History Forum / General / General Topics / December 2007

While Adolf Hitler is today recognized as the central figure
of Nazism, he was a less important player when the Nazi
machine was first assembled. Its first leader was Ernst
Roehm. Homosexual historian Frank Rector writes that "Hitler
was, to a substantial extent, Roehm's protegé" (Rector:80).
Roehm had been a captain in the German army. Hitler had been
a mere corporal. After World War I, Roehm was highly placed
in the underground nationalist movement that plotted to
overthrow the Weimar government and worked to subvert it
through assassinations and terrorism. In The Order of the
Death's Head, author Heinz Hohne writes that Roehm met Hitler
at a meeting of a socialist terrorist group called the Iron
Fist and "saw in Hitler the demagogue he required to mobilize
mass support for his secret army" (Hohne:20). Roehm, who had
joined the German Worker's Party before Hitler, worked with
him to take over the fledgling organization. With Roehm's
backing, Hitler became the first president of the party in
1921 (ibid.:21) and changed its name to the National
Socialist German Worker's Party. Soon after, Rossbach's Storm
Troopers, the SA, became its military arm. In his classic
Nazi history, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, author
William Shirer describes Roehm as "a stocky, bull-necked,
piggish-eyed, scar- faced professional soldier...[and] like
so many of the early Nazis, a homosexual" (Shirer:64). Rector
writes:

Was not the most outstanding, most notorious, of all
homosexuals the celebrated Nazi leader Ernst Ro[e]hm, the
virile and manly chief of the SA, the du buddy of Adolf
Hitler from the beginning of his political career? Hitler's
rise had in fact depended upon Ro[e]hm and everyone knew it.
Ro[e]hm's gay fun and games were certainly no secret; his
amorous forays to gay bars and gay Turkish baths were
riotous. Whatever anti-homosexual sentiments may have been
expressed by straight Nazis were more than offset by the
reality of highly visible, spectacular, gay-loving Ro[e]hm.
If there were occasional ominous rumblings and grumblings
about "all those queers" in the SA and Movement, and some
anti-gay flare-ups, homosexual Nazis felt more-or-less secure
in the lap of the Party. After all, the National Socialist
Party member who wielded the greatest power aside from Hitler
was Ro[e]hm (Rector:50f).
Betraying his roots in the "Butch" faction of the German "gay
rights" movement, Roehm viewed homosexuality as the basis for
a new society. Louis Snyder writes that Roehm "projected a
social order in which homosexuality would be regarded as a
human behavior pattern of high repute...he flaunted his
homosexuality in public and insisted that his cronies do the
same. What was needed, Roehm believed, was a proud and
arrogant lot who could brawl, carouse, smash windows, kill
and slaughter for the hell of it. Straights, in his eyes,
were not as adept in such behavior as practicing
homosexuals" (Snyder:55). "The principle function of this
army-like organization," writes historian Thomas Fuchs, "was
beating up anyone who opposed the Nazis, and Hitler believed
this was a job best undertaken by homosexuals" (Fuchs:48f).

The favorite meeting place of the SA was a "gay" bar in
Munich called the Bratwurstglockl where Roehm kept a reserved
table (Hohne:82). This was the same tavern where some of the
earliest formative meetings of the Nazi Party had been held
(Rector:69). At the Bratwurstglockl, Roehm and associates-
Edmund Heines, Karl Ernst, Ernst's partner Captain Rohrbein,
Captain Petersdorf, Count Ernst Helldorf and the rest-would
meet to plan and strategize. These were the men who
orchestrated the Nazi campaign of intimidation and terror.
All of them were homosexual (Heiden:371).

Indeed, homosexuality was all that qualified many of these
men for their positions in the SA. Heinrich Himmler would
later complain of this: "Does it not constitute a danger to
the Nazi movement if it can be said that Nazi leaders are
chosen for sexual reasons?" (Gallo:57). Himmler was not so
much opposed to homosexuality itself as to the fact that non-
qualified people were given high rank based on their
homosexual relations with Roehm and others. For example, SA
Obergruppenfuhrer (Lieutenant General) Karl Ernst, a militant
homosexual, had been a hotel doorman and a waiter before
joining the SA. "Karl Ernst is not yet 35," writes Gallo, "he
commands 250,000 men...he is simply a sadist, a common thug,
transformed into a responsible official" (ibid.:50f).

This strange brand of nepotism was a hallmark of the SA. By
1933 the SA had grown far larger than the German army, yet
the Vikingkorps (Officers' Corps) remained almost exclusively
homosexual. "Roehm, as the head of 2,500,000 Storm Troops,"
writes historian H.R. Knickerbocker, "had surrounded himself
with a staff of perverts. His chiefs, men of rank of
Gruppenfuhrer or Obergruppenfuhrer, commanding units of
several hundred thousand Storm Troopers, were almost without
exception homosexuals. Indeed, unless a Storm Troop officer
were homosexual he had no chance of advancement"
(Knickerbocker:55).

In the SA, the Community of the Special's Hellenic ideal of
masculine homosexual supremacy and militarism was fully
realized. "Theirs was a very masculine brand of
homosexuality," writes homosexualist historian Alfred Rowse,
"they lived in a male world, without women, a world of camps
and marching, rallies and sports. They had their own
relaxations, and the Munich SA became notorious on account of
them" (Rowse:214). The similarity of the SA to Freidlander
and Brand's dream of Hellenic revival is not coincidental. In
Gay American History, Jonathan Katz writes that Roehm was a
prominent member of the Society for Human Rights (SHR), an
offshoot of the CS (J.Katz:632).

The "relaxations" to which Rowse refers were, of course, the
homosexual activities (many of them pederastic) for which the
SA and the CS were both famous. Hohne writes that Roehm "used
the SA for ends other than the purely political...Peter
Granninger, who had been one of Roehm's partners...and was
now given cover in the SA Intelligence Section. For a monthly
salary of 200 marks he kept Roehm supplied with new friends,
his main hunting ground being Geisela High School Munich;
from this school he recruited no fewer than eleven boys, whom
he first tried out and then took to Roehm" (Hohne:82).

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