"I need you"
Hitler's personal appeal to Ernst Rohem over the telephone, 1931.
Rohem returned from his five-year self-imposed exile in Bolivia to help save Hitler and the rapidly collapsing NSDAP by reorganising and fully integrating the SA under party leadership and discipline for the first time since the Munich Putsch.
"If the General [Schleicher] suddenly felt that his chief, Groener, was in his way, Röhm had almost the same feeling towards Adolf Hitler. Röhm had become more and more open and confiding. towards Schleicher; he had played Hitler into Schleicher's hands by telling him a number of unrepeatable stories about his Fuhrer; in conversation with third parties, Schleicher boasted of knowing the most gruesome details.
Hitler insisted that he, personally, should be the one to arrest Rohem on the occasion of the NASDP's first
significant -and very lethal- internal purge - showing a flair for personal engagement in the kind of unpleasant and invariably messy affairs of State he was rarely, if ever, indulge in again to the extent he does here :
" Hitler entered Roehm's bedroom alone with a whip in his hand. Behind him were two detectives with pistols at the ready. He spat out the words; "Roehm, you are under arrest."
Roehm's doctor comes out of a room and to our surprise he has his wife with him. I hear Lutze putting in a good word for him with Hitler. Then Hitler walks up to him, greets him, shakes hand with his wife and asks them to leave the hotel, it isn't a pleasant place for them to stay in, that day. "
"We know roughly what happened in Germany on the Night of the Long Knives, when Adolf Hitler realised that he was in a position to be able to eliminate all remaining opposition, not just in the political arena, but within his own party, which is the real key..."
The Liar Christopher Hitchens of MI6
"Some of the officers of the army are swine. Most officers are too old and have to be replaced by young ones. We want to wait till Papa Hindenburg is dead, and then the SA will march against the army."
Max Heydebreck,
SA leader in Rummelsburg
1934
"[Carl] Schmitt was the author of Article 48 of the 1919 Constitution of the Weimar Republic, which was the clause that allowed the Reich President to declare an emergency or state of siege and thereafter rule by decree. Schmitt's activity during the 1920s was largely devoted to agitating in favor of the dissolution or marginalization of the Reichstag (parliament) and the institution of a dictatorship of the President of the Reich.
One of Schmitt's favorite sayings was that sovereignty meant the ability to declare a state of emergency. If you can find what organ of government has the ability to call out the state of siege, suspend the legislature, and impose martial law, Schmitt reasoned, you have found the place where sovereignty is actually located.
For Schmitt, the concept of emergency rule is a totally lawless realm; under it, the ruling authority can do literally anything it wants, without regard to law, separation of powers, constitutional freedoms, equity, or anything else.
In one of his essays Schmitt approvingly quotes a speech by the Reich Justice Minister Schiffer to the Reichstag on March 3, 1920, in which Schiffer points out that under Article 48, the Reich President can attack "German cities with poison gas, if that is, in the concrete case, the necessary measure for the re-establishment of law and order." (Schmitt, Die Diktatur, 201)
Schmitt was adamant that the emergency provisions of the Weimar constitution were theoretically and practically unlimited, and could be used to justify the greatest imaginable atrocities. We see here a tradition of thought, alive in the Schmittian-Straussian neocons of today, which would have no trouble in accommodating a crime on the scope of 9/11.
In July, 1932 the Nazis and their allies carried out a cold coup against the minority Social Democratic caretaker government in Prussia, the largest political subdivision of Germany. The pro-Nazi government in Prussia then became the springboard for Hitler's seizure of power via a legal coup in January 1933.
Carl Schmitt was the lawyer for the coup forces in the German supreme court in Leipzig. (The parallels of this action to the Schwarzenegger/Warren Buffet oligarchical coup in California in 2003 are more than suggestive, since California is the largest US political subdivision in the same way that Prussia was in Germany.) Schmitt also provided legal services for Hitler's seizure of power in January, 1933.
