Long Knives taught the rest of the leadership a simple lesson. Past service did not confer immunity. Personal familiarity was not protection. Once a Nazi became an independent centre of power, the relationship ended the same way Röhm’s did: with a knock at dawn and a shot in a prison cell. Hitler did not fear Röhm as a battlefield commander or as a plotter with a finished plan. He feared what Röhm represented — a Nazi who still believed the revolution had a life of its own.
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