Roehm was hiding out with his staff at the hamlet of Wiessee, not far from Munich. His guards, heavily armed, had strictest orders to stop everyone, but everyone, and by that underlining emphasis in the orders, everyone was meant to include Hitler himself. Nevertheless, on the fateful morning, Hitler with two automobiles containing among others the canny Goebbels, several high SS officers, and a handful of SS gunmen, drove into Wiessee at daybreak, and when Roehm’s guards saw the All-Highest, instead of stopping him they saluted “Heil Hitler!” There was at least some bravery in Hitler’s daring to go personally to arrest Roehm, surrounded by his bodyguards. Once he had penetrated the sentry lines, there was not much for Hitler to fear, especially not in his personal encounter with Roehm. He found Roehm in bed with what they call in German a Lust Knabe.
Roehm was a barrel-chested, scar-faced desperado whose only two weaknesses were his homosexuality and drink. He had grown potbellied, and invariably woke with a hangover. He slept in a nightgown. When Hitler flung open his bedroom door at daybreak and routed him out of bed, Roehm must have been distinctly at a disadvantage. There he stood, bleary-eyed, nightgowned, potbellied, before his Fuehrer roaring charges of treason, yelling that he was under arrest, ordering him to dress and be quick about it.
I passed through Munich on my way from Rome to Berlin to cover the Blood Purge the next night. From SS officers who boarded my train at Munich, via the good-looking Italian Wagon-Lit conductor who had been from time to time propositioned by Roehm, I learned that Major Buch, Hitler’s chief SS executioner, had that evening gone to Roehm’s cell where a revolver had been left to let him commit suicide, and had shot Roehm as he cried, “Tell Adolf to come kill me if he has the nerve!”
Q. Is it true that Hitler is a homosexual?
A. No, it is not true. He came seriously under suspicion because of his intimacy with Roehm, and because for so many years he tolerated the blatant homosexuality of Roehm and his cohorts. This was a scandal so colossal that it surely has no counterpart in history. Roehm as the head of 2,500,000 Storm Troops had surrounded himself with a staff of perverts. His chiefs, men of the rank of Gruppenfuehrer or Obergruppenfuehrer, commanding units of several hundred thousand Storm Troopers, were almost without exception homosexuals. Indeed, unless a Storm Troop officer were homosexual, he had no chance of advancement.
All this was known to every intelligent observer in Germany and of course was known in every detail to Hitler. His moral indignation when he made his Blood Purge and cleaned out this “nest of immorality” was one of his more brazen pieces of hypocrisy. He purged Roehm not on account of his distasteful habits but because Roehm was plotting to seize power, make himself head of the Army, and form what would have been, incidentally, a homosexual government.
Nobody knows whether he intended to do away with Hitler or merely force Hitler to go along with him. At any rate Hitler would have no part of it, and Roehm was killed, though not for his abnormal love life. Thereafter Hitler passed the most stringent edicts against homosexuality and this odd feature of German life was driven underground. It remains, nevertheless, characteristic of the Germans, that they, outwardly the most brutally masculine of all European peoples, are the most homosexual nation on earth.
Naturally because Hitler never showed any sign of interest in women, he came under suspicion, but prolonged observation has convinced all the witnesses I know, including Germans and foreigners, that Hitler is simply asexual, has no sex life at all, or rather has sublimated it in his “marriage to the German people.”
Q. How do you mean, “marriage to the German people”?
A. That is precisely the relationship Hitler conceives himself to have with the Germans, and I must say millions of Germans appear to feel as though they constituted his wife. Incidentally it was Lord D’Abernon, long-time British Ambassador to Germany, who remarked that the world did not properly understand the meaning of masculinity and femininity as applied to nations, and that in his opinion the Germans were the most feminine people in Europe and the French the most masculine. Whether D’Abernon would today be of the same opinion, I do not know. At any rate Hitler certainly obtains from his contact with the German people a more than adequate surrogate for normal sex life.