How a murder intensified the persecution of homosexuals

On 30 June 1934, a campaign of murder began in Bad Wiessee near Munich that went down in history as the "Night of the Long Knives". In the early hours of the morning, Adolf Hitler had the SA Chief of Staff, Ernst Röhm, and other leaders of the National Socialist Storm Detachment arrested. Over the following two days, the SS murdered at least 85 people, and by other estimates well over a hundred. Röhm himself was shot on 1 July in Munich-Stadelheim prison.

Officially, the regime justified the murders with an allegedly planned coup. In reality, it was about power struggles between the SA, the SS and the Reichswehr. But since Röhm was popular as Hitler's long-standing companion, a further pretext was needed. Nazi propaganda seized on the "moral depravity" of a supposedly homosexual leadership clique. Röhm was in fact gay, which had been public knowledge since 1931. As long as he remained useful, nobody had minded. Now it served as justification.

Röhm was not a victim in the usual sense. As SA chief, he shared responsibility for the violence of the early Nazi regime. But his murder became the catalyst for the systematic persecution of homosexual men. In the months that followed, denunciations increased and the police stepped up their action. In 1935 the Nazis tightened Paragraph 175. In almost all large cities there were raids, surveillance and the closure of gay meeting places. Thousands of men were convicted, many deported to concentration camps, where they had to wear the pink triangle.

It is remarkable that the German-language exile press also commented on Röhm's murder with homophobic undertones. In the fight against fascism, left-wing and bourgeois papers alike shared the regime's disgust at Röhm's sexuality.