Röhm scandal

Ernst Röhm in 1924

The Röhm scandal resulted from the public disclosure of Nazi politician Ernst Röhm's homosexuality by his Social Democratic opponents in 1931 and 1932. According to historian Laurie Marhoefer, Röhm became the world's "first openly gay politician" as a result of the scandal.

The scandal began with the publication of series of front-page stories in the SPD newspaper Münchener Post, which turned out to be based on forgeries. In 1931 and 1932, Röhm was subjected to five criminal trials, but prosecutors were never able to prove that he had violated Paragraph 175, Germany's law against homosexuality. During the 1932 German presidential election, the SPD released a pamphlet edited by ex-Nazi Helmuth Klotz with genuine letters by Röhm in which he candidly discussed his sexual orientation. This second round of disclosures sparked a plot by some Nazis to murder Röhm, which fell through and resulted in additional negative press for the party. Although the SPD supported the repeal of Germany's laws against homosexuality, the party opportunistically used homophobia to attack its Nazi opponents and portrayed the Nazi Party as dominated by homosexuals. In fact, the Nazi Party condemned homosexuality and Röhm's sexuality weakened his position in the party.

The scandal came to national attention as a result of the beating of Klotz by Nazi deputies in the Reichstag building on 12 May 1932 as revenge for his publication of Röhm's letters. Many Germans saw this attack on democracy as more important than Röhm's personal life. The Nazis' electoral performance was not affected by the scandal, but that it affected their ability to present themselves as the party of moral renewal. Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler defended Röhm during the scandal, but his position in the party was weakened. In 1933, Röhm was appointed to the Hitler cabinet, but he was murdered in 1934 during the Night of the Long Knives with Hitler citing his homosexuality as a reason for his murder. The systematic persecution of homosexuals followed.

Background

Ernst Röhm (1887–1934) was one of the early leaders of the Nazi Party and built up its paramilitary wing, the Sturmabteilung (SA), violently attacking communists and other perceived enemies of the German people. He was a friend of later German dictator Adolf Hitler and in 1923 he was convicted of treason for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch. Although Röhm was attracted exclusively to men, until 1924 he only had sex with women. That changed when he was elected to the Reichstag and went to live in Berlin. He frequented homosexual establishments, including the Eldorado club. In 1929, Röhm joined the homosexual association Bund für Menschenrecht (League of Human Rights) and became known to many figures in Berlin's homosexual movement. In 1925, a man he slept with tried to blackmail him. Röhm reported the man to the police. Although Hitler found out about this incident, he did not take action.

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 a Traitor"). As part of a denunciation of conservative, bourgeois morality, Röhm had written, "The struggle against the cant, deceit and hypocrisy of today’s society must take its starting point from the innate nature of the drives that are placed in men from the cradle … If the struggle in this area is successful, then the masks can be torn from the dissimilation in all areas of the human social and legal order." He blamed bourgeois morality for causing suicide. Heimsoth asked if he intended this as a criticism of Paragraph 175, the German law prohibiting sex between men. Röhm replied, stating "You have understood me completely!" He told Heimsoth that he had initially intended to be more explicit, but toned the passage down on the advice of friends.

Röhm and Heimsoth befriended each other and spent time together at homosexual meeting places in Berlin. They corresponded while Röhm was in Bolivia, where he had emigrated in 1928 to work as a military adviser. Both men saw their homosexuality as compatible with Nazism; Heimsoth hoped that Röhm could lead the Nazi Party to become accepting of homosexuality. They saw homosexuality as a sign of masculinity rather than a form of femininity and denounced homosexual activist Magnus Hirschfeld because he was a Jew. In his letters, Röhm discussed his sexual orientation in unambiguous language, once describing himself as "same-sex orientated" (gleichgeschlechtlich). In another letter, he stated that he was proud of his orientation despite the difficulties it caused him.

The Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and Communist Party of Germany (KPD) were the primary supporters of repealing Paragraph 175, but they also opportunistically used accusations of homosexuality against political opponents. Historian Christopher Dillon comments, "While far from German Social Democracy’s finest hour morally... it was a shrewd tactic politically". Confronted with the rise of Nazism, they exploited a stereotype associating homosexuality with militarism that had been established during the Eulenburg affair. For example, in 1927, SPD deputies heckled Nazi deputy Wilhelm Frick, shouting "Hitler, heil, heil, heil. Heil Eulenburg!" after Frick called for harsh penalties for homosexuality. Leftist paramilitaries taunted the SA with shouts of, "Heil Gay" (Schwul Heil) or "SA, Trousers Down!" (SA, Hose runter!) In 1928, the Nazi Party responded negatively to a questionnaire about their view of Paragraph 175, declaring "Anyone who even thinks of homosexual love is our enemy." Nazi politicians regularly railed against homosexuality, claiming that it was a Jewish conspiracy to undermine the German people. They promised to have homosexuals sterilized if they took power. Unlike Röhm, who tried to separate his private and political life, historian Laurie Marhoefer writes that "most Nazis considered supposedly private matters like sexuality intensely public and political".

Development of the scandal

Röhm's return to Germany

Röhm returned to Germany at Hitler's request in late 1930, and was officially appointed leader of the SA in January 1931. After returning to Germany, his position was fragile and dependent on Hitler's personal support. His predecessor, Franz von Pfeffer, believed that Röhm had been appointed "probably, also because of his inclinations. . . . [which] offered a useful point of attack at any time". Within weeks of his appointment, Röhm became the target of internal party criticism, which Hitler had to deflect. Hitler asserted that the SA was "not a school to educate the daughters of the upper classes, but a formation of rough fighters".

Röhm's double life became unsustainable in the face of his higher profile and the rising popularity of the Nazi Party. He became more circumspect than before, avoiding homosexual clubs. His friend Peter Granninger procured young men sixteen to twenty years old and brought them to apartments owned by Granninger and Karl Leon Du Moulin-Eckart for sexual encounters. When an unemployed waiter in Munich tried to blackmail him, it was reported in the press. By the beginning of 1931, newspapers started to allude to his homosexuality, leading Joseph Goebbels to write in his diary that the Nazi Party was seen as "the Eldorado of the 175-ers".

Different Nazis had different views of Röhm's sexuality, which was an open secret even before the scandal. Some refused to believe it due to his masculine presentation. Others, including Rudolf Hess, Walter Buch, Alfred Rosenberg, and Heinrich Himmler disapproved, while another group including Hitler, Reinhard Heydrich, and Hermann Esser were indifferent. A third group including Martin Bormann wanted Röhm gone because they saw him as a political liability. Röhm's sexuality weakened his position in the party and was cited by his opponents to undermine him. Although he asserted that the party had become "accustomed to my criminal idiosyncrasy", Marhoefer concludes that this "was wild optimism or self-delusion".

Röhm–Meyer letters (1931)

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 rooted in the Nazi Party. The first story claimed that Röhm and Edmund Heines were part of a homosexual clique in the SA and that they walked arm-in-arm with Hitler, citing an unnamed former Nazi. The second article accused the Nazis of hypocrisy for condemning homosexuality in public but turning a blind eye to homosexuals in its own ranks, reporting that Hitler had ignored various reports of Röhm's homosexuality. Similar articles were given front-page treatment for months. The newspaper even coined the word Röhmisch to describe the alleged moral dissolution of the SA. Other SPD and KPD newspapers repeated the reports. The stories were accurate in their basic details, but the letters that they were based on—from Röhm to the former Nazi Eduard Meyer—turned out to be forgeries. Röhm sued and Meyer killed himself in prison.

Trials against Röhm

After this affair, SPD leaders decided to find authentic evidence of Röhm's homosexuality to charge him under Paragraph 175. 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. The police confiscated the letters between Röhm and Heimsoth—whose existence was probably revealed by Nazis—and interrogated Röhm and Heimsoth. On 6 June 1931, a trial against Röhm opened. Reif testified that he and a friend, hotel employee Peter Kronninger, had participated in mutual masturbation with Röhm in late 1930 in a hotel room. Reif said that when he did not receive the money he was promised, he ended up going to the police. Röhm and Kronninger denied the incident. Röhm admitted that he was "abnormally inclined", but denied ever having violated Paragraph 175. The trial was eventually dropped for lack of evidence. In all, Röhm was unsuccessfully tried five times for alleged violations of Paragraph 175 in 1931 and 1932, but the prosecution was never able to prove that he had violated Paragraph 175.