Carl Schmitt wrote articles for the gutter-level anti-Semitic tabloid Der Sturmer, edited by Julius Streicher. In 1934, when Hitler massacred the brown-shirted SA leader Ernst Rohm and his faction for supporting a second revolution against the financiers, industrialists, and the army, Schmitt quickly emerged as one of Hitler's most shameless apologists.
In his scurrilous pamphlet, "Der Fuhrer Schutz das Recht" ("The Fuhrer defends the law"), Schmitt endorsed the Byzantine theory according to which law is a successful act of strength by the stronger party against the weaker.
Schmitt wrote that the primary task of the Fuehrer was "to distinguish friend from enemy ... The Fuhrer takes the warnings of German history seriously. That gives him the right and the power to found a new state and a new order ... The Fuhrer protects the law from the worst abuse, when he -- in the moment of danger -- through the power of his leadership as supreme judge, directly creates law. His role as supreme judge flows from his role as supreme leader. Anyone who wants to separate one of these from the other is trying to unhinge the state with the help of the justice system .... the Fuhrer himself determines the content and scope of a crime." (Schmitt 200)
This opens the door to every arbitrary outrage under color of law. While these ideas, so dear to today's ruling neocons, have been applied to Abu Ghraib, it is also clear that they are equally applicable to 9/11."
Tarpley,
9/11 Synthetic Terror : Made in USA
"He (Röhm) was a stocky, bull-necked, piggish-eyed, scar-faced professional soldier... with a flair for politics and a natural ability as an organizer. Like Hitler he was possessed of a burning hatred for the democratic Republic and the 'November criminals' he held responsible for it. His aim was to re-create a strong nationalist Germany and he believed with Hitler that this could be done only by a party based on the lower classes, from which he himself, unlike most Regular Army officers, had come. A tough, ruthless, driving man - albeit, like so many of the early Nazis, a homosexual."
William L. Shirer,
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1964)
"In and of themselves, perhaps none of Machtan’s points prove his thesis.
Perhaps it means nothing that as a youth in Vienna Hitler frequented the same areas that were notorious for homosexual activity.
It may simply be coincidence that Hitler and his best friend lingered around Bayreuth, worshipping Wagner along with gays from several European nations.
It may be a failure of historical research that we can’t place Hitler in anything resembling a normal relationship with a woman prior to Eva Braun.
Perhaps we are misreading Hitler’s boyhood infatuation with August Kubizek to suggest it was homosexual in nature.
Perhaps Mend and numerous other witnesses who swore that Hitler had homosexual tendencies were seeking revenge or trying to sell sensationalistic stories to the international press.
But is it possible that all these stories, all these possibilities, all these indications are wrong, that they are simply the concoctions of sick or vengeful or headline-seeking minds? "
Louis L. Snyder argues: "Hitler later alleged that his trusted friend Röhm had entered a conspiracy to take over political power. The Führer was told, possibly by one of Röhm's jealous colleagues, that Röhm intended to use the SA to bring a socialist state into existence... On June, 1934... Hitler came to his final decision to eliminate the socialist element in the party. A list of hundreds of victims was prepared."
On 29th June, 1934. Hitler, accompanied by the Schutzstaffel (SS), arrived at Bad Wiesse, where he personally arrested Ernst Röhm. During the next 24 hours 200 other senior SA officers were arrested on the way to the meeting. Erich Kempka, Hitler's chauffeur, witnessed what happened: "Hitler entered Röhm's bedroom alone with a whip in his hand. Behind him were two detectives with pistols at the ready. He spat out the words; Röhm, you are under arrest. Röhm's doctor comes out of a room and to our surprise he has his wife with him. I hear Lutze putting in a good word for him with Hitler. Then Hitler walks up to him, greets him, shakes hand with his wife and asks them to leave the hotel, it isn't a pleasant place for them to stay in, that day. Now the bus arrives. Quickly, the SA leaders are collected from the laundry room and walk past Röhm under police guard. Röhm looks up from his coffee sadly and waves to them in a melancholy way. At last Röhm too is led from the hotel. He walks past Hitler with his head bowed, completely apathetic."
