Ernst Röhm

Born in Munich in 1887, Röhm joined the Royal Bavarian Army in 1906 and fought through the First World War, wounded three times, decorated with the Iron Cross First Class. After the war he stayed on as a Reichswehr captain and in 1919 joined the German Workers' Party, where he met Adolf Hitler and used his military connections to build the paramilitary groups that became the SA. He marched beside Hitler in the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, took a suspended sentence, then broke with Hitler in 1925 and left for Bolivia to advise its army. Hitler called him back in 1930; by 1931 Röhm commanded an SA over a million strong, waging street violence against communists, Jews, and anyone in the way. After Hitler took power in 1933, Röhm was named Reichsminister and the second-highest Nazi official, but his calls for a "second revolution" and his ambitions for the SA alarmed both industrialists and the Reichswehr. Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich decided he had to go. On 30 June 1934, the SS purged the entire SA leadership in the Night of the Long Knives; Röhm was taken to Stadelheim Prison and shot the next day.