Röhm–Heimsoth letters and the presidential election (March 1932)

Hitler and Röhm at the Nuremberg rally, 1933

The SPD decided to publish the Röhm–Heimsoth letters during the 1932 German presidential election in which Hitler was running against Paul Hindenburg, hoping to discredit the Nazi Party. The former Nazi turned anti-fascist publicist Helmuth Klotz prepared a 17-page pamphlet titled Der Fall Röhm (The Röhm Case) that contained facsimiles of the letters. In early March 1932, the SPD printed and mailed 300,000 copies of the pamphlet. In the pamphlet, Klotz argued: "This fish stinks from its head. Decay reaches deep into the ranks of the NSDAP". He asserted that a party that tolerated homosexuality in its highest echelons must intend to "poison the Volk[,] … destroy [its] moral strength" and would lead to the decline of Germany similar to the decline of ancient Rome. Klotz also claimed that young men in the Hitler Youth and SA were vulnerable to abuse. SPD newspapers also published excerpts of the letters, but most media did not report on the scandal until May 1932.

Röhm sued in an attempt to stop the distribution of the letters, but the lawsuit was thrown out of court as he did not assert that the letters were fakes. The court ruled that there was no illegality in the publication of genuine letters. Adolf Hitler initially defended Röhm from the criticism of this scandal from anti-Nazis and the left. Röhm later told Franz von Hörauf that he had offered his resignation, but Hitler had refused it. Other high-ranking Nazis were more critical. Konstantin Hierl worried the scandal would hurt the party among conservative voters that Hitler needed to poach from Hindenburg. Buch and other Nazis plotted to murder Röhm, du Moulin-Eckart, and Röhm's press officer Georg Bell, and frame the KPD for it. One of the plotters told the intended victims, the plan fell through, and the resulting press coverage harmed the Nazis' image even further.

The scandal was unpleasant for the Nazi Party, but Marhoefer argues that it did not affect the Nazis' electoral performance. Historian Larry Eugene Jones argues that "At the very least, the revelations about Röhm were an unwelcome distraction [for Hitler's campaign]... at worst a damaging blow to the Hitler’s credibility as a worthy claimant to the high office of Reich president". The scandal made it more difficult for President Hindenburg to appoint Hitler chancellor as was considered in 1932.

Assault of Helmuth Klotz in the Reichstag (May 1932)

Reichstag building, c. 1900

On 12 May 1932, Klotz visited the Reichstag café to meet a SPD deputy. While the other man was away for a vote, Klotz was recognized by Heines, who had entered the café with a group of Nazi deputies. Heines shouted something to the effect of "You’re the hoodlum who published the pamphlet!" and slapped him across the face. The Nazis subsequently assaulted him with their fists and a chair, but fled when a waiter and other deputies intervened. Two policemen appeared at the scene and offered to escort Klotz outside so he could identify his attackers. Klotz agreed, but outside the café they were set upon by dozens of Nazis who assaulted them. Someone called Klotz' wife and told her to come to the Reichstag "to collect his bones". A brawl between Nazi and SPD deputies in the plenary was narrowly avoided.

Since parliament was in session at the time of the attack, Reichstag president Paul Löbe (SPD) ordered the maximum suspension (30 days) of Nazi deputies Hans Krause, Fritz Weitzel, and Wilhelm Stegmann for assaulting Klotz. Several policemen under the command of Bernhard Weiss entered the building to restore order, where they arrested Heines and two other Nazi deputies. The Reichstag never met again before the July 1932 German federal election. Another deputy, Gregor Strasser, was later arrested and also charged with assault. The attack and subsequent trial made the headlines of widely read national newspapers. Strasser was acquitted; Heines and two others were convicted and sentenced to three months in jail. As a result of the attack on Klotz, the Röhm scandal was widely covered on the front pages of German newspapers, although the nature of the scandal was not always specified in the press coverage. Nevertheless, the scandal did not significantly affect the July election. The scandal had not died out by 11 January 1933, when Münchener Post published an article speculating that Hitler would dismiss Röhm.