A large number of the SA officers were shot as soon as they were captured but Adolf Hitler decided to pardon Röhm because of his past services to the movement. However, after much pressure from Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler, Hitler agreed that Roehm should die. At first Hitler insisted that Roehm should be allowed to commit suicide but, when he refused, Ernst Roehm was killed by two SS men.
David Low, The Salute with both hands now (3rd July, 1934)
David Low, The Salute with both hands now (3rd July, 1934)
Hitler told Albert Speer what happened at Bad Wiesse: "Hitler was extremely excited and, as I believe to this day, inwardly convinced that he had come through a great danger. Again and again he described how he had forced his way into the Hotel Hanselmayer in Wiessee - not forgetting, in the telling, to make a show of his courage: We were unarmed, imagine, and didn't know whether or not those swine might have armed guards to use against us. The homosexual atmosphere had disgusted him: In one room we found two naked boys! Evidently he believed that his personal action had averted a disaster at the last minute: I alone was able to solve this problem. No one else! His entourage tried to deepen his distaste for the executed SA leaders by assiduously reporting as many details as possible about the intimate life of Röhm and his following."
The purge of the SA was kept secret until it was announced by Hitler on 13th July. It was during this speech that Hitler gave the purge its name: Night of the Long Knives (a phrase from a popular Nazi song). Hitler claimed that 61 had been executed while 13 had been shot resisting arrest and three had committed suicide. Others have argued that as many as 400 people were killed during the purge. In his speech Hitler explained why he had not relied on the courts to deal with the conspirators: "In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I become the supreme judge of the German people. I gave the order to shoot the ringleaders in this treason."
Joseph Goebbels later regretted the killing of Röhm: "I point out to the Führer at length that in 1934 we unfortunately failed to reform the Wehrmacht when we had an opportunity of doing so. What Roehm wanted was, of course, right in itself but in practice it could not be carried through by a homosexual and an anarchist. Had Roehm been an upright solid personality, in all probability some hundred generals rather than some hundred SA leaders would have been shot on 30 June. The whole course of events was profoundly tragic and today we are feeling its effects. In that year the time was ripe to revolutionise the Reichswehr. As things were the Führer was unable to seize the opportunity. It is questionable whether today we can ever make good what we missed doing at that time. I am very doubtful of it. Nevertheless the attempt must be made."
Himmler with Rohem, 1934
Trouble Brewing.
“The Hidden Hitler” by Lothar Machtan
German historian Lothar Machtan has been taking some lumps for his controversial book “The Hidden Hitler,” and a great many of them are well deserved. Machtan sets himself up early in opposition to such writers on Hitler as Ian Kershaw (whose conclusion was “Take away what is political about him, and there’s little or nothing left”) and promises to show us “the whole man,” not just the dictator.
Machtan doesn’t succeed at this — it would probably be more correct to say that he never really attempts it. If Machtan had simply called the book “The Homosexual Hitler” and stuck to that theme he would have had a better book and one less deserving of many of the brickbats being thrown at it.
Of course, that would have made it no less controversial, and the unfair knocks being directed at Machtan outnumber the legitimate ones. For instance, in the Oct. 25 Washington Post Book World Geoffrey Giles reprimands Machtan for coming “perilously close to blaming the entire Holocaust on Hitler’s alleged sexuality.” If this accusation were true, Machtan would be deserving of the same kind of mockery that has always greeted historians who have tried to explain authoritarian personalities in terms of their sexuality (Jonathan Swift satirized the lot of them when he suggested that Alexander the Great tried to conquer the world because all his unused semen had gone to his head).
But that’s not what Machtan is trying to do; what he is trying to do is prove that Hitler was a homosexual. Not a maniac or a paranoid — Machtan doesn’t waste steam on what we already know — but a homosexual, and the major resistance to this idea is coming, understandably, from homosexuals — who are anxious not to see Hitler’s name with “gay” in front of it — and from sympathetic liberals.
