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Hitler's Gay Traitor: The Story of Ernst Röhm, Chief of Staff of the S.A.

by Tony Atcherley and Mark Carey

414 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #06-2004; ISBN 1-4251-0247-6; US$26.96, C$31.00, EUR22.14, £15.50

The Man who made Hitler.

About the Book

As far as we know, this is the first attempt to deal with Röhm's life as a whole. We have tried to give a more rounded picture of him than appears in most accounts of Nazi history, and to correct the stereotype, thoughtlessly repeated in much of the literature, of him as a mere Nazi thug. After the story of his early military life and heroic performances in world War One, we tell of the major part he played into he early Nazi movement, culminating in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923.

We discuss the relationship between Röhm and Hitler, and especially why the latter, with his antipathy to homosexuality and strong sensitivity to public feeling, should nevertheless have given Röhm high office. We go into the effect Röhm's homosexuality had on his plans for the S.A. and the Reichswehr, which brought him into conflict with the Generals and finally with Hitler.

We have sought to correct the lurid descriptions sometimes given of his final hours, and end with a refutation of Hitler's declared reasons for murdering Röhm while acknowledging that he really had no other option than to get rid of him.

About the Author

Tony Atcherley, BA, MA, Diploma in Sociology, Teacher's Certificate, Ph.D. Born 1925 in Leeds. After fighting in the N.W. Europe Campaign from D Day to VE Day, served for three and a half years as an interpreter in Germany from which arose his lasting interest in modern German history. Studied Philosophy and Sociology at the University of London and Intellectual History at the University of Sussex. Spent thirty years as a teacher in Secondary, Further and Higher Education ending as Principal. Later visiting, Lecturer at the University of Brighton.

Mark Carey BA. Born in 1965 in Hastings. Read Intellectual History at the University of Sussex.

Reviews

"Ernst Roehm, Hitler's friend and commander of the Nazis' huge paramilitary force, the SA, was the first victim of Hitler as Head of State. His murder in 1934 ("The Night of the Long Knives") at the instigation of the Generals who feared an SA takeover of the army, has paradoxically condemned him to relative obscurity compared with the other Nazi leaders among whom he had once been pre-eminent. Atcherley and Carey's interesting and attractively written book corrects the lazy caricatute of him as a psychopathic bully, given to homosexual orgies. Roehm was an old-style militarist; not, as a convivial Bavarian, of the stiff Prussian kind, which he associated with desk-bound officers rather than the cameraderieof the front-line; he remained nostalgic for the monarchy and, though anti-semitic, did not share Hitler and Himmler's racial obsessions. Defiantly homosexual, he found himself as a regimental officer, though he was also an excellent organizer.  Almost pathologically brave ( his disfiguring scars became part of the caricature), he found his deepest emotional satisfaction in male-bonding and identificstion with his men, later embodied in the SA. Loyalty to them rather than the Fuehrer, about whom and to whom he could be notably candid, was they keynote of his character, and it led to his death. The book is far from a partisan rehabilitation, being shrewdly sceptical about evidence both for and against Roehm, and it does not gloss over his unattractive qualities, but he emerges here really for the first time as a recognisable human being, less repellent, for example, than the devious and cold-blooded Goering, with whom he shared some superficial characteristics.*"

Professor J W Burrow
FRHistS, FBA, Emeritus Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, formerly Professor of European Thought, University of Oxford.

Excerpts