Ernst Röhm

Ernst Julius Günther Röhm (28 November 1887 – 1 July 1934) was a German military officer and an early member of the Nazi Party. He was a close friend and early ally of Adolf Hitler and a co-founder of the Sturmabteilung, the Nazi party’s militia. He led the Reichskriegsflagge militia at the time of the Munich Beer Hall Putsch. R Öhm was executed during the Night of the Long Knives.

About Ernst Röhm in brief

Summary Ernst RöhmErnst Julius Günther Röhm (28 November 1887 – 1 July 1934) was a German military officer and an early member of the Nazi Party. He was a close friend and early ally of Adolf Hitler and a co-founder of the Sturmabteilung, the Nazi party’s militia. He led the Reichskriegsflagge militia at the time of the Munich Beer Hall Putsch. By 1934, the German Army feared the SA’s influence and Hitler had come to see R Öhm as a potential rival, so he was executed during the Night of the Long Knives. He is remembered as a “fanatical, simple-minded swashbuckler” who frequently displayed contempt for danger. His father Julius, a railway official, was described as strict, but once he realized that his son responded better without exhortation, allowed him significant freedom to pursue his interests. The family had no military tradition, but he entered the Royal Bavarian 10th Infantry Regiment Prinz Ludwig at Ingolstadt as a cadet on 23 July 1906 and was commissioned on 12 March 1908. In 1919 he joined the German Workers’ Party, which the following year became the National Socialist German Workers Party. Not long afterward he met Adolf Hitler, and they became political allies and close friends. He died of a heart attack at the age of 48 in July 1934 in Berlin. He left behind a wife and three children, all of whom survived the war. He also had a son and a daughter, both of whom died of heart disease at a young age.

He had no children of his own; he was buried in Munich, where he lived with his wife and two children until his death in 1974. He never married. He has a daughter and a son-in-law, who died in a car accident in 1998. He leaves behind a son, who is a physician and a grandson, who served in the German army during the Second World War, and a stepson, who worked in the oil industry. His son is also a physician, and he has two children of whom he also served as a doctor. He served in World War I and was awarded the Iron Cross First Class before being wounded at Verdun, and was promoted to captain in April 1917. After the armistice on 11 November 1918 that ended the war, he continued his military career as a captain in the Reichswehr. In April 1919 he was one of the senior members in Colonel von Epp’s Bayerisches Freikorps für den Grenzschutz Ost, formed in Ohrdruf in April 1919, which finally overturned the Munich Soviet Republic by force of arms on 3 May 1919. In September 1923, he helped bring together some 100,000 participants drawn from right-wing militant groups, veteran’s associations, and other paramilitary formations. He rented the cavernous main hall of the Löwenbräukeller, supposedly for a reunion and festive comradeship. It was here that he planned to use the units at his disposal to obtain weapons from secret caches with secret caches.