Graft, the Fake Moral Scapegoating of Gays, and Fascist Gangsterism
What the Night of the Long Knives Teaches Us About Fascism
Graft (politics): This refers to the dishonest or corrupt acquisition of personal gain or advantage by using one's official position or influence. This can involve misusing public funds, taking bribes, or other unethical actions for personal profit.
The German Langes Messer, or “long knife,” is a late medieval and early Renaissance weapon that is really a type of single-edged sword despite its name. It was a civilian weapon, close in some respects to a machete, with some versions referred to as a peasant’s weapon. It is an interesting irony that the Nazis, derided by many of the elite as jumped-up peasant thugs, should have chosen this name for their summer 1934 purge, as they were themselves inspired by the British legend of the Treason of the Long Knives, when the invading Anglo-Saxons, a Germanic people, betrayed and murdered the indigenous Celts of Britain, the Welsh.
The events of the Night of the Long Knives were mysterious when they first occurred. It took weeks to begin to unravel the events. The US State Department kept itself informed through careful sourcing of German and European news, pronouncements by the regime, and the diligent work of US Embassy staff in Berlin. Ambassador William E. Dodd’s reports were illuminating. By the middle of July 1934, the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was well informed of the barbaric nature of the Nazi regime.
On June 30, 1934, Adolf Hitler ordered the arrest and murder of several of his enemies, their families, and associates. The cover for this was the allegation that there was a plot to overthrow the government, which Hitler also linked to what he called the immoral lifestyle of the Sturmabteilung (SA) (also known in English as the Storm Troopers) leader Ernst Julius Günther Röhm, who was a gay man. However, the truth was that this was a convenient scapegoat for Hitler and a corrupt conservative elite. The sexual orientation of Röhm had been known by Hitler for years. The SA played a major role in bringing the Nazis to power. They protected Nazi leadership as bodyguards; they policed Nazi rallies. They beat up Hitler’s political opponents and intimidated opposition voters to raise the Nazi vote tally. Röhm was critical to this, but he was not the first SA leader nor its founder; he was its savior.
After Hitler was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for treason in 1923—he should have been executed—the SA was outlawed. It was Röhm who invented a new legal organization to be the “SA” in disguise, the Front Regiment or Frontbann. By the time Hitler was out of prison, the Frontbann was 30,000 men strong. Röhm clearly had the skill for recruitment and organization. He had been an officer of the Royal Bavarian Army in the Imperial German forces of World War I and was awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class. But Hitler did not like how ambitious Röhm was for the Frontbann to join a renewed SA, because after 1923 Hitler wanted to take power through apparent legal means—even if he used violence and threats to get there—that meant not antagonizing the official government too much by threatening anything that looked too much like a social revolution. As a result, Röhm left Germany for Bolivia, where he became an adviser for that country’s army. The Frontbann then joined as the center of the new SA, without Röhm.
Hitler fell out with his handpicked SA leader, a Prussian officer named Franz Pfeffer von Salomon, who wanted the SA to become a new German Army. When Hitler refused to give Pfeffer’s SA representation on the Nazi election list for the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament, Pfeffer offered to resign and Hitler was glad to be rid of him. Hitler contacted Röhm and asked that he return to Germany from Bolivia in late 1930 after a group of the Berlin SA revolted due to not receiving the accolades they thought were their due and even fought and beat up members of the SS in a dispute over who would guard Nazi officials. Röhm was back in Germany in January 1931.
He knew Röhm was gay; Hitler did not care. Röhm could make the SA into what Hitler needed. He did. By 1934 the SA had between 3 and 4 million members, and Hitler was now chancellor with almost dictatorial powers but subject still to President Paul Ludwig Hans Anton von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg. From 1931 to 1933 Röhm’s SA protected the Nazi leadership and fought street battles with the militias of the Social Democrats and the Communists. Röhm’s men were the clear victors, and it is fair to say that they were critical to the Nazi takeover of Germany at each stage. And yet most of the men were unemployed. Now that their man, Hitler, was in power, they wanted what they thought should be coming to them. Röhm wanted what he thought should be coming to them. However, Röhm was a man with his own power base and his own ideas. While it is understood that the official German military, the Reichswehr, opposed the SA taking over the armed forces, it can be said that, if Hitler had wished it, the 3- or 4-million-strong SA could have taken the army if backed by the police, as the official German Army was limited to 100,000 men in detachments around the entire country due to the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler did not wish it. And so it is alleged that the disgruntled Röhm planned a coup against Hitler. The US Embassy saw through the lies.