I’m both sympathetic and liberal, but Machtan’s case is simply too strong to be brushed aside. In a recent edition of LGNY.com, Paul Schindler points out that when “a print ad for the book that has run in the New York Times bears the headline, ‘The first book to reveal Hitler’s secret life and its calamitous public consequences’ … it’s hard to escape the conclusion that anybody connected to the marketing campaign must have recognized that such a tease certainly suggested a link between homosexuality and the 20th century’s most despicable crimes. In fact, media reaction to the book has played up exactly that link.”
Schindler is right; he’s also right when he holds the author and his publisher at least partially responsible for teasers like the one used on an Oct. 15 interview with Machtan on the “Today” show, which told viewers they were about to see an interview with an author whose book claimed that “Hitler was actually gay, and that his homosexuality was at the root of his evil.” Everyone involved in selling the book should have been more responsible. But bad marketing doesn’t make a bad book.
The problem here is that Machtan’s book is being judged by its hype. And when you look past the hype to the book’s central thesis you are left with the unshakable conclusion that Machtan is on to something. You may well ask why, with the thousands of books written on Hitler, no one else has caught on to this. The answer is that much of what Machtan says has been written about before and that many people have shared his opinions for decades. (Did anyone think the image of Hitler as flaming queen came solely from the fertile imagination of Mel Brooks?)
Several of Machtan’s most reliable sources (including the classic biographies by Joachim Fest and Alan Bullock, as well as Bullock’s dual biography of Hitler and Stalin) have raised many of the same points as Machtan has, though their authors chose not to emphasize them or pursue them at length. Why? Possibly for no more reason than that their author’s interests lay elsewhere. As Voltaire is said to have said, history does not change, but what we want from it does.
If Machtan’s tone toward his evidence in “The Hidden Hitler” is defensive, one must grant him at least a modicum of sympathy. Virtually anyone in Hitler’s life who might have supported Machtan’s argument with harder evidence was ruthlessly exterminated (such as his longtime colleague and head of the paramilitary SA group Ernst Rohm, a known homosexual who appointed known homosexuals to positions of power within his organization), while many others disappeared or committed suicide (including Eva Braun, Martin Bormann, Heinrich Himmler and Hermann Goering).
By no means all of these potential witnesses died by Hitler’s order or under suspicious circumstances, but the sheer number of the ones who did, particularly those cronies from Hitler’s early years about which we know remarkably little, is staggering. “Hitler himself,” writes Machtan, “tore the crucial pages out of his life story. In this he was no different from other prominent homosexuals. What was peculiar to his conduct was simply the ultra methodical and unscrupulous way in which he eliminated every threat of exposure.”
It can and is being argued that the absence of material on Hitler’s past stands as proof of no particular thesis, let alone as proof of his homosexuality, and this is true (though there can be no doubt that Hitler was frantically trying to cover up somethingin his past). But “The Hidden Hitler” works better if the reader is willing to disregard the author’s often aggressive tone in pushing his argument and simply consider the evidence.
Machtan’s most intriguing contribution to the subject is the so-called “Mend Protocol,” testimony from a dispatch rider named Hans Mend who had served with Hitler in the First World War and swore that he witnessed Hitler engaging in homosexual acts. This evidence isn’t as solid as the author thinks it is; Mend was later discovered to be a liar and blackmailer. But one is entitled to point out that anyone who would be involved with Hitler would almost certainly be some kind of liar or scoundrel (and in any event Mend seems to have had no reason to lie about Hitler several decades later).
More to the point, though, is that anyone interested in knowing the truth on this subject ought to grant Machtan credit for assembling so many persuasive strands of evidence. Evidence, of course, is not proof, but merely the building blocks which must be considered in constructing the truth, and as Machtan’s critics are insisting, most of his is circumstantial. But if Machtan’s hard evidence isn’t as hard as he insists, neither is his soft evidence so soft as his critics contend. For one thing, most important criminal cases, to say nothing of most great historical judgments, are decided on the basis of circumstantial evidence, so we should not be quick to deride all judgments based on it.
