The History of Sex: Berlin -- Hitler's Gay Righthand Man -- (Chapter IX, Part 11)

Still, like most of the population, Germany's homosexuals managed to delude themselves into complacency and occasionally even allegiance to the regime.

After all, Hitler's righthand man was gay—he was even a member of the League for Human Rights.

Ernst Röhm was a scarfaced brute who'd done time in jail with the Führer and was one of the select few allowed to call him by his first name.

Röhm had transformed the brownshirted stormtroopers of the SA into Hitler's private army, an odd beast made up of beer-swilling, Communist-bashers who were buggered by their commanders as they ascended the ranks.

Tragically, just as leftwingers had tried to bring down the Kaiser by exposing gays in the government before World War One, it was a socialist newspaper that outed Röhm by publishing his love letters to another Nazi.

Despite the party's official condemnation of homosexuality, Röhm wrote that he was happy to be gay and argued that Paragraph 175 should be repealed.

Goebbels, Hitler and Rohm

Hitler's own attitude to homosexuality seems to have been ambivalent.

Though he publicly condemned it, he also seems to have understood it—possibly intimately, if you believe the scuttlebutt that he'd been a street hustler in Vienna.

Whereas his allies believed the Nazi Party had to be purged of homosexuals, Hitler tolerated sexual 'perverts' so long as they were useful to him.

By the middle of 1934, though, he'd decided that Röhm's ambitions threatened his own bid for power.

So Hitler purged the SA.

During the 'Night of the Long Knives,' he personally oversaw Röhm's arrest in a hotel near Munich.

In the same raid, the SS caught Röhm's deputy in bed with an eighteen-year-old troop leader.

Hitler had both of them executed on the spot.

Later, Röhm was given the chance to commit suicide; when he refused, the SS shot him dead, too.