Röhm scandal
Röhm's double life began to fall apart when he returned to Germany in 1930 and was appointed leader of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Nazi Party's original paramilitary wing.
Beginning in April 1931, the SPD newspaper Münchener Post published a series of front-page stories about alleged homosexuality in the SA, which turned out to be based on forgeries.
During the German presidential election in March 1932, the SPD released a pamphlet edited by ex-Nazi Helmuth Klotz [de] with Röhm's letters to Heimsoth.
Ernst Röhm (1887–1934) was one of the early leaders of the Nazi Party and built up its paramilitary wing, the Sturmabteilung (SA), which violently attacked communists and other perceived enemies of the German people.
[8][5][4] In 1928, the homosexual, nationalist physician Karl-Günther Heimsoth wrote a letter to Röhm questioning a passage in the latter's autobiography, Die Geschichte eines Hochverräters ("The Story of an Arch-Traitor").
[37] The SPD initiated the Röhm scandal in an effort to prevent or delay the Nazi seizure of power at a time when the defenders of the Weimar Republic's democracy sensed that they were running out of options.
[48] The internal opposition to Röhm intensified in February 1931 when Hitler replaced Stennes with Paul Schulz, who promoted two suspected homosexuals, Edmund Heines and Karl Ernst, within the Berlin SA.
It was incorrectly claimed by Röhm's opponents that "large circles of Berlin party comrades are informed about the gay clubs",[26] and these rivals noted with satisfaction that the perceived homosexual cliques were exposed in the left-wing media.
[49][50] On 14 April 1931, the SPD newspaper Münchener Post began reporting a series of front-page stories on the "hair-raising depravity in the Section 175 sense" that it argued was rampant in the Nazi Party.
[49][51][52] The first story claimed that Röhm and Heines were part of a homosexual clique in the SA and that they walked arm-in-arm with Hitler, citing an unnamed former Nazi (possibly Otto Strasser).
[55][57] The Münchener Post claimed without evidence that German youth were endangered by Röhm's homosexuality[58] and coined the word Röhmisch to describe the alleged moral dissolution of the SA.
In September 1931 the SPD's Hamburger Echo [de] brought up "the gay (schwul) captain Röhm" in response to a Nazi political poster calling for "a clean Germany, a true family life".
The Berlin police, under the jurisdiction of Prussian interior minister Carl Severing (SPD), often declined to enforce this law but opened an investigation against Röhm based on the testimony of waiter Fritz Reif.
[68][69] In early March 1932, the SPD printed and mailed 300,000 copies of the pamphlet to important Germans including politicians, army officers, doctors, teachers, and notaries.
[70][45] Klotz claimed that leaving Röhm in his position would make the Nazis complicit in "crimes of having knowingly and intentionally furthered the seduction of German youths into becoming homosexual minions".
[71] The campaign did not target Röhm as much as Hitler and the entire Nazi movement, smearing them as ridden with homosexuality and suggesting that German youth were morally endangered.
[80][77] Konstantin Hierl worried the scandal would "break the faith of the masses in the strength and purity of the National Socialist Movement" and hurt the party among conservative voters that Hitler needed to poach from Hindenburg.
[66][82] In an effort to protect the Nazi Party from the scandal, in March 1932 Walter Buch put ex-Nazi Emil Danzeisen [de] in charge of a plot to murder Röhm.
Röhm tried to put an end to the plot quietly by telling Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, while du Moulin-Eckart and Cajetan Graf von Spreti reported it to the Munich police.
[89] On 4 March, the Minister President of Prussia, Otto Braun (SPD), asked Chancellor Heinrich Brüning to bring the Röhm–Heimsoth letters to Hindenburg's attention.
[97][103] The judge condemned the Nazi deputies for their hooliganism in the Reichstag building, a holy site of democracy, when they could have chosen non-violent methods of resolving their dispute with Klotz.
[114] The Nazi-sympathizing Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger held that "above all the Reichstag building is not the right place to take revenge or vengeance with a series of ear-boxings", although it also condemned Klotz's pamphlet.
For example, Vorwärts appealed to the "healthy people's sentiment [de]" using Nazi terminology, and implied that any boy or young man joining the Hitler Youth or SA was in danger of homosexual predation.
[126][36] Bisexual activist Adolf Brand wrote, "when someone ... would like to set in the most damaging way the intimate love contacts of others under degrading control—in that moment his own love-life also ceases to be a private matter".
"[8] In April 1933, one of Hitler's conservative backers, Reichsbank president Hjalmar Schacht, deplored Röhm and his "homosexual clique" to which he attributed great political power.
[133] Röhm was appointed Reich minister without portfolio in Hitler's cabinet in December 1933 and reluctantly confirmed by Hindenburg, thus becoming "probably the first previously known homosexual in a German government" according to historian Michael Schwartz [de].
[144][145][146] The book claimed that a clique of homosexual stormtroopers led by Heines set the Reichstag fire; van der Lubbe remained behind and agreed to accept the sole blame because of his desperation for affection; Bell was killed to cover it up.
[149] Wackerfuss states that Reichstag conspiracy appealed to antifascists because of their preexisting belief that "the heart of the Nazis' militant nationalist politics lay in the sinister schemes of decadent homosexual criminals".
[158] Wackerfuss argues that, "By deploying public panic against homosexuality, Hitler and the Nazi media won support for their illegal murders and laid further foundations for unchecked state violence.
[162][163] In 1950s West Germany, during the Cold War, the Federal Ministry of Justice cited the Röhm affair as an example of what they called the "danger of homosexual subversion", to justify retention of the Nazis' more punitive revision of Paragraph 175.