In and of themselves, perhaps none of Machtan’s points prove his thesis. Perhaps it means nothing that as a youth in Vienna Hitler frequented the same areas that were notorious for homosexual activity. It may simply be coincidence that Hitler and his best friend lingered around Bayreuth, worshipping Wagner along with gays from several European nations. It may be a failure of historical research that we can’t place Hitler in anything resembling a normal relationship with a woman prior to Eva Braun. Perhaps we are misreading Hitler’s boyhood infatuation with August Kubizek to suggest it was homosexual in nature. Perhaps Mend and numerous other witnesses who swore that Hitler had homosexual tendencies were seeking revenge or trying to sell sensationalistic stories to the international press. But is it possible that all these stories, all these possibilities, all these indications are wrong, that they are simply the concoctions of sick or vengeful or headline-seeking minds?
The flaws in Machtan’s presentation should not be confused with errors of research. It will probably fall to those better qualified than Machtan in areas of sex and psychology to take the next step and tell us how Hitler’s homosexuality (or at least his frustrated homosexuality) affected his political doctrines, but from here on historians are going to have to contend with Machtan’s conclusions. As John Lukacs was fond of saying, “We are not finished with Hitler.”
Allen Barra cowrote Marvin Miller's memoirs, A Whole Different Ballgame. His latest book is Mickey and Willie: The Parallel Lives of Baseball's Golden Age.
The SA was an "alien" body which had not been integrated into the party in 1930. Mommsen p. 337.
See e.g. Toland pp. 210-211 (April 1925 conflict between Hitler and Ernst Röhm over proper purpose of SA, leading to Röhm's resignation; p. 220 (Hitler's later selection of Pfeffer von Salomon as SA chief of staff to preside over a legitimate, non-military organization consistent with Hitler's announced "policy of legality" following the Beer Hall Putsch; and pp. 248-251 (tension between SA leaders seeking military function and Hitler's desire for strictly political function).
Fischer p. 85. Of course this was Röhm's view, both before his 1925 resignation from the party and after his return from South America at Hitler's request to lead the SA in 1931 -- a view which eventually led to his murder in The Night of the Long Knives.
In the Reichstag election of May 1928, the Nazis had won just 12 seats out of a total of 491. As a consequence, they were only the ninth largest party in the Reichstag, and had less than one-fourth the seats held by the Communists, who made substantial gains in 1928 and who came to control 54 seats through the 1928 election. The parties of the Left (Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Communist Party (KPD)) were the main winners in 1928 and jointly controlled 226 seats as a result of the 1928 elections; if they could jointly muster a coalition of only 246 seats, the coalition would be a parliamentary majority. See 1928 election results. The NSDAP's pitiful showing (less than 3% of the 1928 popular vote) "appeared to confirm the correctness of those commentators who for years had been preaching the end of Hitler and his Movement," Kershaw p. 302. In the cities, the results were awful for the Nazis; in Berlin, the NSDAP received 1.57% of the vote. Ibid p. 303. Some within the party even came to believe that Hitler would be forced to repudiate his plan to obtain power strictly through legal means, instead of by putsch, and he authorized the Nazi press in June of 1928 to reaffirm his commitment to constitutional procedures as the path to power. Ibid p. 304.
The SA was an "alien" body which had not been integrated into the party in 1930. Mommsen p. 337.
See e.g. Toland pp. 210-211 (April 1925 conflict between Hitler and Ernst Röhm over proper purpose of SA, leading to Röhm's resignation; p. 220 (Hitler's later selection of Pfeffer von Salomon as SA chief of staff to preside over a legitimate, non-military organization consistent with Hitler's announced "policy of legality" following the Beer Hall Putsch; and pp. 248-251 (tension between SA leaders seeking military function and Hitler's desire for strictly political function).
