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- Born in Munich in 1887, Ernst Röhm joined the German army as a teenager and served in World War I. He became acquainted with Adolf Hitler in 1919. Hitler shrewdly took note of Röhm's intensely militaristic nature, his experience in the war and the fact that he was the leader of an extreme right-wing paramilitary organization called the Frontbann--one of many such units, called "freikorps", that existed in Germany at the time--and he persuaded Röhm to join his fledgling Nazi party.
Röhm, along with Hitler, was among the Nazi participants in the abortive "Beer Hall Putsch" in Munich in 1923, and within a few years he took on a major role in the development of the Nazi party. He formed a group called the Sturmabteilung, or SA--the notorious "Storm Troopers", comprised mainly of street thugs, brawlers, ex-convicts and fanatical right-wing German nationalists. Röhm turned them into a tough, disciplined military unit, fanatically devoted to Hitler and Naziism. The SA took part in many violent clashes with Nazi opponents on both the left and the right, and were responsible for the deaths of quite a few, whether as the result of street fights or outright political murders. The unit soon gained a fearsome reputation, which eventually proved to be Röhm's undoing.
As the SA began to become more widely known and feared, Röhm wanted it to be independent of the Nazi party's political arm and also wanted to be able to act on his own. Hitler, in his desire to exercise complete control over all facets of the party's structure, expressly forbade this, and soon began to suspect Röhm of plotting a coup against him, especially when he discovered that most of the senior SA leadership was more devoted to Röhm than they were to him. Hitler also had instructed Röhm to tone down the increasingly radical behavior of his "brownshirts", which were beginning to give the Nazi party a bad name (one of the reasons the party usually did so poorly in elections was the public's revulsion at and distrust of the SA's tactics). The situation resulted in Röhm's resigning from the party and taking a job in South America training the Bolivian army. However, although Hitler placed men more to his liking in charge of the SA, the unit began getting more and more out of control, finally incurring the enmity of the German army, which demanded that Hitler clamp down on the SA or it would do so. Desperate to avoid any confrontation with the army--whose support he knew he would need when it came time for him to grab power--Hitler re-installed Röhm as head of the SA to bring it back under control. However, not only did the SA grow even more violent and unpredictable under Röhm, but he managed to mollify the army and even secured use of military facilities at which to train his men, whose numbers were now increased by Röhm's absorption of several independent paramilitary groups into the SA. By this time the Nazi party was beginning to accumulate some political power in Germany, and the SA's continuing violence and brutal tactics were threatening to undermine that power. By 1934 it had grown to more than two million members--more than 20 times the strength of the regular German army, which now looked upon it in alarm as both a rival for power and a threat to Germany itself. In addition, Röhm's ardent socialism alienated many of the wealthy businessmen and industrialists who bankrolled the Nazi party, and his blatant homosexuality--and that of many of the SA's top leaders--were beginning to cost Hitler support among conservative religious and political groups, which up to then had backed him strongly. Hitler also again suspected that Röhm and the SA were planning a coup against him now that they believed they were stronger than Hitler and his colleagues.
On the night of June 29, 1934, the leadership of the SA held an important meeting in Munich, which Hitler promised to attend. Instead, he sent several carloads of SS troops there, and they arrested Röhm and the other top leaders of the SA. Other arrests of SA leaders took place in cities around the country, and many others were simply shot as soon as they were located. Röhm and much of the SA leadership were thrown into prison, and Röhm himself was shot by two SS executioners in his cell when he refused to commit suicide. It is estimated that several hundred SA officials were killed that night and in the following several days, a period that has become known as the "Night of the Long Knives", although the real numbers will never be known. The SA was disbanded, with some of its members being absorbed into the SS, and one more threat to Hitler's grab for absolute power in Germany was eliminated. - German Army Gen. Kurt von Schleicher was born in 1882 in Brandenburg, Germany (then Prussia), the son of an officer in the Prussian army. He himself enlisted in the Prussian army, soon graduating from officer training school with the rank of lieutenant. In 1909 he attended the Prussian Military Academy, where he made the acquaintance of future political leader Franz von Papen. Schleicher subsequently was assigned to the Railway Department of the Prussian General Staff.
When World War I broke out Schleicher, now a captain, was attached to the General Staff at Supreme Army Command. During the year-long battle of Verdun--in which more than one million men died--Schleicher suspected that the reason many of the German artillery shells, for example, didn't explode on contact was because of shoddy workmanship due to defense contractors' greed for profits, and he wrote a blistering paper attacking war profiteering. That earned him a reputation as a liberal--not the best thing to be known as in an organization as fanatically conservative as the Prussian officer corps--and he spent the rest of the war on the General Staff. After the war he became assistant to Gen. Wilhelm Groener, who was placed in charge of the German army. In November of 1918 Germany was torn by political turmoil, much of it coming from a militant, armed leftist group known as the Spartacist League. Schleicher was used by the army as the negotiator between the civilian government and army, which wanted to enter Berlin and crush the Spartacist revolution once and for all. Schleicher managed to persuade the government to accede to the army's wishes, which caused his stock to rise in the halls of power within Germany. It was Schleicher's efforts that led to the government allowing the army to remain basically autonomous, without civilian oversight or control, in exchange for the army's promise to protect the government against any further revolutionary attacks.