Reactions

The Nazi press responded to the scandal either by ignoring it or by denying the allegations against Röhm, claiming that they were fabrications by socialists and Jews. It also exaggerated Röhm's military activities in Bolivia, falsely claiming that he was offered the position of Chief of Staff of the Bolivian Army. Marhoefer argues that even convinced Nazi opponents did not necessarily use Röhm's sexuality to attack the party, and argues that this was a success of the homosexual movement in convincing Germans that private sexuality was not their concern. Nevertheless, she states, "The highly public, persuasive allegations about Röhm’s sexuality made it tough for the NSDAP to campaign as a party of moral renewal."

Even many of those who were anti-Nazi and did not question the accuracy of the allegations disapproved of the outing, believing that being privately homosexual was no concern of the public. After the Klotz attack, the main message in press coverage was the exposure of the Nazi's violent methods, their "rule of fists" (Faustrecht) as opposed to the rule of law, and antipathy for democracy. Röhm's homosexuality was an issue of secondary or tertiary importance. This was the case for those as far left as the SPD and as far right as the German National People's Party (DVNP). 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. A wide range of conservatives and liberals blamed Klotz for bringing up the issue of Röhm's sexuality.

The general tenor of the coverage by the SPD was to appeal to homophobia in order to discredit Nazism, and portray homosexuality as embedded in the Nazi Party. For example, Vorwärts appealed to the "healthy people's sentiment" using Nazi terminology, and implied that any boy or young man joining the Hitler Youth or SA was in danger of homosexual predation. Although the KPD had declined to publish the Heimsoth letters, after the scandal broke it responded inconsistently. In the KPD newspaper Welt am Abend it was argued that Röhm abused his position of power to take advantage of economically vulnerable workers. Die Rote Fahne argued that the NSDAP was a breeding ground for homosexuality and Röhm was unsuitable as a youth leader. Only a few leftists criticized the outing. One of these was Kurt Tucholsky, who wrote in Die Weltbühne, "We fight the scandalous §175, everywhere we can, therefore we must not join the choir of those among us who want to banish a man from society because he is homosexual."

In contrast to the left-wing press, homosexual activists emphasized the hypocrisy of the Nazi Party in condemning homosexuality while harboring homosexuals in its own ranks. In response to the outing, 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". While homosexual associations such as the League of Human Rights and the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (WhK) opposed Nazism, they condemned the outing, arguing that Röhm's private life should remain private. Both the WhK and Friedrich Radszuweit, the leader of the League of Human Rights, criticized the SPD for exploiting homophobia to attack the Nazi Party. Some but not all of the homosexual activists at this time understood that Nazism was an existential threat. Radszuweit wrote that the Nazis' dispute was with the Jews rather than homosexuals. In a later edition of his memoirs, Röhm condemned the scandal, calling it "a large-scale moral campaign... unprecedented in its shamelessness and meanness". He argued that public disclosure of private matters was generally wrong and that the political instrumentalization of his private life was a low point in the lack of decency.

Aftermath and legacy

Röhm developed even more enemies within the party as a result of the disclosure of his homosexuality. In 1932, he admitted that he had become personally dependent on Hitler, telling Kurt Lüdecke: "My position is so precarious. I can't be too exigent ... I stick to my job, following him blindly, loyal to the utmost—there's nothing else left me." He was appointed Reich minister without portfolio in the Hitler 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. No other Weimar political party had a known homosexual in its leadership. Marhoefer argues that Röhm became the world's "first openly gay politician" as a result of the scandal. The scandal around Röhm was the origin of the long-lasting but false idea that the Nazi Party was dominated by homosexuals, a recurring theme in 1930s left-wing propaganda.

Liberal politician Werner Stephan considered the disclosure of Röhm's homosexuality "the only impressive action against Hitler" during the last phase of the Weimar Republic. In 1933, Klotz managed to flee Germany, but he was arrested after the German invasion of France in 1940 and murdered in 1943. Before 30 June 1934, the Nazis prosecuted those who made claims about homosexuality in the SA leadership. On that day, Hitler had Röhm killed during the Night of Long Knives. Nazi propaganda claimed that Hitler had recently discovered Röhm's homosexuality, which was cited as justification for the politically motivated murders. Afterwards those who accused Hitler of tolerating the homosexual cliques in the SA for too long were prosecuted. Sopade reports prepared after the murders indicated that many Germans had heard of the Röhm scandal before 1933 and associated it with the SPD. This purge opened the systematic persecution of homosexual men in Nazi Germany.

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