Ernst Röhm

Biography

Ernst Röhm was born in Munich in 1887, the son of a railway official. He joined the Bavarian army as a cadet in 1906 and was commissioned two years later. In the First World War he was badly wounded three times, including a face wound in 1914 and a chest wound at Verdun in 1916, and rose to captain.

After the war he stayed in the army, helped Freikorps Epp crush the Munich Soviet Republic in 1919 and joined the German Workers' Party, where he became a close ally of Adolf Hitler. He used his army contacts to arm and organise right-wing paramilitary groups, led a force that occupied the Bavarian war ministry during the Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923, and was convicted of treason in 1924 but given a suspended sentence.

He sat briefly in the Reichstag in 1924 for the National Socialist Freedom Movement and built the Frontbann while the SA was banned, but broke with Hitler in 1925. From 1929 to 1930 he served under contract as a military adviser and staff officer in the Bolivian army.

Recalled by Hitler, he became chief of staff of the SA in January 1931 and turned it into a mass force of millions; public disclosure of his homosexuality in 1931-32 failed to unseat him. After 1933 he was made a Reichsleiter, a Reichstag deputy and a minister without portfolio, but his call for a second revolution and his demand to absorb the army into the SA alarmed the army and business leaders. Hitler had him arrested at Bad Wiessee on 30 June 1934, and he was shot in Stadelheim prison on 1 July during the Night of the Long Knives.