One problem the army had was that, due to the Treaty of Versailles' restrictions on the size of the newly re-formed German army, many of the troops left in the army couldn't be counted on to remain completely loyal. Schleicher solved that problem by helping to form "freikorps", or paramilitary-type militia units, which consisted mainly of disaffected German veterans, in addition to street toughs, ex-convicts and convicted criminals. These units, while not officially part of the German army, were used to crush political opposition--the Spartacist League, for example, was effectively destroyed by the freikorps--in either street battles or straight-out assassinations, often in close cooperation with army officials. Adolf Hitler's feared "Storm Troopers", and later his even more feared SS, originally consisted mostly of former or current freikorps members. The German army did not consider the Weimar Republic, the elected government at the time, to be legitimate, and did everything it could to sabotage and undermine it. Schleicher's main function was to ensure that the army stayed independent of the government and got what it wanted without giving anything up, a task at which he succeeded admirably.
Schleicher rose quickly through the ladders of power in the German army and government, gaining a reputation for ambition and ruthlessness combined with a knack for ingratiating himself with the powers-that-be and a mastery of the intricacies and intrigues of the cutthroat--and lethal--politics of the time. He became a proponent of the philosophy of "total war" against Germany's real and perceived enemies and found ways around the disarmament clauses of the Treaty of Versailles, meant to ensure that Germany would never re-arm itself to the point where it would pose another threat to peace in Europe. He used the freikorps to crush street protests against the government and even to assassinate political opponents. He became a close confidant and adviser to German President Paul von Hindenburg through his friendship with Hindenburg's son, a fellow army officer. In that capacity he exercised immense power and used that power to undermine the democratic process in Germany--he believed that only a military dictatorship, with him as head, could "make Germany great again"--and decided to use the ever-increasing power of Adolf Hitler's Nazi movement to accomplish that. He believed that he could use the Nazis to crush all domestic opposition and put them in power, then destroy them himself. However, Nazi officials knew Schleicher better than he thought they did--Herman Goering once quipped that "any Chancellor who has Herr von Schleicher on his side must expect sooner or later to be sunk by the Schleicher torpedo"--and they had no illusions as to what he had in store for them.
Schleicher's rise to power eventually resulted in his being appointed Chancellor. However, his term turned out to be a disaster. His relations with the Cabinet were frosty at best, and his once solid friendship with President Hindenburg's son evaporated over some sort of personal affront--it's never been made clear exactly what happened--but it also resulted in the loss of his access to President von Hindenburg himself. Schleicher's skills at political intrigue didn't translate into skills at governing, and he alienated practically every level of the German government and society itself. Matters finally came to a head when the army leadership demanded that Hindenburg fire Schleicher as Chancellor and install Hitler, which Hindenburg did on January 30, 1933.
Schleicher tried to ingratiate himself with the new Hitler government, but with little success. Hearing of the growing rift between Hitler and SA (Storm Trooper) leader Ernst Röhm, Schleicher decided to throw in with Rohm against Hitler. That proved to be his undoing. Hitler, fearing that Rohm was organizing a coup against him by the SA, moved against Rohm on June 30, 1934, thereafter known as "The Night of the Long Knives". Rohm and the top SA leadership and their associates were arrested and imprisoned--many, including Rohm, were murdered in their cells by SS executioners--and many more were simply shot as soon as they were found. Unfortunately for Schleicher, he was one of them. SS assassins burst into his house that night and shot and killed Schleicher and his wife. - Gregor Strasser was born in Geisenfeld, Germany, on May 31, 1892. When World War I broke out he joined the German army, and won the Iron Cross for bravery under fire. When the war ended Strasser joined one of the "freikorps", which were right-wing paramilitary units, many composed of ex-soldiers, that formed in Germany after the war ended and engaged in intimidation of political opponents, street brawls and political murders. He soon joined the Nazi party, and took part in the Munich "Beer Hall Putsch" of 1923, when Adolf Hitler and his Nazi followers unsuccessfully attempted to overthrow the Bavarian government. For his efforts, Strasser spent some time in prison.
After being released from prison Strasser moved to northern Germany, and he soon became an important figure in the SA (Sturm Abteilung), a paramilitary force within the Nazi party that became known as the "Storm Troopers", which carried out the dirty work--including murders--ordered by the party's leaders.
Although Strasser was a Nazi, he was also a committed socialist and fiercely opposed Hitler's policy (eventually successful) of trying to win the support of Germany's wealthy industrialists, which Strasser and other socialists saw as one of the main reasons Germany was in the sad shape it was in. Unfortunately for him, he had no compunctions about making those views known. Hitler--who detested those who disagreed with him and was also concerned about Strasser's growing and devoted following within the SA--bided his time.
In December 1932 German Prime Minister Paul von Hindenburg asked Kurt von Schleicher to become chancellor and invited Strasser to be his deputy. Hitler and Hermann Göring came out against Strasser, claiming that it was an attempt by the government to break up the Nazi party. Not wanting to cause a schism in the party, Strasser resigned and went to work for a chemical company.
Hitler never forgot a slight, though, and on June 30, 1934, he had the Gestapo and the SS move against the SA, which he believed was becoming too powerful. Although Strasser was no longer involved in the SA or in Nazi party politics, he was nevertheless arrested along with many other SA officials, such as leader Ernst Röhm. Strasser was taken to Gestapo headquarters for "interrogation", and while in his cell was shot in the back of the head by SS executioners.