Fischer p. 85. Of course this was Röhm's view, both before his 1925 resignation from the party and after his return from South America at Hitler's request to lead the SA in 1931 -- a view which eventually led to his murder in The Night of the Long Knives.
In the Reichstag election of May 1928, the Nazis had won just 12 seats out of a total of 491. As a consequence, they were only the ninth largest party in the Reichstag, and had less than one-fourth the seats held by the Communists, who made substantial gains in 1928 and who came to control 54 seats through the 1928 election. The parties of the Left (Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Communist Party (KPD)) were the main winners in 1928 and jointly controlled 226 seats as a result of the 1928 elections; if they could jointly muster a coalition of only 246 seats, the coalition would be a parliamentary majority. See 1928 election results. The NSDAP's pitiful showing (less than 3% of the 1928 popular vote) "appeared to confirm the correctness of those commentators who for years had been preaching the end of Hitler and his Movement," Kershaw p. 302. In the cities, the results were awful for the Nazis; in Berlin, the NSDAP received 1.57% of the vote. Ibid p. 303. Some within the party even came to believe that Hitler would be forced to repudiate his plan to obtain power strictly through legal means, instead of by putsch, and he authorized the Nazi press in June of 1928 to reaffirm his commitment to constitutional procedures as the path to power. Ibid p. 304.
In September 1930, as a consequence of the Stennes Revolt in Berlin, Hitler assumed supreme command of the SA as its new Oberster SA-Führer. He sent a personal request to Röhm, asking him to return to serve as the SA's chief of staff. Röhm accepted this offer and began his new assignment on 5 January 1931. He brought radical new ideas to the SA, and appointed several close friends to its senior leadership. Previously, the SA formations were subordinate to the Nazi Party leadership of each Gaue. Röhm established new Gruppe which had no regional Nazi Party oversight. Each Gruppe extended over several regions and was commanded by a SA Gruppenführer who answered only to Röhm or Hitler.[4]
The SA by this time numbered over a million members. Its traditional function of party leader escort had been given to the SS, but it continued its street battles with "Reds" and its attacks on Jews. The SA also attacked or intimidated anyone deemed hostile to the Nazi agenda, including uncooperative editors, professors, politicians, other local officials and businessmen.
Under Röhm, the SA also often took the side of workers in strikes and other labor disputes, attacking strikebreakers and supporting picket lines. SA intimidation contributed to the rise of the Nazis and the violent suppression of left-wing parties during electoral campaigns, but its reputation for street violence and heavy drinking was a hindrance, as was the open homosexuality of Röhm and other SA leaders such as his deputy Edmund Heines.[5][6] One American journalist later wrote, "[Röhm's] chiefs, men of the rank of Gruppenfuehrer or Obergruppenfuehrer, commanding units of several hundred thousand Storm Troopers, were almost without exception homosexuals."[7] In 1931, the Münchener Post, a Social Democratic newspaper, obtained and published Röhm's letters to a friend discussing his homosexual affairs.
Röhm with Hitler, August 1933
Hitler was aware of Röhm's homosexuality. At this point they were so close that they addressed each other as du (the German familiar form of "you"). No other top Nazi leader enjoyed that privilege, and their close association led to rumors that Hitler himself was homosexual.[7] Röhm was the only Nazi leader who dared to address Hitler by his first name "Adolf" rather than "mein Führer."[6]
As Hitler rose to national power with his appointment as Chancellor in 1933, SA members were appointed auxiliary police and marched into local government offices forcing officials to surrender their authority to the Nazis.
Second revolution
Röhm and the SA regarded themselves as the vanguard of the "National Socialist revolution". After Hitler's takeover they expected radical changes in Germany including power and rewards for themselves, unaware that Hitler as Chancellor now no longer needed their street-fighting expertise as storm troopers. However, Hitler did name Röhm to the cabinet on 1 December as a minister without portfolio.
