He was one of the few men who dared to address the Führer as "you", who trusted him so much that he appointed him head of the SA, the shock force. During the day he sent his men to hunt down gays with the same cruelty as Jews, but he spent the nights at Eldorado, the emblematic Berlin venue where the German LGBT community met.
In his memoirs, published in 1962, the English journalist Sefton Delmer tells how his close relationship with the leader of the Nazi stormtroopers, Ernst Röhm It was the key that allowed him to become the first British reporter to interview Adolf Hitler in 1931. At that time, the bond between Delmer and one of the most trusted men of the future German dictator was so close that Röhm had no qualms about showing him the most intimate aspects of his life, unknown to almost all the rest of the Germans. The Englishman reflects this with an anecdote that occurred in the famous LGBT cabaret Eldorado, a night he shared with the Nazi who commanded the fearsome men of the brown shirts. He says that at one point a man dressed as a woman approached the table and mentioned to Röhm the “wonderful party” they had shared a few nights before. When they were alone again, Delmer told the leader of the SA:
-There you have it, Mr. Chief of Staff. No prostitute would approach a former client like that and talk in front of a stranger like me about the night they spent together.
-I'm not your client. I am your commander. He is one of my SA men. – the journalist says Röhm responded naturally.
Röhm, part of the German LGBT world
The episode narrated by the English journalist occurred shortly before Hitler came to power, when Eldorado, on Motzstraße, was one of the five Berlin locations of the LGBT environment which operated during the interwar period. Röhm and other members of the Nazi shock groups were regular customers of the place and did not hide it. Nor was it surprising that this was the case, because the SA men displayed a strong homoerotic element and did not hide their dislike for the “weakness” of women, something they used in some way to justify their homosexuality.
Night life in Eldorado is very well told by directors Benjamin Cantu and Matt Lambert in the documentary with that title that can be seen these days on Netflix. However, the greatest reference to the contradictory tensions that coexisted in Germany under the rising Nazis remains “Cabaret,” the acclaimed film directed by Bob Fosse and starring Liza Minelli, Michael York and Joel GrayThis film masterfully reflects the contrast between those nights of debauchery and the virile overacting of the young men in brown shirts in the streets singing “Tomorrow belongs to me” in broad daylight.
Although Section 175 of the Weimar Republic's Criminal Code condemned sexual relations between men, male homosexuality was not actually prosecuted in Germany in the 20s and early 30s. Although it existed on paper, the legal provision was rarely applied because courts required physical evidence of sexual intercourse to convict defendants.
In this context, Röhm left written testimonies about his sexual preferences and “the disgust” that women caused him. “I am not bothered by my inclination, even though it has sometimes brought me a fair amount of trouble. Deep down, perhaps, I am even proud of it. At least, I think so,” he wrote in a letter to the doctor Karl-Günther Heimsoth, author of “Hetero and Homophilia” and considered the introducer of this last concept in Sexology.
The situation would change radically with Hitler's arrival at the Reich Chancellery, when he launched an open persecution against homosexuals, whose practices he considered contrary to the German model of masculinity. However, Röhm considered that the general provisions of the law did not apply to him: He was confident that his close friendship with the Führer made him untouchable.
The Führer's Friend
For 1933, Hitler and Röhm had been fighting side by side for more than a decade to seize power in Germany. Röhm was not only one of the founders of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazi) and had participated in the Munich Putsch, Hitler's failed attempt to seize power by force in 1923, but he was also a friend of the Führer, to the point of being the only one in his environment who dared to address him informally.
Hitler knew and tolerated his friend's sexual inclinations and a sidekick, something that could have cost anyone else expulsion from the party. Röhm's sexuality became a public scandal in 1931, when a left-wing newspaper reported that he was gay. The moderate left-wing Social Democratic Party of Germany then used his sexuality for its election propaganda.
Despite the scandal and its political exploitation, Hitler defended Röhm. He trusted him so much that in 1931 he put him in charge of the SA, the paramilitary forces uniformed with brown shirts that he used as shock groups and for the persecution and mistreatment of Jews and homosexuals.
Gay communities were one of the first targets of state persecution after Hitler came to power. Beginning in 1933, the Nazi regime harassed and dismantled them. One of the first actions was to close bars and other gay meeting places. For example, in late February and early March 1933, in response to Nazi orders, the Berlin police closed down numerous such venues. One of them was Eldorado, the same one that Röhm used to frequent, which had become a prominent symbol of Berlin's gay culture.
