Ernst Röhm
14 quotes
Biography
"I am still today a soldier and only a soldier. (Ich bin noch heute Soldat und nur Soldat)"
"Since I am an immature and wicked man, war and unrest appeal to me more than good bourgeois order. Brutality is respected, the people need wholesome fear. They want to fear someone. They want someone to frighten them and make them shudderingly submissive."
"Many things are between us and the Communists, but we respect the sincerity of their conviction and their willingness to bring sacrifices for their own cause, and this unites us with them."
"Adolf is a swine. He will give us all away. He only associates with reactionaries now. His old friends aren't good enough for him. Getting matey with the East Prussian generals. They're his cronies now. Adolf is turning into a gentleman. He's got himself a tail-coat now. Adolf knows exactly what I want. I've told him often enough. Not a second edition of the old imperial army. Are we revolutionaries or aren't we? Allons, enfants de la patrie! If we are, then something new must arise out of our élan, like the mass armies of the French Revolution. If we're not, then we'll go to the dogs. We've got to produce something new, don't you see? A new discipline. A new principle of organization. The generals are a lot of old fogeys. They never had a new idea."
"Hitler can't walk over me as he might have done a year ago; I've seen to that. Don't forget that I have three million men, with every key position in the hands of my own people, Hitler knows that I have friends in the Reichswehr, you know! If Hitler is reasonable I shall settle the matter quietly; if he isn't I must be prepared to use force - not for my sake but for the sake of our revolution."
"All revolutions devour their own children."
"He (Hitler) is thinking about the peasant girls. When they stand in the fields and bend down at their work so that you can see their behinds, that's what he likes, especially when they've got big round ones. That's Hitler's sex life. What a man."
"I expect that on the 1st of August, the SA will be once more ready for duty. If the enemies of the SA are hoping that the SA will not return from leave, we are ready to let them enjoy the hope for a short time. The SA is, and remains, Germany's destiny."
"If I am to be killed, let Adolf do it himself!"
"Mein Führer, mein Führer!"
"Röhm deceived himself when he thought that his closeness to Hitler would allow him to survive while other German homosexual men were being persecuted. Röhm was not murdered because he was homosexual, but the fact that he was so gave his enemies a means of turning Hitler against him and securing his destruction."
"I pointed out to the Führer at length that in 1934 we unfortunately failed to reform the Wehrmacht when we had an opportunity of doing so. What Roehm wanted was, of course, right in itself but in practice it could not be carried through by a homosexual and an anarchist. Had Roehm been an upright solid personality, in all probability some hundred generals rather than some hundred SA leaders would have been shot on June 30. The whole course of events was profoundly tragic and today we are feeling its effects. In that year the time was ripe to revolutionise the Reichswehr. As things were the Führer was unable to seize the opportunity. It is questionable whether today we can ever make good what we missed doing at that time. I am very doubtful of it. Nevertheless the attempt must be made."
"Röhm presented himself as a ‘rational’ anti-Semite, and as man who had more empathy with his radical opponents on the left in the Communist party than with the moderate politicians of the centre."
"Ernst Roehm was a thug. He was a brutish and zealous believer in National Socialism. If anything, he was more radical than Hitler. He believed in the elimination of anyone connected with the old order, businessmen, office holders of any kind. He became the leader of the SA, the Storm Troopers, whose terror tactics had helped make Hitler the leader of Germany."