The American Ambassador sent reports back to the Secretary of State that exposed the complicity of the Army in Hitler’s plot against the SA and cast doubt on whether there was ever any plot by the SA against the Nazi leadership. Hitler had been willing to accept Röhm’s homosexuality when he needed him, but then, to consolidate power, he betrayed Röhm and used his lifestyle and orientation to shock German sensibilities into supporting the Nazi purge. Sensational stories and rumors were spread to make Hitler—the man known to his family to have abused his niece Geli Raubal—appear the upholder of traditional values. Lies. Should not the murders have shocked more than anything about Röhm?
Röhm was too independent and no longer needed once Hitler had what he had long coveted: the support of the army The US Embassy noted with wry irony in the ambassador’s report to the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, that the “most prominent leaders of the S.A. were captured virtually without resistance either from themselves or the alleged mutineers they were supposed to lead.” That is odd for people about to launch a coup. Likewise, the head of the SA in Berlin, a man named Karl Ernst, was arrested in the German North Sea port of Bremen, which Ambassador Dodd noted is odd, as he “was not arrested in Berlin on June 30 but at Bremen where he was about to depart on a cruise. Hitler, however, states that on that very day Ernst was to carry out a major operation resulting in the seizure of the government buildings and the death of many persons.” Because in the 1930s, without cell phones or the Internet, you totally led coups from cruise ships hundreds of miles away.
In the confusion caused by the movements of the SS and Gestapo against the SA, Hitler struck against his conservative rivals and sometimes opponents—simply people who could have built an independent base in Germany—and murdered them, including his predecessor as chancellor, Kurt Ferdinand Friedrich Hermann von Schleicher and his wife. Von Schleicher had been a German general in the Great War, and Hitler had been purging his associates from the army since early 1934, which had nothing to do with anything Röhm and the SA were doing. And in response this and the murder of other high-ranking Germans, the conservatives including the former field marshal and then president, Paul von Hindenburg did nothing to stop it, nor did anyone in his inner circle or the army. What was going on?
The American Embassy became aware of a reason for the apparent silence from German President Hindenburg: it learned that it was alleged that Hindenburg’s son and the president’s aide were guilty of stealing money from the 1932 presidential election campaign, and that the Nazis knew this and could blackmail the men to do as they wished. There was more: the old elite was caught double-dealing, and the Nazis had the goods on them. There was the Osthilfe (Eastern Aid) scandal. In 1926 the Weimar Republic came up with a plan to aid farms in East Prussia, and the connected elite diverted the money to their estates rather than the average farmers. This was related to the Neudeck scandal, a scheme in which President Hindenburg’s brother’s estate, heavily in debt, was bought by German oligarchs, then gifted back to the Hindenburg family but put in the president’s son’s name to avoid inheritance taxes. In fact, the Hindenburgs were upset with von Schleicher for not keeping a lid on it when he was chancellor. Now Hitler was chancellor and knew of these scandals and could use them to lock them all away, or, as Ambassador Dodd reported to the US government in Washington, Hitler could make the president’s son, Colonel Oscar von Hindenburg, “do what he wants.” Hitler clearly chose the latter and made the Osthilfe scandal vanish. The corruption of the old elite played directly into Nazi hands. Röhm, his associates, and the conservatives who could have threatened the Nazis were murdered during the Nacht der langen Messer (Night of the Long Knives) from June 30–July 2, 1934. Hitler attacked them in a speech on July 13, which Ambassador Dodd clearly exposed, writing:
For instance, it is a completely ex parte one-sided denunciation of persons who can no longer appear in their own defense. No documentary proofs are cited by Herr Hitler although in one or two places he refers to oral confessions of guilt. Similarly no evidence is adduced to support the statements concerning the alleged conspiracy of Schleicher with foreign officials, although it might be said in reply to this that a due regard for Germany’s international relations may have restrained Hitler. Such omissions naturally tend to arouse doubt and suspicion as to the real nature of the alleged plot and the identity of the persons implicated.
— William E. Dodd, US Ambassador to Germany, July 24, 1934.
Dodd went on to describe how Hitler alleged a wild plot whereby Catholics, the SA, and Schleicher were all colluding, together, toward the goal of toppling the government. And so prominent Catholic anti-Nazis were murdered too, for example Carl Albert Fritz Michael Gerlich, a Catholic journalist and newspaper editor who had been in imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp since 1933. He was in on the plot too? From Dachau? Of course that is nonsense, and yes, the camps were open that early. A corrupt establishment could only standby and watch and collaborate.
Fascism is a lawlessness that poses as law and order. This enables them, once they are in power, to be criminals who exploit the criminality of others. Regulations and laws become things for the fascists to break and for them to strictly enforce on others. Hence any corruption, white lie, or procedural misdeed, no matter how minor, on the part of those who wish to potentially oppose the fascists, becomes their undoing. Fascism is a graceless movement, and improprieties among their opponents are not things to be forgiven or held in common as honor among thieves; they are to be exploited to break, humiliate, and enslave them.