The next step was the arrests. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, it is estimated that From 1933 until the end of the war, around 100.000 men were arrested. for violating Article 175, which is now applied without the need for proof of sexual intercourse. Many of them spent many years in prison or were sent to concentration camps.
Röhm did not see this situation as something contradictory to his mission at the head of the SA, but rather commanded his men with an iron fist to carry out the persecution of homosexuals, in the same way as he did against Jews, communists, trade unionists, Roma, political dissidents or blacks.
By 1934, he was one of the most powerful men in Nazism, but he had also made powerful enemies at the highest levels of the regime, where his rivals disqualified him in Hitler's eyes because of his sexual orientation. However, that was not the cause of his fall from grace and death, but a political battle that he lost due to his excessive ambition for power.
A strategic error
By mid-1934, Hitler was far from accumulating the power that would make him Germany's absolute leader for the next ten years. He had already succeeded in banning all rival political parties and bringing the country into a one-party regime controlled by the Nazis, but he still needed to control the armed forces, an indispensable instrument for his plans.
In that context, Ernst Röhm proposed to merge - a euphemism for subordinating - the Army to the SA, which already numbered more than 70.000 men. The first step was to draw up a memorandum in which he requested that his shock troops replace the regular army as the national force and that the soldiers and officers be placed under his command.
Röhm was already on the move and he didn't plan on stopping. He was one of the few who He questioned Hitler's policies, which he described as lukewarm. "If he thinks he can squeeze me for his own ends forever and one day throw me away, he is mistaken. The SA can also be an instrument to control Hitler himself," he said.
Hitler rejected the proposal, which put on alert the enemies that Röhm had made in the Nazi leadership, such as Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler, who saw that this project of subordinating the Armed Forces to the SA would give him enormous power. To counteract this, they began to conspire against him. Göring hated him since they had met, Himmler was in theory his subordinate and he saw in the fall of the head of the SA an opportunity to rise in the regime.
Another who looked askance at Röhm and the power that the SA accumulated was the German Foreign Minister, Baron Konstantin von Neurath, who was then in charge of organizing a summit meeting between Hitler and Mussolini. Days before the meeting between the two leaders, he ordered the German ambassador to Italy, Ulrich von Hassel, to ask Mussolini to speak out against the SA during the meeting. When they met at the end of June 1934, Hitler heard his Italian ally tell him that the forces led by Röhm were “blackening the good name of Germany.”
It is possible that, individually, neither the criticisms of Il Duce nor those of Göring and Himmler would have convinced Hitler to take measures against the powerful leader of the "brownshirts", but the confluence of the two flanks of attack gave the expected result.
A decisive meeting
The culmination of the maneuver was a speech by the Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen at the University of Marburg, where he warned of the threat of a “second revolution.” This led to Hitler meeting with President Hindenburg, who demanded that he retaliate against Röhm, warning that failure to do so would result in martial law being declared and power being handed over to the armed forces.
The president was the only man in Germany with the legal power to depose the Führer. By the end of June, under great pressure, the leader made a decision. After his meeting with Hindenburg, Hitler summoned Röhm to a meeting between the army high command, the heads of the SA and those of the SS, where the leader of the "brown shirts" was forced to sign a document in which he recognized and accepted the power over the SA of the German armed forces. During the meeting, Hitler made it known to those summoned that the SA was to become an auxiliary force of the army and not the other way around. At the end of the meeting, Röhm assured that he would not abide by this resolution and that he would continue to promote the project of an army led by the SA.
With that statement Röhm sealed his fate. The maneuver to destroy him, orchestrated by Hitler himself, was called “Operation Hummingbird,” and began with a direct order to Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SD, the intelligence service of the SS, to gather all the information he could about the head of the SA and his entourage. Heydrich had a file falsified suggesting that Röhm had received 12 million marks to overthrow Hitler and had them sent to the most important SS leaders.
Long knife ending
In the early hours of June 30, 1934, Hitler and his closest associates flew from Berlin to Munich, where the SA had caused serious disturbances the night before. From the airport they went directly to the headquarters of the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior, where they met with the SA leaders. Enraged, Hitler ripped the insignia off the shirt of the Munich police chief for failing in his mission to maintain order in the city. While the “brownshirts” were being led away to prison, Hitler gathered numerous members of the SS and police and went to the Hotel Hanselbauer, where Röhm and his followers were waiting for him.
Once at the hotel, Hitler himself arrested the head of the SA, which was guarded by two men with their pistols drawn and unlocked. Röhm did not resist. When the SS searched the rooms in the establishment, they found the SA leader in Wrocław, Edmund Heines, in bed with an 18-year-old SA soldier. They murdered them on the spot. Meanwhile, the SS arrested a large number of SA leaders and executed 30 of them between the night of 1 June and the early morning of 85 July. The event went down in history as “The Night of the Long Knives” because most of the killings were carried out with knives.
“Let Hitler come”
The leader of the “brown shirts” was transferred from the hotel to the Stadelheim prison in Munich. Hitler was hesitating whether to kill him or not, in honour of the friendship of the old days. It was again his entourage who urged him to make a decision. They told him that, Even in prison, Röhm would retain his prestige and influence, who would be a danger while he was alive. Moreover, if he were brought to trial, the investigation would lead to the revelation of the manoeuvres - including the false denunciation concocted by Heydrich - that had triggered the purge of "Operation Hummingbird".
Finally, on July 1, after much hesitation, Hitler ordered Theodor Eicke, the commandant of the Dachau concentration camp, to offer Röhm the chance to commit suicide and, if he refused, to kill him. That same afternoon, Eicke and SS officer Michael Lippert visited Röhm in his cell and gave him a pistol loaded with a single bullet. They told him he had ten minutes to commit suicide or they would kill him.
-If you want to kill me, let Hitler come in person - the prisoner replied.
Ten minutes later they returned and found him standing in the middle of the cell with his chest bare, in a defiant attitude. Lippert shot him dead at point-blank range.
The essay “The Sexual Aberrations of Nazi Germany” was published in one of the issues of a publication in France of Republican Spain in exile, a kind of special investigations magazine. Although the text is an obvious criticism of Nazism and fascism, it focuses on the homosexuality of the Nazis, or even of German soldiers and military personnel before that, and on other sexual aberrations, such as sadism or submission. This analysis of homosexual relations among Nazis was written by the well-known Jewish anarchist Eugen Relgis, in 1949.
In “The Sexual Aberrations of Nazi Germany” it talks about a Nazi regime focused on satisfying its sexual drives, without looking at anything other than breaking with the most traditional or orthodox aspects, or ending the customs considered mentally healthy in sex, at least in those years still very puritanical, so much so that, for example, the Republican prisoners who were in the Nazi concentration camps of Mauthausen, despite being Spanish among the most communist or anarchist, many were Catholic religious or celebrated Christmas, one of the reasons why the German Nazis stopped considering them their main targets for mistreating in the concentration camp, when at first they targeted them for being the evil reds that their comrades Franco and the Spanish Falangists called them, and then they focused more on other prisoners, such as the Poles or later the Russians, not the Jews because there were none in Mauthausen or the few that arrived were quickly murdered. Jews did not arrive at Mauthausen until almost the end of the war, during the so-called "death marches." Those who survived were among those transferred from concentration camps in Eastern Europe, such as Auschwitz. When these Jews arrived, the Spanish Republican prisoners took the risk of hiding a blond Jewish-German child that the Nazis had left alive, Siegfried Meir, who had become infatuated with a German Nazi SS guard and had intended to sexually abuse him during one of his drunken binges. This Nazi SS was a known pederast in the camp.
Because of the large number of homosexuals who joined the Nazi party, they would be of a type of homosexual who were sexually aroused by militaristic paraphernalia and extreme violence. This communist or anarchist text repeatedly criticises the homosexual basis of Nazism with an evidently homophobic tone, a tone that was typical or commonly accepted in the year of publication, still very recent after the defeat of Nazi Germany, and that despite the fact that the Spanish fascists and Nazis have also been given to homophobia, it is not unthinkable in today's Spain that something similar could occur as is happening in the current major far-right parties of Western Europe, where all support gays and lesbians, as long as they are fascists, or have prominent gay and lesbian leaders, as were the top leaders of the Dutch far-right party, Pim Fortuyn, and the Austrian, Jorg Haider. This essay or research paper mentions the homosexuality of key German politicians as the cause of the two world wars that Germany started, provoked by Von Eulenburg and Von Holstein, for their homosexual morbidness to be sexually aroused by violent males, who are seen much more and in greater numbers with the wars, without failing to mention the famous head of the SA or the brown shirts, Ernst Röhm, a well-known homosexual, or perhaps pederast, who boasted in public of his sexual condition. German homosexuals also joined the Nazi party to escape a penal law in force in Nazi Germany that persecuted homosexuals, because being Nazis they were free from being punished. The Nazis fought fiercely, especially at the beginning, apart from for drugs such as amphetamine brand Pervitin, for the homosexuality of many soldiers, since they were fighting either to save the life of their beloved companion or to avenge his death.
Hitler was also popularly known for being a country bumpkin, some even dared to take him for effeminate, he was originally from an Austrian agricultural area, a region isolated from the rest of the country, so much so that inbreeding was frequent, with probable consequences for mental health. Hitler's father was a good example, a violent abuser who married, for the third time, an underage cousin, the mother of the criminal offspring. As for Hitler's own sexuality, apart from the strangeness that was already in itself, more than likely he was mainly a masochist of the type who gets sexually excited by young girls hitting him and urinating on him, it is also suspected that he could have been a homosexual or even a pederast, since it seems that he had a sexual incident at school that, naturally, the Nazis would make sure could never be clarified, just as they murdered in "accidents" the young women who were direct witnesses and gossips of Hitler's sexual intimacies. Apparently, without fully confirming, two of the "girlfriends" that Hitler had, or the young women that he forced to be his "girlfriends", made the tremendous mistake of saying something about Hitler's particular sexual tastes. Geli Raubal, his underage niece, apparently told the Nazi Otto Strasser that she was very disgusted by what her uncle Hitler asked her when it came to having sex, Strasser was the Nazi leader of the most communist sector, the red color of the Nazi party is for the part that the Nazis have of communism or socialism, without serving as a precedent, the red was not for the much blood that these criminals always shed, although Otto Strasser also ended up being murdered by his Nazi comrades, perhaps also for knowing too much about Hitler's strange sexuality. While the German actress Renate Muller occurred to joke at parties or spread the rumor of the masochistic Hitler. So Hitler's two girlfriends ended up being murdered, but not without the Nazi criminals pretending that they committed suicide.
In addition, the text mentions the homosexuality of the Nazis of a subtype that is caused by the extreme misogyny of this absurd ideology, in turn a copy of very militaristic and violent cultures such as that of the Spartan pedophiles of ancient Greece, also very misogynistic and who despised women, so much so that in love and sex they preferred men or children. For the education of the most heterosexual beardless German Nazis, in the Republican magazine or in the essay of the Jewish anarchist there appear a kind of texts to educate Nazi schoolchildren, which served as a reference for them for sex, for example a Nazi sexual ceremony consisted of a young girl throwing a rock at the head of the beardless Nazi, to indicate to him that she wants to have sex, then they must begin a game of tag in the forest, until suddenly, for some unknown reason, the beardless future Nazi criminal penetrates the young girl violently, a sex more similar to sadomasochism, most likely copied from what is instilled by "the Prophet" of the fascists and Nazis, the philosopher Nietzsche, which is always to act crazy as a rule. While the young girl, who had suddenly transformed from savage to submissive, remained submissive.
It is surprising that a text from 1.949 is full of knowledge that is considered very modern, apart from the very homophobic general tone that is not very current. Furthermore, it does not appear to be a publication of communist ideology, or in fact anarchist, and it would be more appropriate to describe it as a moderate republican ideology. A significant example of the ways of German Nazi criminals was the Nazi SS commander, Oskar Dirlewanger. For a time he was imprisoned in Germany for being a pedophile rapist, but the Nazis released him in exchange for serving the Nazis. Although unknown in Spain, Dirlewanger was also on the fascist side during the Spanish Civil War. Later, the Nazis put him in charge of a military unit made up of German Nazi criminals. His special unit became famous for its cruelty in Belarus and in Nazi-occupied Poland. But the German Nazis did not care how criminal their soldiers were, as long as they remained loyal to Nazi Germany.